journeyintomanhood:

ironfoxe: > “puberty blockers cause no harm!! i know this based on nothing more than what i’ve heard from a community that has vested interest in suppressing information on the negative effects of said drugs and haven’t done any research on the subject!” > sources showing the many dangers, long term effects, and deaths caused by the number one prescribed “puberty blocker” > “lalalala can’t hear you THEY ARE FINE OKAY” Please show me these sources that say puberty blockers are dangerous for youth. I have done research on the subject and I’m aware they aren’t perfect (no medication is) and that we also don’t know everything there is know about them (once again the same with most medications). What I do know is the following in regards to fertility and bone density: “With regard to hormone blockers, should an individual come off blockers and proceed with biologic puberty, they would still be as fertile as they would have been without blockers. There are no studies that show infertility as a side effect to GnRH analogues when used in children with central precocious puberty, which is the population most similar to our trans kids on blockers.” - Trans Health UCSF

“ Extrapolating from the CPP experience, it is likely that peak bone mineral density would not be affected in transgender youth on GnRH analogues, but research is needed to confirm this assumption.” - Trans Health UCSF

There is also overwhelming evidence that the effects are reversible if one wishes to go off them at a later date. This medication is not brand new and in fact has been used in treating other conditions (ex. precarious puberty) for a number of years and has been used in parts of Europe for gender dysphoric youth since at least the 1990s. If there was a huge amount of physical or mental health repercussions don’t you think we would have heard about it? I also know that there has been a lot of proof of puberty blockers improving the quality of life of these youth. For example a study in the Netherlands which found that youth taking these hormones were just as happy if not happier than their peers. Shouldn’t we all be most concerned with improving the lives of these youth? Of keeping that happy and safe?

You can view a masterpost here, another compilation here, a chilling in depth look here, and a hub website here. I also found a lot of great information from this website, but they’re currently down. I’ll go out on a limb here and tackle this information below as well. Get ready, because this one is gonna be a doozy.

For starters, you link to a site that, as noted in the (sarcastic) op, has a vested interest in not presenting the negatives of so-called puberty blockers. On top of that, there are no citations provided on the page you linked to and the second link you provide doesn’t even work…and from what you quote from it, it admits to making unsubstantiated claims (”but research is needed to confirm this assumption.”) It claims that there are no long term effects to fertility, and yet side effects reported directly to the FDA beg to differ as they include infertility, (premature) menopause, irregular menstrual periods, and miscarriages, among other disturbing results including everything from vaginal hemorrhaging to myocardial infarction (heart attack). It should be noted while we’re discussing it that “[i]n an article in the Journal of American Medical Association, then FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler revealed that ‘only about 1% of serious adverse events are reported to the FDA’.” (Moore, Thomas J. Prescription for Disaster: The Hidden Dangers in Your Medicine Cabinet. New York. Simon & Schuster, 1998) so it’s quite likely that these are grossly under-reported. Speaking of reporting to the FDA, you can see a short list of deaths attributed to one of the drugs commonly touted as a “completely safe puberty blocker”, as reported to the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System between 1997 and 2004, here.

There are multiple petitions and letter-sending campaigns revolving around the dangers of Lupron, the most popularly prescribed “puberty blocker”, and how understated and obfuscated the dangerous side effects are, including (from the first linked petition): hot flashes, memory loss, tachycardia, hematura, hypotension, dizziness, insomnia, anxiety, depression, Vitamin D deficiency, constant gnawing bone/joint pain, osteoarthritis, osteopenia, osteoporosis, fibromyalgia, degenerative disc disease, autoimmune diseases, blood disorders, cancer and many others including death. That quote alone is just describing adult women’s experiences and as they point out again, not a single long-term study has been conducted (for women or, in particular, children.) I’d encourage you to check the masterpost link provided at the top, wherein never-obey helpfully attached screenshots of the frightening testimonials of juvenile victims and their parents about the side effects they were never informed of ahead of time. You can also work your way through the laundry list of lawsuits filed against the manufacturers by the (mostly female) victims.

You’re correct in pointing out that it’s not new medication, but it is newly being applied to vulnerable children with no longitudinal studies on what exposure to these drugs does to long-term health and development. These drugs have been used for precocious puberty (not “precarious puberty”, as you put it), as well as treatment of conditions like prostate cancer and endometriosis in men and women respectively. Lupron is NOT approved by the FDA for use on dysphoric children, as seen here. When prescribed to children diagnosed as having “gender dysphoria”, it is considered off-label.

The study you linked about how youth taking these drugs are “happy” doesn’t make any impact on disproving the adverse effects on children’s physical wellbeing, and beyond that it has a sample size of just fifty-five kids. It also only surveys kids that went on to receive sex reassignment surgery, and since there are, once again, no long-term studies showing how many supposedly transgender children grow up to NOT pursue such surgeries or even continue to identify as transgender, it seems dubious at best. From PBS’s Growing Up Trans: “What makes treatment tricky is that there is no test that can tell whether a child experiencing distress about their gender will grow up to be transgender. The handful of studies that do exist suggest that gender dysphoria persists in a minority of children, but they involved very few children and were done mostly abroad.” It goes on to give us the following paragraph as well:

The Endocrine Society’s guidelines suggest starting puberty blockers for transgender children when they hit a stage of development known as Tanner stage 2 — usually around 10 or 11 years old for a girl and 11 or 12 years old for a boy. The same guidelines suggest giving cross sex hormones — estrogen for transgender girls and testosterone for transgender boys — at age 16. However, doctors caution that estrogen and testosterone, the hormones that are blocked by these medications, also play a role in a child’s neurological development and bone growth. “We do know that there is some decrease in bone density during treatment with pubertal suppression,” Finlayson said, adding that initial studies have shown that starting estrogen and testosterone can help regain the bone density. What Finlayson said there isn’t enough research on is whether someone who was on puberty blockers will regain all their bone strength, or if they might be at risk for osteoporosis in the future. Another area where doctors say there isn’t enough research is the impact that suppressing puberty has on brain development. “The bottom line is we don’t really know how sex hormones impact any adolescent’s brain development,” Dr. Lisa Simons, a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s, told FRONTLINE. “We know that there’s a lot of brain development between childhood and adulthood, but it’s not clear what’s behind that.” What’s lacking, she said, are specific studies that look at the neurocognitive effects of puberty blockers.

The piece, published in June of this year, ends on a somber note: “The stakes are super high, and we don’t have all the answers,” Garofalo says. “Hopefully, there’s going to be more research and some of those unanswered questions, hopefully, will begin to be answered.”

It’s interesting that this study you provide is based out of the Netherlands, because the situation surrounding “transgender youth” in that country is mentioned in the next article I’ll bring up. This one, published in 2009, discusses the dangers of putting gender nonconforming kids on the medical alteration track when they are too young to know what they want or who they will develop into as adults and, more insidiously, how likely it is that kids who are pushed toward this from a young age will continue down this path as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy, NOT because they are “truly transgender”:

Those recommending puberty-suppressing drugs insist that [surgical alteration surgeries] are the only means available to relieve the suffering of adolescents who believe they were “born in the wrong sex body.” When the surgical solution was seen as something to be avoided, most pre-adolescent children who believed they were or wanted to be the other sex eventually accepted the reality of the sex they were born with. Only a tiny percentage grew up to demand surgical alteration. Today, however, in places like the Netherlands, rather than trying to help these children accept their biological sexual identity, certain experts encourage parents and schools to allow the children to present themselves in public as the other sex. The very availability of these procedures convinces these adolescents that if they resist the therapist probing into the causes of their delusions and desires, if they keep insisting they were “born in the wrong body,” they will be allowed to access to hormones and surgery they desire and be able to live their fantasy. Some have opposed this course of action. Kenneth Zucker and Susan Bradley, experts in the treatment of children with sexual identity problems, argue that if treatment begins early and if the parents cooperate the problem can be resolved and the desire to be the other sex usually disappears… According to Zucker and Bradley, “Seeking sex reassignment surgery is a defensive solution and a mechanism for control of anxiety.” (Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, 1995) These adolescents resist working with therapists and demand an immediate transition.

I won’t even touch on how most supposedly trans kinds are identified as such because they are gender nonconforming (i.e. little boys that like pink, little girls that want to roughhouse, etc.) which is TERRIFYING when you consider how many could grow up to be perfectly functioning, healthy gay and lesbian individuals (or otherwise just gender nonconforming adults) if they were not medically interfered with as children. When you start going down that rabbithole, the transitioning of youth starts to look more and more like early intervention conversion therapy. Gender Identity Disorder, the only prerequisite for having these non-FDA approved drugs prescribed to a child, is broadly applied to these gender variant kids as a way of making them palatably gender conforming rather than allowing them to live there lives as medically unaltered, gender nonconforming children. And future gay/gnc youth are hardly the only ones at risk; the diagnosing of GID is so slapdash and haphazardly applied that there are already horror stories out there of mentally ill individuals being victimized similarly: “In one instance, a man suffering GID and awaiting SRS was administered female hormones for a number of years, which caused enlargement of his breasts and atrophy of his genitals. After being correctly diagnosed with schizophrenia and medicated properly, he regretted the hormone treatment as he no longer believed he was truly female.”

We’re eventually going to face a massive fallout when a generation of misdiagnosed, medically abused young people enter an altered version of their natural adulthood and find themselves staring down a mountain of health problems on top of the inevitable identity issues that will come from reconciling with the fact that their parents and doctors, authority figures that should have been protecting them, choose instead to pressure them into hormonal and surgical intervention to cure the early indicators of their gnc behavior/budding sexuality.

So to conclude, should we be concerned with children safe and happy? Hell yes. And that includes protecting uncertain, vulnerable kids from being dosed with dangerously under-researched drugs with no long term studies backing up their safety.

Bottom line? If you’ve been told “puberty blockers” are a cheery, reversible, consequence-less route for youth to travel down, you’ve been lied to big time by a few well-funded physicians pushing an agenda that cares more about putting gnc kids onto a track of puberty suppressants, cross-sex hormones, and sex altering surgery (aka big money to be made for said medical establishment) over the well-being of those aforementioned gnc kids.

You mentioned “overwhelming evidence” that supports your argument. Here’s mine, where’s yours?