U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here "weaponize" means use evidence to reach policy conclusions the author does not like.
If you want gross misinterpretation of scientific results in a different field go look up the "99% of people don't become addicted to oxy" study whose weaponization for policy outcomes is credited for starting the opioid crisis.
Your priors for "how puberty blockers affect mental health outcomes" should be glued to "doesn't make it better (how could it), doesn't make it worse" and that's what they're claiming the study showed.
"Are Jews more predisposed to financial fraud than non-Jews?"
Do you want the answer to that question? How confident are you that you want it? What do you think are the odds that launching that study will benefit the world? What statistical test would you prefer, and what is the balance between type 1 and type 2 error rates? What sort of group is likely to want to fund that study? If you perform 30 of these studies and find that for P>0.05, 3 of them do show a statistically significant result, how do you think that is going to impact society? Do you think it will mean the same thing to scientists as to non-scientists?
Acknowledging that society incorporates a longstanding war of dueling narratives, and that scientific studies are a part of that, becomes an unfortunate necessity. I have watched geeky friends go from "Science must prevail over politics" to alt-right eugenicists, and I have watched alt-right eugenicists weaponize "Science must prevail over politics" for the sake of promoting what looks more than a little bit like ethnic cleansing.
It is often easier for a group to make obviously poor decisions due to internal conflict, than for an individual who can consolidate a worldview. As a collective group, we have gotten a lot dumber than we were in recent memory.
The way the article is worded, it almost sounds like they were expecting them to work like mood enhancers. I mean, it's somewhat interesting that there were different outcomes in both studies, but it doesn't speak in any way against the use of puberty blockers.
A child at 16 is going to have gone through a substantial portion of the 'wrong' puberty already. Are their outcomes better/worse than children who start them earlier? If this study found that it makes no difference, it would suggest that blockers are not achieving the very thing you say they're intended for.
We're suppose to trust institutions based on the idea that institutions are inherently trustworthy.
Having dealt with a few I honestly think they're marginally more trustworthy _but_ are better at hiding and obscuring their biases... which is worse in some ways.
Best example in the article:
> “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
> That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.
Also this study is funded by the government (our taxes) and has received almost $10 million. Not releasing the results is wild and the reasoning is worse. I have almost no faith that this team won't try some sort of p-hacking to get the results they wanted to see.
Trust-based systems and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
These days no one checks their sources, and whole networks of people make decision to benefit their views and wants, and not to disclose facts no matter the findings.
You have to say that people are depressed because they can’t transition, because the alternative would be to say that people who are depressed or otherwise mentally ill are more likely to do crazy things, and that’s taboo, so instead you make up a series of bizarre non sequiturs because using logic would lead to saying “banned” things.
It’s like some sort of weird Soviet Union joke, 2+3=6 because we have to report that we have made 6 units of grain, even if we only made 2 in one field and 3 in another, we made 6 units of grain, it doesn’t make sense because it can’t.
Same as in COVID. Masks have an effect, but we originally said they didn’t because we wanted to avoid shortages. It wasn’t factual, it was a narrative with a goal, if you look at it like a logic problem and assume that every statement is truthful you’re going to have issues.
Ok so there was no "improvement" because they were doing fine already. What's the problem here?
In trans kids the purpose is to buy time in a way that is reversible. Reversibility is the point. If a child says “I might want to medically transition” they can defer their normal puberty think on if they want to make an irreversible decision and then if they don’t the blockers are ceased and they continue life as normal.
Edit: I missed the point about the premise as well. We do this for the same reason we encourage self expression in all children. Expressing yourself and playing with that expression is an incredibly important part of childhood. Puberty blockers enable a child, an incredibly small number of them who’ve already shown a lot of interest in it, to explore a side of themselves that is potentially going to be erased without much risk at all.
There is a developmental window that opens during puberty that cannot be returned to later on once closed. That is, the blocked part of this pubertal window is not deferred: it's forfeited.
If a child is on puberty blockers for a significant period of time during this, they risk lifelong infertility and anorgasmia, underdeveloped sexual organs, undermineralized bones leading to osteopenia and osteoporosis, and potential brain developmental defects.
None of which is reversible in adulthood.
As an analogy, hypothermia is "reversible" up to the point you're about to die of it. This means that you can raise a hypothermic person's body temperature back to its normal setpoint. However, this does not mean that if you get gangrene from hypothermia, the dead tissue can be resuscitated and brought back to normal function. This is not reversible.
No reasonable health provider is going to leave a child on blockers so long that they end up functionally a eunuch. Is it possible for problems to occur? Of course. Is that the intent and the way they are usually used? No. Has it happened to a non/0 number of people? Maybe? Being technically correct here doesn't help anyone.
We're not talking about the difference between "almost dead" and "dead" we're talking much more about something like a tattoo or an ear gauge. Ear gauges are reversible up to a point. You experiment with them and if you enjoy having the ability to adorn yourself that way you do so. If you don't you stop increasing the size before you have to spend the rest of your life with a giant hole in your ear.
That is the claim made by proponents of this treatment, but the evidence base for this is remarkably weak.
Recently, the Cass Review examined the available research and concluded that "the most significant knowledge gaps are in relation to treatment with puberty blockers, and the lack of clarity about whether the rationale for prescription is as an initial part of a transition pathway or as a 'pause' to allow more time for decision making."
Even more concerning, they make the point that there is "no way of knowing whether, rather than buying time to make a decision, puberty blockers may disrupt that decision-making process."
The Review further explains that there are indications that brain maturation may be disrupted by puberty blockers, meaning this could be a significant factor in reducing the ability of the individual to reach such a decision, due to the potential of causing neurocognitive deficits.
Because of all this, puberty blockers are actually banned in the UK now for this purpose, except when being offered under a strictly controlled research protocol.
As for anorgasmia, I was able to have one long before puberty so idk, I feel like it's not true.
I think maybe this is because you don't understand how someone can be gender non-conforming and also happy. Maybe you are having a hard time with the asymmetrical and temporal aspects (child is happy, child chooses their puberty path, child is happy during and after puberty). Isn't that a good path for care?