I'm playing devil's advocate but bear with me...

[Ofew]

I was reading the thread about the AAP and what struck me was that the emphasis is on changing the child to fit into society (e.g. by making a gender non conforming boy into a girl via drugs and surgery, even in cases where there is no gender dysphoria) rather than changing society to accept children as they are.

I have a sort of parallel in my own life: one of my kids is deficient in growth hormone. There's no medical cause as such, he doesn't have a condition which causes him to lack growth hormone. He just doesn't make enough of it to grow at a "normal" rate.

When he was four and this was diagnosed we were advised that he should have growth hormone treatment.

This takes the form of daily injections which he will probably need until his mid twenties. Without the treatment his adult height would have been around 5'2", so very small for an adult man.

The only reason for him to take the growth hormone is essentially cosmetic. He should grow to well within normal ranges.

We did agonise about whether to set him off on this long term course of treatment. It felt like we were making our young child change to fit in with society instead of asking society to accept a smaller than average man.

After a lot of soul searching we made the decision to start the treatment. I still feel uneasy about it in some ways, but I couldn't bring myself to subject my own child to the challenges of being "different" when I knew there was something I could do about it.

Are there parallels here with the course that some parents might take with their gender non conforming kids? Am I judging them too harshly?

Your child has a condition whereby a naturally occurring hormone is being produced in insufficient quantities to allow typical growth. Treatment entails making up the shortfall.
If boys or girls produce insufficient hormones at any point in time, making up the shortfall to enable typical functioning is nothing like using blockers/cross sex hormones.
It is simply not medically sound to say blockers or cross sex hormones being prescribed and administered due to dysphoria is at all the same as prescribing treatment to compensate for insufficient naturally occurring hormones being produced.

I’m 5 feet 2 and I’m a woman, and I‘d love to be a few inches taller. I hate being short. I can’t reach things from the top shelf of the cupboard, I can’t see at gigs, I get swamped by taller people when trying to get served when I’m out. Height is a practical thing, it doesn’t change who or what you are, it just makes you more visible and more imposing, and means you can reach things off high shelves.

I wonder whether Susie Green et al might claim that their child was also lacking in a hormone that they should have had? This might be consistent with the "born in the wrong body" narrative, i.e. Susie G might argue that her child was not producing "enough" oestrogen and was producing "too much" testosterone, so medical treatment was "necessary" to "correct" that.

I wonder if in some cases there is indeed a hormonal issue, but that the 'susie et al' solution is 180 degrees arse about face?

What leads me to wonder this is my experience of PCOS, which some TRAs foolishly try to coopt into their arguments. Yes, there's typically a hormone imbalance; treatments include anti androgens, oestrogen, ovulation inducers) - all in the direction of redressing abnormalities, and in the direction of restoring reduced fertility not rendering the woman infertile.

I do get what you're saying, OP.
We'd do anything if we thought it would make our kids happy- even if it goes against everything we believe.
it's all very well saying society should catch up with and fully endorse my (for example) feminine boy, but we know that that doesnt happen (much) and no parent is going to wait for a seismic shift in attitudes while their child is miserable.
awful situation to be in and of course it only perpetuates odious trans ideology- but when it's your kid it's what you do.
yes, v important that we don't vilify parents caught up in this nightmare

it could also be argued that additional hormones given to menopausal women is not required - it is after all making the body do something entirely unnatural in order to make the woman feel better.

Many women say that their body no longer matches how they feel. they still feel young, they still want to be sexual and they are happy to take HRT to replace lost hormones to achieve that better "feeling". To be more in line with how they feel about themselves.

I've literally never thought about this parallel before. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

HotRocker- I'm 5ft 1" and yes, its a pain but in no way is it comparable to a 5ft 2" man- be realistic!
i too have a short son, Op- no surprise given my stature- and it does worry me- tho at present he's ok with it (yr 8 secondary school- smallest person!)
but he is within normal limits- if he had a projected height of 5ft 2" i'd give him growth hormone-definitely! (having read up on it, of course)

The average / "normal" heights in humans are not social constructs, they are a material biological fact (albeit with not massive variaiton over the years depending on access to food / nutrition).

Norms around height are not social constructs.

Gender (boys are like this and girls are like that) is 100% socially constructed with (despite what the evopsych bunch like to say about red berris) no known basis in anything biological. The changes in gender role between different countries / and through history are LARGE and switch around sometimes.

There is no parallel.

I see this is about "fitting in" and for sure it is hard to be "different" but not impossible and many find pride and community there >> e.g. groups of people who are deaf who do not see it as anything to fix. I know there is controversy around that, so I dont' want to sidetrack the discussion, just an example.

There are loads of people living with difference (often quite massive) everywhere.

Changing a child to fit regressive gender norms that we were JUST starting to get somewhere with removing, will roll it back for EVERYONE. With gay men and lesbians first in the firing line to be "normalised" through drugs and hormones and surgery when there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THEM.

Sorry for shouting.

hotrocker

I'm 5'3! and have the same issues

tall fuckers at gigs
shelves
not being able to reach the holding on rail on the train
etc

This is because the world has been built for "default male" >> average height male with no encumbrances (lots of shopping bags / pregnancy / pushchairs / kids), youngish & non disabled etc

I 'm not too short, everything has been built for average male. 5'3 is hardly remarkably short for a woman, it's ridicuous that I can't reach the handrail on my train!

Outdoors space / public services need to be designed to meet comfort levels for the multitude of people in society, not just one "optimal" sort of man.

Makes me think of the "shelves of patriarchy" I had a mirror of patriarchy when I moved into my house >> I couldn't even see the top of my head in it lol

Also when I went to a country in Asia where the women were mostly my height |I felt INCREDIBLY comfortable >> thinking about it, everyone was a bit smaller, I was more the norm, stuff probably just fitted better. My DH would probably have felt like a giant

Tall fuckers at gigs >> no solution to that sorry. Some bastard about 6/5 and really wide came and stood right in front of me at a gig recently the bastard. Funny thing was, some other bloke more normal sized had stood in front of me prevously and I danced "energetically" until he decided to move 6'5 fucker eventually went in front of him - you should have seen his face - he was LIVID lol

Hey NothingOnTelly- i do agree with you
but i take the op's point that you can understand why parents opt for hormone blockers for their kids- much as i think it's wrong!!
Op, you've made me think differently about such parents- I was pretty harsh about them before!

I don't; blame individual parents for anythigng TBH must be hard, nor indivdual people at all really expect for certain people who have shown themselves to have a really iffy agenda.

None of this is about individuals it's about the theory which is total illogical regressive bollocks that will totally fuck things over for both gay people and women.

I can see the parallel you are making, but if you leave your son to develop naturally and he is unhappy at 18 there is absolutely nothing he can realistically do to make himself a more standardized height. A GNC child can transition as an adult.

You don't have the luxury of waiting and allowing your child to make the decision for himself. By acting now, you are not restricting his choice as an adult, by allowing puberty blockers followed by hormones (before brain development is complete) the parents of transitioning children are limiting the choices and fertility of a future adult.

Nothing on telly- yes I relate!!

Just 5 foot tall here! A few more for your list:

Seats on planes, actually all fixed seats where my feet never touch the floor

Any public spectacle or crowd

Proportions on clothes being all wrong

And don’t get me started on public transport - I once had a man on the tube use my head as a rest for his newspaper!!

But these are all things I’ve come to put up with. I wouldn’t change my height usibg medical intervention.

I do welcome the OP raising a new perspective and encouraging a nuanced discussion

bah! keep losing my message- anyway i agree with you, NothingOn- regressive bollocks, it is!!

What I would love to see for kids is a campaign along the lines that it’s ok to be different, that teaches them to embrace quirks and to love themselves, just the way they are. That could be completely inclusive and kids struggling with gender could be supported in that environment. I’d love to see a campaign along these lines

As a slight tangent, hormones rarely have only one job.
Growth hormone deficiency has significant morbidity even in fully grown adults. Adults with severe ghd caused by pituitary insufficiency are still replaced with GH, because they are at higher risk of several health issues, both physical and psychological.
Even late onset partial growth hormone deficiency has measurable effects in adults.

My point is this:
What looks at face level to be a trivial and even cosmetic decision about replacing a hormone that is missing, rarely is that straightforward. There will be sound medical reasons, not just cosmetic ones. A hormone deficiency usually has significant consequences, and hormones often have several functions besides the most obvious one.

The human body is pretty damn good at knowing which parts and hormones to put where.

Removing healthy organs and adding hormones that do not belong in a healthy body's equilibrium is not comparible with replacement of ones that are missing.
The latter brings a body back into equilibrium, the former throws a balanced body out of it.

Also, speak to your endocrinologist, OP. You may want to talk about whether HGH is discontinued completely in adulthood or not. There is a case for continuing at adult replacement dosages for wellbeing in some circumstances.

A closer parallel is cochlear implants.

A profoundly deaf child can grow up into a functional, productive, perfectly happy adult.
To hearing parents of deaf children, cochlear implants are an opportunity for their children to access spoken language - an important part of what (they feel) it means to be human.
The trouble is, that cochlear implants do not provide the quality of hearing that is typical among the general population, and the surgery is not without significant risk.
Many people in the deaf community argue that the push for cochlear implants erases their community, and is insulting. Although deafness is a disability in law, deaf people often don't think of themselves as disabled, merely users of a different language.
Whereas ofew's son's treatment is low risk and likely to be successful, for both deaf people and trans people, the treatment is high risk and does not yield an ideal result.
It is understandable that in both cases, there is debate over whether pursuing treatment or acceptance is the right solution.

Those are good points Barracker. In our case I tried to get someone to tell me what the effects of GHD are (aside from the cosmetic). There was some discussion about bone and muscle mass being potentially compromised, but the connection, as far it was explained to me, was tenuous at best. No effects other than the mental health implications of being small were mentioned in some blurb from the drug manufacturer (who presumably has every reason to play up the benefits of their treatment).

We have been told the treatment will continue until my son is fully grown (so late teens) and possibly after that until mid twenties to aid continued muscle development.

Although all of that isn't completely relevant to why I started this thread, as various posters have said, what we have decided to do for our son is qualitatively different to blockers etc.

Science yes that is an interesting parallel too.

ooh this sounds interesting....

"There's a wonderful book by Andrew Solomon called Far From the Tree about children who are unusual in some way (e.g., they have dwarfism, or they're deaf, or they are autistic, or they are gay - a whole range of things) and it's about the extent to which parents accept their children as they are or whether they try to change them to be more "normal" (for want of a better word). It's often the case that the parents feel very differently from the children about this. "

"There's a wonderful book by Andrew Solomon called Far From the Tree about children who are unusual in some way (e.g., they have dwarfism, or they're deaf, or they are autistic, or they are gay - a whole range of things) and it's about the extent to which parents accept their children as they are or whether they try to change them to be more "normal" (for want of a better word). It's often the case that the parents feel very differently from the children about this. "

That does sound like a good read, definitely relevant for me and my "unusual" family.

Thanks again all for a good discussion today.

Ofew,

As a bloke, I think you're doing the right thing and it's not just about social expectations.

An extremely small male is going to face issues that a small female is less likely to IMHO - like being an 'easy target' for physical bullying and being called a 'manlet'. As a big guy (and total softy) I'm glad that my appearance has always seemingly put people off trying to initimdate me if I'm totally honest.

Thanks for the interesting post and replies. I think your situation has a few relevant parallels to the transgender children issue.

1. The dilemnas parents face when evaluating risk/benefit ratios for medical interventions for their kids. (physical and psychological)
2. Gender constructs and how they harm/will maybe harm our children in the future. The desire to reduce harm is key when considering interventions, right?

I started thinking about my own bias against short men. As a teenager, I recall noticing that small dudes are much more volatile and can be exceptionally fierce fighters. I chalked that up to being insecure and not "measuring up" Authority figures are mostly tall men. Successful and politically powerful men are generally tall. I come from a family of tall men, but for some reason I pro-created with 2 rather not-tall men. They are not my favorite people..lol. So there is my convoluted mind path. Raising confident smaller boys is definitely the work of feminism and I do believe sexism is the root of all the potential short guy distress

If you want to nerd out a bit check out this : It's kooky www.humanbodysize.com/articles-human-body-size/publications-human-body-size

As for the hormone treatments, it seems the temporary nature of it's application is in his favor.

Take care

After reading Barracker's post above, I feel sorry for what I just spewed. Very complex indeed and I hope I didn't go off-track too much.
Only your endocrinologist and you can know. Take a friend/advocate and a list of questions to the next appointment. Take care