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For me the only issues I have with navigating the world where Trans people are more common and in the open are the competitive sports one and then the puberty blockers and surgical solutions for children.
The sports one I think my take will be unpopular. I think women's competitive sports should be for CIS women. It does seem unfair and I don't think that competing in these high level events is a right and maybe a sacrifice you just have to make if you are going to make the transition. I think perhaps calling the men's sports open instead of mens would help and at the highest levels, if a cis women or trans women could compete in say the NHL they would be allowed too. At lower level sports participation for all is a must and I think the only issue there is hate not fairness. Most sports are mixed in non competitive, especially in small towns where girls teams just don't always exists. The dressing room thing is so easy to solve it is not worth mentioning, but if anyone wants to know how we do it for hockey when girls play with the boys let me know.
The surgical intervention for minors seems pretty clear to me as well at no. Just wait until your an adult, so much can change while your brain is still developing it seems premature. That being said I'll probably make my kids wait on Tattoo's.
The puberty's blockers are more complicated to me, partly because I just don't know enough. Like if someone chooses to get off it what are the consequences. Because this is something that needs to happen at a young age to even work so waiting to take them is not an option. But I also feel really uncomfortable if there is long term issues created by using them.
My positions on all these issues is still very malleable because I really just do not know enough and it seems really difficult if not impossible to a have a non emotional, logical discussion about it because anytime I've tried, I just get hate from both of the political sides.
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United States42691 Posts
Puberty blockers are the opposite of irreversible hormone therapy on a prepubescent child. Nobody would advocate for flooding a child with hormones that change their body and brain chemistry irreversibly while they’re too young to consent and not certain that they want it. If an assigned female at birth child was unsure of their gender it would be incredibly reckless for a doctor to flood them with testosterone and hope for the best. People would rightly say that there is absolutely no rush and no certainty, we can wait for more information and more consent before hormones.
The same theory applies for naturally produced hormones. If an assigned female at birth child identifies as female and wants to be flooded with estrogen then good for them, their ovaries will do that. But if they identify as male and would prefer not to be flooded with estrogen against their will then delaying puberty isn’t a medical intervention, it’s the opposite of one. It’s not flooding their body with hormones they don’t want. It’s giving them more time to grow up, mature, and make an informed decision.
Puberty blockers should be the least controversial thing imaginable and yet people get weird about them. It’s a medicine that makes nothing happen. People go to the doctor and say “I’m not certain (or I am certain and it’s the other one but you don’t think I’m old enough to decide yet) so I’d like nothing to happen until I’m older”.
It’s baffling that people go “you’re too young to consent to nothing, the only reasonable course here is for an awful lot of biological changes to happen that you’re expressly not consenting to”. How can they be too young to consent to nothing and how could forcibly transitioning them from a child to a woman against their consent be somehow better.
If they’re too young then that is precisely why the correct path is for nothing to be locked in until they’re older. It’s not like the assigned female at birth child is asking for testosterone therapy, they’re not asking for medical assistance transitioning, they’re just declining huge amounts of estrogen. They’re deferring the unwanted transition to female.
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United States42691 Posts
Also the thing that happens when you go off puberty blockers is puberty.
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Young people shouldn't do anything to their bodies untill much later.
Delaying natural development in the correct growth phase is also huge, not nothing.
Even "minor" things like lip fillers can have lifelong consequences even when done correctly.
Fill your lips to big once and you might need fillers rest of your life to avoid looking weird.
The highest age limit in Sweden is heavy motorcycles at 24 years of age. All the data shows that risk assessment and thinking about consequences is not developed untill then and when you strap that to a sports bike you get scores of dead young men.
Below that you have driving licences for cars, alcohol and tobacco.
But hey, let's allow kids to alter their bodies during some of the physically and mentally most important years of their life.
"But they want to be a man or a women!"
Disregarding poor decision making and peer and social pressure that is a huge problem, they can't possibly know what they want.
They have only ever been kids, and they have no idea of what it is to be an adult, let alone an adult man or women.
Logic dictates we let them grow up first so they have an experience to compare with before making a choice wich is life altering with very poor information of what it means.
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On April 30 2025 09:55 Billyboy wrote:
For me the only issues I have with navigating the world where Trans people are more common and in the open are the competitive sports one and then the puberty blockers and surgical solutions for children.
The sports one I think my take will be unpopular. I think women's competitive sports should be for CIS women. It does seem unfair and I don't think that competing in these high level events is a right and maybe a sacrifice you just have to make if you are going to make the transition. I think perhaps calling the men's sports open instead of mens would help and at the highest levels, if a cis women or trans women could compete in say the NHL they would be allowed too. At lower level sports participation for all is a must and I think the only issue there is hate not fairness. Most sports are mixed in non competitive, especially in small towns where girls teams just don't always exists. The dressing room thing is so easy to solve it is not worth mentioning, but if anyone wants to know how we do it for hockey when girls play with the boys let me know.
The surgical intervention for minors seems pretty clear to me as well at no. Just wait until your an adult, so much can change while your brain is still developing it seems premature. That being said I'll probably make my kids wait on Tattoo's.
The puberty's blockers are more complicated to me, partly because I just don't know enough. Like if someone chooses to get off it what are the consequences. Because this is something that needs to happen at a young age to even work so waiting to take them is not an option. But I also feel really uncomfortable if there is long term issues created by using them.
My positions on all these issues is still very malleable because I really just do not know enough and it seems really difficult if not impossible to a have a non emotional, logical discussion about it because anytime I've tried, I just get hate from both of the political sides.
Ok... but have you considered that the reason you're against trans inclusivity in competitive sports and "life-saving" gender affirming surgeries for adolescents is because you just want to rage against trans people and strip their rights away? I don't believe for a minute that you actually care about cis-women's sports.
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United States42691 Posts
We shouldn’t give trans kids the thing that is proven to stop them from killing themselves because of lip fillers?
They can’t know what they want until they’re older so let’s lock them in to the one thing that they’re saying they don’t want rather than waiting until they’re older?
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Despite what you've been told that puberty-blockers are a risk-free way to pause puberty and have proven efficacy, that actual evidence for their use is not great. For example...
In November 2024, the New Zealand Ministry of Health released an evidence brief on puberty blockers. The brief found there to be a lack of evidence for both the efficacy and harms of puberty blockers and recommended "a more precautionary approach"
In 2023, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board, an independent non-governmental organization, issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.
On 22 February 2022, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare said that puberty blockers should only be used in "exceptional cases" and said that their use is backed by "uncertain science".
The April 2024, Cass Review stated that there was inadequate evidence to justify the widespread use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, and that more research was needed to provide evidence as to the effectiveness of this treatment, in terms of reducing distress and improving psychological functioning. This led to a de facto moratorium of the routine provision of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria within NHS England and NHS Scotland outside of clinical trials
There was also a doctor in the US that led a study that showed puberty blockers did not improve mental health of trans children. She withheld the study and didn't publish it because the results were not the ones she wanted to show.
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On April 30 2025 15:50 KwarK wrote:
We shouldn’t give trans kids the thing that is proven to stop them from killing themselves because of lip fillers?
They can’t know what they want until they’re older so let’s lock them in to the one thing that they’re saying they don’t want rather than waiting until they’re older?
Brought to you by the generation that created the world's most massive mental health crisis.
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On April 30 2025 14:49 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:
Young people shouldn't do anything to their bodies untill much later.
A decision for that young persons parents or guardians
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On April 30 2025 15:50 KwarK wrote:
We shouldn’t give trans kids the thing that is proven to stop them from killing themselves because of lip fillers?
They can’t know what they want until they’re older so let’s lock them in to the one thing that they’re saying they don’t want rather than waiting until they’re older?
Doesn't seem like we know it even helps.
The push for these treatments seem almost unprecedented.
One problem is that it's treatment that affects the body alot that is done because the patients have self reported problems. They want the treatments. Even with objectively diagnosed diseases it could be hard to implement new medical treatments with this little evidence and it's a lot harder to diagnose and evalute effectivness when it's not a physical disease with objective signs and outcomes.
But the treatment itself isn't even for their medical problems which are psychological. They don't turn to suicide because of their gender itself it's because they are depressed or have other psychological conditions which might be because they feel they are the wrong gender. So it's not even treating the primary disease we are treating what the patient thinks is the reason behind the primary disease. If you worked in healthcare you would realise what a red flag that is.
Psychological problems are hard to treat and evalute treatments for already, we don't even really know how good SSRI is. And doing life changing treatments as some kind of tertiary treatment...
Now comes the argument; well the patient wants it.
Back to my rants about kids. The trope that teens doesn't know what they want and every single thing is the end of the world exists for a reason.
So no, just because they want it is not a good reason, they can wait like for every other thing they aren't allowed to do because they are children.
And if it's a medical problem because they get depressed and potentially suicidal the evidence seems to be by far inconclusive to use it as some kind of secondary treatment at this point.
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I think everyone is kinda missing the point of these things. Because how do we know if something to treat mental issues in people resolving is/can be succesful without testing it on these people?
There's only so much you can do in the lab before you need to release it on a larger cohort and then when results aren't what they should be, they are adjusted.
Now there's a large problem with authority/clout entrenching and that certainly needs to be addressed, but that's a more systemic academic issue.
The facts of the matter are that dysphoic teens have high suicide rates (later) in life. So how do we stop a subpopulation of a subpopulation of doing that and give them a QoL change that makes them have better to good outcomes. Hypothesis is tested and then synthesized. And them you iterate. It's not easy and it takes time. Especially with something this complex. There's so many variables to consider that can have an impact on these situations and only a very minite amount of tools to use.
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Simply put, this is just a medical question. Currently the doctors who are specialists on this question feel (afaik) that puberty blockers is the best option in these cases, so, let's do that. Maybe they're wrong! Maybe there's something else that's better and we haven't discovered it yet. What we shouldn't do is get in the way of this, and especially not for a super mundane reason like "Delaying natural development in the correct growth phase is also huge, not nothing." Probably the medical field has considered that I reckon, and they still feel that blockers (that's a shortcut, there's also counseling and other things along) are the best option. Typically this is the moment in the discussion where I hear about how doctors just want to pump kids full of hormones to make money or because they're part of the evil international trans agenda, but this being TL I assume we're above that.
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The ethical boards that decide what (doesn't) passes as a proposed therapy or trial setup are definitely nothing to sneeze at.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On April 30 2025 15:43 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2025 09:55 Billyboy wrote:
For me the only issues I have with navigating the world where Trans people are more common and in the open are the competitive sports one and then the puberty blockers and surgical solutions for children.
The sports one I think my take will be unpopular. I think women's competitive sports should be for CIS women. It does seem unfair and I don't think that competing in these high level events is a right and maybe a sacrifice you just have to make if you are going to make the transition. I think perhaps calling the men's sports open instead of mens would help and at the highest levels, if a cis women or trans women could compete in say the NHL they would be allowed too. At lower level sports participation for all is a must and I think the only issue there is hate not fairness. Most sports are mixed in non competitive, especially in small towns where girls teams just don't always exists. The dressing room thing is so easy to solve it is not worth mentioning, but if anyone wants to know how we do it for hockey when girls play with the boys let me know.
The surgical intervention for minors seems pretty clear to me as well at no. Just wait until your an adult, so much can change while your brain is still developing it seems premature. That being said I'll probably make my kids wait on Tattoo's.
The puberty's blockers are more complicated to me, partly because I just don't know enough. Like if someone chooses to get off it what are the consequences. Because this is something that needs to happen at a young age to even work so waiting to take them is not an option. But I also feel really uncomfortable if there is long term issues created by using them.
My positions on all these issues is still very malleable because I really just do not know enough and it seems really difficult if not impossible to a have a non emotional, logical discussion about it because anytime I've tried, I just get hate from both of the political sides. Ok... but have you considered that the reason you're against trans inclusivity in competitive sports and "life-saving" gender affirming surgeries for adolescents is because you just want to rage against trans people and strip their rights away? I don't believe for a minute that you actually care about cis-women's sports.
Read any article with comments enabled on say, the BBC sport’s page, and if it’s about women’s sport you’ll have a slew of comments bashing it, ‘why is my license fee paying for coverage’, ‘the standard is rubbish’, ‘wokesters are ramming it down my throat’, ‘why do we have female presenters for male sport now?’ yadda yadda yadda.
I’d bet the house that there’s quite the overlap between people who actively take time out of their day to denigrate women’s sport publicly, and those who are happy to use it as a vector to attack trans folks.
As Billy here hasn’t been doing the former he hasn’t had people jumping in and criticising their motives, bar you sarcastically doing so. Funny how that works eh? Write a thoughtful, earnest post where you confess you’re not 100% sure on everything and voila, people are more receptive.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On April 30 2025 17:08 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2025 15:50 KwarK wrote:
We shouldn’t give trans kids the thing that is proven to stop them from killing themselves because of lip fillers?
They can’t know what they want until they’re older so let’s lock them in to the one thing that they’re saying they don’t want rather than waiting until they’re older? Brought to you by the generation that created the world's most massive mental health crisis.
Ain’t that the truth.
Minibat has thus far expressed basically zero ambiguity in his sense of gender, so I don’t think it’s a problem we’ll be tackling, but in the abstract there’s about a thousand things I’m more worried about him facing.
Some of which are completely unavoidable! Yay
On April 30 2025 19:03 Uldridge wrote:
I think everyone is kinda missing the point of these things. Because how do we know if something to treat mental issues in people resolving is/can be succesful without testing it on these people?
There's only so much you can do in the lab before you need to release it on a larger cohort and then when results aren't what they should be, they are adjusted.
Now there's a large problem with authority/clout entrenching and that certainly needs to be addressed, but that's a more systemic academic issue.
The facts of the matter are that dysphoic teens have high suicide rates (later) in life. So how do we stop a subpopulation of a subpopulation of doing that and give them a QoL change that makes them have better to good outcomes. Hypothesis is tested and then synthesized. And them you iterate. It's not easy and it takes time. Especially with something this complex. There's so many variables to consider that can have an impact on these situations and only a very minite amount of tools to use.
I don’t bother anymore, as often the retort would be ‘the first link that agrees with me’, but I did a fair bit of reading up on trans mental health outcomes and factors back in the day.
And a big, big one, often numero uno was how they were treated.
Even if you negotiate a transition and personally feel comfortable in your own skin (and not everyone does), doesn’t mean everyone else behaves that way towards you, which is obviously pretty depressing.
It makes it rather non-trivial to look at the efficacy of certain courses of action, especially if it’s across countries and cultures. Hell, I imagine you’ll have a huge difference between someone who lives in a rural farming community and someone who lives in a big liberal city.
Not in this thread thankfully, but it’s been a huge issue I’ve encountered over the years, people don’t actually care about these mental health outcomes, they’re using it so they can cherry-pick and show that gender-affirming care in various forms doesn’t work.
If it was an earnest endeavour, one would quite quickly look at the giant flashing neon sign saying ‘don’t be a dick to trans people, that is bad for our mental health’ and at least factor it in.
There’s also the question of other mental health problems. Gender dysphoria doesn’t block off the brain to those. I’m bipolar and sometimes that makes insurance fun, it’s also IIRC the singular mental health condition with the biggest contribution to suicide risk. Yay!
So when assessing a trans person’s outcomes, to be rigorous you probably have to compare to comorbidities and versus those populations, rather than more generally.
Which I imagine gets pretty tricky, it’s not a huge, huge population to begin with. Maybe you can’t get all the additional data you want on other conditions depending on how you’re collecting it etc.
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Norway28669 Posts
On April 30 2025 18:50 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2025 15:50 KwarK wrote:
We shouldn’t give trans kids the thing that is proven to stop them from killing themselves because of lip fillers?
They can’t know what they want until they’re older so let’s lock them in to the one thing that they’re saying they don’t want rather than waiting until they’re older? Doesn't seem like we know it even helps. The push for these treatments seem almost unprecedented. One problem is that it's treatment that affects the body alot that is done because the patients have self reported problems. They want the treatments. Even with objectively diagnosed diseases it could be hard to implement new medical treatments with this little evidence and it's a lot harder to diagnose and evalute effectivness when it's not a physical disease with objective signs and outcomes. But the treatment itself isn't even for their medical problems which are psychological. They don't turn to suicide because of their gender itself it's because they are depressed or have other psychological conditions which might be because they feel they are the wrong gender. So it's not even treating the primary disease we are treating what the patient thinks is the reason behind the primary disease. If you worked in healthcare you would realise what a red flag that is. Psychological problems are hard to treat and evalute treatments for already, we don't even really know how good SSRI is. And doing life changing treatments as some kind of tertiary treatment... Now comes the argument; well the patient wants it. Back to my rants about kids. The trope that teens doesn't know what they want and every single thing is the end of the world exists for a reason. So no, just because they want it is not a good reason, they can wait like for every other thing they aren't allowed to do because they are children. And if it's a medical problem because they get depressed and potentially suicidal the evidence seems to be by far inconclusive to use it as some kind of secondary treatment at this point.
They can't really 'wait' with puberty blockers, though. This is exactly why this particular question is genuinely kinda hard, and why this particular question is one where you won't find a hard consensus even among people who have nothing against trans people. I think most of the critical questions regarding trans people from most people involved are genuinely of the 'I'm gonna hone in on this one to camouflage my bigotry'-kind, but the two questions that aren't, are ones pertaining to sports and to what degree children should be allowed to make medical decisions.
As far as puberty my cursory glance suggest that the science isn't settled. When the top medical community in Norway and Sweden are in disagreement, this, to me, is usually an indicator that both sides probably have valid points, because this disagreement is likely to be grounded in different interpretations of science/data, rather than be political in origin. Currently, the stance here is that it's mostly safe, while Sweden has implemented more restrictions. I read some interview with some swedish official a couple years ago where they were in particular skeptical towards girls who experienced gender dysphoria or gender incongruence (I dunno) at the start of puberty but who hadn't experienced this during their entire childhood. In those cases, it was more likely to be a fleeting experience.
Anyway - if it's a 'there are 0 negative side effects to delaying puberty' situation, then obviously that should be okay. If there are a bunch of irreversible consequences, then a child shouldn't whimsically be allowed to go for it. I believe all sane people agree on this- but the disagreement stems from 'how many irreversible consequences are there'. This however, isn't a simple equation, or necessarily one that can even be scienced out, because growing up is irreversible, and even if you disregard gender incongruence entirely, people who enter puberty at a younger age will be influenced by this in some way shape or form, and people who enter puberty at a later age will also be influenced by this in some way shape or form. While I haven't seen statistics, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find a correlation between 'was bullied during my teenage years' and 'entered puberty later than my peers', or 'entered puberty earlier' and 'have had more girlfriends throughout my life', in the same sense that 'reasonably tall people are more likely to hold prestigeous jobs'. Now, I'm not arguing against puberty blockers (not a medical professional) - but opposition isn't necessarily caused by hatred of trans people. (That said - the 'sane' opposition is in my opinion likely to be a bit.. nuanced, while the hate-led opposition will be entirely negative because they consider the idea of not sticking to your biological gender inherently unacceptable.)
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On April 30 2025 20:08 Nebuchad wrote:
Simply put, this is just a medical question. Currently the doctors who are specialists on this question feel (afaik) that puberty blockers is the best option in these cases, so, let's do that. Maybe they're wrong! Maybe there's something else that's better and we haven't discovered it yet. What we shouldn't do is get in the way of this, and especially not for a super mundane reason like "Delaying natural development in the correct growth phase is also huge, not nothing." Probably the medical field has considered that I reckon, and they still feel that blockers (that's a shortcut, there's also counseling and other things along) are the best option. Typically this is the moment in the discussion where I hear about how doctors just want to pump kids full of hormones to make money or because they're part of the evil international trans agenda, but this being TL I assume we're above that.
I trust doctors as a group implicitly and doctors as individuals about as far as I can throw them. And I'm not hitting the gym right now.
It's a new unproven treatment so it's incredibly easy to find doctors who thinks it's a great treatment and those who would never even consider it.
The national health board in Sweden (and many other countries) has experts at going through medical evidence and they think the level of evidence for treatment is very weak.
If you think this is a medical issue that should be your baseline.
Also consider that in a new field early researchers and treatment providers are going to be the ones who belive in the treatment even without evidence. Which means the current experts who has done a lot in the field have a real risk of bias. Not saying they are wrong but it's better to look at reviews by health professionals who are not stakeholders in the issue.
Given the small population size what should be done is to aggregate every single case into a research environment to gather more evidence. But if I understand it that has also been somrwhat problematic in this case due to politics.
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On April 30 2025 22:21 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2025 20:08 Nebuchad wrote:
Simply put, this is just a medical question. Currently the doctors who are specialists on this question feel (afaik) that puberty blockers is the best option in these cases, so, let's do that. Maybe they're wrong! Maybe there's something else that's better and we haven't discovered it yet. What we shouldn't do is get in the way of this, and especially not for a super mundane reason like "Delaying natural development in the correct growth phase is also huge, not nothing." Probably the medical field has considered that I reckon, and they still feel that blockers (that's a shortcut, there's also counseling and other things along) are the best option. Typically this is the moment in the discussion where I hear about how doctors just want to pump kids full of hormones to make money or because they're part of the evil international trans agenda, but this being TL I assume we're above that. I trust doctors as a group implicitly and doctors as individuals about as far as I can throw them. And I'm not hitting the gym right now. It's a new unproven treatment so it's incredibly easy to find doctors who thinks it's a great treatment and those who would never even consider it. The national health board in Sweden (and many other countries) has experts at going through medical evidence and they think the level of evidence for treatment is very weak. If you think this is a medical issue that should be your baseline. Also consider that in a new field early researchers and treatment providers are going to be the ones who belive in the treatment even without evidence. Which means the current experts who has done a lot in the field have a real risk of bias. Not saying they are wrong but it's better to look at reviews by health professionals who are not stakeholders in the issue. Given the small population size what should be done is to aggregate every single case into a research environment to gather more evidence. But if I understand it that has also been somrwhat problematic in this case due to politics.
Yes, and this is in line with what researchers are saying. Continue with the treatment, collect more evidence so that we no longer have this weak level of evidence, and then if we observe some issue because of this new collection of evidence, course correct. This is the standard way of going about "new" treatments (in quotes because this one has been used for a little while at this point, really).
Contrast that with some other statements that are more political in nature, like, "We have weak evidence that this care helps / on the side effects of this treatment, so we should ban it". If we ban it, we're not going to collect more evidence, clearly, so that doesn't make any sense. And while nobody worth listening to would disagree with more research being done, we do not need more research to assert that no treatment at all, which is the alternative if we ban care, leads to bad outcomes.
Edit: I believe I remember someone saying that "weak" in the context of these studies means something different than what we think it does in layman terms, but let me look into this later I have to pretend that I'm working for a few hours and then I have to go for 4-10 drinks.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On April 30 2025 22:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2025 18:50 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:On April 30 2025 15:50 KwarK wrote:
We shouldn’t give trans kids the thing that is proven to stop them from killing themselves because of lip fillers?
They can’t know what they want until they’re older so let’s lock them in to the one thing that they’re saying they don’t want rather than waiting until they’re older? Doesn't seem like we know it even helps. The push for these treatments seem almost unprecedented. One problem is that it's treatment that affects the body alot that is done because the patients have self reported problems. They want the treatments. Even with objectively diagnosed diseases it could be hard to implement new medical treatments with this little evidence and it's a lot harder to diagnose and evalute effectivness when it's not a physical disease with objective signs and outcomes. But the treatment itself isn't even for their medical problems which are psychological. They don't turn to suicide because of their gender itself it's because they are depressed or have other psychological conditions which might be because they feel they are the wrong gender. So it's not even treating the primary disease we are treating what the patient thinks is the reason behind the primary disease. If you worked in healthcare you would realise what a red flag that is. Psychological problems are hard to treat and evalute treatments for already, we don't even really know how good SSRI is. And doing life changing treatments as some kind of tertiary treatment... Now comes the argument; well the patient wants it. Back to my rants about kids. The trope that teens doesn't know what they want and every single thing is the end of the world exists for a reason. So no, just because they want it is not a good reason, they can wait like for every other thing they aren't allowed to do because they are children. And if it's a medical problem because they get depressed and potentially suicidal the evidence seems to be by far inconclusive to use it as some kind of secondary treatment at this point. They can't really 'wait' with puberty blockers, though. This is exactly why this particular question is genuinely kinda hard, and why this particular question is one where you won't find a hard consensus even among people who have nothing against trans people. I think most of the critical questions regarding trans people from most people involved are genuinely of the 'I'm gonna hone in on this one to camouflage my bigotry'-kind, but the two questions that aren't, are ones pertaining to sports and to what degree children should be allowed to make medical decisions. As far as puberty my cursory glance suggest that the science isn't settled. When the top medical community in Norway and Sweden are in disagreement, this, to me, is usually an indicator that both sides probably have valid points, because this disagreement is likely to be grounded in different interpretations of science/data, rather than be political in origin. Currently, the stance here is that it's mostly safe, while Sweden has implemented more restrictions. I read some interview with some swedish official a couple years ago where they were in particular skeptical towards girls who experienced gender dysphoria or gender incongruence (I dunno) at the start of puberty but who hadn't experienced this during their entire childhood. In those cases, it was more likely to be a fleeting experience. Anyway - if it's a 'there are 0 negative side effects to delaying puberty' situation, then obviously that should be okay. If there are a bunch of irreversible consequences, then a child shouldn't whimsically be allowed to go for it. I believe all sane people agree on this- but the disagreement stems from 'how many irreversible consequences are there'. This however, isn't a simple equation, or necessarily one that can even be scienced out, because growing up is irreversible, and even if you disregard gender incongruence entirely, people who enter puberty at a younger age will be influenced by this in some way shape or form, and people who enter puberty at a later age will also be influenced by this in some way shape or form. While I haven't seen statistics, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find a correlation between 'was bullied during my teenage years' and 'entered puberty later than my peers', or 'entered puberty earlier' and 'have had more girlfriends throughout my life', in the same sense that 'reasonably tall people are more likely to hold prestigeous jobs'. Now, I'm not arguing against puberty blockers (not a medical professional) - but opposition isn't necessarily caused by hatred of trans people. (That said - the 'sane' opposition is in my opinion likely to be a bit.. nuanced, while the hate-led opposition will be entirely negative because they consider the idea of not sticking to your biological gender inherently unacceptable.)
You raise some interesting points as per usual. Changes in one’s formative years (hell even when in the year you’re born) have pretty big knock-on effects.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some girls misconstrue discomfort from the more obvious elements of female puberty as dysphoria, and that may indeed settle given time. As per your example of those who hadn’t experienced these pre-puberty.
Of course there are hormonal shifts, but really us blokes talk a bit deeper, we’re a little hairier.
I wonder if for young girls, be it conscious or not, that puberty also signifies ‘will be subject to the male gaze now’, and that distress, for some may be parsed as dysphoria. Or perhaps not and I’m talking bollocks
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United States42691 Posts
Drone, entering puberty at the same time as your peers isn’t a good thing if it’s the wrong puberty.
If you identify as a boy then sure, I can see why you’d want your voice to break and facial hair to grow at the same time as the other boys. That makes sense. I can see why being delayed there may cause bullying.
But the argument you’re making about bullying is that the AFAB trans boy might be insecure about growing a mustache later than the other boys and so the best thing for them is a big set of tits. I don’t see how that’s going to help with the bullying.
Hormones at the right time assumes they’re also the right hormones. The argument you’re making is “the right hormones at the right time (which is around the same time everyone else gets them)”. I don’t disagree with that.
The issue trans people face is that they’re legally barred from having the right hormones during the normal age of puberty. The right hormones at the right time isn’t available to them. The second best option is then deferment, the right hormones at the wrong time. Later than their peers which, as you say, could cause bullying. It’s not ideal but whatever. But that’s still better than your proposed solution, the wrong hormones at the right time.
Estrogen and testosterone are not fungible. You can’t say “it’s important that they get hormones at the normal age of puberty” and handwave which ones are being referred to.
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EPT
