Nine-year-olds are prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones
Ben Leo said:
“So you're happy prescribing 9 year old children with puberty blockers. Yeah. All cross hormones.”
Nine years old is a number a viewer can picture straight away, and the answer given on air was about puberty rather than about age, which can sound evasive to anyone who does not already know that puberty is the thing being timed.
Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are two entirely different medicines, given years apart, and no protocol anywhere gives cross-sex hormones to a nine-year-old. Blockers are timed to the start of puberty, not to a birthday, which is why age alone tells you very little: some children begin puberty at eight and some at fourteen, and the medicine is matched to that moment, not to an arbitrary number. The reasonable question about timing is worth taking seriously, but folding blockers and hormones into a single sentence, joined by "and all cross-sex hormones", turns a clinical question about when puberty starts into a picture of hormones being handed to small children, and those are not the same thing. Families who believe that picture may walk away from care their child genuinely needs, at the one point when timing actually matters.
Families weighing up whether to seek care, who are left believing their child would be put on hormones years before anyone would consider it.