Happy end of Trans Visibility Week 2022! I’m sure you’re all relieved that the troons will go back to being invisible for another 51 weeks.
First up, an apology, as I realise now that Tony had been referring to his “girlfriend” in otherwise boring tweets that I didn’t pick up on at the start of the week. Tony is living the female-college-student-hood he never got by listening to, er,
tranny punk recommended by one of his boyfriends (
archive).
We’ll gloss over Tony discovering that women are individuals and each have
their own political opinions (
archive) and go straight into his NYT puberty blockers thread.
On Monday November 14 the New York Times published a feature by Megan Twohey and Christina Jewett titled “
They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?” (
archive, avoids the paywall).
Now, I won’t really be “assessing” the article directly, only through Tony’s enraged tweets about it. But I did want to pause here and note that if you were dead set on publishing an anti-puberty blockers story you would not allow this standfirst/kicker:
Puberty blockers can ease transgender youths’ anguish and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about long-term physical effects and other consequences.
Because, as we have discussed ad nauseam ad infinitum, there is
little evidence that puberty blockers (GnRH agonists) “ease … anguish”. The claim that they “buy time to weigh options” is also hotly contested and gets right to the heart of the question of “why block puberty?” This was an important point of the High Court of England and Wales’s
ruling in Bell v Tavistock:
there is a lack of clarity over the purpose of the treatment [puberty blockers]: in particular, whether it provides a “pause to think” in a “hormone neutral” state or is a treatment to limit the effects of puberty, and thus the need for greater surgical and chemical interventions later …
Tony
appears to be in the latter camp (
archive), where puberty blockers are taken for aesthetic reasons:
And every year that I desisted was another set of procedures, surgeries, and therapy visits that were added to a box that one day the time would come due to open.
More generally, I’d say that the article does an OK job but from my perspective there’s a lot of unjustified accommodation of people’s feelings rather than the (lack of) evidence, and some things are misrepresented to a greater or lesser extent (what the “Dutch protocol” actually is, what Bell v Tavistock actually was).
Here’s a portion from the NYT story that will be very relevant, however:
Republican governors and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are working to limit or even criminalize the treatments … Meanwhile, the Biden administration describes transgender medicine as a civil right. And some advocates criticize anyone who questions the treatments’ safety.
Anyway we’re here for Tony! It’s his time to shine! Prove wrong their claims about TRAs lashing out at anyone who asks questions about puberty blockers’ safety! Here’s
his thread on the NYT story (
archive).
Er, leaving aside that the BBC employed trans propagandist Ben Hunte as its LGBT reporter for several years, this tweet is doing a lot of work.
When Tony says “not endorsed by any major medical organization” he is presumably referring to WPATH which, even leaving aside
its advocacy for those who are sexually aroused by castration (
archive), is a thoroughly unserious organisation dominated by trans activists. Listen to the discussion of WPATH’s most recent self-identifying “Standards of Care” on
episode 94 of the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast for a run down of the insanity.
He may also be referring to the Endocrine Society or the American Academy of Pediatrics, both of which are thoroughly captured. For information on the Endocrine Society’s capture see
this letter from Malone et al (
archive) and
Malone’s interview on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast. For the American Academy of Pediatrics, see
this article by Julia Mason and Leor Sapir (
archive),
this detailed one by James Cantor (also attached below as it’s not open-access), or
this Gender: A Wider Lens interview with Leor Sapir.
An important point that Sapir makes in
that interview is that other, more general, medical bodies will typically defer to more specialised ones. So, for instance, you have the American Medical Association deferring to the compromised American Academy of Pediatrics.
Tony’s position is also a curious one to take given that the national health services of Sweden, Finland and England (health is devolved to the UK nations) have effectively ceased using puberty blockers in a widespread manner. Are these not major medical organisations? The NHS is
the world’s fifth-largest employer, after all.
And, as for Tony’s claim that the reporters “fear-monger”, well, read the damn article. It’s the kind of anodyne prose
you’d expect from the NYT.
Phew, one tweet down, just … 18 to go
.
“Out of context readings of studies rather than the best review of the literature”. Aha! An easy one! Thank god. I thought I’d be writing this all weekend.
The best reviews, in English, of the literature are the ones done by NICE - one each of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. (Presumably Tony’s illogically excluding the Florida one because for some reason believes it was written by a dentist rather than two Canadian specialists in medical evidence synthesis.)
They found, in short, that the evidence for any hoped-for outcome was very weak. If Tony has other systematic reviews of puberty blockers (or CSH) I would like to see them (as would all the doctors in the field!).
Tony takes issue with the fact the New York Times commissioned an analysis on the effects of puberty blockers on bone density. I am entirely unsurprised that the NYT did this, because the existing evidence on GnRHa and bone mineral density is very poor. Here’s what NICE had to say about it (my emphasis):
The results of the studies that reported bone density outcomes suggest that GnRH analogues may reduce the expected increase in bone density (which is expected during puberty). However, as the studies themselves are not reliable, the results could be due to confounding, bias or chance. While controlled trials may not be possible, comparative studies are needed to understand this association and whether the effects of GnRH analogues on bone density are seen after they are stopped. All the studies that reported safety outcomes provided very low certainty evidence.
Again, the important point here is not “puberty blockers do
x to bone density” but rather that the studies we have on this subject are so poor that we can’t say with any real degree of certainty.
The next few tweets are just Tony screeching that one of the two NYT reporters follows people on Twitter who urge caution on pediatric transition. He also complains that news organisations won’t let a transgender person report on this subject – but one of the people included in Tony’s screenshots, and marked as anti-trans by his Shinigami Eyes extension, is psychologist Erica Anderson, a trans-identified male.
Almost there folks, you’re nearly free of my autism for the moment.
These literature reviews supporting the safety of puberty blockers that Tony talks about are still elusive, much like all the “cis lesbians” he would have us think he was having lots of hot sex with before he nailed himself to the T4T mast.
And he keeps banging on about peer review, but lots of shit gets past peer review. The whole “
Grievance Studies” hoax involved peer reviewed journals. And in medicine the notorious and “utterly false” Andrew Wakefield paper linking the MMR vaccine, widely used in the UK, with autism
passed peer review at The Lancet (
archive) – perhaps the most prestigious medical journal in the world. I mean, here’s
a 15-year-old article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine laying out the problems with peer review (
archive).
Let’s take Tony’s claim here at face value. That means that, seemingly, for all of human history until the past 10 years there has been a cohort of society who were traumatised, suicidal trans-identifying people. And yet they escaped notice. All I have to say is that
“growing out” of transgender identification (
archive) makes a lot of sense if you consider that puberty is a time of sexual maturation, and (previously) those who identified as the opposite sex would grow up to be same-sex attracted.
Yes well I’m glad that Kate Strangio is here to hypothesise on the other side. It boggles my mind that I’m typing this, but we don’t have studies because (a) the resistance of gender medics to conducting rigorous studies and overwhelmingly (b) because treating children with puberty blockers for many years is a new phenomenon. And I don’t just mean new as in “new for trans-identifying children”, I mean just plain new. GnRH was discovered in 1971, and GnRH agonists mostly launched in the 1980s and 1990s.
The first children taking puberty blockers were those (mostly girls) diagnosed with precocious (early-onset) puberty. How seriously is their health being taken? Not very! In fact, Christina Jewett, co-author of this New York Times article, seems to be one of the few people treating these drugs with the seriousness they merit. She wrote
an article 5 years ago for Kaiser Health News about Lupron (
archive). It leads with the story of Sharissa Derricott, who is one year older than Tony, was given Lupron for precocious puberty, and has had to have her jaw replaced because of it.
This isn’t hypothetical, though. We know that blockers prevent the expected large increase in bone mineral density children experience in puberty. Does this increase occur when blockers are withdrawn? We don’t know. Why? Because the gender docs haven’t done the studies. I’ve seen some studies that discuss “add-back” protocols for adults who lose bone density when taking GnRH agonists (for prostate cancer, for instance) but to be clear these are adults who have developed normal bone density in the first place.
Plus “just take a pill” has the same energy as “cut your tits off? just get implants!”.
Really hates those detransitioners! God forbid these “trans women” were able to develop normally while this bitch was living the high life of experimental puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
Another cynical suicide claim. First of all,
the study he references (
archive) is about cross-sex hormones (“gender affirming hormone therapy”, or GAHT) and the authors explicitly distinguish between cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. So its conclusions can’t be applied to a different category of drugs and this is made clear in the study.
Second, the study is cross-sectional, as in “Alice has chocolate and is not suicidal; Bob does not have chocolate and is suicidal”. You can’t draw the kind of conclusion Tony does here from this kind of study. And in any case the evidence for puberty blockers’ effect on depression (and by proxy suicidality) is assessed in the NICE review, and the evidence is of “very low certainty”. See
my suicide post for details.
This was certainly what was claimed in the Tordoff et al publicity, but unfortunately is
not what their study actually found (
archive).
Ah, yes, “do better”. “Do better at conforming to my irrational beliefs.”
Ballsy for Tony to say this about
Turban’s thread (
archive). Tony’s claim is that the NYT article is wrong, but Turban is saying “so what we knew all this” (a classic trans activist gambit when faced with bad news). So which is it?
(I won’t do Turban tweet-by-tweet but in short, he completely misrepresents what is meant by puberty “clarifying” gender feelings, makes an unevidenced claim about bone density increasing, misrepresents the situation in Europe with gender clinics, and whitewashes off-label prescribing.)
Lastly, for completeness sack, here's
Tony's TikTok video about the article in which he has smeared the camera lens with vaseline.
And a little present for those who made it this far:
. But that's fixed now so here you go, all 20,410 pixels tall of it:
