Puberty blockers trial can start recruiting children
bbc.com
bbc.com
Given the permanent nature of a transition on a body, I really wish the advocates of pushing this at young ages would not push back against discussions of people who decide to detransition. Such stories break my heart way more than someone being unable to transition before a certain age.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/body-integrit...
No, we don't. Your linked source literally says that surgeons and providers won't perform these amputations.
This statement seems to be incorrect by definition. Do you mean, not otherwise irrational?
The right-wing sociopathic influencers and politicians you opted to listen to know this perfectly well. They actively chose to lie about it and to stoke rage and fear, lest they lose followers, influence, money, and power.
If I did undergo that path when I wanted to, at which point would you consider me "becoming them"? At the inception of the thought? After some rumination? After making the decision? After first time taking meds? After undergoing surgery?
I don't consider it gatekeeping, rather prevention of making an irreversible choice while the frontal lobe is still far from knowing even what path it wants for itself for the rest of its life. I know that might be seen as unfair to a lot of people, but given the persistence with which gender affirmation is being pushed, I feel that cases like me are simply considered collateral damage. Really glad I didn't end up as such.
To control access is gate keeping.
Puberty blockers' effects are reversible generally. Puberty's effects are not.
Gender affirming care regret rates are very low.
> I know that might be seen as unfair to a lot of people, but given the persistence with which gender affirmation is being pushed, I feel that cases like me are simply considered collateral damage.
Access to gender affirming care is pushed persistently because denial of gender affirming care was and is pushed persistently. And the benefits are significant. And regret rates are very low.
Do you understand that no regretted treatment would require no treatment? What ratio of regretted treatment and regretted non treatment would you consider fair?
You're trying to figure out a decent ratio, and I'd like the total number of regretted treatments to become a permanent flat zero.
A child brought into this world learns from those who have walked on it for much much longer. It puts TRUST into them. The moment you have a single regretted treatment, that moment you have a human life who got failed by everyone around them. The social system, the government system, the family system. Systematically encouraging things where a regretted treatment can very well mean a life destroyed is not something I can ever support.
One's perception that life dealt them inadequate set of cards should never result in a borderline-militant push for a systemic change that reduces regretted treatments to a ratio number.
Suicide attempts and successful suicides among teens denied puberty blockers when diagnosed as needing them are three times higher than among the general teen population. This was measured after the UK prohibited them.
Puberty blockers' effects are not permanent. Stopping to take them reverses their effects and allows normal puberty to proceed, a bit delayed compared to other teens. Had you been actually diagnosed with gender dysphoria at that age (were you an exceptionally skilled actor at 12? were you able to keep acting for six months before a team of professionals without ever breaking the act?), and had you changed your mind at 15, you'd have by now reached normal adulthood at your birth gender normally.
So, please tell us: how many children suiciding are a price worth paying for the non-permanent, temporary, reversible regrets of those 0.01% (1% of regret from the 1% of transgender individuals) of the teen population?
Kids undergo years of assessment.
This entire fear is not based in reality.
Why is that? As the other commenter here suggested, this looks like a lack of empathy to me.
There are people who detransition. It is rare. It is wild to me that each of these people matter more to you than each genuinely trans person who is unable to transition because of the law. Both of these sets of people are stuck in bodies they don't want. Why is one worthy of so much more empathy than the other?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6795021/
Just as a reminder for everyone here, 0.14% of US children (+3x in a decade) are given Human Growth Hormone because they are short. Our government says that being in the bottom 2 percentiles is a medically valid condition to be treated with hormones.
Differentially focusing your emotional response on sex-expression hormone therapy vs. hormone therapy generally is reflective of bias.
A reminder that actual people have been turned into a cultural wedge issue, their lives put in danger due to the vitriol the culture war issue has stirred.
If you have known a person who has transitioned, you'd likely see someone happier after being able to transition.
Laws targeting trans people won't stop an actual criminal from entering the wrong bathroom.
Children and teens can absolutely know these things about themselves. Imagine telling a child who has a hetero crush on a classmate that they're too young to know they're straight. Children are little people. It won't be the correct choice for every child, but for every child it is the correct choice for, it will lead to a happier life and a more effective transition.
last but not least, you didn't care about competitive women's swimming before, you're not fooling me that you care about it now.
The article quotes a campaigner against the trial who first transitioned and then detransitioned (as far as this was still possible I assume, since a lot is irreversible). So kids can absolutely make the wrong decision. The question is what the relative frequency of these mistakes is.
https://apnews.com/article/transgender-treatment-regret-detr...
Most change their mind.
So this includes both detransitioners and people who just changed their phone number. Not exactly something where we can assume that all of these people were unhappy with their transition.
The thing about Puberty blockers, is they can be mostly reversed. This isn't about children getting things cut off, it's about preventing certain features that surgery cant fix from developing. IMO it's cruel for a teenager who is absolutely sure, to be forced to go through the incorrect puberty and have to undo that later.
They can also absolutely be unduly influenced by their parents or other authority figures. The fact that Megan Fox has 3 trans kids points to upbringing as being a major factor.
Why on earth would a child be allowed to decide on life-changing or even life-shattering bodily harm?
If you are 11 and wait 7 years to transition, you will suffer irreversible physical and psychological damage. You will have missed formative social experiences. You will have to get expensive, painful surgeries to partially correct what was done to you.
To fix that, we'd need microneurosurgery on the level of science fiction. Maybe in a few decades we will, but right now, reshaping the body so it gets as close as possible to what the brain expects is the only option available.
And yes, that neuroimaging could be used as a clinical diagnostic criterion, entirely replacing psychological and psychiatric evaluations. The problem is it costs a fortune, so right now only scientific teams with big budgets use it, and only to publish papers. Over the next several years, with any luck, neuroimaging diagnosis may fall enough in price that it may become the norm, at least in first-world countries.
Could the MPS people get surgerey so they have more mouths, limbs or even entire bodies except the brain? How about the schizo? Would treatment involve a set of VR goggles with a program that randomly generates perpetually morphing fantasy worlds? How about we make the depressed colorblind so their world is actually gray all the time?
I don't see why a therapy would purposefully not treat the actual symptoms, other than helping a patient understand and cope with them so they can recover their wellbeing.
Second, you don't see it because you don't care for their problem, otherwise you'd either learn what the actual hard scientific research on the topic by neurologists and psychiatrists show, as well as the measurable results of the different clinical protocols developed by psychiatrists and psychologists, or defer to their expertize. You yourself "not seeing why" what they do in such cases is what needs done is as meaningless as you "not seeing why" any expert does what they do in fields you're not yourself an expert in. So either become one, or stop getting in their way based on "common sense"-based cognitive errors and biases.
Trying to make-believe that people can convert to the opposite sex, and even go back, is doing more psychological damage than accepting our differences, not to speak of the invasive/destructive treatments on an otherwise healthy body.
*Note that a disagreement about whether currently available medical procedures constitute a "sex change" is almost always a dispute of semantics and not of fact. A trans woman who describes herself as having "changed her sex" is almost never claiming she can give birth.
Disclaimer: I don't know any trans person IRL, so my perception is likely skewed by their loud online interactions.
See this article about muxes, the third gender of the prehispanic Zapotec civilization that still survives today, for an example of accepting gender choice differences healthily, without creating culture wars, and without aggresive treatments on an otherwise healthy individual:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20181125-the-third-gender...
Don't know the context, but I don't think this is a "trans" thing. It is usually considered taboo to bring up someone's fertility or sexual issues, even if said issues are common knowledge.
> Disclaimer: I don't know any trans person IRL, so my perception is likely skewed by their loud online interactions.
As an exercise, pick any other minority group, and try to imagine forming an impression of them based solely on reading about the group in culture war arguments and online controversies. I know many trans people due to working in tech, living in California, and hanging out in (bio)hacking circles, and I can promise they are sane and normal people.
I'm not sure what you mean with "opposite gender" (given that "gender" is now often no longer considered a synonym for "sex"), but I can tell you that all the MtF people I knew from college registered to me simply as men trying to act like women.
As for the second part, you imply they were failing at that. Can you describe those failures?
We also let children decide on inflicting life-shattering bodily harm to themselves all the time. The classic examples are things like contact sports (children playing tackle football is pretty fucked up) and ballet. In the latter case they're like four when they commit to having deformed feet.
Trans children deserve to mature at the same time as their peers.
When do you think puberty happens?
1. To delay extremely early-onset puberty in children as young as seven or eight who had a pituitary disorder.
2. To treat advanced prostate cancer.
3. To treat endometriosis and uterine fibroids in women.
4. As part of a treatment for breast cancers, part of fertility protocols, or treatments for endocrine disorders.
This notion of using these drugs to disrupt healthy and physiologically normal puberty, was not even a little part of their purpose. It's how they're being used now in some cases.
The fact is that administering hormone disruptors or synthetic hormones are the opposite of what should be done, as gender dysphoria often resolves itself as the process of puberty and natural maturation unfolds. Interventionism, in these cases, is extremely harmful.
Adults making these choices are a completely different case.
The context was gender dysphoria treatment. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
> This notion of using these drugs to disrupt healthy and physiologically normal puberty, was not even a little part of their purpose.
Gender dysphoric puberty has unhealthy effects.
> gender dysphoria often resolves itself as the process of puberty and natural maturation unfolds
I never saw this claim supported by studies which did not include children who did not meet gender dysphoria criteria. And those studies found persistence predictors when they looked. Meeting gender dysphoria criteria for example.
The suffering in the moment is "I want" and the damage the treatment has in satisfying the want creates "I can't ever..."
Discussing that requires the broader context, so your redefinition doesn't work.
Puberty doesn't have unhealthy effects, the dysphoria does. There is also evidence that treatment doesn't resolve the worst "effects" namely depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation or tendencies. Those often return after the initial euphoria of getting what's desired wears off. It's why there's a fair percentage of kids that later regret having done that to themselves, and it's why the suicide rate for those who receive transition treatment doesn't actually go down, and in some cohorts the rate actually went up.
If we really cared about people suffering from dysphoria we'd look at these facts and be forced to reconsider how quickly we reach for these treatments.
I'm 100% with Sarah McBride on this. The blame for this culture war is arguably as much because of how pro-trans folks handled it as it is resistance from conservatives. It did not need to happen this way. There will be progress in the future but it definitely got set back a ways over the last few years. Unfortunately with collateral damage for the rest of the LGBT community.
The opponents of transgender healthcare have used the minor uncertainty of prescribing this medication to a group a few years older to argue not for tighter safeguards, but for a legal ban on prescribing it for that purpose. Not letting doctors evaluate the potential risks and benefits for their patients is one thing, but not even wanting a medical trial to begin to gather more data is outrageous. There is absolutely no concern from these same groups about any risk of the medication to cisgender children, which casts doubt that the concerns are raised in good faith.
That seems orthogonal, yes? Delaying puberty until the body gets into the usual range of growth is arguably improving something that was otherwise going off the rails. Delaying puberty from normal onset until after the body has otherwise stopped growing is a different use case, different intended goal. It does not seem unreasonable to have different expectations.
Apart from that, "different use case, different intended goal" is cause for what I'd call "ordinary levels of scientific uncertainty." A 13-year-old just starting puberty is not so different from an 8-year-old just starting puberty to justify denying a medication to one by law while still prescribing it to the other without concern.
The trial protocol said diagnosed with gender incongruence. And explained this.[1] Not questioning their gender.
[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/assets/pathways/trial/pathways-t...
What exactly are the safeguards for real? It’s literally irreversible damage when you mess up with hormones while on puberty.
I am conflicted myself, but I think I err on the side of caution and think that avoiding messing with your hormones should be no brainer.
Puberty blockers are safe, effective, and generally reversible
Any credible studies to back this up? I find the contrary when I looked last time around, and it does not feel reversible when you disrupt the most important phase of your development (body wise).
But maybe I miss context here so happy to learn
Rew, L., Young, C.C., Monge, M. and Bogucka, R. (2021), Review: Puberty blockers for transgender and gender diverse youth—a critical review of the literature. Child Adolesc Ment Health, 26: 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12437
Jamie L Finegan, Maja Marinkovic, Kyle Okamuro, Ron S Newfield, Jennifer T Anger, Experience with gender affirming hormones and puberty blockers (gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist): a qualitative analysis of sexual function, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Volume 22, Issue 5, May 2025, Pages 945–950, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdaf061
This is equally true when you don't intervene. The children being recruited for this study would otherwise be forced to undergo physical changes that cause them severe psychological distress and would need to be surgically corrected in adulthood.
The effects of puberty blockers can be reversed much more than the effects of puberty.
Puberty blockers are reversible generally. Suicide is not.
Many people believe adults should be denied assisted suicide.
Your point was what?
No they don’t, you’re lying through your teeth.
> Puberty blockers are reversible generally
No they aren’t, stop lying.