A 12-year-old boy in the UK has started puberty-blocking treatment in an effort to “transition” to a female, making him one of the youngest in the country to do so.
Terri Lammin told The Telegraph her son, Ash, insisted he was a girl from the moment he could speak.
“When she [Ash] was three she said to me, ‘I’m a boy because you gave me a boy’s name – it’s your fault,” Ms Lammin said.
“I remember feeling horrible because she blamed me. I’d never come across it before and I just went along with it. I just thought, ‘if he’s happy, well that’s the main thing.”
Kate Law, the headmaster at Chilton Primary School, described the youngster as a “pioneer” and encouraged Ms Lammin to send her son to class wearing a girl’s uniform.
“Before, when I was taking her into school, she was biting me and kicking me,” Ms Lammin said. “She didn’t want to go in. As soon as she put the girl’s uniform on, she wanted to go every day.”
“[The school] let her use the girls’ toilets and get changed for swimming separately. But this isn’t the same in all schools,” Ms Lammin added.
“I’d like to see the subject of transgender people included in some lessons like there are about same-sex families. There needs to be more about liking people for who they are, not what they are,” she said.
The youngster will reportedly be taking hormone-blocking treatment until he’s 18-years-old and can decide whether or not to go ahead with full gender reassignment surgery.
According to The Telegraph, puberty blockers can be prescribed to any child suffering from gender dysphoria from age 10 by the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). So far, GIDS has treated approximately 230 children under the age of 14 with puberty blockers.
Although the clinic has insisted that such treatments are safe and reversible, GIDS have been accused of hiding bad results about its use of the experimental puberty blockers on teenagers.
The UK’s Christian Institute reports:
The Tavistock clinic claimed the effects of the drugs are “reversible” and that the results “have been positive”.
Yet the clinic’s own unpublished study revealed that the treatment actually could have devastating outcomes.
In 2010, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) launched its trial of puberty blockers for young teenagers with gender dysphoria.
Dr Polly Carmichael, Director of GIDS, claimed in 2014: “Now we’ve done the study and the results thus far have been positive”.
Subsequently the Trust doled out puberty blockers to over a thousand teens – including hundreds under the age of 14 – on the basis of the study.
Dr Michael Biggs, an associate professor at Oxford University’s Department of Sociology, said the clinic had failed to open the results of the study to scientists, and that the drugs have not been certified as safe or effective by the manufacturers or by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.
The study actually showed that after a year of using the drugs there was “a significant increase” in the number of adolescents who said they “deliberately try to hurt or kill themselves”.
Parents also reported “a significant increase in behavioural and emotional problems” and “a significant decrease in physical wellbeing” in girls.
There was no positive impact on “the experience of gender dysphoria”.
Dr Biggs said: “Puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria. Yet the study has been used to justify rolling out this drug regime to several hundred children aged under 16.”
The NHS Health Research Authority revealed that the study itself concluded: “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.”
Dr Carmichael has since admitted: “Nothing is completely reversible.”
It was also revealed that the Tavistock clinic came under great pressure from trans activist groups such as Mermaids, who had opposed the clinic’s initial caution.
