A breach in the defenses perhaps:
An upsurge in teenagers requesting hormones or surgeries to better align their bodies with their gender identities has ignited a debate among doctors over when to provide these treatments.
An international group of experts focused on transgender health last month released a draft of new guidelines, the gold standard of the field that informs what insurers will reimburse for care.
How about informing the well-being of the patient first?
A new chapter dedicated to adolescents says that they must undergo mental health assessments and must have questioned their gender identity for “several years” before receiving drugs or surgeries.
How about questioning the very idea of “gender identity”? How about not treating it as a real and detectable thing, as opposed to an idea in search of people to believe it?
Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks, such as irreversible fertility loss. And in some cases, thought to be quite rare, transgender people later “detransition” to the gender they were assigned at birth. Given these risks, as well as the increasing number of adolescents seeking these treatments, some clinicians say that teens need more psychological assessment than adults do.
Ya think? It’s almost as if teenagers are easily influenced by their fellow teenagers, with whom they spend most of their time.
Comments
9 responses to “Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks”
That cannot possibly be right. In my own teen years I was a model of independent thought: especially about what was making it to the top of the hit parade, and who I had a crush on, and who to invite to the high school dance.
“Thought to be quite rare,” eh? “Thought” by whom? Why would anyone think that? No matter what anyone does to their body, the body will always be the original sex. Nothing will change the actual sex of the body. Surely, the patient will always be acutely aware of his or her actual sex. How do you know how “rare” it is? It seems like there are more and more “detransitioners” all the time. The high numbers of people seeking drug and surgical interventions for “gender identity” is a recent phenomenon. There hasn’t been enough time yet for the victims of the gender industry to come to grips with the reality that sex change is not possible. It’s a question that deserves actual, long-term study. The gender industry is opposed to any such study, and detransitioners are punished by their erstwhile TA “friends,” so it’s no wonder the gender industry tries to say that detransition is “rare.”
Also, there is no such thing as “gender assigned at birth.” It’s sex, not gender. It’s observed, not “assigned.” It can be observed before birth.
I have an idea! How about we require thirteen years of therapy before we allow doctors to prescribe puberty blockers!
GW@3
For the doctors or the patients? I think you meant the patients, but maybe 13 years of intense education of the doctors would be more useful.
Sackbut@4: That depends on who is giving the education…
I can’t help but thinking of the mastectomy picture of the teen girl who had cut marks all over her body, not just her arms. How can anyone look at that photo and think that the way to solve her pain is to make her into a simalucrum of a boy?
And it doesn’t seem to occur to them that they just might be participating in Conversion Therapy.
I guess the ‘pray away the gay’ crowd could get back into business by calling their torture ‘affirming.’
I’m not sure where anyone lost track of the notion that puberty, no matter how awful it can be socially and/or physically, is an essential step in developmen towards adulthood. “Pausing it,” even if the process and drugs were safe, would delay the onset of adulthood. How then, can one be said to be mature enough to make a decision on whether or not they should transition?
Taking these drugs can easily be seen to lead to transition because the patient becomes invested in the idea that this is what will make them happy – transitioning. In for a penny, in for a pound.
The comments on the article give me hope. Every comment I read said some criticism of medical treatment for children, teens, and/or young adults. I did not see a single comment supporting medical treatment. Maybe there was some support for medical treatment in replies to the comments, but I did not dig that far. This comment by Russel I in Boston MA is a good summary: