Puberty Blockers Can Help Transgender Youth. Is There a Cost? (original) (raw)
Health|They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/health/puberty-blockers-transgender.html
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After two years of puberty blockers, Emma Basques was prescribed estrogen at 13, starting her transition.Credit...Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times
They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?
Puberty blockers can ease transgender youths’ anguish and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about long-term physical effects and other consequences.
After two years of puberty blockers, Emma Basques was prescribed estrogen at 13, starting her transition.Credit...Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times
- Nov. 14, 2022
The medical guidance was direct.
Eleven-year-old Emma Basques had identified as a girl since toddlerhood. Now, as she worried about male puberty starting, a Phoenix pediatrician advised: Take a drug to stop it.
At 13, Jacy Chavira felt increasingly uncomfortable with her maturing body and was beginning to believe she was a boy. Use the drug, her endocrinologist in Southern California recommended, and puberty would be suspended.
An 11-year-old in New York with deepening depression expressed a desire to no longer be a girl. A therapist told the family the drug was the preteen’s best option, and a local doctor agreed.
“‘Puberty blockers really help kids like this,’” the child’s mother recalled the therapist saying. “It was presented as a tourniquet that would stop the hemorrhaging.”
As the number of adolescents who identify as transgender grows, drugs known as puberty blockers have become the first line of intervention for the youngest ones seeking medical treatment.
Their use is typically framed as a safe — and reversible — way to buy time to weigh a medical transition and avoid the anguish of growing into a body that feels wrong. Transgender adolescents suffer from disproportionately high rates of depression and other mental health issues. Studies show that the drugs have eased some patients’ gender dysphoria — a distress over the mismatch of their birth sex and gender identity.
Behind Our Reporting on Puberty Blockers
Behind Our Reporting on Puberty Blockers
Megan Twohey and Christina JewettReporting for the Investigations Desk
As growing numbers of adolescents who identify as transgender are prescribed drugs to block puberty, the treatment is becoming a source of confusion and controversy.
We spent months scouring the scientific evidence, interviewing doctors around the world and speaking to patients and families.
Here’s a closer look at what we found →
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