Puberty is optional. That’s the message transgender rights activists and gender clinicians are communicating to children. If you’re going through puberty and you don’t like it, they say, just take puberty blockers and it’ll stop!
Puberty blockers, the experts tell us, are perfectly safe. The St. Louis Children’s Hospital
informs children and parents
that taking puberty blockers, which have not been FDA-approved for use in
gender dysphoric
patients, is “like hitting a pause button” on puberty. Likewise, the Boston Children’s Hospital
calls
puberty blockers “temporary” and “completely reversible.”
COURT TO DECIDE WHETHER ARKANSAS CAN BAN TRANSGENDER PROCEDURES FOR MINORS
As someone who was put on Lupron, the most commonly used puberty-blocking drug, as a 15-year-old, I can say with confidence that these are lies.
Lupron is prescribed off-label and is intended to be used to treat conditions such as endometriosis or prostate cancer. The drug’s
website
warns of serious side effects: “Thinning of the bones … hot flashes/sweats, headache/migraine, decreased libido (interest in sex), depression/emotional lability (changes in mood), dizziness, nausea/vomiting, pain, vaginitis, and weight gain.” The American College of Pediatricians
states
in no uncertain terms that “transgender interventions,” including puberty blockers, “harm children” and can cause mental illness and irreversible physical harm. The list of potential side effects from puberty blockers includes “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.”
While on Lupron, I experienced almost daily migraines, constant muscle aches, and intense depression. At the time, I attributed my unhappiness to “gender dysphoria,” the condition I was supposedly on Lupron to treat. How many other children who get put on this drug suffer tremendously and use that suffering to validate their belief that they’re meant to be the opposite gender? Maybe that’s why so many children who start puberty blockers go on to transition medically. They become convinced that the only solution to the confusion and discomfort they’re experiencing is to keep pressing forward, regardless of the consequences.
Given the experimental and harmful nature of puberty blockers, we ought to wonder why trans activists are pushing them onto children so aggressively. Consider the intended effects of puberty blockers: to prevent sexual maturation. When I was a 15-year-old and transitioning to female, strangers on the internet encouraged me to start puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as soon as possible before my body was “poisoned” by puberty. I was cheered along in my transition, and the most cheers always came when I posted pictures of myself in women’s clothing — the skimpier, the better. At the time, I craved the attention. It made me feel good about myself when not much in my life did. I was exactly the kind of lonely, vulnerable boy internet pedophiles like to prey on, and I consider myself lucky I never met any of my adult “friends” in person. Their version of self-actualization was destroying their bodies for sexual fulfillment, and they wanted to convince children to do the same.
These activists believe there’s nothing valuable about letting bodies grow naturally, nothing worthwhile in preserving the health and fertility of children. The dream world of the “queer community” is one in which children have their puberty blocked until they decide which sterile sex object they’d most like to shape themselves into. It’s a world of total sexual “liberation,” where people are “freed” from the constraints of family, procreation, and the limits of their human bodies.
All transition aims to warp healthy human bodies for sexual and aesthetic gratification. By relying on
the fiction of gender identity
, the trans movement has snuck this radical concept into the mainstream. Childhood transition, facilitated by puberty blockers, is the result. These children are being sterilized, mutilated, and sexually exploited. It needs to stop now.
Unfortunately, the
current administration
not only supports the supposed right of doctors to perform these monstrous experiments on children, but is also aggressively trying to sell these treatments as a positive good. President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Department claims “transgender children” have a “right” to access “gender-affirming health care” and suggests those who raise concerns about it are “transphobic.”
But those of us who know the truth, especially those of us who have lived through it, know better. And it is our responsibility to protect future generations from the same harm to which we were exposed. We must make it clear with both our speech and our vote: This cannot be allowed to continue in America.
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Steven Richards detransitioned after living as a transgender woman for eight years. He writes about the transgender movement and the philosophy of gender identity at cutdowntree.substack.com.
