If a poor boy has his puberty blocked ....

[Chamomileteaplease]

then what happens when he grows up?

Rather than saying no men in the women's sports etc, sometimes people say, no one who has gone through male puberty.

But these poor boys who have had their puberty blocked by mad doctors, will they argue that they should be allowed to compete with women?

I fear they will need to stop going on about male puberty and switch to just saying no natal males. What do you think?

"I thought castrati were so tall because their bones never really stop growing @BellaAmorosa?"
Castrating any mammal before the end of puberty delays growth plate closure, so bullocks are taller than bulls of the same age, for example.
Geldings compete on the same terms as stallions in races. Both have to carry 3lb more than mares in Flat races, and 7lb more than mares in jumps races.

"Weren't they often portly , even obese too?"
Castrating (and spaying) dogs does change their metabolism and makes weight gain more likely, though not inevitable if owners are aware of this and adjust accordingly.

I agree that I don't want society to encourage boys down the medical pathway by saying that puberty blockers will get you woman's sports. See also putting women's facilities as a prize for having their penis and testes removed.

No one should be incentivised to medically alter their bodies in the vain attempt to change sex. It isn't possible.

Abigail Shrier's book is about the female side of this, but she points out that they egg each other on to greater self harm the same way those with anorexia do. Lauding people who have done the most damage to themselves as courageous and committed, or suggesting those people are the "real deal" causes those caught up in this to take more drastic steps. Certainly don't offer them women's medals or toilets as prizes for self harm.

The doctor may manage it, too.

But I wonder how all the people who committed themselves to the "puberty blockers are reversible" stance after this interview (in 2021) will fare.

excerpt
The problem for kids whose puberty has been blocked early isn’t just a lack of tissue but of sexual development. Puberty not only stimulates growth of sex organs. It also endows them with erotic potential. “If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty's blocked, it's very difficult to achieve that afterwards,” Bowers said. “I consider that a big problem, actually. It's kind of an overlooked problem that in our ‘informed consent’ of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.”

Nor is this a problem that can be corrected surgically. Bowers can build a labia, a vaginal canal and a clitoris, and the results look impressive. But, she said, if the kids are “orgasmically naive” because of puberty blockade, “the clitoris down there might as well be a fingertip and brings them no particular joy and, therefore, they’re not able to be responsive as a lover. And so how does that affect their long-term happiness?”

(Continues)
Bowers told me she now finds early puberty blockade inadvisable. “I’m not a fan of blockade at Tanner Two anymore, I really am not,” she told me, using the clinical name of the moment when the first visible signs of puberty manifest. “The idea all sounded good in the very beginning,” she said. “Believe me, we’re doing some magnificent surgeries on these kids, and they’re so determined, and I’m so proud of so many of them and their parents. They’ve been great. But honestly, I can’t sit here and tell you that they have better — or even as good — results. They’re not as functional. I worry about their reproductive rights later. I worry about their sexual health later and ability to find intimacy.”

Bowers knows what the loss of fertility and sexual intimacy might entail: She has three children, all born before she transitioned, and she spent a decade tending to victims of female genital mutilation. “Those women, a lot of them experience broken relationships because they cannot respond sexually,” she said. “And my fear about these young children who never experience orgasm prior to undergoing surgery are going to reach adulthood and try to find intimacy and realize they don’t know how to respond sexually.”

Thank you all for that fascinating information; I wasn't aware for instance that sometimes it makes the boy taller than he might otherwise have been. That seems weird, especially if they want to be female.

And if even Bowers is expressing concerns then feels even worse!

Yes, I wonder if during the two minute chat (in some cases) they have before being given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, they are told " you will never be accepted as a woman and therefore into women's spaces. You will always be an outsider." I think not. The lies they must be told, it's just so sad.

If you read beyond the summaries of the few (not particularly good) puberty blocker studies that exist you can find all sorts of horrific stuff.

Natal girl patients seem to get the worst of the unintended consequences (and without much benefit for ‘future passibility’) but it’s not great for the boys either.

Besides anything else, to be a competitive athlete (even at county level) takes a massive amount of commitment from children and their parents.
It’s extremely unlikely that a family whose time is taken up with gender (medical appointments, advocating for rule changes in schools etc) will also have time to commit to training and competing.

Especially as (going off the families in the public eye) many of the pre pubertal ‘transgender kids’ are growing up in complicated situations, (eg profoundly disabled siblings, separated parents who disagree on transition and are fighting through courts, parental illness or bereavement, children in the looked after system, children who have been internationally adopted etc)

One of my friend’s kids was scouted for an Olympic sport by a club that runs free sessions in primary schools specifically to find raw talent. Her child is primary age and she’s had to put her foot down and refuse to do any more than three training sessions a week (plus periodic competitions) because it was ruining quality of family lIfe. Most of the kids at the club are doing 4/5 training sessions every week, some with long drives between home and club.

No boys should be in girls sports at any level at all, not even in schools, but the idea that prepubertal transition will result in world class MtF athletes is transactivist fantasy.

If you put any stock in Blanchard’s typology then the naturally feminine, same sex attracted ‘transgirls’ who show gender non conformity from toddler hood and are diagnosed with gender Dysphoria in time for total pubertal blockade to occurs are not the same ‘type’ of male gender
transitioners who want compete in women’s sports anyway (they are the late onset three letter acronym type).

*I personally think Blanchard’s typology has merit, but it’s based on a pre smartphone data set and new presentations of Gender Dysphoria/Transgenderism now exist on top of the old ones.

SEGM is a good resource:

https://segm.org/studies

The boys won’t have puberty blockers without asking for them. However, yes they may well be too young to make an informed decision. But I believe once the puberty blockers have been stopped, puberty comes on, it is just later.

There is no evidence of this.

The speculation is based on using the same class of drugs for precocious puberty, but that’s delaying an abnormally early puberty until a normal time.

There is no evidence that delaying a normal onset puberty to an abnormal time still results in normal growth and development.

Plus the side effects of taking the drug are many and varied, even when used for precocious puberty (the use of these drugs for precocious puberty is for an overwhelmingly female cohort). The risk/reward is different too (being a sexually mature but not intellectually mature 6 year old girl is almost never in that girls best interest).

Also the percentage of kids who come off blockers without going on to cross sex hormones is tiny.

Puberty blockers stop a child’s brain developing as well as their body. The blockers might be giving them ‘time to think’ but they’re also making them less capable of doing that thinking.

It's like saying there's only one Lance Armstrong, so it's fine for a few people to take performance-enhancing drugs.

Some may think it unlikely for all manner of reasons that a puberty-blocked boy would grow up into a young man interested in and talented at sport, and therefore there would not be many. That doesn't make it fair. One talented male, like the child in coachblade's example (see @DarkDayforMN's post above), can dominate an entire sport. Every woman placing below him has been adversely affected. A little bit of unfairness, or occasional unfairness, is no more acceptable to me than a lot of unfairness or constant unfairness.
Nobody puts up with even the tiniest unfair advantage in men's sports.

Let's say boy A is gay. He also loves football. Or tennis. He is put on puberty blockers by his homophobic parents. He grows his hair. All the teachers at school accept him as a "girl". Why would any of this stop him playing football or tennis and staying fit as a result? Not all males respond to testosterone suppression in the same way. Some become very ill, others tolerate it very well. It's naive to think this will not be a problem in the future. It's actually a problem now.

Well this is a depressing thread. Puberty blockers are so often described as harmless.

Exactly.

The number of gender distressed children who have experienced pubertal blockade from Tanner 2-3 is still a small cohort and those who don’t go on to cross sex hormones is a tiny fraction, so we really cannot state with any certainty that withdrawing these medications results in normal-but-late puberty.

The new, enormous cohort of teens who identify as trans only begin that cross sex identification after puberty is well underway, so even if their parents go for rapid medicalisation the teens are still experiencing partial-to-near complete puberty before artificial blockade begins.

In the case of precocious puberty sexual maturity is taking place out of sync with the other stages of normal child development (height/physical growth, intellectual and emotional development etc).
The aim of pubertal delay for precocious puberty is to give an extra couple of years for physical growth (because girls generally only grow an extra inch or two after menses begin) and then when the normal time frame comes for sexual development to kick in the sex hormone suppression drugs are withdrawn and (hopefully!) all of the parts of pubertal development, emotional, social, physical & intellectual proceed together, as normal.

Adult women don’t benefit from being the height of a 6 year old and 6 year old girls don’t benefit from sexual maturation/ability to become pregnant (because sadly, some skeevy adult men WILL take advantage of a primary school aged girl who through no fault of her own has a libido but lacks the mental maturity to cope with it).

Using these drugs for gender distress makes normal child development arse backwards - you start with a healthy child and prevent the sexual, emotional and intellectual maturation processes that should be occurring at that age and leave them only with the physical growth part.

Which is exactly what you want for a 4/5/6 year old but in a 10/11/12 year old can (as noted in other’s comments above) result in abnormal growth, as observed in other mammal species.

And instead of intervening with the intent of helping the child develop in a manner more akin to their peers, gender pubertal suppression makes the child develop differently to their peers.
It’s an artificial inducement of abnormal development in a healthy child.

(Precocious puberty is often comorbid with serious illness or profound disability, extraordinarily early pubertal onset with no identifiable cause is pretty rare and obvs when a cause is identified, eg a brain tumour, you treat that underlying cause)

The side effects are horrendous, tooth loss, bone density issues etc - the gender quacks pretend it’s harmless but if you look at the case reports and class action lawsuits from the other uses of the exact same drugs it’s obvious that they aren’t harmless. Just the other day someone was asking on Twitter re: possible lung/respiratory issues in a child on puberty blockers for gender - if you look at the cancer org info pages the exact same drugs have lung inflammation and pulmonary embolism listed as possible side effects and shortness of breath indicates contacting a doctor immediately. Yet mermaids spent years telling all and sundry that it’s a ‘harmless pause’

No males in female sports ever is the only sensible way to handle the sports issue.

Boys and girls have different growth charts from BIRTH so no matter what meddling goes on with puberty, you can never make a male child female.

Unless it’s top level competition stuff officials will never know if a boy had his puberty blocked completely or partially anyway - early social transition doesn’t necessarily mean total blockade at Tanner 2.

I’ve been looking up the prepubertal ‘trans kids’ who were on the telly 10-15 years ago and most of them look like their natal sex.
Wish I could share the images but that would be a dick move on my behalf (unless they put their adult selves in the public eye, a la Jackie Green). Their parents should never have paraded them about in public in the first place.

One of the early, high profile American kids has detransitioned but mum is still giving trans activism pep talks to politicians because one of the OG kid’s siblings is now nonbinary!

To add to your posts, here's an article excerpt on how it's working out for girls treated with lupron for precocious puberty: not well.

extract

For years, Sharissa Derricott, 30, had no idea why her body seemed to be failing. At 21, a surgeon replaced her deteriorated jaw joint. She’s been diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition. Her teeth are shedding enamel and cracking.

None of it made sense to her until she discovered a community of women online who describe similar symptoms and have one thing in common: All had taken a drug called Lupron.
Thousands of parents chose to inject their daughters with the drug, which was approved to shut down puberty in young girls but also is commonly used off-label to help short kids grow taller.

The drug’s pediatric version comes with few warnings about long-term side effects. It is also used in adults to fight prostate cancer or relieve uterine pain and the Food and Drug Administration has warnings on the drug’s adult labels about a variety of side effects.
More than 10,000 adverse event reports filed with the FDA reflect the experiences of women who’ve taken Lupron. The reports describe everything from brittle bones to faulty joints.

In interviews and in online forums, women who took the drug as young girls or initiated a daughter’s treatment described harsh side effects that have been well-documented in adults.

Women who used Lupron a decade or more ago to delay puberty or grow taller described the short-term side effects listed on the pediatric label: pain at the injection site, mood swings, and headaches. Yet they also described conditions that usually affect people much later in life. A 20-year-old from South Carolina was diagnosed with osteopenia, a thinning of the bones, while a 25-year-old from Pennsylvania has osteoporosis and a cracked spine. A 26-year-old in Massachusetts needed a total hip replacement. A 25-year-old in Wisconsin, like Derricott, has chronic pain and degenerative disc disease.
“It just feels like I’m being punished for basically being experimented on when I was a child,” said Derricott, of Lawton, Okla. “I’d hate for a child to be put on Lupron, get to my age and go through the things I have been through.”

(continues)

Federal records show that the FDA official who led the drug approval process two decades ago was troubled by the two studies he reviewed. In a 1993 letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, former FDA medical officer Dr. Alexander Fleming wrote in a memo for the drug approval file that it was “regrettable” that the panel approved the drug after minimal study.
One study followed 22 children for just six months, Fleming said. He described the other study as a “free for all” review that made it difficult to determine what dose was best for children of different sizes. Still, he suggested long-term tracking of the drugs’ effects and favored approval “in the absence of any better approach.”

The study Fleming referred to as the “free for all” concluded in 1992, according to a summary submitted to European authorities. Fleming had no further comment when contacted recently.
A different drugmaker-sponsored study, completed long after Fleming’s letter, looked at children who had taken Lupron for precocious puberty from 1991 to 2009. The 2010 study, which was submitted to the FDA, reported that seven of 55 kids had suffered serious side effects, but said the only serious side effects possibly related to Lupron were the growth of a preexisting tumor, deteriorating vision, and severe asthma exacerbation.

According to the National Institutes of Health repository of clinical research, which lists adverse effects discovered in studies, there are two serious side effects of Lupron that aren’t mentioned in the drugmaker’s 2010 study: a bone disorder and a disease-caused fracture, an omission which looks “puzzling” to Dr. Ned Feder, a staff scientist at the Project on Government Oversight.

“It does seem to me that that is certainly a point of criticism,” Feder said. “What are they doing? Is this an accident?”

Link in next post.

Drug used to halt puberty in children may cause lasting health problems

I have also thought about the issues with talking about "having gone through make puberty".

My worry is that it will encourage batshit parents to rush into medical transition even earlier.

Top trans surgeons say "it wasn't us guv, the endocrinologists did it and ran away".

Marci Bowers had every chance to know but chose not to.

There's going to be a lot of blame-shifting as it all comes out on top.

Definitely. The problem with affirmative only health care is it is the patient who makes the diagnosis. No one takes responsibility, not the gender therapists, not the endocrinologists not the surgeons.

It's this weird cosmetic surgery adjacent thing where the customer diagnoses the problem and chooses the treatment. But also weirdly led by HCPs (what a term, seeing as care, health and professionalism seem to all be very low priorities behind playing god, politics and telling patients what they want to hear rather than the truth).

The stories of detransitioners explain how their parents trusted the experts that this was the right path for their child, are coerced with the spectre of suicide and trusted that the treatment offered was safe and effective.

But they put so much weight on the child knowing themselves, as if we didn't all reinvent our idea of ourselves repeatedly through childhood and adolescence.

What they know is they feel distress and that they have been told that is the cause and this is the cure.

Marci Bowers knows that the males coming for surgery have never experienced any form of sexual arousal or pleasure or orgasm but carries on with the surgery anyway.

That tells you all you need to know about Bowers.

Agreed.