Quote:
Originally Posted by Flint
There. Are. No. Medical. Procedures. Done. On. Children.
|
That is incorrect.
Mastectomies for girls as young as 13 who have already decided to transition are medical procedures on children.
Using hormone blockers on a child is a medical procedure - it just isn't a surgical one - there is some evidence to suggest it can have an impact on their health in later life: though this seems to be particularly the case for female to male transition. There is evidence (I am not well versed enough to be able to say how compelling) to suggest that girls who block puberty and then transition through male hormones do not store sufficient calcium and are at much higher risk of osteoporosis.
I think it's a different situation with boys who are given puberty blockers - there seems less evidence of long term impact from the delaying of puberty.
There is also an apparent risk of infertility and other irreversible effects - though how much of that is through delaying puberty and how much through the use if male or female hormones to allow transition I am not sure.
There are also risks involved in not allowing transgender children to begin down the path - and they shouldn't be minimized.
Parents of trans children are between a rock and a hard place - and so are many health professionals - but there is, running alongside that an ideological drive by some to actively promote gender transition or genderlessness - (from kids shows on youtube singing songs for pre-schoolers about how everyone is really queer and teaching all about the multiplicity of genders on the spectrum (Moon Gender anyone?), to an insistence that you don't need gender dysphoria to be transgender and deplatforming academics and health professionals who disagree and who consider it the definitive reason for transition.
So there is a risk that youngsters who are not suffering from gender dysphoria, but are subject to other forms of body dysmorphia are finding themselves on the transgender track - all the whlle having that diagnosis validated and confirmed by that track so they end up on hormone treatments by the the time they are in their early to mid-teens: and if someone who doesn't actually have gender dysphoria
is misdiagnosed and treated as if they do, then this can actually create dysphoria by bringing about fairly radical changes some of which will not go away if they decide to abandon hormone treatment.
Again, this seems to be something which is primarily affecting girls who think they are transgender and then realise its something else, like anorexia, or anxiety about male attention.
There are cases of the above. How prominent that experience is compared to those for whom early transition partly or wholly resolved their gender dysphoria and allowed them to live a normal life, i don;t know - and I suspect few, if any here know either.