If you are interested in specifically long term prospective effects of puberty blockers the reason we had support for the trials on children is because there are naturally occuring conditions like Androgen insensitivity syndrome where people grow up with the chromosomes of a male person but their body develops as phenotypicly female because their body chemistry cannot read their horomones. These and other intersex conditions meant we weren’t going in blindly because we studied adults into advanced ages who never actually went through a regular puberty so we have a raft of information of different forms of naturally occurring puberties outside of the male and female binary. In the case of blockers the idea is not to use these measures very long term because there are escalating side effects for folks once they hit their mid 20’s but nobody is advocating for anybody to mimic intersex conditions artificially for that long. Sixteen- seventeen is considered the upper end and those are the ages kids with the signoff of their adult guardians can start making decisions about HRT.
The book A Comprehensive Guide to Intersex by Jay Kyle Peterson is a good place to start if you want to understand the various forms of conditions that contribute to our understanding of sex development.
Getting into the weeds of the history of Transgender DSM and puberty blocking treatment trials is not the easiest to do because there is a lot of politically motivated hijacking of the algorithm but here is an early documentation from an early trial in 1998 and a guide developed for paitent selection criteria from 2001. You will notice some outdated nomenclature and the DSM has since been refined and updated since :
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9879847/ http://www.genderpsychology.org/transsexual/hbsoc_2001.html
Anecdotally it’s not a bad idea to get to know some trans folks who share their experiences about going through the system to get a sense of what the system is like and what the problems experienced by the people in the system are.
This is Alexander who went through the US system and describes what it was like. https://youtu.be/a4r0CoXsGmk
Jamie went through the UK system and now has his PHD in Psychology specializing in studying transgender development and wellbeing. https://youtu.be/lWngA08D9LU His videos center around either information or trans/annti-trans memes.
And Abagail Thorn has an MA philosophy , is a playwright and actress in the UK who uses the medium of philosophy to expound on many aspects of trans life. She does a very good job citing her sources but is also very entertaining in her presentation on subject matter. This is her video about going through the system as an adult. https://youtu.be/v1eWIshUzr8
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https://piped.video/lWngA08D9LU
https://piped.video/v1eWIshUzr8
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Thank you for the links. It’s going to take me some time to go through it all. Have an upvote!
I watched most of video from Alexander so far and plan on finishing it. Seems like good stuff from a fairly reasonable person so far. Its giving me topics that I can use for further research on this to help develop my opinion.
I think my fav is Abagail’s stuff because at some level I never got over being a theater nerd and she places all her citations on screen! It is more heart wrenching in this video though because the UK is an extremely rough place to be trans. Jaime’s stuff is more scattershot so I picked a slightly more random vid.
I must say it is extremely refreshing to see anyone be willing listen. The people using trans people as an example of "how the left are insane/misguided " and often a lot of folks on the left themselves are usually more used to treating our advocacy like some kind of shuttlecock in badminton. It becomes more about who is factually ir ethically right in some kind of 2 dimensional sense than focusing on the actual nuance of living with what is a pretty complicated psychological condition where experts have drawn conclusions for treatment that can seem counter intuitive from the way we handle other psychological conditions.
I really want to thank you. It gives me a lot of hope when someone just shows some actual curiosity. Advocating for my community’s quality of life is kind of like fighting a hydra and 9/10 times people just want to rip a chunk out of you about their singular beef instead of taking the time to see how it all ties together.
