Stunting their Growth (end of series)

How can it be safe?

I have other things to write about, so I want to complete this thought on the subject of puberty blockers. Please catch up by reading the prior posts on the subject, from these links:

Stunting Their Growth

and

Stunting Their Growth, Continued

There are three prongs to the question of the safety of puberty blockers.

1. Are the drugs safe, and are the side-effects concerning long-term health for the patients reasonably minimal?

2. Assuming that the answer to the first is “yes,” are the long-term effects of blocking puberty acceptable as a way to minimize the transition needed to assume the appearance of the other sex?

3. What happens to kids who think they may be trans but don’t go through a course of puberty blockers?

Many of the sites that I searched through in preparation for this post provided similar information to this one from the British Columbia Provincial Health Services Association’s Trans Care BC site.

In a neon-lit version of a red flag, they make this statement:

We are not sure if puberty blockers have negative side effects on bone development and height. Research so far shows that the effects are minimal. However, we won’t know the long-term effects until the first people to take puberty-blockers get older.

If you have erectile tissue (penis) and think you might eventually want to have a vaginoplasty, talk with your primary care provider or endocrinologist for more information. Vaginoplasty is the surgical procedure that creates a vagina. If you start taking puberty blockers early in puberty you might not be able to have the vaginoplasty surgery that is most commonly used in Canada, later as an adult. There are alternative techniques available, such as the use of a skin graft or colon tissue.

So, what are they talking about here?

Bone development for one. thing. Adults who suffer from osteoporosis risk their lives when they walk on icy sidewalks because they can easily break brittle bones. One of the worst things I can remember as a child was the news that someone older in my hometown had fallen and broken her hip. We knew, even though we didn’t say it out loud, that she would never see the outside of the hospital again. People need strong bones, and taking drugs that might have negative side effects on bone development is ignoring a major contraindication right there. They are advising kids and their parents that there’s probably nothing to worry about, but they don’t know, and there really isn’t any longitudinal data that shows it’s a problem so let’s just go with it!¹

And the other issue is penile developement. They deal with it by assuming that it’s only a problem if they want to have a vaginoplasty. What about boys who desist and decide that this trans phase was actually only a phase? Too bad, you’ll have to live with a small penis, but according to Freud you can make up for it with a big truck and a gun when you get older.² The Trans BC site, an official site sponsored by a government agency, is making light of serious future medical and emotional problems as if they were just, sort of, something less important than thinking you might be trans and needing to do something NOW. The scare tactics from the same site:

Health care providers refusing to provide puberty blockers to youth can cause additional distress, and may lead to anxiety and depression. 

Withholding puberty blockers and hormone therapy is not a neutral option and can result in an increased risk of mental health issues.

Better a brittle adult bitter about sex, than one who may or may not commit suicide.³

What are the drugs? Funny you should ask. Lupron is one puberty blocker. It was developed for adult males to treat prostate cancer. It is also used in adult women to relieve uterine pain. It causes chemical castration, which is preferable to actual physical castration. Calling it safe is a stretch, just knowing about chemical, and is irresponsible to say the least. Government health outreach should not be so reckless. In 2017 Stat News (a publication of the Boston Globe Media Company, but not directed by the Boston Globe’s editorial board,) published this story on the long-term effects of Lupron:

More than 10,000 adverse event reports filed with the FDA reflect the experiences of women who’ve taken Lupron. The reports describe everything from brittle bones to faulty joints.

In interviews and in online forums, women who took the drug as young girls or initiated a daughter’s treatment described harsh side effects that have been well-documented in adults.

Women who used Lupron a decade or more ago to delay puberty or grow taller described the short-term side effects listed on the pediatric label: pain at the injection site, mood swings, and headaches. Yet they also described conditions that usually affect people much later in life. A 20-year-old from South Carolina was diagnosed with osteopenia, a thinning of the bones, while a 25-year-old from Pennsylvania has osteoporosis and a cracked spine. A 26-year-old in Massachusetts needed a total hip replacement. A 25-year-old in Wisconsin, like Derricott, has chronic pain and degenerative disc disease.

“It just feels like I’m being punished for basically being experimented on when I was a child,” said Derricott, of Lawton, Okla. “I’d hate for a child to be put on Lupron, get to my age and go through the things I have been through.”

I’m thinking that this may provide enough fodder for the government of BC and everyone else to think that it’s not “safe.”

There are other drugs that are used to block puberty, and they may or may not have such side effects, but as I alluded to in point 2 above such safety is predicated on the idea that it is possible to just pause adolescence, no biggie. ⁴

So, let’s take a look at that, shall we? Aside from superficial secondary sex characteristics such as voice, pubic hair, breast tissue, and chest hair, what are the body parts that are affected by puberty and thus their development is retarded by puberty blockers?

Aside: I’m just going to say this and allude to it briefly: Nearly every site that I found in just searching for data on bodily and emotional changes in puberty include some inserted reference to “an age when kids explore or learn their gender identity so it is an especially challenging time for trans kids.” I used to think that Jennifer Bilek’s research bordered on the conspiratorial, but I’m starting to feel a bit more generous towards the points that she makes at her 11th Hour Blog. She also writes at Substack and you could do worse than subscribe to her work here.

During puberty our bones strenghten and lengthen, our hearts and our lungs mature, girls’ pelvic bones move about and adjust as they prepare for the ability to birth babies sometime in the future, and our brains develop. If I were one of the irritating type to tweet with scoldy handclaps, or to tweet such patronizing phrases as “once more for those in the back,” this is where I would do that in the “our brains develop” phrase. I’m not a handclapper or a those-in-the-back tweeter, except when I go into hipster mode and do so ironically.

Our brains develop during puberty, and this is the organism that ultimately is expected to recognize while going through a paused puberty whether or not it is housing a personality of the sex opposite to the actualy physical sex of the temporal body said personality is attached to. Somehow metaphysically different to the body, sir. Don’t ask questions how, because that’s transphobic.

On many of the sites I looked at, early phases of puberty are marked by increased risk-taking behavior, impulse control is markedly reduced as children try to stretch their boundaries and make very poor decisions that put them at risk. Experience is a great teacher, and if children go through these phases of testing their boundaries without the brain developing in ways to learn from those experiences then children can’t mature.

I once met a man whose DSD medical condition delayed puberty naturally until he was in his mid-thirties. When it finally hit, he was already seriously sexually messed up, because the social expectations for his age were never realized and he decided that he needed to do a lot of catching up when it finally hit. I steered the conversation to something else when he started to lead into the fetishes he was trying out. I don’t know why people want to confide in me sometimes, and this was one time that I had rather not been a part of the converstaion. I do recall the conversation, however, when people talk about the safety of puberty blockers.

“Puberty blockers are safe.” It’s a blanket statement that leads me to think that someone is trying to brush past the serious concerns that naturally come to mind. When I think of the effects that they have on human bodies in preventing the development of physical secondary sex characteristics, I am cognizant that there are males who express a physical attraction to children, and many of them don’t recognize the harm of their attraction. These pedophiles know that the law is against acting on their desires, but I don’t, think it’s outlandish to suggest that they also recognize that the age of majority and at which they can no longer be prosecuted for statutory rape is 18. So if they can snag an 18 or 19 year-old who presents as a pre-adolescent boy or girl they don’t have to worry about Stone Philips showing up at their door after months of chats with an undercover cop.

I’m making an insuation, based on suspicion but not on fact. There may be more to the puberty blockers trick than just to pause puberty so that kids can decide when they’re old enough. I don’t know, I only suspect.

So, aside from the dire warnings of “Trans BC,” what are the observed outcomes for gender confused kids once they pass through adolescence?

There are conflicting claims, and while looking for good information I had trouble finding sources that are not ideologically driven, and I suspect that there is a paucity of good data. One of the issues found with Tavistock is the lack of followup study on their patients. So, I will invite good sources to be posted in the comments, but my understanding is that 80% of gender clinic patients who proceed with puberty blockers go on to more permanent medical treatments of affirmation. And with no PB intervention, 80% of gender clinic patients who do not take puberty blockers resolve their gender issues by the time they reach early adulthood and do not seek transition.

One reason for the continuation of puberty-suppressed transgender medicalization is likely due to the “sunk-cost” of being emotionally invested for several years in the idea that they are trans, and have already altered their bodies, stunted their growth enough that they feel like they are committed to a course that will affirm they are trans.

What we need to be doing rather than “pausing puberty” is to be looking at why children believe themselves to trans, and this often involves talk therapy. Detransitioners and desisters report that when they began their “trans journey” there was very little intake review on their past histories and any trauma that they may have experienced that might lead them to grasp at something as revolutionary as being trans, and now they can never recover the physical aspects of their sex that they lost through “affirmation” medical treatment.

We owe it to kids to be skeptical of medical treatments for gender confusion.

1. The phosphorus in most sodas are also dangerous in that they bind with calcium, and drinking excessive amounts of “pop” as adolescents is also heavily linked with adult early-onset osteoporosis. Diet pop/soda is not a safe alternative as sugar is only one of the dangers.

2. I considered whether or not to post this picture due to the license plate number of the truck not being blocked out, but the owner is the one who originally posted it. DO NOT look up the owner and harrass him. Also, don’t make any assumtions about whether or not Freud was right. That’s sexist.

3. There is no good science to back up the suicide claim. There are no studies on the risk of suicide by those who were led on a course of transition but later realized they shouldn't have been and now have serious medical issues that caution would have prevented.

4. Literally. No more need be said on that.