Transgender athletes

[MigL]

Next time you submit a paper for review, CharonY, and your conclusion sums up a study saying "There were no changes", then you add the following line "But there may be some changes, and we don't know the extent of these changes due to time constraints.", don't be surprised if it doesn't get published 😄 .

[CharonY]

28 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

Are you sure you agree with the statement as written? (because you seem to be suggesting you do... and yet feel compelled to qualify it?)

"If you decide to stop taking them, your body will go through puberty just the way it would have if you had not aken puberty blockers at all."

Or do you just like to think you want to support the "scientists" that wrote it?

It is a simplified statement, but not so much that I would disagree with it. If you take a look at the lit, it shows that after discontinuing suppressors hormonal levels start progressing as through normal puberty.  In fact it, is the general  consensus of most health professionals. Or conversely, I do not see studies that found irreversible effects of puberty blockers. 

A little sidebar here:

In biology as well as medical sciences all claims require some level of qualifications. SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are very safe. Yet there are rare cases of issues. Should the CDC and other sources claiming that SARS-CoV-2 is safe deemed pseudoscience now?

Same with puberty blockers. They suppress the onset of puberty and stopping reverses the process. But we do not know whether that delay itself could have any effects down the road. Heck, even "normal" developmental processes should have qualifiers when you want to be very accurate (because as I have said so many times, in biology there is no strict normality, just stochastic processes with varying degrees of likelihood). However, that is not what you would tell laypersons, as that would just confuse everyone.

Thus, in terms of normal health communication it seems to follow what is generally understood with regard to puberty blockers. 

I also think it a bit weird that you automatically assume that this claim is wrong, without looking at what consensus is among health professionals. I.e. while you imply bias on my side, you do not have any evidence other than your interpretation of two sentences. From there you make a rather big claim of pseudoscience. 

Meanwhile, you could take a look at other sites that provide information for laypersons. Such as the Mayo clinic and others. There you find things like:

Quote

What happens when pubertal blockers are stopped?

 

Use of GnRH analogues pauses puberty, providing time to determine if a child's gender identity is long lasting. It also gives children and their families time to think about or plan for the psychological, medical, developmental, social and legal issues ahead.

If an adolescent child decides to stop taking GnRH analogues, puberty will resume and the normal progression of the physical and emotional changes of puberty will continue.

Quote

Are Puberty Blockers Permanent? 

No, puberty blockers are temporary:

• Injectable blockers (such as Lupron) can last one, three or six months. Patients can continue getting injections until they decide what to do next.
• Implants (such Supprelin), which are placed just under the skin in the arm, can last 12 to 24 months before they need to be replaced.

Both types are meant to give patients more time to consider their options:

• If your child decides to continue transitioning, they will likely want to consider hormone therapy and possibly gender affirming surgery.
• If your child decides that they want to develop characteristics of the sex they were assigned at birth, they can simply stop taking puberty blockers. Once the puberty blockers are out of their system, they’ll go through the puberty of the sex assigned at birth. Puberty blockers alone should not affect your child’s fertility, but hormone therapy can.

And so on. So you would need to extend your claim to well-known health providers as part of as pseudoscientific cabal. I can also provide some literature, but I am honestly not sure whether it warrants the effort.

8 minutes ago, MigL said:

Next time you submit a paper for review, CharonY, and your conclusion sums up a study saying "There were no changes", then you add the following line "But there may be some changes, and we don't know the extent of these changes due to time constraints.", don't be surprised if it doesn't get published 😄 .

You will be surprised to know that papers have a different target audience and that you use more than one sentence to make a point. Also, reviewers read the whole paper rather than take out a snipped and interpret it to death.

[MigL]

44 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

it's pseudohomophobic, at best...

Others' ideas offend you, Dim ?
It would be so much better if everyone in the world thought as you do.
Intolerance takes many forms; you just displayed one by your characterization of others'ideas.
 

11 minutes ago, CharonY said:

You will be surprised to know that papers have a different target audience and that you use more than one sentence to make a point. Also, reviewers read the whole paper rather than take out a snipped and interpret it to death.

And JC's claim was that the statement was pseudoscientific.
It wouldn't fly in a scientific paper ( scientific studies of Covid vaccines list all side effects and anomalies ).
But it may be valid as a news article.

Been fun chatting; gotta go to work ...

Edited June 21, 2022 by MigL

[CharonY]

16 minutes ago, MigL said:

And JC's claim was that the statement was pseudoscientific.
It wouldn't fly in a scientific paper ( scientific studies of Covid vaccines list all side effects and anomalies ).
But it may be valid as a news article.

Scientific papers only identify effects found in their respective cohort (sounds trivial but is an important distinction). And the overall recommendation based on a range of studies is therefore that it is safe (which may vary a bit based on the criteria of different health agencies). It does not make the claim pseudoscientific, but is rather a simplification for broader communication. I.e. because it is not precise enough for a paper, it does not mean that it is pseudoscientific. If that was the criterion, virtually all statements outside of scientific papers, including on this forum would be considered pseudoscience. 

I also do not think that anyone confused the recommendation of a health website with a scientific paper nor that is what JC was referring to. 

Edit:

I will add that the evidence level for puberty blocker is not quite as high as for some other treatments (as their use is rare), and since it involves children, it does has some unique ethical issues surrounding consent (which is also why children-specific treatments are difficult to develop). There, added some qualifiers. Is it now semi-pseudoscientific?

[dimreepr]

40 minutes ago, MigL said:

Others' ideas offend you, Dim ?
It would be so much better if everyone in the world thought as you do.
Intolerance takes many forms; you just displayed one by your characterization of others'ideas.

Did I though???

[zapatos]

1 hour ago, MigL said:

He is not saying it is pseudoscientific, your link is.

Please show me where in my link it says it is "pseudoscientific".

1 hour ago, MigL said:

the 'absolute' statement, that there will be no difference what soever once you stop taking puberty blockers, is negated by the next statement that says there very well may be, and we don't know the extent.

Please show me in the link where the absolute statement "there will be no difference what soever once you stop taking puberty blockers" is.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

1 hour ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

The claim made in the link, which I clearly bolded for all to see is unscientific.

You clearly have no idea what the word "unscientific" means, or what it means to "provide evidence".

[J.C.MacSwell]

2 hours ago, zapatos said:

 

You clearly have no idea what the word "unscientific" means, or what it means to "provide evidence".

I used to. I'm sure there are some new Orwellian definitions that haven't made it up to Nova Scotia yet...

Let's just call your link and claim "not very scientific" and move on....

More importantly it will be interesting to see how the FINA rules on transgenders affects the rules on fairness and inclusion in other sports and also at other levels of sport. It certainly disincentivizes athletes taking drugs (assuming they hadn't started any protocols before the age of 12) for the purposes of meeting arbitrary targets.

OTOH it could lead to some unfortunate effects on inclusion at younger ages.

[iNow]

This is boring 

It’s not your choice to make. It’s the parents and healthcare providers involved in that child’s life. 

Maybe they’ll want to someday play non-elite level childhood and school level sports. We should stop passing laws making that illegal. 

Puberty blockers aren’t the problem here. Equality and acceptance blockers are. 

[J.C.MacSwell]

Emotional arguments aside, minor sports are typically categorized by birth year in two year intervals (Peewee, Bantam etc), which can give a 2 year difference of age in each category (and effectively more than that including premature birth dates).

So it is not uncommon to have Tanner Stage 1 individuals required to compete with some that are in or have even completed Tanner Stage 6. (and it is a significant safety issue in physical sports)

Edited June 22, 2022 by J.C.MacSwell