It is called 'Dutch protocol' the treatment of children with gender dysphoria with puberty blockers. And it is based on a single study from 2006 introducing the concept of 'sex change for transgender children' and that it would be funded by Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the company marketing tryptorelin, the drug with which the natural development of girls and boys is stopped. This was revealed by a reportage by journalist Jan Kuitenbrouwer and sociologist Peter Vasterman recently published in the NRC Handelsbladone of the largest Dutch newspapers.
La tryptorelin is a drug used mainly in the treatment of hormone-sensitive tumourssuch as prostate cancer and breast cancer, in the treatment of precocious puberty, endometriosis, uterine fibroids and in assisted reproduction. Use as a puberty blocker is off-label, but has also been authorised in many countries under pressure from transactivism. AIFA has been authorising it in Italy for several years.
The authors of the report denounce that "the scientific foundations of the Dutch protocol turn out to be rather shaky". As stated in the article, the study has been discredited several times due to the lack of a control group, the short follow-up period, the number of participants lost in the follow-up and other fundamental methodological flaws. Moreover, one of the participants in this landmark study even died from complications of so-called 'gender confirmation' surgery, as it is called in the jargon of transactivists.
But all this has not prevented the puberty suppression protocol from being blindly adopted in the international world of 'gender medicine'. without any thought to the obvious health risks resulting from developmental arrest in girls and children.
It has long been observed that almost all children who are given puberty blockers go on to take hormones of the opposite sex and often also undergo genital and breast surgery. Puberty blockers would therefore not be a 'pause button' to give time to the teenager dysphoric to decide their gender, as their promoters claim, but would instead be 'a self-fulfilling prophecy', Kuitenbrouwer and Vasterman write.
Added to this is the growing list of side effects of these drugs, from altered bone formation to infertility and loss of sexual function. Recently the Food and Drug Administration US added a requirement to write a warning on the label that puberty blockers can cause brain oedema.
The report also records the changes in the phenomenon from the date of publication of the study: in 2006, the number of children suffering from gender dysphoria and seeking medical treatment was negligible, and almost all of them were boys. Subsequently, there has been a sharp increase in cases and the number of girls with gender dysphoria has grown to far exceed that of boysadolescent girls now make up the majority of cases treated in gender clinics, in the Netherlands as in other countries. The turning point can be identified around 2013, coinciding with the increased use of smartphones and social media and the rise in popularity of the 'trans rights' movement.
Kuitenbrouwer and Vasterman question why this phenomenon would only affect adolescent girls, the demographic group known to be most susceptible to social contagion, and they would also like to see independent investigations in the Netherlands like those conducted in Sweden, Finland and England that have led the governments of these countries to abandon the 'affirmative' model to return to a psychotherapeutic approach to the treatment of these-vulnerable young people.
Here the text of the Dutch report.
Here the news in English.
Translation by Maria Celeste
