Can Kids Consent to Hormone Blockers?

No. They are not.

To be clear, there is a huge difference between adult "play" mostly associated under the umbrella of BDSM and pedophiles.

Most pedophiles are not part of the BDSM community.

In fact, most people in the BDSM community are not into coercion or force. Everyone involved is into and wants to "play".

The BDSM community, for the most part, will condemn or even notify police if they find a member who is not conforming to the "everyone must be acting on their own choice and not coerced".

Children are definitely not part of the BDSM community.

So, the trouble is not the BDSM community or people with fetishes, it's the people who want to take by force something that doesn't belong to them.

This. The BDSM community's all about consent, pedophiles are all about power and control. You can think a uniform is sexy without wanting to control the person wearing it.

Sorry @Jenee, I’m not quite with it (long day) and my phone keeps logging me out so I end up retyping things probably not as well as I could’ve.

Totally get it. Phones are not user friendly when it comes to WF.

I don’t think anyone should find a child’s uniform that they HAVE to wear for their education setting “sexy”, or sexualise it. But that’s another topic to this one I guess.

Yea, that's one I don't get either. Or a woman calling a man "Daddy". {cringes}

But.... I'm not one to fetish-shame.

Yeah when I did similar research that @RickDeckard did and found similar papers saying the same thing that in fact, yes there are side effects that are irreversible I also Googled these people. You're absolutely right that a shit ton of right wing christian sites use them as sources to push their agenda. Yes it did give me pause and yes I did think about it. You're not going to see extreme left wing sites even entertaining the notion because they have their own agenda. Did you ever think about that? There are some left leaning sites that do have this type of information, but I suspect you'd call them TERFS.

A lot of the time the majority of guys who change their mind end up just being gay men who were just confused at the time because they were ELEVEN when they started taking the blockers.

NOW you're getting it. Yes, left wing sites have an agenda as do right wing sites. The trick is to find sites (and podcasts) that do not have an agenda. Sites that are reporting the news or providing a non-partisan analysis.

Every fucking day.

No. TERF is a specific title for a specific mindset. If you find a left leaning site that incorrectly calls someone a TERF, there is a user correcting them.

I look at it more like they took an attractive combination of a pleated skirt, dress shirt, and had kids wear it. Dress shirts and pleated skirts with thigh high socks on people look phenomenal. It's like how a well tailored suit can do the same, and yet children are expected to wear these as well. So it has become associated with a standard children's uniform, but I'll be damned if these adults don't look incredible in them:

I was expecting a from Dicky, but instead got a fantasy rep. Way to subvert my expectations.

I don’t disagree, but that’s a slight and subtle shift from “schoolgirl”, isn’t it? And the fact that we don’t go nuts over short shorts, knee socks, Just William caps and blazers kind of indicate the persistent 70s, sexist, “sexy schoolgirl” trope to all this. And sadly, schoolgirls in 2021 still face sexual harassment to and from school because if it.

Because the "girls" uniforms are made to be beautiful and flattering. The "boys" uniforms were made to be functional (and some people do like them, but I find them rather ugly). The bias is in the design, and so the concept of beauty transfers over to the uniform itself, and all that is associated with it. The problem is that these girls are given uniforms that flatter their bodies rather than provide function as the "boys" uniforms do. I think that is at the root of the issue.

Wow, no. Sorry but the root of the issue is not the fault of girls - ie children - wearing “flattering” clothes.

No, you don't understand. I'm not blaming the girls, I'm blaming the designers who purposely design their clothes to flatter the girls while giving the boys basic functional clothing. It comes from a rooted patriarchal mindset that women and girls are to look pretty and appealing at all times.

First, I said that no one in this thread had posted any evidence that they were anything but. You have (at least as to the side effects), congratulations. I didn't and surely wouldn't say "if anyone finds any evidence then clearly no child should be given puberty blockers", so don't get all celebratory yet. You've managed to, maybe, put one thing on the other side of the scales where previously there had been nothing but sophistry.

A lack of case reports on anything irreversible -- especially when there are plenty of followup case reports on those who continue to transition -- is perhaps not the best evidence, but it is evidence.

The paper specifically pointed out that the effect was indistinguishable from low BMD from female-typical disuse. Which is a known treatable form of low BMD. But is it a side-effect? I guess technically, but not one more concerning than from female-typical disuse. To care about one but not the other seems rather convenient for you. Hypothesis: one would expect similar low BMD for social-only transgirls, without puberty blockers. I spent ~5 minutes looking for a paper that looked at BMD for such a cohort, and I couldn't find one. Maybe you'll have better luck. There is some indication in that direction from that paper however, as the transgirls had an abnormally high frequency of low BMD for their age before the puberty blockers began, so AFAICT, that's the best evidence we have at the moment, and it doesn't really help your case much.

Okay, here we go. THIS sits on the scale, for sure. That definitely looks like a side-effect, albeit with a sample size of 1, but there are enough citations of relevant papers that it's not obviously attributing the diagnosis incorrectly. If there were more cases of this kind, that'd be cause for serious concern, particularly for transgirls. It becomes a lot harder to say with any certainty that they're able to give informed consent at 18 if there are significant brain deficits caused. But again, this is one out of thousands and thousands. It doesn't appear to be widespread, so far, despite doctors presumably looking for it since this paper was published. And while possible that no other parent or teacher would have noticed such a thing, it's unlikely.

@Nova, heard anything about this or something like it? If it extrapolates very much, it seems like a serious concern.

So taking the observed frequency vs the demonstrated reduction in GD symptoms and suicides... well, it doesn't tip the balance. That is my opinion, but I think it's well-justified by the observed facts. If you want to get into discussions of QALY-reductions or something, sure we can dig into that, put some harder numbers on the table, but, uh, the magnitudes of suicide and body dysmorphia reductions are gonna trump pretty much anything that isn't like heart-attack-at-40-deadly, is my prior. If you think there's some other metric we should be using (please don't go back to the naturalistic fallacy), by all means, do share. I had always pegged you as rather utilitarian, so I'd be interested to see what else you've got.

I think the survey paper FF posted twice is evidence that medicine is reaching a consensus, with several GD treatment centers starting using the Dutch Protocol during the course of the interviews. Mature? Perhaps not.

I see a lot of concerns about one particular facility's diagnostic criteria and rush to treatment, and for the sake of argument, let's say they're all true. (Note: she said her concerns about reversibility were ignored. I'm taking that -- her concerns were ignored -- to be true, not that her concerns are true). You could find (only if you dug hard enough, because they're not being signal-boosted by the entire right-wing blogosphere) similar concerns about a facility in literally any other field of medicine, including all the pediatric versions thereof. A whole lot of of them, when confronted, their explanations eventually break down to something along the lines of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," at least the ones that aren't about the money. This is not to excuse it; far from it. Just to say that the problem isn't uncommon or unique to this field. That doesn't invalidate the medicine, just their particular practice of it. The letter even points out that her specific facility is not adhering to the standards of the group it's part of. Condemnable? Absolutely, assuming it's true. Evidence of broader malfeasance or doctors generally succumbing to unscientific political pressure? Hardly.

My own thoughts on that is that people can enjoy what they like in the comfort of their own bedrooms but need to respect strangers and other people outside of that. Gross men catcalled out to girls because society have them a pass to do so, and it wouldn't matter if it were a school uniform or anything else. I never had a uniform and mostly dressed like a slob and still got hit on as a younger looking teen.

I don't get it either but the idea of punishing consenting adults for the actions of predators rustles my jimmies.

Edit: NM, Jenee and Amaris beat me to it and said it a whole lot better.

UA: "People can say anything, convince themselves of anything, except me, who am objectively all knowing and thus you are clearly wrong."

If you think only or even mostly right wingers are being silenced you're even more oblivious on that topic than you are on the rest of them.

Republican legislatures are literally passing actual goddamn laws restraining the speech of teachers and professors they perceive to be liberal, several of them are passing clearly unconstitutional laws designed to suppress public protests they disagree with, more of them are threatening legislative and/or congressional actions to punish corporations which voice objections specifically to their voter suppression ambitions. Still others are forbidding even the mention of the existence of LGBT people in sex ed classrooms, one TN proposal would constrain any teacher in any course from mentioning them without prior parental approval.

These are not twitter mobs, you twit, but actual republican office holders exercising the power of the state to silence ideas they do not like.

To be clear, the claim is not "people I dislike agree" but rather "people who are known bad faith actors, bigots and liars, with a clear theocratic agenda, agree with them."

Let me throw some math out here, for a second. I'm not claiming that these figures are exact, so they might well be wrong. However, if they are, then it's likely that they're too high.

Estimates say that 10% of the US population is LGBTQ+. So, that works out to about 33 million people. Of those, only about 3-5% are trans. So, at best, we're talking about 1.65 million people. If 1% of them decide that they got it wrong and decide to detransition, we're talking about less than 20K people. Even if you assume that 100% of the folks who decide to detransition got puberty blockers, that's still far fewer than the number of people who die in car crashes or because of medical malpractice. Not to mention because of guns. What makes this more important?

Not other than sideways allusions from critics, but reading that abstract, the following seems unremarkable:


Results: During the follow-up, white matter fractional anisotropy did not increase, compared to normal male puberty effects on the brain. After 22 months of pubertal suppression, operational memory dropped 9 points and remained stable after 28 months of follow-up. The fundamental frequency of voice varied during the first year; however, it remained in the female range.

Conclusion: Brain white matter fractional anisotropy remained unchanged in the GD girl during pubertal suppression with GnRHa for 28 months, which may be related to the reduced serum testosterone levels and/or to the patient's baseline low average cognitive performance.Global performance on the Weschler scale was slightly lower during pubertal suppression compared to baseline, predominantly due to a reduction in operational memory. Either a baseline of low average cognition or the hormonal status could play a role in cognitive performance during pubertal suppression. The voice pattern during the follow-up seemed to reflect testosterone levels under suppression by GnRHa treatment.

I'm certainly not a microbiologist or anyone else deeply versed in this level of research but:

ONE case

"compared to normal male puberty effects on the brain" <why is this considered the baseline? It should be expected. The question is whether the outcome was female normal.

"Either a baseline of low average cognition or the hormonal status could play a role in cognitive performance during pubertal suppression." <having only one subject borders on an anecdotal sample, they can't possibly control for other pre-puberty biological factors that might interplay with the treatment. By contrast there is a decades long robust sample of outcomes with kids who receive puberty suppression for any of several reasons and to my knowledge not a single longitudinal study of a large cohort that concluded something like "yes, puberty suppression may have been a necessary choice but here are the identified trade-offs in terms of non-positive outcomes. It defines rationality to assume a treatment widely used for 30 years would not have been so studied so absent such a report detailing negative trade-off effects, the logical conclusion is that there are none worthy of being offered as a counter argument to the known downside effects of NOT using them.

I'm not even sure what they are doing regarding "frequency of voice" - what does that have to do with anything?

To the extent that the other citations seem to be referring to long term marginal impact on IQ (itself hardly a settle science) at most I would conclude that that hypothesis be folded into informed consent information to the parents and patients. I can say with absolute certainty that if you tell a GD kid that the blockers can keep them going through the wrong puberty but it might cost them a 10% decrease in their adult IQ they will elect the blockers 1,000 times out of 1,000.

But yet, every major professional organization of scientists, researchers, and practitioners in any way relevant to this topic give full throated, enthusiastic, impassioned support to the appropriateness of the treatment and the right of families to choose the treatment where indicated.

That's not the sort of thing where there's credible "active debate" - that's the kind of thing that happens when the "active debate" originates with mostly cranks who can't leave their religion at the door when evaluating the science. In any case, when you have the unanimous voice of actual professionals (as represented by their professional organizations) aligned on the same side of the question, it is not THEY who are politicizing the debate, but the skeptics.

To quibble, while it might be true that 3-5% of the population is trans, that estimate would be assuming a large proportion who are closeted and not perusing transition. Most estimate put the proportion of people who are trans (based more on evidence that can be publicly identified) at less than 1% although it seems to be higher in younger generations (the closet becomes a way of life in older, less accepting generations, less so among the younger cohort)

But let's recalculate. Assuming roughly 330 million Americans, 1% of those (on average between generations) are around 3.3 million subjects.
Assuming for the sake of argument this represents a fair estimate of transitioned or otherwise "out" trans people and an unknown, likely larger, cohort that are not and are thus not relevant to this point.
HOWEVER
The VAST majority of these transitioned in adulthood and never experienced puberty suppression.
We know that the transition rate due to concluding that one was not, in fact, trans is well less than 1% so if you extrapolate that you're down to something like 15-20,000 individuals in all - and yet try and go out and find even a thousand individuals who detransitioned for that specific reason and you probably can't do it so there's some uncertainty here.

Still and all, the point of this thread has to do specifically with hormone suppression treatment for out trans youth of the appropriate age who THEN, presumably in adulthood, concluded that they were not, in fact trans, and such a treatment was a source of regret.

Per this link:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/

There are an estimated 20.8 million Americans between the ages of 10 and 14 which is an appropriate proxy for the age range at which such treatment would be administered (it's actually more like 12-16 but the population should be similar)

Now, from that group you reduce it thusly
>>the proportion which are out and known to be trans
>>the proportion of those for whom suppression is indicated (not every self-declared trans child because you need a history)
>>the proportion of those who have the resources to access these drugs (highly expensive and often not covered by insurance, often not geographically available)
>>the proportion of THOSE who have parental support and consent to receive the treatment (contrary to the scaremongering, given the expense and limited access, there's no reason to think their are kids out there obtaining this treatment without any parental consent)
>>The proportion of THOSE who having received such treatment come to later decide the treatment wasn't right for them.

See where I'm going with this?

If 1% of 20.8m are trans, then you're at around 200k
if 25% of those meet all the other stipulations above you're at maybe 50k (that assumes each step reduces the cohort by half, really no way to know for sure, but I'd be shocked to know that at any given time there are 50k patients receiving suppression for GD in the U.S. - I'll be there's not even 10% of that. But I'm being SUPER generous with my estimates.

If 1% of that 50k end up regretting, that's 500 individuals out of 200k which equals .25%
And, as noted, that's likely WAY too high.

So the argument is that we should withhold needed, possibly even life saving but certainly extremely helpful, treatment from 99.75% of patients in order to avoid mal-treatment of 0.25%?
No other medical procedure, including those specifically for kids, is held to anything remotely approaching such a standard.

Conveniently this was posted today
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/04/22/transgender-child-sports-treatments/

Wide ranging Q&A but relevant to the above:


At what age do young people realize they are transgender?
This depends entirely on each individual case. With more information about the transgender community becoming available to young people and their parents, more children are coming out at earlier ages than in the past, and more transgender clinics are available to provide them with care.

Some people don’t realize they are transgender until they reach puberty, or later in adulthood. But some children show signs that they are transgender early on in childhood. “Not everybody puts their puzzle together in the same way or at the same time,” said Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of the largest transgender clinics in the country.

Olson-Kennedy said the vast majority of transgender youth patients at the clinic first arrive when they have already reached puberty. The average age for presentation for services at the clinic is 15, she said. Despite the intense political focus on young transgender children, only 10 percent of the children arriving at her clinic are pre-pubertal.

How many young people identify as transgender?
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimates that 0.7 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender. A recent Gallup poll found that 11 percent of LGBT adults identify as transgender. Re-basing this percentage to represent the share of the U.S. adult population, Gallup found that 0.6 percent of U.S. adults identify as transgender. But among Generation Z adults, about 2 percent identify as transgender, and researchers expect that number to continue to grow.

Does this mean there are more transgender people than before? Advocates say it’s merely a sign that more transgender people have the information and language available to understand and describe their identities. Transgender people have existed throughout history, including transgender children. But many clinics have been treating transgender children only in recent decades. Olson-Kennedy said her clinic has been taking care of trans young people since the 1990s.

“What’s happening now is not a massive surge in transgender people,” said transgender advocate Gillian Branstetter. “It’s an understanding that gender, much like sexuality, exists on a spectrum and is more fluid than people allow.”
--------------------------------------------

For the discussions further upthread:


How does a young child transition?
For pre-pubertal transgender children diagnosed with gender dysphoria, doctors recommend avoiding gender-affirming medications, according to the Endocrine Society’s Clinical Practice Guideline, which sets standards of care for transgender people.

“If you have not yet started puberty, there’s nothing to block and nothing to add,” Olson-Kennedy said. “It’s about creating environments that are supportive.”

Rather than beginning a medical transition, pre-pubertal transgender children may begin a social transition, changing one’s name and pronouns, and wearing different clothing or hairstyles. This transition can in some cases involve legal changes to names and genders listed in identifying documents. Transgender children are not offered puberty blockers or hormone treatments until they reach puberty. Medical guidelines generally do not recommend genital gender-affirming surgeries before a child reaches age 18.


What are puberty blockers and when are they offered to transgender children?
Once a transgender child has met diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria, and after the child first shows physical changes of puberty, clinicians may recommend puberty-suppressing treatments, also known as puberty blockers.

Puberty blockers are fully reversible. The medications pause puberty and prevent unwanted changes to teenagers’ bodies, such as periods in transgender boys or the deepening of the voice in transgender girls. The puberty blockers are intended to give young people more time to decide what to do next. At any point, a transgender teenager can stop taking puberty blockers and will continue to go through the puberty of their sex assigned at birth.


For decades, puberty suppression has been used by doctors to treat precocious puberty — abnormally early onset of puberty — in children, as well as endometriosis and prostate cancer in adults. But it was first used as gender-affirming treatment in the 1990s, at a transgender clinic in the Netherlands.

Politicians critical of puberty blockers have at times focused on federal approvals for the drugs. While puberty suppressants are approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat children with precocious puberty, the medications have not been approved specifically for gender-affirming care. Olson-Kennedy argues that this lack of approval is because drug firms have declined to perform the studies necessary to get these approvals.

In general, because many drug companies avoid performing trials on children, it is common in pediatric medicine for doctors to prescribe drugs off-label.

What are hormone treatments and when are they offered to transgender youth?
Once a transgender teenager reaches later years in adolescence, some may request sex hormone treatment — estrogen for transgender girls and testosterone for transgender boys. These medications can help align a transgender person’s body to their gender identity, leading to facial hair growth and a deeper voice in transgender boys, for example, and breast growth in transgender girls.

Since these are partly irreversible treatments, the Endocrine Society recommends waiting to begin treatment until after a person has “sufficient mental capacity to give informed consent,” which the society said most adolescents have by age 16. In some cases, according to the 2017 guidelines, transgender youth may have this capacity by age 14. Each teenager’s ability to consent has to be determined individually, Olson-Kennedy said. “One person’s 14 is very different from another person’s 14.”


The Endocrine Society recommends starting treatment with a gradually increasing dose schedule carefully monitored by a multidisciplinary team of doctors.

In recent debates over transgender medical care, politicians have made claims that transgender children are undergoing genital surgeries at young ages. Current medical guidelines say children should not undergo gender-affirming genital surgery before they turn 18.

Chest surgeries can be performed on transgender teenagers before theage of majority in a given country (age 18 in the United States), according to standards of care from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, “preferably after ample time of living in the desired gender role and after one year of testosterone treatment.”


What does scientific research tell us about these treatments and their impacts?
Research on these medications is still evolving, due in part to the nascent nature of the treatments, the challenges of performing studies on children and the small size of the transgender youth population. But several studies on puberty blockers have found that transgender young people who were treated with the medications showed lower rates of depression and anxiety, and demonstrated better global functioning.

A study conducted by Turban and colleagues, published in the journal Pediatrics in 2020, showed that young people who wanted a puberty suppressant and were able to access it had lower odds of considering suicide.

Critics of gender-affirming treatments often argue that children are too young to make these decisions and may regret them in adulthood. Skeptics will often cite statistics from studies suggesting that a majority of young transgender children will eventually grow out of their transgender identity later in life. But Turban and other experts have argued the methodology used in these studies is flawed because the researchers included a large cohort of children referred to transgender clinics, not children who actually met the criteria for gender dysphoria. He argued that many of these children were not transgender to begin with and may have simply been brought to the clinics by their parents because they were “tomboys” or gender-nonconforming children.

A new study by Turban and other researchers from the Fenway Institute and Harvard Medical School found that 13.1 percent of currently identified transgender people have “detransitioned” at some point in their lives but that 82.5 percent of those people attributed their decision to external factors such as pressure from family, school environments and vulnerability to violence.
(that works out to 2.29% of the whole trans population - and as noted above, the vast majority of which didn't transition in their youth)

What are some of the risks of these medications?
Since puberty blockers are reversible, they do not impair fertility or lead to other permanent changes to a child’s body. Puberty suppressants do come with some risks, and the Endocrine Society’s 2017 guidelines mentioned the need for more research on the effects of the prolonged delay of puberty in adolescents.

Puberty suppression may include adverse effects on bone mineralization, according to the Endocrine Society, but the estimated calculated risk of bone fracture remains extremely low, Turban said, citing a recent paper in Pediatrics. For each patient, this likely low risk of fracture needs to be weighed against the risk of adverse outcomes from gender dysphoria itself, Turban said.

If a child has been on puberty blockers for years, “most endocrinologists will say by the time you get to 16, you make a decision. Either come off the blocker or start estrogen or testosterone to mineralize your bone,” Turban said.

For transgender teenagers who first take puberty blockers and then take estrogen and testosterone treatments, the Endocrine Society warns that the treatment may compromise fertility later in life. But Turban says more research is needed on the subject. The Endocrine Society recommends that clinicians counsel all transgender people seeking hormone treatments on their options for fertility preservation before they start taking estrogen or testosterone.
------------------------------------------------------
And regarding the other thread...


What legislation has advanced in the U.S. to restrict these medications?
As of April, at least 18 states have introduced bills to criminalize or ban access to puberty blockers, hormone treatments and transition-related surgeries for transgender minors. Legislators in Arkansas in early April voted to pass the nation’s first ban on gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender youth, overriding a veto from their governor. Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) described the bill as a “vast government overreach” that would interfere with physicians and parents “as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters involving young people.”

Major medical organizations including the American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians have written in opposition to these bills. And according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, an estimated 45,100 transgender youth ages 13 and older in the United States are at risk of being denied gender-affirming medical treatments due to proposed and enacted state bans.

(Some of these bills are beginning to die off - North Carolina had a bill banning care through age 20, but the Speaker (IIRC) has said he will not advance it to a vote, it's difficult to keep up because several of the athletic bans are faltering. The ND governor vetoed one, FL and MO are apparently not advancing theirs. TX and TN remain major concerns for both)


Transgender youth and sports
What are the current guidelines in the U.S. for the participation of transgender people in sports?
Policies on the participation of transgender students in high school sports vary from state to state. At least 16 states and the District of Columbia have policies that help facilitate the full inclusion of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming students in high school sports, according to TransAthlete.com and the American Civil Liberties Union.A patchwork of policies exists in other states, with at least 10 states requiring trans athletes to undergo some treatment, and 12 states effectively banning participation, including four that passed new laws and executive orders this year.

At the college level, NCAA guidelines require at least a full year of testosterone suppression before a transgender woman is allowed to compete with other women. That guidance, published in 2011 and citing medical experts, notes that transgender women “display a great deal of physical variation, just as there is a great deal of natural variation in physical size and ability among non-transgender women and men. … It is important not to overgeneralize.” The assumption that all people assigned male at birth are “taller, stronger, and more highly skilled in a sport” is not accurate, the handbook states.

At elite levels, policies also vary across national and international associations and federations. The International Olympic Committee issued guidance in 2015 for determining eligibility. According to the guidance, transgender men can compete in male categories without restriction, but transgender women must meet certain conditions, including demonstrating that their total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months before their first competition.

How has the participation of transgender girls in sports impacted outcomes for cisgender high school athletes?
As lawmakers across the country introduced bills to restrict transgender participation in sports, the Associated Press contacted two dozen state lawmakers sponsoring such legislation. In almost every case, the AP reported, lawmakers could not cite “a single instance in their own state or region where such participation has caused problems.”

Many supporters of these bills point to a 2020 case in Connecticut. The families of three Connecticut high school track and field athletes filed a federal lawsuit objecting to a Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference rule that allows high school athletes to compete in sports corresponding with their gender identity.

The lawsuit centered on transgender runners Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, who won a combined 15 state titles in different events. But two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed, one of the cisgender plaintiffs defeated one of the transgender girls in a state championship.

“We’ve had years and, in some cases, decades of inclusion … and just quite simply there are no examples of trans people taking over or winning in any sort of significant numbers,” Strangio said. “And there’s been zero examples of a trans girl in high school getting an athletic scholarship to compete in college.”

Guys who do catcalls can STFU. Girl's school uniforms are comfortable for me for a number of reasons. The skirts are often non restricting, easy to walk in, and they let my legs breathe. Boys uniforms almost never involve shorts. I am always extremely warm. I will wear a pair of bloomers that is going to cover my junk if the skirt blows upward, but OMG is it much cooler. Even if it is a shitty itchy material it is so much nicer. I also do not have problems with stockings or tall socks. I know some people find them itchy and uncomfortable, but I actually love them in cold weather. I miss the north because I love stockings and I cannot wear them down here in the hell temps.

I hate the feeling of male dress pants on my legs. It is itchy, hot, and annoying. Not to mention it gives me panic attacks. I do not mind men's jeans and whatever fabric is used for military fatigues. I can wear them all day long as long as it is cool enough outside, but again I get really hot really fast. Even then I can soak that material down and wear it wet and be comfortable. The material for men's dress pants just sucks. If they use the same material in a skirt it is often hemmed and does not get on your legs as much. I actually prefer men's polo shirts to women's professional blouses. I think that is more because polos were often worn as the female cheerleader top for girls, and they can be uniform wear for women.

I lust love pleated skirts. I think they fall nice, look sharp, and with the right material they do not blow up as much. I find them as comfortable to wear as just underwear because I can sit almost any way in them and they can cover me.

So I mentioned.

Puberty doesn't cost girls 10% of their IQ, nor do boys start with a 10% IQ advantage.

Care to link to those studies? Because AFAICT, there doesn't seem to be much of any such studies. The few studies (largely on precocious puberty patients) there have been seem positive on the whole, but no, the kinds of studies you're assuming exist do not appear to. This is not uncommon. You know how long it took for there to be serious medium-term safety studies on Tylenol? 115+ years. They STILL haven't done long-term studies on it. I'm not saying that puberty blockers aren't apparently safe, but the studies you're claiming exist don't, and the power of the studies that do exist is only strongly suggestive, not compelling. In part that's 'cause running observational studies, let alone RCTs, on children is hard; longitudinal studies even harder.

Because the paper isn't making an argument; it's an observational case study. Hence why neither RickDeckard nor myself said anything about it. It's irrelevant.

Kinda, but the bigger thing would probably be to suggest that parents enroll their children in an observational study as part of the treatment.

Their parents might be more hesitant. Hence, more studies needed.

That seems to overstate things a bit. As per the survey paper FF posted twice, even the practitioners that use it regularly are not entirely absent concern, just probably not enough concern to warrant making it not the go-to treatment for well-diagnosed GD kids.

Arguing it is appropriate is not arguing that there is an absence of concerns, only that the clear positive outcomes outweigh the marginal concerns.

As to the studies you ask for, I'm merely referring to the observed results re precocious puberty and other applications. AFAIK there's no one who's made a credible case that the physiological effects are likely to be different when treating a different condition in this case, the drugs do what they do. After this long a time, particularly in relation to a treatment for minors, it seems to me that there would be a documentation of any established negative trade-off.

Relevant to this thread:

But usually "full-throated, enthusiastic, impassioned support" kind of is. Particularly "full-throated"

Ah, fine then.