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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about them, but for me, that’s correct. Solid research should be the foundation we make decisions on.

I used to have a problem with that idea too, until someone pointed out that puberty is an irreversible process with major consequences. The fact that everyone goes through it is a bit irrelevant; if it was happening to someone over 18, puberty blockers wouldn’t even be controversial.

As a parent, what to do? I look at my 2yo daughter and wonder if I’ll have to support her in a decision like that one day, or go against her wishes just because she’s 11. If there’s research indicating that delaying puberty doesn’t have major long term harm, then I’m more likely to endorse puberty blockers.

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I made an off hand comment here that has got a lot of great response while I slept. I do wonder though if I'd have mentioned a handful of other issues whether the trans one would still have been the one to stir most controversy.

The fact is trans people are a tiny minority who are abused for political gain. I don't have hard numbers but it's probably not an exaggeration to say that to grant or withhold puberty blockers is probably no more common than a smorgasbord of other agonising medical decisions you may have to make.

Personally I don't like the idea of puberty blockers but if my 7 year old decided tomorrow that she was a boy, and lived that as authentically as they were able for years, then I think long and hard about it.

It is impossible to pause puberty or any other biological process. You cannot delay and restart something that is biologically time-bound. By giving a child puberty blockers you permanently prevent them from becoming an adult. They will never develop any of the features required for having children, they will never experience the brain developments that help with reasoning and empathy.

There are no studies on this Bec doing such studies is considered grossly unethical and evil, same as studying brain lobotomies in infants. As such we have no science on this, there are just people who have decided one thing and are performing live experiments without any controls. However, it should be noted that until very recently there was no significant incidence of unexplained child suicide, there was no significant incidence of unexplained teenage suicide, nor was there a significant incidence of unexplained young adult suicide. This is 100% social contagion, exacerbated by evil greedy pharmaceutical orgs who have latched on to small childhood insecurities and used them to build a multi-billion dollar industry mutilating and disfiguring healthy people.

Puberty blockers have been used on children to manage early puberty. The meds don't know if you're trans or not, so it's only reasonable to assume giving them to trans kids would have similar outcomes.

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