Puberty blockers disrupt normal development unlike any other child treatment
Helen Joyce said:
“There's no other treatment that we would give a totally healthy child that disrupts normal physiological development. Puberty is an absolutely crucial process. It's the process that turns children into adults. You know, delaying an early, catastrophically early puberty is not the same as interrupting normal puberty. Everything else that we do for children is because something isn't working.”
The intuition that medicine should only intervene when something is broken, and that deliberately pausing a natural process in a healthy child is categorically different, is one many parents and viewers will find immediately persuasive.
GnRH agonists have been used in children for decades, not only to pause puberty in gender dysphoria but to pause puberty in precocious puberty, where the child's development is not diseased but simply poorly timed. A child whose puberty begins at five or six is, by most measures, physiologically healthy: the system is working, just at the wrong moment. The clinical logic in both cases is identical: the timing of puberty is causing harm, and slowing it down creates space for something better. Whether the benefit-risk calculation is right in any individual case is exactly the kind of question clinicians and families should be working through together, but the claim that pausing puberty is without precedent in healthy children is simply not accurate, and every young trans person told otherwise is being given a reason to distrust a treatment that might give them real relief.
What I said at the time:
“We use puberty blockers across all ages whenever puberty starts, when damaging or inappropriate.”
Young trans people and their families who are told, falsely, that any medical support is without precedent and therefore inherently reckless.