Children of 12 to be allowed gender drugs to prepare for sex change

[femtastic]

Do you consider this to be a positive development?

Children of 12 to be allowed gender drugs to prepare for sex change

CHILDREN as young as 12 are to be allowed drugs to prepare them for changing sex.

The controversial treatment halts puberty, stunting sex organs and preventing the growth of facial hair and sperm in boys, and breasts in girls.

The injections, previously available only to over-15s with gender identity disorder, are being made available to younger people under an NHS study after pressure from families and doctors.

Doctors admit most children with the problem do not go on to have a sex change, often turning out to be gay. But blocking puberty hormones can make surgery easier if they need it.

Dr Polly Carmichael, who runs Britain?s only GID clinic in London, said several under-16s were prepared to sign up for the jabs, until now available only in the US, Holland and Germany at that age.

She said: ?The majority of our referrals are 15-plus. Of the children aged 12 and 14, there?s a number who are keen to take part.?

The study was approved by the ­National Research Ethics Service, which oversees hundreds of NHS projects.

I'm not sure what I think I'm very much againsy interfering at childhood.

sorry about your sister vicar

At 12 years old, children already have a fixed and certain idea of their own gender.

I cannot comment further than that, as I do not have experience or knowledge of this area. Clearly this is designed to help the individuals with a difficult problem, at their own request. I am not sure if it is appropriate for people not involved to be judging this either way.

Some 12 year olds have a fixed idea of their gender, and other don't. Just like some 12 year olds have a fixed idea of their sexual orientation, and others don't.

I don't understand people feeling trapped in the wrong body. I understand that when it happens with ethnic minority children it is connected to racism, but the issues around BIID and GID seem less obvious.

Lockets, if you don't want to explain the situation, why are you posting extremely personal and distressing details about it?

From this thread, it seems that those who have GID, go on to change their bodies to match and find peace in their new, corrected situation wish they had had an earlier and easier transformation.

The voices we are not hearing are those of the children who believed and maybe were assessed for as while as GID, but for whom it became clear later that this was the wrong assessment. Without this voices, it must always be difficult to weigh up the right place to set the general guidelines for the population (and the strength of evidence required to depart from them).

Not every child who self-identifies as transsexual is in fact transsexual and, even then, not all transsexuals eventually have surgery. There are some adult post-operative transsexuals who have regretted the decision to have surgery because they now feel they were confused about other issues and were misdiagnosed as transsexual. If adults can be so unsure, then I wouldn't be surprised if the risk of regret and misdiagnosis could be as high or higher in teenagers.

This proposal might ease the transition of people who are transsexual, but it appears biased against those children who have other issues, e.g. their sexuality rather than their sex. I hope plenty of attention is given to those children, whose health and future should be considered just as important as any transsexuals who do opt for surgery.

How will it be established that the child is genuinely transsexual? The child's gender development would still continue even with the suppression of physical puberty. It wouldn't be occurring in a social and psychological vacuum. Puberty suppression is likely to have real physical and mental effects on the child. It doesn't put things on hold as far as the child comparing themselves to their peers is concerned. They'd become less and less like their peers with every day of puberty suppression. A boy would grow increasingly more womanly and less manly compared to other boys, not because he was developing female secondary characteristics such as breasts (he wouldn't - that would need female hormones) but precisely because he wasn't developing the male set. Male is normal, other is female. I think that could introduce undesirable feedback or bias into the child's thinking. The child might be unduly influenced to believe that they are indeed transsexual after all and therefore surgery is a probable irreversible outcome. Or perhaps they weren't transsexual after all, but it might be too late to rectify the situation.

Puberty suppression should only be used with extreme caution.