Susie Green and Keira Bell on Newsnight

PotholeParadies that would suggest that blocking puberty of boys would make them extra tall?

Probably best not tell my nearly 17 year old that 4ft8 is as tall as she’s getting

There is an interesting discussion of what it did, height-wise, to boys, back when it was cultural to castrate boys to stop their voices breaking.

amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ir6yd/how_big_are_eunuchs/

Girls who go on puberty blockers and don’t stop them will end up short compared to expected height I think. Testosterone may cause some skeletal effects but I’m not sure it would increase height as much as a normal growth spurt.

I’m also still trying to figure out how long can someone suppress puberty for. If puberty blockers are withdrawn at 18 would puberty kick back in? What about 22? 24? What’s the final cut off before the hypothalamus just gives up?

Difficult to figure out. Just chalk these two things up on the “101 things we don’t know about what the hell we’re doing to these kids” list .

That tallies with my experience. Started periods at 12 and stopped growing taller around 14.

From healthline:

When will a girl stop growing? Girls grow at a quick pace throughout infancy and childhood. When they reach puberty, growth increases dramatically again. Girls usually stop growing and reach adult height by 14 or 15 years old, or a couple years after menstruation begins.

I'm not sure what would happen if a girl took them from 9/10/11. It's possible she might gain more height than she would have done because as I understand it puberty is thing that fixes bone growth in place in girls so maybe she'd keep growing?

I'm by no means an expert so might be completely wrong about the above.

I think that the effect of puberty on growth is complex. I think that oestrogen and testosterone actually cause fusion of growth plates, bit I don't know if that means puberty blockers made someone taller as I'm not sure what else they block www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/88791

girls lose particularly badly in terms of the positives for gender changes because you can't change your physical size which is a barrier to 'passing' as a man

What happens in terms of growth when on puberty blockers? One of the big impacts of puberty is a growth spurt. Surely if you block puberty you will be even shorter?

[quote nauticant]Speaking of Kids Company, that matter has currently resurfaced:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9012395/Alan-Yentob-denies-strong-arming-ministers-handing-millions-doomed-Kids-Company-charity.html[/quote]
Yes, *nauticant, a lot of analogies to be drawn.

Also, Camila B says none of it was her fault!
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8931847/Kids-Company-founder-tells-court-neurological-condition-means-avoided-director-charity.html

citing reasons why she avoided a director role, Miss Batmanghelidjh said she was born prematurely which adversely affected her neurological development.

This means she struggles to read and write and cannot type, she said.

The 57-year-old added: 'I do not have a proper sense of what month we are in, what day it is and I have a poor short-term memory but, perhaps confusingly, a very good long-term memory.'

She said that while she created the concept of Kids Company in 1996, she would 'never have taken on the challenge of being director' and had 'around me highly capable people to undertake the functions that would be beyond me'.

I wonder what excuses Susie Green will try when the pigeons currently flying home to roost all arrive and start shitting.

I imagine F2M transition could be very unsettling for transmen who hadn't properly understood men and masculinity. I spent a lot of time when younger working with and around men in a typically male, physically demanding job. I and they accepted that I wasn't physically as strong, but I could do most things well and was a very hard worker so I gained their respect. When I couldn't do something safely or efficiently, I didn't. I also recognised that male culture and relationships are different, and where a natal female can fit in and where she really doesn't.
M2F, however, seems to be a far more performative and superficial effort, and many of these transitioners really don't understand what it means to be of the sex they're trying to fit in to (hence the hurt and bafflement when they're not accepted and treated with suspicion). So they may not feel regret in the way a transman might, and if they do, might blame it on others, rather than their own misunderstanding.

Yes- this!

Don't forget, too, that any negative repercussions will be pushed onto the shoulders of 'transphobic' society and any mental health issues are also blamed on the rest of the world being 'transphobic', rather than at any point anyone suggesting that happiness is, when you come right down to it, something one has to build/make/discover for oneself.

The whole narrative is so horribly corrosive and disempowering.

Why not tell children they are fine as they are, a healthy body is never 'wrong'? Why not teach children self acceptance, and to care less about how other people may see them? All the encouragement to seek out and make a big thing of 'hate incidents' - it's all so masochistic and self perpetuating. Turning these children/young people into imagined pariahs.

Yes, there will be arseholes who will despise anyone for being different/the wrong religion/race/sex/shape. I doubt the human race is perfectible. We do have pretty robust laws and social conventions that already challenge anyone directing bad behaviour for these reasons.

We don't need medication, surgery, and people trying to reality-proof our lives. We do for absolute sure need better mental health treatment, support, understanding. I think we also need to help children/YP navigate life with all its risks and challenges.

Teach resilience, teach self acceptance, teach critical thinking.

In such a hypothetical situation, your entire life would be a sunk cost fallacy. How could anyone dare explore whether they had regrets if one of their closest relatives had made a career and income out of campaigning for people like you to make that choice?

Quite hard I imagine. Trust would be a hell of an issue - those who didn’t question you and who cheered you on, plus those who tried to dissuade you (building bridges and mending relationships there).

Strawman indeed.

Also I wonder the psychological impact of even admitting regret after such a radical irreversible procedure.

In addition, in our population the average time to regret was 130 months, so it might be too early to examine regret rates in people who started with HT in the past 10 years.

Interesting.

Does some back of fag packet calculations.

So if someone close to a certain activist was to eventually have regrets, you wouldn't expect them to until... yeah its just hit about 10 years I believe.

So that would mean that someone has been campaigning for a decade on the basis of anecdata which may be completely consistent with the one study that they repeated quote, and they still may be in the 1% that they quote.

And thats about a seperate treatment to puberty blockers and one that girls can't even have.

I think Datun has pointed out before but girls lose particularly badly in terms of the positives for gender changes because you can't change your physical size which is a barrier to 'passing' as a man and the side effects seem to be particularly bad. Which may mean women have regret a lot sooner than men, and the pattern for transition for males is distinctly different anyway and much more likely in middle age rather than a teenager.

So this particular activist is talking about issues irrelevant and not necessarily applicable to females, basing it on a study on older males who had a different procedure not puberty blockers, and this study showed that regret in this group was happening on average after a longer timeframe than her child has had this procedure.

Ah. So its a complete strawman argument, not just one based on anecdata.

In addition, in our population the average time to regret was 130 months

They were measuring time to regret being documented in clinic notes. It is likely the time to regret was considerably shorter than this.

17thEarl And presumably it's pretty relevant to whether people seek reversal or not that there's no reversal available for gonadectomy! It must be like a bad dream you can't wake up from.

www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-a-reevaluation-of-the-evidence/76A3DC54F3BD91E8D631B93397698B1A

This is a good paper which brings together data on children and adolescents. And I think that it is open access.

@Rhynswynd I found the interview on YouTube.

It is much more of a US thing.

UK yes, used by women too. Pensions easily spring to mind