le=”font-size: 11pt”>Many ethical questions remain. How can you create a control group when those children on placebos would quickly know, since their puberty would begin? How can you disentangle the benefits of psychotherapy — which Cass has promised all patients — from those of a drug? How do you factor in that most patients have co-morbidities such as anorexia, autism or trauma from homophobic bullying or sexual abuse? Will a cohort of children feel under pressure from activists to be positive about these campaigned-for drugs? A key justification for blockers, especially among late-transitioning males, is they allow trans people to “pass” more easily as the opposite sex. But how can such cosmetic advantages be weighed against loss of physical capacity to have children?
Above all, how do you select child patients to test a drug when 85 per cent of dysphoria cases resolve themselves at puberty — but doctors can never predict which ones? And what if participants, whose bodies and lives are changed forever, have later regrets?
Maybe, say some clinicians, it would be better to study the huge new trans patient cohort that emerged only a decade ago: teenage girls. Or if a long-term view is required, compel adult gender clinics to release data on about 9,000 children who graduated into their care. (Six out of seven clinics have refused.) Yet there is one reason the NHS is compelled to launch a trial. If such an experiment were deemed too risky, why the hell was it being conducted at Gids since 2011?
It is time to throw puberty blockers into the pile of medical crazes, like lunchtime lobotomies and trepanning. End too the mad notion that demanding these terrible drugs is the metric of how much you care about gender-questioning young people. Are we really going to turn more children into lab rats because we haven’t yet convinced ideologues such as Creasy? Because the chances are no medical trial, no amount of scientific evidence, ever will.
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