The blockers-to-hormones pathway leads to adult sterility
Helen Joyce said:
“the pathway that Helen Webberley is describing is a pathway that leads to adult sterility. Your own sex organs will not develop.”
It is biologically true that blocking puberty and then replacing with cross-sex hormones means the gonads do not go through their natal puberty, so the inference that fertility is affected sounds like straightforward physiology.
Fertility impact is real, documented, and disclosed: it is not a secret buried in the process but one of the first things that reputable guidelines, including those from WPATH and the Endocrine Society, require clinicians to discuss with patients and families before treatment begins. Gamete banking exists precisely because this conversation happens early enough to act on it, and for those who pause blockers and allow natal puberty to resume, fertility potential can be retained. What this framing leaves out is that informed consent is the architecture of the whole pathway, not an afterthought, and that a young person and their family who have been through that process are not victims of concealment. The people who actually pay when this claim lands unchallenged are trans young people and their families, who may walk away believing that the clinicians advising them have been hiding something, and who may refuse the care they need on the basis of a risk they were already told about and had every right to weigh for themselves.
What I said at the time:
“the side effects of gender affirming hormones are the effects that that person wants. So for example somebody who is given and Helen calls it a fee you can't have a female puberty, okay let's call it an oestrogen puberty. Right. And the effects of the oestrogen puberty are the effects that the person wants.”
Trans young people and their families who may conclude that clinicians are concealing this risk from them, undermining trust in the informed consent process.