Pro-Transgenderism-for-Children Partisans Receive $10 Million from Federal Government to Prove Puberty Blockers Help 11-Year-Old Children.
But Now That the Data Show Children Aren't Helped -- and May Be Hurt -- They Refuse to Pubish the Results.
Via John Sexton.
A radical pro-transgenderism-for-children "researcher" asked the government for around $10 million for a "study." Really, a propaganda effort as we now know.
One single study conducted in the Netherlands claimed that children benefit from being pumped full of sterilizing chemical castration agents.
This claim is widely derided. She wanted to prove that pumping children full of sex-change hormones is good for them.
Well, her study proved that children are
not helped by the hormones.
And guess what she did next?
She decided to simply withhold the study that we paid $10 million for, because she doesn't want the study's conclusion to be used against transgender fanatics like herself.
Even the trans-crazy
New York Times finds it curious that "science" is now being published or withheld from publication based on the political agenda of the "scientist" involved.
U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says
The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.
I repeat: We paid $10 million for this attempted propaganda operation and now that the proof is in that transgender drugs are harmful to children, they're locking up the results.
Sue them for the $10 million back and lodge FOIA after FOIA for the results.
We fucking paid for them. They have no right to classify them as Top Secret just because the truth is other than what they prayed for.
An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.
The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes -- like breasts or a deepening voice -- that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.
The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.
But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.
No that's not true, as even the New York Time will note later.
So her claim is "there was no improvement because they were already doing swell."
Keep that in mind when they tell you we
must give kids transgender drugs and surgeries or else they'll become suicidal and kill themselves.
She's saying the kids were doing great before the procedures!
"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.
Before the "study:" We need to give these kids transgender surgeries because they're depressed and/or suicidal
After the "study:" Never mind what I said about them being depressed and/or suicidal, their mental health hasn't improved only because their mental health was
already swell!
In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy's team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.
Her findings would prove critics are right, so she's hiding the research she bilked the American taxpayer for.
"I do not want our work to be weaponized," she said. "It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time."
The findings, like the election results from Atlanta and Detroit, need more time to be tabulated.
...
Dr. Olson-Kennedy is one of the country's most vocal advocates of adolescent gender treatments and has served as an expert witness in many legal challenges to the state bans. She said she was concerned the study's results could be used in court to argue that "we shouldn't use blockers because it doesn't impact them," referring to transgender adolescents.
Other researchers, however, were alarmed by the idea of delaying results that would have immediate implications for families around the world.
"I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it's really important to get the science out there," said Amy Tishelman, a clinical and research psychologist at Boston College who was one of the study's original researchers.
Note that this study was intended to support the tiny Dutch study -- which itself was repudiated by the much more robust Cass Study in the UK.
England's youth gender clinic in 2011 tried to replicate the Dutch results with a study of 44 children. But at a conference five years later, the British researchers reported that puberty blockers had not changed volunteers' well-being, including rates of self-harm. Those results were not made public until 2020, years after puberty blockers had become the standard treatment for children with gender dysphoria in England.
In 2020, Dr. Olson-Kennedy's group described the initial psychological profile of the children enrolled in the U.S. study of puberty blockers, whose average age was 11. Before receiving the drugs, around one quarter of the group reported depression symptoms and significant anxiety, and one quarter reported ever having thoughts of suicide. Eight percent reported a past suicide attempt.
In a progress report submitted to the N.I.H. at that time, Dr. Olson-Kennedy outlined her hypothesis of how the children would fare after two years on puberty blockers: that they would show "decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time."
That hypothesis does not seem to have borne out.
Now check out this spin:
"They have good mental health on average," Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in the interview with The New York Times. "They're not in any concerning ranges, either at the beginning or after two years." She reiterated this idea several times.
When asked in follow-up emails to clarify how the children could have good initial mental health when her preliminary findings had showed one quarter of them struggling, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said that, in the interview, she was referring to data averages and that she was still analyzing the full data set.
What?
The NIH says it's fine if they take the $10 million grant and bury the report:
An N.I.H. spokesman said that while the agency generally encourages the publication of data supported by its grants, researchers decide how and when to do so.
Note the whole purpose of a study is to take a small but representative sample of the general population, study that sample, and extrapolate the results to the general population. Obviously you can't track the health of every single person.
But we have accepted for hundreds of years of medical science research (as well as polling or any other statistical sampling) that a small but representative sample shows what the whole group is experiencing.
In order to justify refusing to release the results, this Dick-Chopping Maniac now says there's no point in studying a small sample, because that tells us nothing about the larger group at all:
Although the N.I.H. studies are large, she said, "these are minuscule compared to the amount of people that we've taken care of."
OUT: "Trust the science"
IN: Fuck the science, we're doing Transgender Justice on the taxpayer's dime!
Fuck you.
Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at
03:34 PM