Thread by @RoisinMichaux

MC Sarah Holmes gets up to introduce next speaker @JuliaMasonMD1, and uses the opportunity to ask people watching the @genspect livestream to speak up. Say something. Don't wait any longer, she says. 1/#GenspectBiggerPicture

Julia Mason is one of the founders of @segm_ebm, the Society of medicine-based evidence. They are concerned that the current answer to gender distress is surgery and hormones. They have difficulty getting published, so they share directly with other professionals. 2/

A paediatrician, @JuliaMasonMD1 is here to talk about the broken chain of trust in medicine. "You have to trust that some has done the research," she says. But there's no evidence to back up the treatments currently doled out to gender distressed kids. 3/
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In medical school, she was told that 90% of the medical text book was wrong. "But I can't tell you which 10% is correct," she was told by a professor. #GenspectBiggerPicture
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Working paediatricians don't have time to go through all the evidence. The lowest quality level of evidence is experience, and the highest quality of evidence is systematic evidence review. The countries that did these reviews stopped hormone treatments for kids. 5/

Medicine is littered with the detritus of treatments the profession was once convinced would work, says @JuliaMasonMD1. Talks about how peanut allergies are common because paediatricians followed misguided rules about what to feed babies. 6/

Gets into the problems with the infamous Dutch study/Dutch protocol. Very low numbers, and they flipped the scales and at the end, asked girls about erections and boys about periods - this is perhaps the study's most egregious flaw. 7/ #GenspectBiggerPicture

And yet the Dutch evidence is the strongest evidence we have for puberty blockers, says @JuliaMasonMD1. Talks about subsequent research that is biased, that paid cash to respondents, excluded detransitioners. The quality of this kind of data is highly suspect, she says. 8/

Prominent journals won't print rebuttals of bad studies. This stifling of debate contributes to the broken chain of trust, she says. A very bad study won paper of the year (I think in Paediatrics?) - the editor told @JuliaMasonMD1 it was chosen because it got the most clicks.9/

("Children who read medical journals will be offended" by papers refuting the evidence for puberty blockers, is one defence for not printing rebuttals, apparently!!) 10/ #GenspectBiggerPicture

@JuliaMasonMD1 is going through some examples of the worst transgender medicine studies. I can't keep up with all of them but trust me when I say: they are insane. I cannot believe what I'm hearing. Gasps and laughs throughout the @genspect room. 11/

A big long-term project "we have all been waiting for" - it got big bucks from the NIH. They said they would look at things like depression and anxiety and a host of other things. They didn't end up reporting on the other 6 measures. Madness. 12/#GenspectBiggerPicture

@JuliaMasonMD1 says something very important that's been pointed out by others: she calls it a massive uncontrolled experiment on children, but the word "experiment" is a misnomer because the clinics aren't even collecting data. 13/ #GenspectBiggerPicture