1./ On Jolyon Maugham and his underhand tactics. Here's Jolyon complaining that an expert cited by the prosecution in the Tavistock trial is a.... veterinary scientist who did work on sheep. To self-styled genius Jolyon this appears to be an outrage. It isn't. And here's why. 
2./ How would YOU test puberty blockers? Now that they're in widespread use Jolyon's side argue it would be unethical to run a trial where a control group of gender dysphoric kids are NOT given PBs. So why not run an animal trial? That's exactly what Professor Neil Evans did.
3./ His team at Glasgow University worked with researchers from Norway's leading Gender Identity clinic. Jolyon didn't mention them. But anyway how CAN animals help us work out the impact of puberty blockers? Simple: all mammals go through adolescence. Yep even sheep.
4./ Strange as it may seem almost identical chemical interactions happen in adolescent sheep as in humans. Yep, pituitary gland, GnRH hormones, sex hormones. Even more importantly, the rewiring of the brain that happens in teen humans happens in sheep too. courses.lumenlearning.com/ap1x94x1/chapt…
5./ How do I know this? Because unlike Jolyon I was intellectually curious enough to speak to the team and read their papers. If like me you grew up in the country you'll know already sheep aren't the pacific little creatures of school rhymes. discoverthelakes.co.uk/how-to-survive…
6./ My boyfriend and I were once chased by rams cos we had our dog (on a leash) and ewes with lambs ain't friendly either. Neither ...despite millenia of domestication are sheep as dumb as we like to imagine. There's another thing that's useful about them.bbc.com/earth/story/20…
7./ If you want to study the impact of a chemical on the entire body mice are so different in body mass from humans it's hard to get the comparison right. Sheep are much closer (average mass 55kg) to humans. So they go thru adolescence and they're close in mass to us! Tick. Tick
8./ The problem is how to examine the mental function of a sheep in ways that might shed light on subtle human brain function. The Glasgow team did something brilliant. They devised a complex maze for their sheep and trained them (using food) to navigate their way through it.
9./ The "teenage" sheep who weren't given puberty blockers when they were reintroduced to the maze after an absence found their way round just as before. Those who took the PBs were lost. This is a very precise sort of memory: spatial memory.
10./ It's the sort of memory that means if you go back to your home town you know you're way around. Could the lack of that sort of memory be suggestive (that's all we can say) of more pervasive identity problems in humans? You can read the paper here. 👇ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
11./ Remember the team were trying to be very precise and only focus on a very few functions. This isn't to say there weren't other deleterious effects of PBs. It just means the experiment was designed to explore THIS one. The team also found distinct emotional differences.
12./ Rams who were given PBs remained more emotionally reactive after the blockers were stopped than the control group. The team concluded "perturbing normal hippocampal formation .. may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function."
13./ I don't get it. Jolyon and his side say THEY care about kids who believe they are trans. So then why would they not bother to read the paper from, never mind speak to the team who ran the only large animal trial into the powerful drugs they want to give to those kids?
14./ Maybe Jolyon isn't motivated by the truth. Here he points out slyly the team's work was "taken up" by a Christian outfit. So what? Are we to judge Einstein's work on the basis that David Icke sometimes quotes it? This is a lazy attempt to smear good science by association.
15./ Evans was cited by the Christian Institute not paid by them. What's strange is I used to believe some of Jolyon's conspiracy theories. What this debacle proves is that when it comes to facts he can be as careful as a medicalised teenage sheep lost in a long forgotten maze.
@threadreaderapp please supply a nice thread
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