Study find trans kids thrive after early transition

[Wakame]

pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/09/02/peds.2013-2958

A study has found that young adults who transitioned in childhood through puberty suppression and cross sex hormones are thriving. Here's an excerpt:

"After gender reassignment, in young adulthood, the GD was alleviated and psychological functioning had steadily improved. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population. Improvements in psychological functioning were positively correlated with postsurgical subjective well-being."

It's a small study, but of course, when the results are so unambiguous, they become statistically significant even with smaller studies. You can of course counter this study with more science - just find a larger study that shows the opposite.

Oh and re the post talking about forcing trans people to have painful surgeries , well on a statistical level far fewer people will face painful surgeries if we leave children alone to grow up.
Brain not fully developed until 25, suggesting 16 is an adult is insane.

In the UK you can pass your driving test at 17. So why not give the option to drive your own body?

Driving a car isn't comparable. Yes at worst there is risk of death but most drivers are safe. It takes quite a lot to get a license in the first place, you take out insurance. We have police who are ideally ensuring bad drivers get taken off the road.

Driving isn't making serious, damaging changes to your body which aren't reversible and which will leave you sterile.

And young male drivers probably statistically do the most damage. There are restrictions on how many of them can drive simply because insuring them is extortionate and thus out of reach to many.

Sperm and Ova are viable and storable

Again, ova for 10 years only. If you bank them at 16, that means you have until 26 to use them. Many people don't want children at 26 or aren't able to afford them yet.

And again....surrogacy isn't necessarily ethical. I can't have children and however excuciatingly painful that is, I really don't believe I could actually go through with using a surrogate in reality. It's all very easy to talk about things hypothetically. It's much more complex in real life.

@SirVixofVixHall - I am presuming your comment was wrt to my comment?

I am not saying that the brain is fully developed at 16. But the age at which a personal sense of self if achieved happens much sooner than 25.

Halting puberty for a year and then choosing to begin cross sex hormones at 17 wont prevent that person's brain from fully developing. It will however prevent unwanted physical changes but allow the person to still mature into a mentally healthy individual.

If 18 is the age where one becomes an adult and can begin cross sex hormones anyway is already the way things are, I do not think pushing a pause button at 16 is that unreasonable? I am not advocating for children at 10-12 to be put on Lupron.

It is fucking outrageous that adults with metal health problems are allowed to promote sterilising childrenas if it is a thing.

This!

In any other avenue adults who promote anything remotely harmful to children have the door rightly slammed shut in their face.
BUT the tra's have done such a good job at making those in power to scared to say no this kind of child abuse is allowed under the umbrella of exceptance and inclusivity.

I genuinly fear for our children. They are experiments. They are being used to promote adults ways of life.

If any one of them really cared about children they would not promote this madness.

@gendercritter - It also takes a lot to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

Perhaps my analogy was not a perfect one, but I think it is applicable seeing as medical consent is already set at 16..

Halting puberty for a year and then choosing to begin cross sex hormones at 17 wont prevent that person's brain from fully developing.

What are you basing that on? Where are the studies please?

And can you please stop calling Lupron a pause button. That's marketing speak, designed to make you think it doesn't have any effects, it's just pausing things, what could be the harm? ]

Really dangerous, manipulative language.

It also takes a lot to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria

So you say. But kids are buying hormones online. And detransitioners report not having had sufficient counselling.

If 18 is the age where one becomes an adult and can begin cross sex hormones anyway is already the way things are, I do not think pushing a pause button at 16 is that unreasonable?

It is unreasonable. To take a very provocative analogy would it be Ok for a thirty year old to have sex with a 14 year old because it’s legal in two years time?

Blocking puberty at any point has massive effects. The only time it’s acceptable is severely precocious puberty (ie puberty starting years before it’s normal.) even then , children who have had these drugs experience problems.

They are not a harmless pause button. I really can’t stress that enough.

Natluc...homeones for a 17 year old girl will be about 5 years too late to stop physical changes.

I don’t think drugging teenagers in a way that causes damage and stops development is anywhere close to ethical. We need puberty, physically and emotionally, to grow , to literally mature. There is no reason at all for blockers at 16 for girls anyway, as almost all will have completed physical puberty by then. So will many boys. No one knows the impact on emotional development as the effect of puberty on the brain is fairly recent science. 16 in terms of the body is a horse, stable door situation. To halt physical changes in girls you would need to get in much earlier, and in boys a year or two after girls. This is what the trans lobby are pushing for, and they clearly see the 80% of children who would be permanently damaged by this as no problem at all. What does that tell you ? I want children to get to adulthood intact, unmediated, fertile, sexually functional and reconciled to their physicality.

Hormones might be the word?

Agree Cosmic Canary.

NatLuc Not offended at all. Always interested to read another perspective in this debate, especially one informed by personal experience.

IMHO the trouble is that the vast majority of kids desist, but not all. We're therefore actually discussing where the medical profession should exercise its discretion - do we harm 80% by putting them all on an early intervention path or do we harm 20% by delaying. In all other areas of medicine, the potential risk of a negative outcome to the vast majority of a patient cohort outweighs the potential benefit to a minority.

As in other areas of medicine, I am therefore of the firm opinion that we should prioritise the avoidance of iatrogenic harm to the desisters. As we know from a large number of studies, even under the stricter criteria for GD, medical professionals continue to be unable to accurately predict who will desist - a considerable number of kids with the severest GD desist, some with mild GD get worse as they go on and persist into adulthood.

Your argument for better support is worthy of closer consideration, especially within a robust debate about all of the consequences of treatment approaches that would touch on those points you raise. Prioritising the avoidance of harm to the majority does not mean abandoning the minority to their fate after all. Although if TRAs succeed in convincing the government that GD is not a medical condition I worry it will go the other way to even less publicly financed support...

Also, the enthusiasm with which those youths have been greeted who develop GD (or more accurately ROGD) in mid-to-late puberty is problematic in this regard. Because we do know from decades worth of research that while we cannot predict persisters/desisters within the younger cohorts, those who persist into adolescence are almost always transsexual as adults. Those are valuable, valid stats professionals can base their decisions on.

Even if ROGD as suspected turns out to be caused mainly by social contagion, it will have muddied the waters as for the stats on the desistance rates in adolescence. I'd love to know what you think of this phenomenon? (It's not caused by greater acceptance or visibility after all, as that would have affected boys and girls equally.)

Stephanie Davies Arai (Transgender Trend) discusses some of these isssues:

It is unreasonable. To take a very provocative analogy would it be Ok for a thirty year old to have sex with a 14 year old because it’s legal in two years time?

No of course that would not be okay. But we are not talking about sex, we are talking about someone taking control of their long term wellbeing. I understand the parallel you are drawing but I don't think it is the same.

So you say. But kids are buying hormones online. And detransitioners report not having had sufficient counselling.

Whilst I was not one of the adolescents purchasing hormones online I DID purchase hormones online from pharmacies as an adult whilst waiting for the adult NHS GIC consultation waiting times between sessions to allow me to get them on prescriptions. But this was only after years of research in to dosages, risks and taking responsibility for my own actions. I think if people were not so desperate there would be no need to do this.

Yes there are those that detransitioned. But the reasons for detransitioning are many. And many of the reasons are nothing to do with 'not being trans afterall'.

@MIdgebabe

Natluc...homeones for a 17 year old girl will be about 5 years too late to stop physical changes

Make that more like eight or nine. I was menstruating at nine, if not earlier.

Yes there are those that detransitioned. But the reasons for detransitioning are many. And many of the reasons are nothing to do with 'not being trans afterall'

How do we know - when TRAs got the person researching it stopped from researching it?

I saw a twitter post with a link from a well known TW. The comment was "you can buy hormones/blockers here kids and no need for mum and dad to know.

This comment was liked hundreds of times.
Anyone else encouraging kids to buy drugs/medication without parental consent would be called a child abuser/drug pusher.
Yet under this "its all for the kids to stop them killing themselves" guise it was deemed ok. Twitter didnt see the harm either.

We have strangers mostly men advocating kids buying meds on line, getting tits early and sucking dick ( yes another well known TW made those recommendations) but its not seen as wrong or something to put a stop to....why?

Humans cannot change sex.

Doubtless there are children who are unhappy with puberty and gender roles. An awful lot of the women on this site are gender non conforming. We have been trying to smash gender roles for decades, some of us.

To then see those roles narrowed to the point it’s acceptable to tell a boy who is feminine that he's a girl is against everything i believe.

That boy is a boy. The solution to his unhappiness at not fitting the ‘boy’ mouldy is not to tell him he can become a girl. He cannot - NOTHING can do that. The solution is to examine why children are unhappy in their gender roles.

For girls (and I think 70% now if oresentations are girls?) I can really see why puberty looks shit. The world is so sexualised now - even from when I was going through puberty there has been a huge change and I’m only fortyish. Porn has exploded and changed in nature. Everything seems so sexualised. Social media is a huge influence and I don’t think those who grew up with it understand just how much it can be toxic and how different life was without it. Girls now - I look around and wonder where the rockers are, the goths, the girls with shaved heads and biker boots and tea dresses. It seems to be a uniform look of swishy straight hair and specific clothes, makeup, everything. Like there’s only one way to be a girl.

But the solution to looking at that and thinking no ta is NOT to say you’re a boy. Nothing can change you into a boy. The solution again is acceptance, of finding g your own way to be a girl, free from the crap gender roles society squeezes you into.

To tell a child they can be the opposite sex is cruel. No other dysphoric or dysmorphic disorder is treated like this.

If an ADULT wants to transition, after full assessment, then that is up to them. But children do not understand what they will lose.

It is child abuse.

I started my periods when I was nine. I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was in the summer holidays. Back then, girls were not properly told what was going to happen and I was traumatised.

I could not have made the decision as to wanting children then any more than I could decide what I wanted for dinner. Children are not thinking of a day when they will have children, or at least they shouldn't be.

No-one can, with any substance say what these drugs are going to do to children used long term. This is another Thalidomide in the making and yet the train keeps on a rolling.

NatLuc, your post re carrying out years of research as an adult before you bought hormones online is in sharp contrast to what many teenagers would do. For them it's all about 'I want it NOW!!' There's no reasoning with a teenager who's hell-bent on doing something. It's bad enough telling my teenage DD that she's not getting to watch 15 films yet. They're not renowned for their ability to plan and wait for something years away. Their brains aren't fully developed.

And the highest risk takers on the roads...people that have just passed their test and think they know it all.

NatLuc Being that you are a TIM (I post that as they have always admitted it themselves) your view is going to be skewed in that direction. You will project how you feel post transition onto children. You were old enough to be able to think through all the implications transition brings. Children are not.

@NatLuc
I understand that you believe 'trans people can come to terms with the body they were born with'. However if you have never experienced dysphoria I feel that you do not understand how naive this approach is. You are then condemning that individual to a lifetime of misery.

That comment seems to be directed at me, as I think that bit in quotes is from one of my earlier posts. Can you explain why that approach is naive? It seems to me that the most appropriate form of treatment for a psychological condition would be to treat it using therapy to help the person to accept their healthy body, rather than medicate it.

There are many conditions where people must feel deeply unhappy about their bodies: many people who are born disabled or become disabled in later life, for example. Obviously medical help can be given as far as is possible, but sometimes nothing can be done other than to give that person psychological support and help them to come to terms with the body they have.

In the case of gender dysphoria, sufferers are not limited in any way with respect to what they can do with their lives in the way that a severely disabled person might be. Their body is healthy and complete as it is. Can you help me to understand why such a person cannot be helped to accept their body? I may be naive, but I would like to learn more.