I read that post, just fyi. I just was a bit busy at the time and didn't really have time to compose the sort of well-thought out response it deserves. Also I'm still kind of mulling it over. I guess that different people can look at the same thing and see it in vastly different ways, and I try to look at an issue from various viewpoints before coming to a firm conclusion about it.
When I first read about so-called "puberty blockers" they were presented as something that's safe and well-tested, and that all you had to do was to stop taking them and then puberty would progress again naturally. Now I'm not so sure about that, and also questioning whether children that young truly know what they will want for the rest of their lives. If it renders them infertile or, for males, leaves them with a child-sized penis or impotence as an adult, that's something they might come to regret later. OTOH, it's said by the other side that the regret is more often not getting this treatment before they develop the sex characteristics they don't want.
There's also the question about how will they feel about it when they are 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. I guess we're seeing a massive experiment take place that will play out over the next several decades.
We are indeed. An experiment with the bodies of children and young people.
The problem is that this is being entirely driven by advocacy pressure groups who are not medical experts and who are quite frankly batcrap mental. Mermaids for example. They have succeeded in having themselves appointed as the advisers and the trainers on all things trans-related and are pushing their falsehoods and anti-science into schools, youth organisations and public bodies. So we get the lies about puberty blockers being harmless and simply buying time and the kids can just stop them any time they want. None of this is true.
First, puberty blockers themselves are not harmless. There is a group of people who were prescribed them for a couple of years for precocious puberty, to spare them the embarrassment of having breasts and periods (or baritone voices and beards) at the age of seven. Duration of treatment was fairly short and these people then progressed to the normal puberty for their sex. Nevertheless they have experienced serious ill-health which they attribute to the puberty blockers. I can't find the article I was looking for but if you google "Lupron survivors" or "Lupron victims" you'll find some links.
Second, the whole "buying time" thing is bogus. It's as harmful for a child to delay puberty when his or her contemporaries have all passed through it as it is to start at seven. But more importantly, preventing natural puberty actually prevents the brain maturation which is all-important in allowing these children to sort out their gender identity. If gender-questioning children are supported to pass through the puberty of their natural sex the vast majority of them give up the notion of wanting to become the opposite sex. Given that life as a trans person is not a bed of roses and still wouldn't be if every single person they met was perfectly accepting and overwhelmingly supportive, given the permanent medicalisation and the surgery involved, this would normally be seen as the ideal outcome. However once these children are put on puberty blockers they don't change their minds. Their brains never pass through the stage that allows them to sort it all out. 100% of them progress to cross-sex hormones and that means permanent infertility even if they keep their gonads.
As far as the infantile penis thing is concerned, the problem isn't that an adult man is left with an infantile penis, it's that a sexless eunuch who wants to have a woman's body is left with too little material for a surgeon to be able to do the normal adult male-to-female sex reassignment surgery and more drastic solutions have to be found. There is also the question of health problems in later life including increased risks of heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer and bone density problems. Given that without the puberty blockers the majority of these men would grow up to be gay males perfectly happy with their own healthy bodies, this doesn't seem like a good trade-off.
OTOH, it's said by the other side that the regret is more often not getting this treatment before they develop the sex characteristics they don't want.
I think "the other side" you're referring to here are adult men who transitioned as adults. These are an entirely different class of patient from the "trans kids". Trans kids are not autogynaephiles. You can split hairs about what proportion of adult male transitioners are autogynaephilic all you like, the fact is that the leaders of the trans activist movement show all the behavioural characteristics of narcissistic autogynaephilia.
AGP men are mostly not very feminine (whereas HSTS men often are). They don't "pass" well. They wish they did. They look back at their childhood selves and think, if only I'd transitioned back then, I would pass so much better. (This is of course blatantly ignoring the fact that they were normal boyish boys and didn't go around playing with rainbow unicorns and asking people to call them Luna at the time.) They then project this regret on to the gender-confused and gender-nonconforming children and insist that their puberty needs to be prevented for the sake of their mental health. (With added lies about the rate of suicide among "trans kids" and emotional blackmail such as "do you want a dead son or a live daughter?")
And since these are the people who have seized control of the narrative and branded anyone who raises concerns as a transphobic bigot who hates trans people, wants them all dead and should be silenced and preferably sacked, we are where we are. What a mess.
