If you enter “Ferring Pharmaceuticals” into a search engine, you will get stories about their gene therapy for bladder cancer along with multiple entries for the company itself, including career opportunities. What you won’t find is a story about the company’s involvement in puberty blockers and the study that it funded. But the Post Millennial has a piece asserting that Ferring Pharmaceuticals did just that in 2006.
The piece cites an article by investigative journalist Jan Kuitenbrouwer and media sociologist Peter Vasterman that was published at the end of last month on the website NRC. The article is about the “Dutch protocol.” This involved using puberty blockers on adolescents who were struggling with gender dysphoria and was adopted as part of gender care by clinics around the world. The Dutch protocol was based on a 2006 study that, according to the NRC article, was “deeply flawed.” The study followed 55 children who took puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones and reported “positive results.” Ferring, the article states, funded the study and also markets the puberty blocker Triptorelin. The NRC piece states that among the problems with the study, there was no control group and there were several participants that the study lost track of during follow-ups. The follow-up period was also short.
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