Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4gotunameagain | Hacker News Reader

  The recent controversy about the use of so-called puberty blockers concerns another aspect of this same complexity: The Tavistock clinic in London was ordered by higher authorities to restrict the use of puberty blockers that suppress hormones and in this way pause a child’s development of sex-based characteristics, such as breasts. Tavistock was administering these drugs to youngsters between 9 and 16 who appeared not to be able to choose their sexual identity.

I still don't understand how it makes sense to have a child make such a decision. When I was 9 I thought I was a dinosaur. I bet that if we could, under the current political landscape we would pay huge bucks to pharmaceutical companies to turn millions of 9 year olds to dinosaurs.

View on HN

I won’t pretend to understand what do people actually feel who really really need that, because I’m not one of them.

But I don’t get how one can justify enabling a person to to switch their gender before the age of consent, or driving license, drinking or voting thresholds. I mean, at least you can stop drinking or voting if you don’t like it, and the age thresholds for those activities are a bit higher than the age of 9.

> But I don’t get how one can justify enabling a person to to switch their gender before the age of consent

IF we didn’t impose gender before the age of consent, there’d be no reason for anyone to switch one before such an age.

OTOH, any logic that can justify the imposition can justify the change.

I’m thinking more along the lines of irreversibility. Reminded me of this recent post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34753240

> I’m thinking more along the lines of irreversibility.

Puberty blockers are not, generally, irreversible (or even permanent-but-reversible, simply stopping taking them usually results in puberty), a fact widely recognized and documented in coverage of their use in delaying precocious puberty, long before ideological activists started attacking them based on a mix of anecdote and fiction because they were also used in treatment of trans kids.

That’s true however with the caveat that the treatment duration is often far shorter than with misgendered individuals.

The reality is that there are no long term studies on puberty blockers since in most used cases they are used as an intervention until the underlying medical condition can be resolved including in precocious puberty.

The fact that individuals can be on them for years or even a decade without any significant long term or permanent side effects also isn’t supported by evidence.

I'm not really deep into the topic, so this may be wrong/inaccurate - but I've read that puberty blockers were actually introduced as a way to solve the problem of children having to make life-changing decisions.

A successful HRT becomes much harder after puberty. On the other hand, performing HRT on children is plain unethical, for all the reasons discussed in the rest of this thread. (And btw something the trans community is advocating against - because forced sex reassignment had been standard practice for intersex children for decades. The trans community is demanding to end this practice.)

So to solve this, the idea was to artificially postpone puberty until the person is old enough that they can make a mature, informed decision about the subject.

Of course that logic has its own weak points - e.g. that puberty itself may play a major role in the person finding their identity. So postponing it until the person has settled into an identity would be sort of like trying to outrun your shadow. I'm not sure what the status of science in that regard is though.

I’m not entirely sure that logic works, they aren’t trying to change their “gender” but primarily wanting to change their sex to the best of our current medical ability.

Not quite, they want to change societies perception of themselves and medically transitioning helps that's by changing certain physical traits often used by society/people to guess which sex they are and thus change what societal expectations are placed on their appearance, behavior, and personality. This is called 'passing'.

A boy or girl dinosaur is the question.

trans dinasour ? /s

Dinoself

Dinothey

There's also no drugs approved by the MHRA (the UK FDA equivalent) as "puberty blockers" it's purely off label use of cancer drugs.

> When I was 9 I thought I was a dinosaur.

This undersells how sinister underage hormone blockers are, because being a dinosaur is not a normal part of human development. identity confusion, especially during puberty, is normal for a significant percentage of people - millions.

Doctors administrating these blockers cross well past malpractice and into evil. If you are permanently altering children - the people we don't let buy cigarettes or alcohol, vote, or drive - without years of therapy first, you deserve jail time.

Let's see this same energy for circumcision then

Trans people have a keen idea of their gender identity from a very early age. If it is a human rights violation to force an adult to live opposite their innate gender identity, surely it's a human rights violation to do the same to a child.

The question isn't do trans children really know their gender identity. It's can the person responsible for allowing the transition to happen distinguish whether the child knows they're gender identity doesn't match their sex, or is it just a child being a child. Going through puberty isn't weird just for trans people.

The issue is with regards to false positives.

Parents have legal guardianship over children not because they 100% of the time know the correct decision, but as a compromise between children literally just coming into the world and knowing nothing, and not handing complete self autonomy over to the state.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com