This is worth a listen from around the 15 minute mark for anyone concerned about the use of puberty blockers.
Some quotes from the talk:
“We are putting responsibility back on the family because we don’t have the evidence base to say ‘it’s these kids or it’s these kids’, or how we can pick out which kids should go forward and which kids shouldn’t. “
“The blocker is not a benign thing, it comes with - I don’t mean financial costs- it comes with downsides, especially around energy- if the young person has mood difficulties the blocker can sometimes make that worse- it also takes away those sex hormones, so that whole thing I was talking about, of being attracted to, developing crushes, when all your teens and peers are getting into relationships and developing social connections in that sense- that’ll be gone, well not totally gone, but that drive that interest whether it’s the opposite or same sex or whatever will be greatly reduced. And we do worry, because we don’t have long term evidence for this. We do worry for what impact that might have on their identity because sexuality is such an important part of your identity,who you’re attracted to.”
“It can often mean you are signing up to be a patient for the rest of your life. In a way you taking what is essentially a physically healthy, you know it’s not got medical- you might say internally in terms of gender it’s not right- but medically it’s a healthy body and you’re introducing medication and making it dependent on medication, so ethically it’s really quite a complicated area, especially for children.”
“We’ve only started talking about fertility in the last 4 to 5 years. Before that, we were putting people down this pathway and actually they were coming back to us 15 years later and going, “oh, you never really said, you know.” And that’s what I mean about this being such a new area, CoS we weren’t even doing hypothalamic blockers under the age of 16 until 5 years ago. We don’t have people who are 40 to 50 to see, you know, how’s your life been, were we right to intervene so early? We don’t know.”