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I got into an argument on JK Rowling recently. That was mildly annoying, but then it shifted to transgender stuff in general, 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. The dismissal of the Cass Review on the part of the pro-trans side has increasingly looked like the stereotypical right winger doing mental somersaults to any science they dislike. But I have some questions on it, there were some things I didn't have great answers to.
What are the actual requirements for getting prescribed puberty blockers? The pro-trans tribe insists that it is a very rigorous process involving thorough checking of gender dysphoria, and it's not commonly done, despite being a readily available tool in the toolbox of clinical practice. I do not believe this after examples I have seen, but I have nothing to cite.
Is there any actual scientific evidence in favor of social contagion playing any part in transgenderism? The pro-trans tribe claims that social contagion plays no role, and to me, it's trivially true that social contagion plays an astounding part, as well as fetishism and abuse, and autism. I have no idea how many kids genuinely become gender dysphoric due to genetics, if there are any at all. And if there are any, I certainly don't think that it's a given that they need puberty blockers. How the hell did that become the default? But anyway, has The Science turned up anything on social contagion?
Are there any actually valid critiques of the Cass Review? Pro-trans tribe will cite the Yale Law retort, then when I point out the responses to it, either holes are poked in them or they just go back to their priors that the Cass Review was methodologically bad, done by a transphobe, misinterpreted studies, and went against the scientific consensus and ruined its own credibility. Actually, they say the same about the recent HHS Report. Please show me if there are any published valid critiques of the Cass Review besides the Yale thing.
What are the probabilities of serious consequences from puberty blockers? I brought up infertility, and the pro-trans tribe claimed that it's actually a very low chance and that it's not anyone's business anyway because not everyone wants to have kids. The latter half of that is completely inane when we're talking about life changing decisions for a demographic that cannot consent, but the former, I don't know. Do puberty blockers cause the infertility, the loss of ability to orgasm, and the complete lack of penis tissue with which to create a neovagina, or is it the ensuing hormones that do this?
Sadly, none of this will do anything to convince anyone on either side anyway. There's really no way out of this hole that has been created. Sometimes, I kind of hate this world. I really thought "don't give minors seriously debilitating life changing pills to solve a solely mental disorder" was an easy hill to stand on, but the fighting was just as vicious as anything else with the gender issue.
Edited to be slightly less angry.
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.
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.
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?
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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