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It has not been prescribed to that many kids for purposes other than delaying extremely precocious puberty. Puberty blockers are in fact useful at blocking precocious puberty, which most people agree should be blocked, and that is the primary thing they're used for. The rate of precocious puberty happening is growing rapidly, and so banning the only effective means of mitigating the problem we have would be a moderately large problem today and a much larger problem in the future.
What observations does the social contagion hypothesis exclude? If there is some evidence that would lead you to think that "social contagion" is more likely to be the correct explanation, there must be some other evidence which would lead you to decrease your credence in that hypothesis. What specific evidence would that be, in your case?
The specific observations I make here about MTF people (I have many more MTF than FTM in my social circle, can't speak to FTM)
I suspect you can make a quite accurate FTM risk score with a linear score over how many of these descriptions apply to a particular person. Now it is possible that this just indicates social spread through this particular demographic, but it very much feels like there's a "type of person" who is into all of these things. Specifically, it feels like the type of person who was at risk of being a furry in the early 2000s or a ham radio operator in the 1980s.
If mere exposure to trans was the primary explanation, I would expect the normal FTM demographic to instead look like normies who happen to like stuff which portrays a lot of trans people, e.g. I'd expect them to
As such I don't think "this is a purely social phenomenon, and it is only by chance that it spread through this particular group of people" is a parsimonious hypothesis, at least for the MTF demographic (again, I don't really know much about the FTM demographic, maybe they do look like normies who were convinced to become trans by positive portrayals in mass media. I doubt it, but that doubt isn't really informed by anything).
That is fair and valid and also not a very good basis for making policy about what medical treatments should be forbidden. It is a good basis for deciding who to listen to in the future for general policy stuff - my objection is narrowly scoped to having policy people make uninformed broad sweeping decisions about medical treatment, because that does not have a history of going great.
I meant banning them for off-label use, like gender dysphoria. Though to be honest, precocious puberty was a bit dubious itself, the last time I checked, but I can let it fly.
Analogous to the placebo effect: exposing a population to a foreign idea, and it not coinciding with a self-identification with that idea.
I see no reason to grant that assumption. Do alien abductees look like normies?
Isn't it a good basis for reversing policies about medical treatments that have been approved, based on trust in the people who have been proven to lie?
Why do you say that puberty blockers for precocious puberty are dubious?
I've only ever seen papers mention psychological reasons for treating it, and I feel like dicking around with hormones to avoid awkwardness in school is rather excessive.
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