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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   33208 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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...and the puberty blocker discussion in particular was very vexing to me. I just genuinely don't know how anyone can be okay with the idea, especially now that we know way more about it than we did 10 years ago.

I'm basically pro-puberty blocker in principle, and my reasoning is as follows:

  • Adults should, broadly speaking, be allowed to make their own decisions regarding their bodies, including physically transitioning.

  • Whether a trans person begins to physical transition before or after adolescense seems to have a big effect on how effectively they'll eventually pass as the opposite sex.

  • I'm quite uncomfortable with non-adults making permanent, irreversible alterations to their body.

  • Therefore, if someone has made clear they want to transition and there's a way for someone to reach adulthood (or get closer to it) while preserving the best chance of passing as the opposite sex, I would be in favour of it. Puberty blockers seem to be a reasonable solution to this problem.

In practice of course things quickly get messy and I don't know what the ideal criteria should be for getting blockers prescribed nor what the trade-off is between possible side-effects and potential benefit. I leave that to people more invested in the topic.

A big wrench in this reasoning is often when puberty blockers would be most effective are on underdeveloped kids, their brains aren't yet fully formed, lord knows boys mature mentally slower than girls, also often the pro-transnes is either pushed by parents ( mothers ) or other adults in the room who are supposed to be the experts. For those cases it's like an inverse tiger moms situation. Unless the kid has 'ran away from its guardians', the adults in their lives are a major influence on their own conception of gender/sex and the immutability of such or not.

Your comment is very confusing, you say you're pro-puberty blocker and list your reasoning, and then every one of your reasons contradicts themselves.

"Adults should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding their body." We're talking about puberty blockers which by definition have to be proscribed to non-adults.

"I'm uncomfortable with non-adults making permanent, irreversible alterations to their body" it seems to me there's fair evidence that puberty blocker's side effects do exactly this.

Puberty blockers cause permanent brain development problems as well as stunting sexual maturity at what tanner stage 2? They aren't harmless.

They aren't harmless.

I didn't say they were.

Do you not see that puberty blockers themselves are permanent, irreversible alterations to the body more than puberty itself is? What kind of evidence would you need to see to believe that?

I assume what you mean is that puberty blockers are more of a deviation from the standard path of physical development than going through puberty itself is (I'd be quite confused otherwise; it's hard to think of any process or operation that actually causes more changes to the human body than puberty).

I'm not really clued into the exact nature of the side effects of puberty blockers, but that doesn't change my argument. It's up to the clinician to weigh the harms of putting a child on puberty blockers vs the potential benefit to their future mental wellbeing of potentially allowing them to transition more effectively.

I am impressed that you are the first person to reply to this post on a forum filled to the brim with chuds.

Permanent, irreversible alterations to the body are not bad things inherently. You need to lose your baby teeth to grow adult teeth. Losing your baby teeth is a permanent, irreversible alteration to the body. Puberty is as well, but it leads to the things that are needed to continue the human race, which is important to biology. Messing with this process has a high chance of creating broken fucked up humans.

As I said in my original post, puberty blockers can cause permanent loss of fertility and permanent loss of orgasm. Jazz Jennings is the example I have seen people bring up, where both of these outcomes took effect. They also cause bone density loss. There are probably a lot of other things they do that I don't know about, or that nobody knows about, since this is all new and good studies likely haven't had the time to be created. Kids cannot consent to getting sterilized in the traditional way. Why should they be able to consent in this circuitous way? Why should such serious consequences be undertaken when simple psychotherapy can produce similar results without any of it, according to the HHS report? How am I supposed to trust the clinician has good cost-benefit analysis here when these possibilites are on the table and the medical community has made serious missteps before, such as their taking seriously Dissociative Identity Disorder (now seemingly on its way back) or, famously, performing lobotomies for hysteria? And it's all in service of making them pass better as the opposite sex as an adult when I don't even agree that that's a valid goal for anyone to undertake.

And it's all in service of making them pass better as the opposite sex as an adult when I don't even agree that that's a valid goal for anyone to undertake.

Well this is the actual crux of our disagreement, in that I believe that physical transition can be a helpful approach for a certain small number of people. Everything else you've brought up is downstream of that - i.e. I can't imagine you'd be particularly animated about potential side effects like infertility if we were discussing some other procedure designed to achieve what you'd consider a valid outcome.

Brain development problems in the range of 8-10 IQ points. (More than half a standard deviation).

Woah, that’s stunning. So we need puberty for brain development to reach its full potential?

Seeing as how puberty is when we start the process of growing up, I wouldn't be at all surprised. If you try freezing your bodily development at the stage of eleven years of age, why expect this won't happen to the brain as well? And even reversing and going off puberty blockers would, I imagine, have effects too: at the least, you've held back natural development for a period of time that now you are trying to catch up on, and at worst it's the same way that smoking does have an effect on your lungs even after you stopped smoking (if you adopt all healthy habits after quitting smoking, this has a much better outcome long-term).

Yes. I if you have an hour or so to kill, I recommend this interview with a man who suffered from hypogonadism as a kid. He reports it had a quite profound impact on his psychology.

I mean… yeah, duh?

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