The social movement causing children to question their gender – and in some instances partake of a chemical brew that suppresses their normal physical development – has created new ethical issues.
And lapses, apparently.
A professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom is accusing the National Health Service’s only specialized clinic for transgender children of suppressing negative results of experimental treatments.
Dr. Michael Biggs of the school’s Department of Sociology alleges the Gender Identity Development Service has been handing out experimental puberty blocking hormones to children even though there was “a significant increase” in the number of girls who self-reported to staff members they “deliberately try to hurt or kill” themselves.
Worse, he alleges the information was suppressed.
The claims surfaced after the governor of the London clinic with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust “resigned last month in protest at its ‘blinkered’ response to doctors who had raised the alarm about ‘woefully inadequate’ care,” said a London Telegraph report.
“Parents also reported ‘a significant increase in behavioral and emotional problems’ and a ‘significant decrease in physical wellbeing’ in children born female, he claims. According to his research, there was no positive impact on ‘the experience of gender dysphoria,’ the diagnosis given to those who are described as feeling intensely uncomfortable with their biological sex,” the report explained.
Biggs alleges the puberty blockers made gender dysphoria worse.
The report cited the experiment’s use of hormones known as Gonadatropin-Releasing Hormone agonists. The study’s own protocol explained: “It is not clear what the long-term effects of early suppression may be on bone development, height, sex organ development and body shape and their reversibility if treatment is stopped during pubertal development.”
The promoters of the treatment also claimed the treatments were reversible.
More than 800 patients under age 18 had been pushed into the experiment by 2017, the report said.
The project recently was given another $1.5 million to continue its research with the University College London and the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, the report said.
