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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.
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.
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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).
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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.
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I mean… yeah, duh?
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