It wasn’t all that long ago that minors didn’t have access to drug or surgical treatments when they identified as trans. Those interventions were reserved for adults. But in recent years, minors in many states became able to get puberty blockers, hormones, and even surgery in what has euphemistically become known as “gender-affirming care.” What was behind the push for extending such treatment to minors in the first place?
The following list is not meant to be exhaustive, but its length is an indication of some of the many factors that went into the change. Part of the impetus was that the activist left became far more focused on trans causes because it seemed like the next step after other causes such as gay marriage had been won. Social media has been another huge factor, because the trans movement spreads through the susceptible younger population in that way, particularly among adolescent girls dealing with the conflicts inherent in going through puberty and becoming a woman in an era in which they feel pressured to be sexually active, and are aware – many through internet porn – of some of the more violent and extreme aspects that can become part of sex. Plus, a great many of these young people identifying as trans are gay or lesbian, and are in retreat from that. There’s also an element of some unknown number of older people with various sexual fetishes encouraging and “grooming” the younger ones, particularly online. And of course, there’s money for pharmaceutical companies, therapists, and doctors, particularly when insurance began to cover such interventions.
But there’s a physiological reason, too, which has to do with the way in which puberty affects the body, especially the bodies of biological males. The majority of transitioners today are young females, but it did not used to be that way. Not too long ago, most people identifying as trans were adult biological males who described themselves as having felt from early childhood that they were females, and it was well known that adult transition was especially difficult for those adult men because they had trouble “passing.” Adult women who took testosterone had a somewhat easier time looking like men even if they had started taking male hormones and had their surgeries in adulthood after puberty, because the growth of facial hair, the prominent Adam’s apple, the deepening of the voice, and the gaining of muscle mass as a result of testosterone in a female is significantly easier to achieve than the taking away of those things in a male once they have already occurred post-puberty. Testosterone often has a more potent masculinizing effect than estrogen has as a feminizer, especially for post-pubescent adults. And both can be dangerous drugs for the opposite sex to take, although that fact tends to be glossed over by many trans activists and trans activist doctors.
That latter goal – making the adult male-to-female trans person’s voice higher, getting rid of male facial hair, and doing away with the heavier musculature of a man – wasn’t really convincingly accomplished by most biological males taking estrogen post-puberty. Once vocal cords have thickened in a post-pubescent male, they don’t thin to female proportions even with estrogen. Once the jaw has grown and male facial features are set, it ordinarily takes heavy-duty plastic surgery to change things and even then the face often retains a certain masculine quality. And a while back, the vast majority of people identifying as trans were adult men who wanted to transition to female.
There also was a growing notion – although not supported by research (see this, for example) – that suicide in young people with body dysmorphia could be prevented through early medical intervention. And so the idea of having childhood medical treatment with puberty blockers and then hormones, followed in many cases by early “top” surgeries (for girls; otherwise known as double mastectomies) and sometimes (but less often) by early bottom surgeries for both sexes, became more and more common, more demanded, and more accepted for a while in the medical establishment. In addition, many websites began to advise teens on what to say to authorities in order to be greenlit for medical transition (threatening suicide works, even if a person isn’t really suicidal), making it relatively easy for children of both sexes to take puberty blockers and sex hormones, and to undergo irreversible surgeries.
It is therefore sadly ironic that, for girls and post-pubescent women, taking testosterone is relatively good at causing irreversible physical changes that will enable them to more easily pass as males (much better than taking estrogen works for post-pubescent males wanting to pass as females), because girls who change their minds and de-transition later on find that even after stopping the testosterone they don’t go back to their previous selves and that they now sometimes have trouble “passing” as females, their actual biological sex.
It is a tragic situation, enabled by the left and the supposed health professions, and that is often true even for girls who have not had surgery. To watch de-transitioner videos and hear their deep voices and listen to them talk about permanent changes in their genitalia, their prominent Adam’s apples, their hair loss, and their wider jaws, is to see something both sad and infuriating. And the people to be infuriated with are the members of the medical and therapy professions who allowed this to happen.
The dangers are obvious and not always or even usually told to these young people, and certainly often not well-understood by them even if they hear them. Informed consent is not possible at those young ages. And many adolescents, especially the girls with late onset gender dysphoria, actually are suffering from other mental disorders such as what used to be known as Asperger’s syndrome and is now known as being “on the autism spectrum.”
The surgeries themselves – difficult and problematic at best – also can have special problems when done early, after puberty blockers have been given. Apparently, it turns out that going through normal puberty is usually vital for psychosexual development. To be blunt, with the taking of puberty blockers, many of these young people never develop normally to the point of having orgasms and later cannot do so even when taken off the blockers. Even with “just” hormones, there can be fertility problems and bone density problems, and even cardiovascular problems. To be blunt again, biological boys who have been medically blocked from going through puberty usually don’t have enough penile material to accomplish bottom surgery (the creation of a fake vagina) in the usual way it’s done for adults. I could go on, but I think you get the idea without my getting even more graphic.
Adults can be assumed to have at least the possibility of informed consent, but that simply isn’t true for teenagers. And the parents of those children are often told by health professionals that if they don’t consent to the medical treatment, their children are likely to kill themselves. Even the most reluctant parents sometimes consent when they hear that.
Then we had the backlash of states banning the surgical procedures for minors. Some also ban hormone therapy for minors, as well. These laws predictably met with fierce resistance from the left and trans activists, for obvious reasons. Leftist “progress” is not supposed to be rolled back in this way. But SCOTUS has finally spoken, and has upheld the right of states to ban these “treatments.”