Puberty blockers socially isolate children from peers
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“brain pruning, which means you're just much more efficient. Um, we've all met teenagers. We know that hormones has quite a dramatic impact on them. What we d- do in this country is we'll block the puberty, so these kids... Well, we don't anymore thankfully, 'cause it was so barbaric. Um, so those kids from 11 to 16, when all their friends are going through all that stuff, they're not doing that. So even at, at, and on, on an emotional and relational level, it's grotesque and abusive.”
The image of a child standing apart from peers while everyone else goes through puberty together is emotionally resonant and draws on real concerns about adolescent belonging and development.
The image of a child standing apart while their peers move through puberty together is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously, but it describes only half of what is actually happening. For a trans adolescent, the alternative is not a neutral shared experience: it is going through a puberty that is wrong for them, developing characteristics that mark them out, cause them deep distress, and in many cases cannot be reversed. What the research consistently shows is that trans young people who experience unwanted puberty face severely elevated rates of self-harm and suicidality, and that pausing puberty reduces that distress rather than adding to it. Calling a treatment grotesque while leaving out what it protects a child from is not a balanced picture of the clinical question, and it is trans adolescents and their families who are left to make decisions on the basis of a story with its most important part removed.
Trans adolescents whose suffering during unwanted puberty is rendered invisible, and parents who are given a one-sided picture of the risks of treatment without any account of the risks of withholding it.