Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
It is also entirely clear that there have been parents (usually mothers) who wanted to have a trans child because it was cool.
> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.
Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.
It almost feels like you're arguing definitions.
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most.
This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed.
> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.
You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.
Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.
I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop
Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two
I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?
There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.
I’m aware that’s kind of a meme in certain highly religious and/or conservative communities but it’d be shocking if it were a mainstream position.
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.
Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...
30% think about killing themselves and 4%+ try each year is shocking. I think whatever side of the debate you are on we can agree things aren't working out for too many people who go through this process. If this was a drug or vaccine or hair shampoo it would have been pulled off the market.
Through what process? This was a study about trans and nonbinary people, not specifically about people who have “transitioned”
I would imagine the rate of depression and similar disorders in trans people is extremely high. To be so unsatisfied with one’s own body that you consider (or go through) major treatment and surgery to change something so fundamental.
I have also pointed out that regret rates for transition are within 2%.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200523211027/https://www.acped...
In 1979 Johns Hopkins Hospital had banned all sex-change operations permanently at their facilities due to rates of suicide having skyrocketed amongst transgender post reassignment surgery. Suicide is twenty times greater among adults who used cross-sex hormones and underwent gender reassignment surgery.
According to Johns Hopkins Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Paul R. McHugh, “Hopkins stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for amputating normal organs.”
John Hopkins concluded...
Transgenderism is a mental disorder
Sex change is biologically impossible
People who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder
The suicide rate among transgendered people who had the surgery is 20 times higher
*70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.
2022 research into Hospital's archives found the decision to cease operation in 1979 was political, not evidence based:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36191317/
> *70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.
This number most likely comes from a study that classified girls as transgender based on behaviors like preference to wear their hair short of wear pants instead of dresses or skirt:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/
Those children did not self-identify as transgender and further more, research could not contact 41% of them for the follow up:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-end-of-the-desistance_b_8...
At 12 kids do not have sufficient capacity to handle any major decision, including any medical procedure.
That does not take away their right to see their best interests represented and defended.
Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).
You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.