I personally doubt that the grass on the other side is as green as reported.
For obvious reasons of ethics, we cannot put human children in a randomised controlled trial in which some are given medication to inhibit their development, and some are given placebos.
But we can do that with non-human animals.
Animal studies suggest such concerns may be worth investigating. One 2017 study looked at sheep, which go through a developmental spurt similar to human adolescence. Sheep given puberty-blockers performed worse than controls on a maze-navigation task, suggesting their spatial memory was inferior. A 2020 paper looking at mice found, among other things, that females given puberty blockers were more timid in unfamiliar environments, and gave up sooner on a “forced swim” test that is commonly used to assess whether anti-depressants work.
So inhibiting adolescent development of organs interferes with development of that other important organ, the brain. Not so surprising, seeing as brain development is kind of a big thing during adolescence. I feel that any inhibition of cognitive development is a drawback for a child aspiring to be a barrister. Is that just me?
www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/18/little-is-known-about-the-effects-of-puberty-blockers
Back in humans, have you heard of the child Jazz Jennings? Jazz was the poster child for taking "puberty blockers". The result of that was that Jazz's genitalia didn't develop, meaning there wasn't enough tissue for the planned vaginoplasty.
For those unaware, in vaginoplasty surgery, a surgeon typically creates a neo-vagina by using skin and tissue from a penis.
This is a computer generated model of the procedure.
www.twitter.com/LabelFreeBrands/status/1428145928641286153?t=sy5wAnoKpbARWeOpurvocA&s=19
Unfortunately for Jazz, there wasn't enough development there for that, and complications happened after the first procedure. Jazz said the new vagina "split open". Jazz has now had to have at least two more operations to repair it..
As a result, Jazz's surgeon, the transwoman Dr Marci Bowers, has reassessed "puberty blockers" as a course of action in teens experiencing gender dysphoria.
extract
But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.
In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.
Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Timespassed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”
Over the past few weeks, I have spoken at length to both women about the current direction of their field and where they feel it has gone wrong. On some issues, including their stance on puberty blockers, they raised concerns that appear to question the current health guidelines set by WPATH — which Bowers is slated to lead starting in 2022.
WPATH, for instance,recommendsthat for many gender dysphoric and gender non-conforming kids, hormonal puberty suppression begin at theearly stages of puberty. WPATH has also insisted since 2012 that puberty blockers are “fully reversible interventions.”
When I asked Anderson if she believes that psychological effects of puberty blockers are reversible, she said: “I’m not sure.” When asked whether children in the early stages of puberty should be put on blockers,Bowers said: “I’m not a fan.”
When I asked Bowers if she still thought puberty blockers were a good idea, from a surgical perspective, she said: “This is typical of medicine. We zig and then we zag, and I think maybe we zigged a little too far to the left in some cases.” She added “I think there was naivete on the part of pediatric endocrinologists who were proponents of early [puberty] blockade thinking that just this magic can happen, that surgeons can do anything.”
I asked Bowers whether she believed WPATH had been welcoming to a wide variety of doctors’ viewpoints — including those concerned about risks, skeptical of puberty blockers, and maybe even critical of some of the surgical procedures?
“There are definitely people who are trying to keep out anyone who doesn’t absolutely buy the party line that everything should be affirming, and that there’s no room for dissent,” Bowers said. “I think that’s a mistake.”
Bowers is not only among the most respected gender surgeons in the world but easily one of the most prolific: she has built or repaired more than 2,000 vaginas, the procedure known as vaginoplasty.She rose to celebrity status appearing on the hit reality-television show “I Am Jazz,” which catalogues and choreographs the life of Jazz Jennings, arguably the country’s most famous transgender teen.
In January 2019, Jeanette Jennings threw her famous daughter a “Farewell to Penis” party. Over a million viewers looked in on guests feasting on meatballs and miniature wieners in the Jennings’ Mediterranean-style Florida home. Family and friends cheered as Jazz sliced into a penis-shaped cake. The rather complicated upcoming procedure came to seem as little more than a Sweet Sixteen.
By that point, Jazz was already Timemagazine’s top 25 most influential teen, the co-author of a bestselling children’s book and the inspiration for a plastic doll. She had served as youth ambassador to the Human Rights Campaign, and she had about one million Instagram followers. Hers was no longer just a personal story but an advertisement for a lifestyle and an industry.
On the day of the procedure — dutifully recorded for Instagram — Jazz’s sister, Ari, teasingly wiggled a sausage in front of the camera. As Jazz was about to be wheeled into the operating room, she snapped her fingers and said, “Let’s do this!”
The vaginoplasty she underwent is what surgeons call a “penile inversion,” in which surgeons use the tissue from the penis and testicles to create a vaginal cavity and clitoris. With grown men, a penile inversion was eminently doable. With Jazz, it was much more difficult.
Like thousands of adolescents in America treated for gender dysphoria (severe discomfort in one’s biological sex), Jazz had been put on puberty blockers. In Jazz’s case, they began at age 11. So at age 17, Jazz’s penis was the size and sexual maturity of an 11-year-old’s. As Bowers explained to Jazz and her family ahead of the surgery,Jazz didn’t have enough penile and scrotal skin to work with. So Bowers took a swatch of Jazz’s stomach lining to complement the available tissue.
At first, Jazz’s surgery seemed to have gone fine, but soon after she said experienced “crazy pain.” She was rushed back to the hospital, where Dr. Jess Ting was waiting. “As I was getting her on the bed, I heard something go pop,” Ting said in an episode of “I Am Jazz.” Jazz’s new vagina — or neovagina, as surgeons say — had split apart.
www.bariweiss.substack.com/p/top-trans-doctors-blow-the-whistle