Comment on Schools won't be allowed to teach children that they can change their gender ID, reports say

• Senal@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Do you have any information on how easy the resumption of puberty is after that sort of delay?

  It never occurred to me that this was possible and I’m interested in how it might work.

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  • exocrinous@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’ll start right back up again completely naturally as soon as you stop taking the pills. The pills are hormone blockers. The gonads still produce sex hormones, but the blockers react with the hormones and render them inert. The inert hormones are passed as urine like any other waste product in the blood. A few days after you stop taking the blockers, they’ll run out and the sex hormones will start expressing themselves just like they would in someone who never took the blockers. Puberty will begin (or resume) just as nature planned.

    The only side effect is that you won’t go through puberty. Unfortunately, this does mean you’ll have a child’s amount of bone density, which is not good for a lifetime. But there’s absolutely 0 risk in delaying puberty until age 18. You’ll just grow up slower, the same as any late bloomer.

    Hormone blockers are actually a component in an adult trans person’s hormone replacement therapy. To take me as an example, I have a pair of testes which produce testosterone. So I take an antiandrogen; a testosterone blocker, to suppress the effects. And I take estrogen pills so that I have a female blood chemistry. When I started taking hormone pills, my body reacted just like any teenage girl’s body. I got softer skin, mood swings, and better hair. I tell you what, having the emotions of a teenage girl as an adult is an absolute trip. I’m glad they’ve settled down since then. Some trans women I know even got period cramps, despite not having a uterus. I don’t envy them.

    The body is genetically programmed to respond to sex hormones in a certain way. It doesn’t matter what you were born as, everyone’s organs, muscles, bones, and brain have a genetic programming that responds to estrogen one way, and testosterone another way. The potential is already inside every living human. That potential remains there for your entire life. Puberty blockers can’t do anything to take it away.

    If I ever stopped taking my testosterone blocker, I’d start growing bigger muscles and hair in strange places. My body would resume functioning like a male body. One day I’ll get my testes removed, and I’ll never have to worry about that again. But that surgery is only available to adults, and it requires a psychiatric assessment. I’ve been openly trans for years and years and I’m still not allowed to do it yet. There’s absolutely no risk of a child going through the procedure without the absolute greatest caution, and a very urgent, life-saving need. And even if a horrible one in a billion mistake was made, they could just give the kid hormone pills the same as I take in order to restore their original sexual chemistry.

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    • Senal@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Interesting, thank you for taking the time to write all of that up.

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• floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Personally I think we should be giving kids a lot more support in not transitioning. And by transitioning, I mean transitioning from a girl to a woman or from a boy to a man. If the child isn’t 100% certain they want to go through with massive irreversible hormonal changes, they shouldn’t.

  I think you’re underestimating the care and caution with which these decisions are approached. No one is rushing kids into transitioning if they’re not sure. There are many safeguards to make sure transitioning only happens where it’s appropriate and the person fully understands and agrees to it.

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  • exocrinous@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    No, that’s not true at all. I was pretty clearly nonbinary growing up, but every adult told me that natural puberty was a good thing and there was no way to avoid it. They didn’t tell me that puberty blockers were an option. They should have. It would only be 2 years after reaching natural puberty that I realised I was trans. 2 years of puberty blockers might have made a huge difference to my life. I was sure as shit rushed by every adult I knew into transitioning into a man, just because I was born with a penis.

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    • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sorry, I misread “from a girl to a woman or from a boy to a man” in your first comment, so I misunderstood your intent.

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      • exocrinous@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I thought so. As a soulist, I’m interested in deconstructing and remixing social constructs into forms that benefit social justice. I noticed the hypocrisy of transphobes crying wolf about kids going through irreversible changes, and figured out it takes next to zero effort to use their own language. In appropriating the forms of our enemies’ arguments, we reduce their disagreement with us down to its fundamental form - in this case, a religious belief in genetic destiny. That’s the only thing setting their arguments of “for the children” apart from my arguments of “for the children”. And this is a much harder thing for a bystander to accept unquestioningly than “for the children”. I like showing bystanders what’s really setting our enemies apart from us.

        Think of it like rhetorical kung fu. Using the opponent’s force against them

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