You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Puberty Blockers’ tag.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew wants children under 16 kept off social media and AI chatbots.
Good.
Not because the policy is automatically workable. Kids are talented little smugglers, and the internet has more holes than any government net. But the premise is sound enough: children are not miniature adults. Their judgment is still forming. Their resilience is still forming. Their sense of self is still being built under pressure from machines designed to harvest attention, anxiety, loneliness, status hunger, and imitation.
Anyone who has spent time in a school already knows this. The phone does not stay in the phone. It follows children into classrooms, friendships, sleep, family life, and self-understanding, dragging the emotional weather of the internet behind it.
So Kinew is not wrong to worry about the infinite scroll.
But now comes the circle no one should be asked to square.
If children under 16 are too developmentally immature to responsibly use TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or AI chatbots, how are they mature enough to consent to medical interventions that can alter puberty, sexual development, fertility, and future bodily integrity?
That is not a cheap gotcha. It is the question.
The same adult world cannot say a 15-year-old is too vulnerable for algorithmic identity machines, then turn around and treat that same 15-year-old as a sovereign authority on an identity framework often first encountered, rehearsed, and socially reinforced online. The developmental premise cannot change just because the political subject changes.
This is where the phrase “gender-affirming care” does too much work.
It bundles together counselling, social transition, names, pronouns, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries, legal changes, and an institutional framework that treats affirmation as the default moral response. Once the label is accepted, scrutiny begins to sound cruel. Caution becomes “denial of care.” Questions become “hate.”
That is how a medical culture loses discipline.
None of this requires pretending that gender dysphoria is fake. It is not. Some young people are genuinely distressed, and they deserve compassion, seriousness, and protection from bullying or humiliation.
But compassion is not the same thing as medical acceleration.
The evidence base for pediatric gender medicine is not as settled as activists and professional bodies spent years pretending. The Cass Review in England found serious weaknesses in the evidence behind youth gender services and pushed the NHS toward a more cautious model. NHS England stopped routine prescribing of puberty blockers for minors in 2024, and the U.K. government later made restrictions on puberty blockers indefinite, citing expert advice about safety risks. (NHS England)
That was not an American culture-war panic. It was a major health system responding to an evidentiary rupture.
NHS England has also moved toward greater caution around masculinising and feminising hormones for minors, including a 2026 consultation on whether those treatments should remain a routine option for under-18s. (The Guardian)
Meanwhile, Manitoba’s own Gender Diversity and Affirming Action for Youth program says hormone blockers may be discussed for some youth early in puberty, while gender-affirming hormones may be discussed for youth who have completed puberty. Shared Health Manitoba has also described puberty blockers as delaying physical and sexual maturity for youth who have not yet entered or completed puberty. (Shared Health)
So the contradiction is not imaginary.
Kinew’s child-safety argument depends on one claim: children under 16 are developmentally vulnerable. They are susceptible to manipulation, emotional contagion, social pressure, adult incentives, and systems they do not fully understand.
Exactly.
Now apply that consistently.
Protect children from addictive apps. Protect them from algorithmic sexualization. Protect them from online mobs and chatbot intimacy. But also protect them from adults who treat adolescent distress as proof of an inner essence that must be medically affirmed before the child has finished becoming herself.
A sane society can hold two thoughts at once.
First, distressed children deserve care.
Second, because they are children, adults owe them caution.
Patience is not cruelty. Hesitation is not hatred. Preserving a child’s future options is not oppression.
Kinew has stumbled into the right premise. Children are not miniature adults. If that is true when the subject is social media, it does not magically become false when the subject changes to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, fertility, and future sexual development.
The standard cannot be: fragile when scrolling, sovereign when affirming.
That is not child protection. That is politics choosing which vulnerabilities count.
Kinew has been hoisted by his own petard. The only question is whether anyone in his political world is willing to notice.
References
Wab Kinew / Manitoba youth social media and AI chatbot ban coverage: (650 CKOM)
NHS England, Clinical policy: puberty suppressing hormones: (NHS England)
U.K. government, Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice: (GOV.UK)
U.K. government explainer, Puberty blockers: what you need to know: (healthmedia.blog.gov.uk)
NHS England / U.K. parliamentary briefing on hormone treatment policy for children and young people: (House of Commons Library)
Shared Health Manitoba, GDAAY program description: (Shared Health)
Shared Health Manitoba, Supporting Trans Youth to “Live Their Best Life”: (Shared Health)
Children are being harmed because medical practitioners are either ideologically captured or too scared to speak out against the grotesque medical experimentation undertaken in the name of transgender ideology.
The transgender debate revolves around thought terminating clichés being flung at people rather than actual arguments based on facts and evidence. “No debate”, “TWAW”, and of course “you don’t want trans people to exist!” are all meant to emotionally manipulate and coerce people into agreement or at least silence on the the matters of gender affirming care specifically, and transgender health care in general. This is why (trans) activists almost always take this route because the facts (and medical evidence) DO NOT support their position and said evidence often indicates a risk of significant iatrogenic harm for children and adults.
When talking with the gender religious another dodge they will use is puberty blockers are just being used in a small number of cases. Replace ‘puberty blockers’ with lobotomies or thalidomide treatments to see how well this argument holds up…
This tragic medical scandal is what happens when we allow medical decisions to be made on the basis of feelings and activism, as opposed to evidence based medicine.
GAC is being halted in the UK and across Europe – Canada needs to get its head out of the sand and rejoin the medical community that follows evidence based medicine instead of the strictures of transgender activism. Children’s lives are being ruined because of this quackery and it needs to stop.
The article quoted below by Maria Maynes describes the content of the study. Read the full article here.
“A new study has suggested that damage done by puberty blockers is permanent, casting doubt on claims by trans campaigners that the hormone drugs simply “pause” puberty and provide time for children who question their gender.
The preprint study from the Mayo Clinic, a world-renowned leader in medical research, found mild to severe atrophy in the testes and sperm of male children on puberty blockers. The authors of the groundbreaking study have expressed doubt about the “reversibility” of such blockers, a claim made by campaigners who promote the use of the drugs for gender dysphoric children.
Scientists at the world-renowned clinic who carried out the study found that puberty blockers can lead to fertility problems, withering testicles, and even cancer among children who take them. Authors found that puberty blockers hurt the development of testicles and sperm production in ways that cannot be fully reversed, with problems including impacting users’ ability to have children in adulthood.”
[…]
“The recently published preprint came ahead of the long-anticipated Cass Review in Britain, released on Wednesday, with the independent review warning that healthcare professionals felt afraid to discuss their views on transgender services for children. The report also found that there was no evidence that puberty blockers or hormone drugs “buy time to think” or reduce the suicide risk in children suffering from gender dysphoria.
The publication of the review by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass has confirmed the NHS in England’s shift away from the medicalised treatment of children struggling with their gender, to one focused on talk therapy and support.
The Mayo Clinic preprint, although not yet peer-reviewed or published, suggests that some of the effects of puberty blockers on testes and sperm may not be reversible, sparking concern from leading medics.
Prof Ashley Grossman, a University of Oxford endocrinologist, has pointed to the study as proof that there is ‘no good evidence’ showing puberty blockers help children.
The endocrinologist highlighted the study, saying that the drugs are too risky to be given to the “greatly increased” number of adolescents who identify as transgender.
“Routine puberty blocking treatment for this use has not yet been adequately studied, and many of these children may have other problems for which they need help,’ he added, hinting at a growing body of evidence showing gender confused youngsters often have other, underlying mental health issues,” he said, as he pointed to the early data released by the Mayo Clinic in the preprint last month.
The UK last month joined the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Norway in a growing list of European nations to have either placed restrictions on or banned medical interventions for gender dysphoric children.”
We need to act now to stop this reckless experimentation on our children.
The mask has been at least partially ripped off in the UK. The use of puberty blockers on children has been stopped and now requires the court approval to prescribe the experimental drugs (with no evidential link to their benefit) to children.
“Now, it may be that there is a genuine unmet medical need among adolescent girls of which clinicians had previously been unaware. It may also be that gender dysphoria and autism are co-morbidities that require an integrated approach to treatment. The problem, however, is no-one has done any research, so whether or not either is the case is simply unknown. It is entirely plausible for Tavistock to return in future litigation with a much stronger argument. For that to happen, however, research simply has to be done. You and I may be able to fly by the seat of our pants, but courts cannot and doctors should not.
Relatedly, the administration of puberty blockers progressed with a grim inevitability to the use of cross-sex-hormones; they did not provide “space to think” but rather seemed designed to ensure that future surgical interventions were more effective. Evidence from the Netherlands indicated, of the adolescents who started puberty suppression, only 1.9% did not proceed to cross-sex-hormones. Tavistock offered no alternative treatment paths, an aspect of the modern (and similarly unevidenced) fashion for “affirmative” treatment of gender dysphoria.
It’s worth making an aside here and noting the general problem of poor record-keeping and cavalier attitudes to evidence and data across a number of British institutions. Over and over again the EHRC, in its report on Labour anti-Semitism, observed a failure to complete the most basic administrative tasks. The same issue emerged in the Home Office during the Windrush scandal, and — as I wrote last year — in the Government’s frankly contemptuous behaviour before the Supreme Court in last year’s prorogation case.
A number of commentators noted that charities Mermaids and Stonewall were refused permission to intervene, and said this looked unfair. They made these observations without realising interveners are there to assist the court, and must provide evidence that is different from that already tendered. If all they do is repeat what Tavistock has already said, they serve no purpose apart from wasting court time, and court time is expensive.
What Mermaids and Stonewall wished to enter into evidence were accounts of positive experiences from young trans people treated with puberty blockers. However, Tavistock had already provided these; they are quoted at length in the judgment. Much of the would-be interveners’ argument was based on the idea that “the voice of the child” must be heard, repeatedly if necessary.
Bell’s lived experience was a tiny part of her case — and, indeed, by choosing judicial review rather than medical negligence, she made her personal circumstances (and those of other people) even less salient. A tort claim would have put her on the witness stand and investigated her treatment pathway because “pain and suffering” (one of the traditional heads of damage) is assessed subjectively when calculating potential damages in such a case.
It has become fashionable, of late, to valorise ‘lived experience’ from people keen to parade both their victimhood and their virtue. Unfortunately, lived experience by itself is not evidence in a court of law. Nor is the argument made by Mermaids that “every young person has the right to make their own decisions about their body” – something more is needed.
It is the role of medicine to heal the sick and leave the well alone, which is only possible via careful recourse to the scientific method and disinterested research. If this does not happen, it then becomes the law’s duty to ensure each and every litigant gets his or her due.”
This gender bullshit has to stop. The sooner the better. I only hope that Canada wakes the heck up and looks to the court precedent set in the UK before passing any more disastrous legislation (bill C-6).
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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