New Zealand’s shamefully high use of puberty blockers for kids gets exposed.

When New Zealand’s kids use puberty blockers at eleven times the rate of England’s kids, it’s likely that New Zealand is the country with a problem. And it’s not the kids.

Charlotte Paul, epidemiologist and emeritus professor in the Dept of Preventative and Social Medicine at Otago University, NZ, has written a factual firecracker of a piece in December’s issue of the North and South magazine about NZ’s continuing high use of puberty blockers for confused and distressed kids. It’s not to be missed.

In September last year, Charlotte had her first public piece about her concerns with NZ’s high use of puberty blockers published in ‘The Listener’ weekly magazine. She did so at the urging of her younger medical colleagues who were too afraid to raise their heads above the parapet on this matter, for fear of the risk to their careers. They are still seeing young people in their clinics who have changed their minds about wanting to transition to the opposite sex they were born, and are left with serious mental health problems unaddressed, some of which preceded them taking the puberty blockers to effect their transition.

In fact, Charlotte writes in ‘North and South’, children in state care are disproportionately likely to identify as trans. A youth worker told her that in his experience of working with marginalised teens, they had “complex histories of trauma, and … an unusually high prevalence of trans-gender identification”. There appears to be little clinical psychological assessment done to distinguish between those kids who have had persistent gender dysphoria and will remain transgender, and those whose gender distress may have another cause, or be a passing phase.

NZ’s Ministry of Health has been slow to respond to the growing amount of evidence from overseas that puberty blockers may have negative side effects which require further investigation, and restriction of their use. There was a time when the MoH indicated it might re-evaluate its position on its advocacy of puberty blockers, but then it fell back on the statement that their use was “a matter for discussion between a treating physician and their patient”. Around Aug/Sept 2022, the MoH did make a small change on its website by removing the description of puberty blockers as being “safe and fully reversible”. However, in a Stuff article shortly afterwards it stated that it endorsed the guidelines from the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA), which state: “Puberty blockers are considered to be fully reversible and allow the adolescent time prior to making a decision on starting hormone therapy.” The MoH finally acknowledged in March this year that due to the evidence emerging from overseas, it would review the use of puberty blockers in its health systems. The evidence brief for this has been slow to emerge, though, and has been dragged out to the end of the year. An independent review may be commissioned, as well, but that is not a given yet.

Parents are caught in a terrible bind with the push of gender ideology onto their kids by some schools, online groups, and gender clinics. Parents want their child to be happy and to not alienate them, but what gender clinics may tell them about their kid’s health being transformed by puberty blockers often doesn’t marry up with what their own instinct and/or research tells them. Charlotte writes “Informed parents know this is a dangerous path. They know that the information they have been given is seriously unbalanced. Yet, how can they disagree with their daughter [or son] without gravely endangering their parental relationship”.

Overseas, some mainstream media have been publishing articles about puberty blockers and their effects on kids, which is where Charlotte says she began discovering what was going on in the rest of the world. Here in NZ, we have a dearth of mainstream media willing to publish more than what amounts to puff pieces about transgenderism, with vanishingly rare exceptions like this Newshub piece in March 2021, and, of course, ‘The Listener’ as previously mentioned, and now ‘North and South’.

For those who know Kim Hill pictured on the cover above, the irony is not lost. Kim Hill, although undisputedly accomplished, has been a staunch defender of all things trans. This has more than once boiled over into overt hostility from her when interviewing people on her show who are opposed to, or question, gender ideology. That she features in the same publication which potentially illustrates she just may have been the champion of a medical scandal, has not gone unobserved.

Charlotte Paul finishes her piece in ‘North and South’ by writing that “Every person [in NZ] who regrets medical transition (or their doctor) can notify this confidentially as an adverse effect to Medsafe via the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring.”

(If you can buy the magazine, please do so to support ‘North and South’, and read the full information-loaded piece which I’ve only lightly touched on here; but if you unable to do that, I’m told that the magazine is now up free on Libby app, with Charlotte Paul’s article on page 44. I haven’t checked this, though, so can’t verify it.)