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Notes -
Look like puberty blockers were prescribed for trans reasons to about 1400 kids in 2021, with that number increasing by about 200 kids / year. Puberty blockers were additionally prescribed to about 20,000 kids in 2021 for central precocious puberty (puberty starting before age 8 for girls or age 9 for boys).
As a point of comparison, about 3100 teens between the ages of 12 and 19 died in car crashes in 2021.
Is there a reason you think that puberty blockers, specifically, are a big problem?
Yeah, they alter the normal development of a healthy child. This is not the case with precocious puberty, so the comparison is not valid.
Rephrasing - is it a big enough problem that the disease of having ~1k kids/year go on puberty blockers is worse than the "cure" that would be implemented by the political apparatus would be? Being realistic about what historical political "solutions" have looked like.
What do you think the political solution would look like? AFAIK no other society has had to deal with trans
Lots of societies have had to deal with some folly of youth causing some number of kids to ruin their lives in one way or another in their quest for status and acceptance. In ancient Rome, kids seeking social status joined gladiatorial schools, and many of those kids ended up crippled or dying. In Victorian England, girls wore incredibly tight corsets which caused reduced lung capacity, skeletal deformations, and abdominal muscle weakness, which led to lots of health problems (including much higher chances of miscarriage or death in childbirth).
Just because something is a problem doesn't mean a political solution exists. The politician's fallacy ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this") is frequently cited as a fallacy due to the third line, but the first line is often also wrong - we don't actually have to try to solve every problem.
I think the use of puberty blockers is a problem of small enough scale and low enough severity that it's probably better to just let it ride.
Ok, what do you think a political solution looks like? My guess is, at most, a planned parenthood doctor gets railroaded for gender affirming care every other year or so, and this may or may not have a chilling effect on adolescent specialized medicine but that was all activists anyways.
Or loses a malpractice suit when they do malpractice, yeah. Again, 40k kids a year start "gender affirming care", only 1k of those 40k start puberty blockers. I really don't think puberty blockers warrant special attention here.
Sure, the rest of gender affirming care is dubious too, and needs just as much attention as puberty blockers.
I would say "more attention than puberty blockers", because the number of affected kids is much higher. Something caused a massive uptick in either the experience of dysphoria, the reaction to dysphoria, or some combination thereof. I think "social contagion" is a thought-terminating non-explanation here. To reduce the rate of trans identification, I think it would be worth looking into what generally leads to discomfort with being embodied (as that seems to correlate extremely strongly, and also seems to be much more common than it used to be).
Of course, if you don't actually care about that and your main objection is to "point deer say horse", that is perfectly valid. But in that event I also don't take statements of concern about puberty blockers at face value, and will discount your policy suggestions in that area accordingly.
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