GOP Lawmakers Request Unreleased Results of Puberty-Blocker Study

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Six GOP lawmakers have issued a letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) inquiring into the results of a study into puberty-blockers that began in 2015, whose full results have not yet been made public.

The senators are pressing Monica M. Bertagnolli to release the full results of “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth,” a research study into the effects of puberty blockers on children.

“Taxpayers have the right to know the outcomes of the research they fund, particularly when the intervention studied has life-altering impacts,” the letter said.

Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), and Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) all signed onto the letter.

It is not the lawmakers’ first inquiry on the subject.

The letter is a follow-up to inquiries launched by lawmakers in 2023 after two children, who identified as transgender or nonbinary, died by suicide while receiving hormone therapy as part of the study.

The lawmakers noted that although researchers had published 29 papers summarizing results from the first two years of the older study group, zero had been published summarizing to the younger group.

The NIH in September 2023 replied to Cassidy and Tuberville, saying that the younger age group was “understudied in biomedical research.”

But a month later, The New York Times reported that the results remained unpublished for political reasons.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director for the Center for TransYouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the paper.

Their work was part of a study to duplicate earlier results from the Netherlands, which showed that puberty blockers and hormone therapy improved mental health in children with gender dysphoria.

That taxpayer-funded research—focused on mental health outcomes in children with gender dysphoria—was divided into two study groups, one older group with an average age of around 16 and another consisting of children with an average age around 11.

Olson-Kennedy, along with other researchers, worked with over 400 children, placing the 95 younger children on puberty blockers and giving the older group cross-sex hormones.

When the study failed to reproduce the results seen in the Netherlands, Olson-Kennedy said that the children’s mental health had not improved because they were already “in really good shape” before and after the study.

But she and other researchers had reported the opposite in August 2020.

“Elevated depression symptoms” and “clinically significant anxiety” were reported ahead of the study by around a quarter of the children placed on puberty blockers. Similarly, around a quarter had experienced suicidal thoughts.

“Life satisfaction was lower amongst both cohorts compared to population-based norms,” the study said.

When later asked about the disparity, Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times she was still analyzing the data when she first spoke to them.

The senators’ letter comes as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments to overturn Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other “gender-affirming care” in children.

Twenty-six states across the country have passed similar laws.

It also comes a year after the United Kingdom, Finland, and several other European nations have shifted away from such interventions in treating minors with gender dysphoria.

The shift in the UK was prompted by a report by Dr. Hilary Cass known as the “Cass Review,” which examined the effect of these treatments on children. The evidence that they helped was “weak,” the report concluded.

The Cass Review was widely endorsed by both sides of the aisle in the UK, and led that nation to cease prescribing these treatments in children under the age of 18.