To me this certainly looks like a conflict of interest, but I’ll let you be the judge. The Post Millennial recently reported that a pharmaceutical maker of puberty blockers funded the original grandaddy study that led to 'gender-affirming care' for minors: The Dutch Study

So how did we finally come to learn of this, well all thanks to a Dutch investigative report which has revealed that the 2006 study upon which the entire medical experiment of child sex changes is based and promoted was funded by a pharmaceutical company, that is a maker of puberty blockers.

The finding of the investigate report were published in an NRC article, on Dec 31, and it takes aim at the treatment approach known as the "Dutch protocol," which involves blocking the puberty of adolescents who are suffering from gender dysphoria and forms the basis for the "gender-affirming care" model adopted by pediatric gender clinics all over the world.

I’ve put a link to the Post Millennial story as well as a link to the story they’ve cited the Dutch NRC, the original story in the NRC is in Dutch, however, if you use Google Translate and put in the webpage in the link, you can read the translated version in English.

Now according to investigative journalist Jan Kuitenbrouwer and media sociologist Peter Vasterman, authors of the NRC article, the "scientific underpinnings of the Dutch protocol turn out to be pretty shaky."

A little background for those of you not so familiar with this, the research that is always cited as justification for clinics adopting the "affirmative model of care" and fast-tracking children onto these questionable, experimental drugs consists of one Dutch study, with results published in 2011 and 2014. Now you would think that given the magnitude of what is being done here, the researchers must have based it on a large control group, sure, if you consider 55 children to be a large control group. Yes, you heard me correctly, this research followed 55 children first treated with puberty blockers and then with cross-sex hormones who according to researchers reported positive results 18 months later.

The article states over and over that this study has been discredited numerous times due to the lack of a control group, the number of participants who were lost to follow-up, the short follow-up period, and certain other key methodological flaws. Stella O’Malley, co-founder of Genspect, recently called the decision not to offer regular follow-ups for this cohort "extraordinary to the point of suspicious."

One of the participants in this landmark study even died from the complications of so-called "gender-affirming" surgery, which led O’Malley to question why this did not put an immediate end to this reckless medical experiment on children.
Well this might be a clue, the NRC report isn’t the first time the connection has been made between Ferring Pharmaceuticals, which funded the 2006 study that set loose this medical experiment onto the world.

In 2018, Transgender Trend, a group that has been at the forefront of campaigning for evidence-based care in gender clinics, published a blog post revealing that the "Amsterdam clinic was financially supported in its experimental project to block puberty in gender dysphoric adolescents by a pharmaceutical company which stood to make commercial gains from their new protocol."

Now you would think that this little “tidbit” might have led those that practice gender medicine from blindly adopting the protocol of puberty suppression, you know given the questionable “conflict of interest”, well you would be wrong. When you’re living in the age of “the speed of science” and “speed of profit”, not fully fleshing out the potential health risks of halting a young person’s development at such a crucial stage in their life, well is the loving thing to do, right?

One of the major concerns ignored by "gender-affirming" doctors is the fact that puberty blockers haven’t turned out to be the "pause button" that they were intended to be, but are instead, as Kuitenbrouwer and Vasterman put it, a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

How so, well it has long been observed that almost all children who are put on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones, meaning that the drugs are better thought of as a start switch for further medical transition. In the past, most children would desist, meaning get over it, and come to accept their birth sex after going through puberty, if not affirmed and put on a medical pathway, like countless millions who came before them.

Adding to the emotional impact of such a life changing decision, is the ever expanding list of side effects of these drugs, from impaired bone formation to infertility and loss of sexual function. The FDA also recently added a warning to its label that the drugs can cause a dangerous swelling of the brain. Kuitenbrouwer and Vasterman also note concerns that the treatment can "interfere with the ability to make rational decisions."
So, given this last fact, how much credibility should we give those who are promoting this on the basis of their own personal experience having lived through it?

When this experiment began, the number of children suffering from gender dysphoria and seeking medical treatment was vanishingly small, and almost all were male children who had experienced extreme gender distress from an early age, but Vasterman and Kuitenbrouwer point to the sudden explosion in the number of children and adolescents seeking care at gender clinics, the majority of whom are teenage girls whose gender dysphoria appeared suddenly at puberty.

To put this in context, until 2010, Dutch gender clinics saw approximately 60 children a year, whereas in 2022, 1,600 were receiving treatment and a further 1,800 were on the waiting list. Like other countries, this sudden surge occurred around 2013, which coincides precisely with the dawn of the modern trans rights movement and the rise in popularity of smartphones and social media.

Now trans activists and proponents of "gender-affirming" care explain this surge as being the result of greater societal acceptance of transgender people, but Kuitenbrouwer and Vasterman, as well as many experts, question why this would have affected only teenage girls, the very demographic known to be most susceptible to social contagions.

They also highlight the sharply rising number of detransitioners as a reason to put the Dutch protocol and "gender-affirming" care under scrutiny, and point to the independent reviews undertaken by Sweden, Finland, and England that caused each nation to pivot away from the affirmative model of care and back to a psychotherapeutic approach to treating these vulnerable young people.

Bottom line for you who are supporters of this, I would beg you to look at this logically and detached of emotion, I know you want to do the “loving” thing here for these kids, so do I. But is it really loving to turn their entire world upside down, based on a flawed study, which comprised of 55 kids, hardly a large control group, one that has no longitudinal timeline, they were only followed for 18 months, but what happened to them 5, 15, 15 years later, given this was done in 2006, what’s happened to this original 55?
Lastly, do you not have any skepticism or pangs of doubt about the results as presented or concerns about the safety of the kids, given the study was funded by a company that produces products, the very same products that the study ultimately promoted?

Is there really nothing to see here, just move on?

The Post Millennial Story
https://thepostmillennial.com/maker-of-puberty-blockers-funded-original-study-that-led-to-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-dutch-investigative-report
The NRC story
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/12/30/ook-transzorg-moet-aan-medisch-wetenschappelijke-standaarden-voldoen-a4152945