Lupron Guinea Pigs: Two Decades of Experimentation on Autistic Children (Part Three)
We take an in-depth look at Lupron, touted in the noughties as a quack 'cure' for autism, embraced later by doctors as 'gender affirming care'... but still somehow used primarily on autistic children.
In part two, we explored the side-effects of Lupron, the creation of the ‘transgender child’ as a useful way to increase Lupron sales and the medical malpractice on trans-identified children supported by charities in the UK.
In the run up to the December 2020 verdict of the Bell v. Tavistock judicial review, journalists began to run regular features about the gender clinic’s hitherto unpublicised practices. One concerning revelation was that large numbers of autistic children were being referred to the clinic for treatment. In June, with the media now awash with articles and features about the case, Susie Green, in her position as the CEO of Mermaids – a charity which had, and continues to have, influence over the police and other organisations and was known to coach parents to get the treatments they wanted for their trans-identified children – posted a tweet containing figures relating to the higher prevalence of autistic children experiencing gender dysphoria. An autistic woman replied to Green’s tweet, expressing concern and wondering why large numbers of gender dysphoric children were autistic. Green responded by tweeting links to a paper by and an interview with Dr. Aron Janssen along with the comment, “at the moment there is no consensus on why, research is ongoing”. (Green since deleted her original tweet but the conversation and her response remains online.)
Dr. Janssen is an American child psychiatrist specialising in paediatric transgender ‘affirmative-care’ at the Lurie Children’s hospital in Chicago. He is also Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs in the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Much of his research focuses on co-occurring mental health disorders and autism among “transgender and gender diverse youth”.
In the podcast recommended by Green, Dr. Janssen says:
We know that there’s biological constructs that shape gender identity; exposure to hormones in utero influences gender identity and expression, it certainly influences how the body ends up looking. But then, how that body looks, and how people perceive that body to be, influences how you’re treated as an infant and so, there’s this social construction of gender that happens as well and when any time you’re introducing a social construction piece to a group of folks with autism, you’re going to get variabilities in how that social communication is received and when you have a primary difficulty in social communication and understanding social communication, it’s quite possible folks with autism might construct their own experience of gender in quite a different way from people who don’t.
Dr. Janssen talks around the issue without making clear statements of fact (perhaps leaving room for the listener’s confirmation bias to do the work for him). He states that biology – presumably referring to biological sex – is ‘constructed’. In the contemporary debate about whether sex is redundant as a category and if ‘gender identity’ should replace it, the two categories are generally presented as binaries so it would appear that Dr. Janssen contradicts his statement that ‘biology is constructed’ when shortly after he states that gender is also “a social construct”. He postulates that when a “social construction piece” (whatever that means) is introduced to an autistic person, his/her “difficulty in social communication and understanding social communication” might cause him/her to “construct [his/her] own experience of gender”. Dr. Janssen’s job is to help children make ‘informed consent’ decisions about taking medications, which must be taken indefinitely and which cause serious side-effects and irreversible changes to their bodies. If he is explaining to autistic children that biology is a construct, gender is also a construct and that sex hormones “shape and influence” our gender identities, gender expression and what our bodies look like, could it be that the confusing explanation is as much to blame for the over-representation of autistic people in gender clinics as autistic people’s “difficulty in understanding social communication”?
The same year that Dr. Janssen recorded his podcast, the Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) responded to a National Health Service England consultation about specialised treatments, specifically regarding the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) Specification. GIRES suggested its own specification (in a handy copy-and-paste format) regarding terminology and the future direction of GIDS. Of the significantly over-represented autistic children accessing GIDS, GIRES wrote:
Anecdotally, young people who have been successfully treated [for gender dysphoria], are often described as having no residual [autism spectrum disorder]. The symptoms have disappeared once the dysphoria has been treated. That is obviously not always the case, but it is something that long-term follow-up should address.
This statement implies, despite its many caveats, that ‘gender-affirming’ treatments, such as puberty blocking medication – e.g.: Lupron – can cure autism.
Dr. Spack, who opened the first children’s gender clinic in the US and who has been prescribing Lupron to children since 2007 - when Mark and David Geier were still touting their ‘Lupron Protocol’ as a cure for autism - claimed that treating gender dysphoria can alleviate not only autism but anxiety and depression too. He suggests in this 2018 interview in an article for Boston newspaper, the Phoenix, “maybe the unusual behaviour patterns are simply a coping method for dealing with the anxiety and depression created from living in an ‘alien body,’ as one patient described it.”
Do you remember us asking in Part Two if Abbott Labs would manage to capture the autism-cure market despite Lupron not actually curing autism? Well, we think this might be how they did it.
In January 2019, the UK’s Dr. Mike Webberley (part-owner of private ‘trans-affirming healthcare’ providers, Gender GP, along with his wife, Dr. Helen Webberley, who was convicted of malpractice the previous year) uploaded a video to the Gender GP Youtube channel. In the short video, he is asked the question, “what is your position on the link between gender variance and autism?” His answer is as follows:
I think there is definitely a link between the two. We have a few young people coming through who I would say have high-functioning autism or Asperger’s and they’re often highly intelligent young people who have had previous diagnoses of being on the autistic spectrum. I can’t remember exactly what our figures are but something like 12% of the children we see are on the autistic spectrum.
Dr. Mike’s “position” is that autistic children are over-represented at the service provided by Gender GP. Why that is or whether that is a positive or a negative thing, he does not say. Why Gender GP decided to upload this video is equally mysterious; however, three months later, in April, Dr. Helen held an online symposium, uploaded to the Youtube channel, with visiting US ‘trans-affirming’ medical healthcare professionals Johana Olson-Kennedy and her legal husband (and trans-identified woman), Aydin Olson-Kennedy, with the US-based GP Darlene Tando joining via video-link. During the hour and a half long video, at around the 59 mins mark, the chair asks the panel a question, submitted anonymously by a viewer: “how should we best treat children who say they are trans but are also on the [autistic] spectrum?” Dr. Helen begins by asking disparagingly, “who put them on the spectrum … in the first place?” [The panel laughs.] “It’s … down to that label and that diagnosis, isn’t it?” She opines, “trans kids can find it very difficult to socially interact because their body doesn’t fit, their thoughts aren’t matching, their voice doesn’t fit and… they can often have social difficulties”. She continues, “and so, the young person is saying, ‘I’ve got trouble with my gender’ and the professional is saying, ‘I think you’re autistic’”. Like Dr. Janssen before her, Dr. Helen obfuscates the autistic trait of “social difficulty”, with a gender-dysphoric child failing to communicate his/her gender confusion. She concludes by saying that it is the “[autism] diagnosis … that’s really problematic.” She emphasises the word “diagnosis” disdainfully, as if pouring scorn on the veracity of the autistic condition itself. Dr. Helen’s colleague, Dr. Olson-Kennedy continues in the same vein, stating without evidence, just as GIRES did in 2016, that “there are people whose symptoms of autism go away when they are affirmed in their gender.”
In September 2020, a year after the brazenly autism-sceptic Gender GP symposium, in the wake of the judicial review being brought by Bell and Mrs. A and in a move worthy of a George Orwell story, GIRES added a comment to its response to the NHS consultation of 2016. In the comment, GIRES ‘corrected’ its earlier statement that autism disappears when gender dysphoria is treated, saying that in those cases, "Autistic Spectrum Disorder] has not 'disappeared' as a result of [‘gender-affirming’] treatment: it wasn't there in the first place."
At the Bell v. Tavistock judicial review hearings, GIDS was asked to disclose data it collected about its autistic client base. It shared with the court that:
A significant proportion of all children in GIDS are also neurodiverse and may present with traits of [autism spectrum condition] and/or a diagnosis. Between April 2011 and August 2018, 48% of children and young people who were seen in GIDS and whose parents completed the social responsiveness scale, a quantitative measure of autistic behaviours in children and young people, scored in the mild – severe range.
At around the same time as the judicial review, the beleaguered Gender Identity Development Service faced an employment tribunal from its own Safeguarding Lead, Sonia Appleby, who claimed the service prevented her from proper work on safeguarding and also failed an inspection by the Care Quality Commission, which rated GIDS "inadequate" after inspectors identified "significant concerns". Between 2016 and 2019, while so-called experts in the field flirted with the anti-scientific notion that ‘gender-affirming care’ might also function as a cure for autism, thirty-five members of staff resigned from the service. The wheels were coming off the wagon and the Tavistock’s nine-year experiment with administering puberty-blocking drugs to children (approximately 1 in 2 of whom were autistic) was beginning to look like an unmitigated disaster.
Bell and Mrs. A’s concerns about children’s ability consent to experimental ‘gender affirming’ hormonal treatments and surgeries were eventually upheld by the judicial review. The verdict, handed down in December 2020, mandated that cases of childhood gender dysphoria would require authorisation of the court in future if GIDS believed clinical interventions were necessary. The verdict was later appealed and overturned largely on technicalities; however, what we learned from the case about the Tavistock’s practices (from which we can extrapolate about the practices of other gender clinics), has not been refuted.
In this series, we have focused on Lupron, whose journey from ‘autism cure’ to ‘life-saving gender-dysphoria drug’ to ‘life-saving gender dysphoria drug and possible autism cure’ demonstrates the way in which autistic children have been experimented on by quack doctors and professionals alike for the past two decades; however, Lupron is by no means the only gender-affirmation drug on the market and the net-worth of the ‘trans children’ gender industry, since Dr. Spack’s clinic opened in the US in the mid-noughties, has exploded. Projections of transgender healthcare profits are into the multiple billions and the juggernaut shows no signs of slowing (despite the science on which it is based being about as robust as that of Mark and David Geiers’ ‘Lupron Protocol’) and referrals continue to flood into the Tavistock and Portman Gender Identity Development Service, 48% of which are presumably still for autistic (or those with autistic traits) people.
In 2009, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and director of the Autism Research Centre, Simon Baron-Cohen, whose theory on testosterone’s role in autism was cited by Mark and Davis Geier in their own papers, was asked by the Chicago Tribune what he thought about giving Lupron injections to autistic children. He said, "the idea of using it with vulnerable children with autism, who do not have a life-threatening disease and pose no danger to anyone, without a careful trial to determine the unwanted side effects or indeed any benefits, fills me with horror", which begs the question: if the UK’s most prominent autism expert believes it would be unethical to give puberty-blockers to an autistic child who has no medical condition, how is it that the Tavistock, Mermaids, GIRES, Dr. Spack and many, many others have got away with it for so long?