Elon Musk makes bombshell claim about his transgender child

because they know he'll be supporting the Dems the election after.

In the context of a thread about pb as treatment for gender distress in children?

Its obvious thats what the poster was talking about. Saying it's not true, and pb are safe is just as misleading.

and I speak as an "expert"
It frightens me that people put so much faith in us. I have colleagues I wouldn't trust with my child and we're definitely not all wise and knowing.

Was he around to parent this child? Bit late, now…

oh and yes, trust experts, absolutely. But also bear in mind that they're influenced by pressure groups too and that they're not infallible robots. They make mistakes.

Absolutely.

So we are in agreement that to say

"If your child has taken puberty blockers - they are sterilised, permanently."

is not correct.

It’s easy to turn people into two dimensional caricatures in an attempt to undermine them but I don’t think it works particularly well as a strategy.

yes, they don't make you infertile if you stop taking them eventually and let
puberty take its natural
course. Of course, we know that the vast majority of children with gender disphoria who take them go on to take cross sex hormones which cause irreversible changes.
By the time they've been cheer led by their families and affirmed by therapists and doctors, they feel they're stuck on an irreversible path.

Its the length of time on the blockers, and when.

Theres a difference between using them for months and then allowing puberty to develop at a more normal age, and using them for years and hoping the body can reset itself at 16, after the normal age for puberty.

But one very mainstream medical use is to interrupt the body's maturation process in the treatment of early onset puberty. I have been through this with my child and there was lots and lots of info about the possible side effects but it is untrue to say that they cause permanent infertility.

The PP's exact words were:

"If your child has taken puberty blockers - they are sterilised, permanently."

That is what I am saying is untrue.

Taking them (for medically indicated purposes) after reaching fertile maturity is very different from using them to interrupt the body's maturation processes during puberty.

Puberty blockers (in trans healthcare) were introduced to allow boys of about 15 and 16 the opportunity to pass more easily as women when they became adults.

Fertility wasnt really considered because it was assumed that these boys would ultimately go on to surgery and wrong sex hormones and never want to father children.

Its only recently that they have been sold as a pause, time to think. So any data about the long term effects of PB havent been focused on pubescent children who want to keep their fertility.

Thank you! I had an absolute trauma trying to unpick whether or not to agree to puberty blockers for my son. As I said in the end we did not but I will certainly take his expert consultant's advice over some furious and thick arsehole on the internet on the subject of my 8 year old's future fertility.

The confidently stated utter nonsense is (ironically) pretty reminiscent of people claiming they can change sex.

Play the ball, not the man.

A lot of people are obsessed with attacking Musk, not the actual issue.

There is an issue with this rise of transgender children (and seems particularly prevalent in the rich and famous), and no one is willing to come out and say the actual consequences.

Now having said that, I do question whether Musk's child is using gender transition as a way to distance himself from his father, by creating a completely different identity/persona. A decent therapist would be able to see this a mile off. But getting to the root psychological issue is "conversion therapy".

That's like saying if someone never stops taking the contraceptive pill, the pill causes permanent infertility.

The point is if a drug causes temporary infertility, the fact that some people may choose not to come off that drug does not mean the drug then causes permanent infertility.

And by the time any person is choosing a course of action that actually causes lifelong infertility, they are adults, not children.

Any drug will have different side effects depending on age, sex and duration.

A boy taking pubery blockers at the age of 12 for 5 years will will have differeng outcomes than a girl at 5 for 6 months, or a woman in her 30s for a year.

There is a question mark over whether PB at puberty can genuinely pause it, and full puberty can restart. Its difficult to get lots of data on this as so many of these children dont stop at PB, but automatically go on to take wrong sex hormones.

That clip is so sad. We’ve become accustomed to seeing doctors as omnipotent and all knowing and of course many, if not most, parents would accept the diagnosis and treatment given by the medical professionals involved in the care of their gender questioning child.

Which makes the rush to gender ‘affirming’ medical treatment all the more despicable. Dr Moreau’s the lot of them, but the surgeons in particular.

Yes this is true. It’s weird everyone forgets this.

But I do think we had more niches for people to experiment within more harmlessly. The youth of today seem very beige. I wonder if that’s a tiktok algorithm thing.

It seems all the niches have merged together to form some kind of street gym bunny meets 90s balloon pant meets finance bro.

Great to see Elon speaking out as this will be very widely reported. Hopefully it will give parents pause for thought. It might not help those who are further down the road but I think it will definitely help parents in the early stages.

Excellent also to see him you the phrase 'mind virus'. The more people who understand this concept the better. The madness around Covid, Trump and 'the far right' would be very good examples of it in action.

Because a lot of people are on them for indications such as endometriosis, breast cancer, as part of IVF regimes, or even for preservation of fertility before some chemo drugs are given.

There are plenty of side effects, there’s no need to make things up. It’s the cross sex hormones that are the problem for long term fertility.

That's completely untrue.

How many of these children actually stop taking the blockers and go through puberty?
I think we can safely assume that a twenty year old who hasn't gone through puberty has now passed the point where it's actually possible, whether they remain on blockers or not.
Therefore they are / have been sterilised.

Indeed. That's the use they were intended for. Off label PB's for children thinking they've been born in the wrong body are catastrophic and even the captured NHS has had to stop saying they're reversible.

He clearly wasn't "a transphobic parent" though now was he, he did sign off on puberty blockers. Presumably before they ever got to the doctor's office, he was enabling him to live as a girl. He then allowed him to go to the doctor's office. He could have refused and insisted that his son was a boy and must wear boy clothes etc, but he obviously agreed to go along with it all until he realised what was going on.

No - they don’t.

A child on puberty blockers who comes off them will return to normal or near normal fertility levels within a year.