The important thing to remember with trans kids is that there isn’t a ‘do nothing’ option if they want HRT. ‘Nothing’ is actually ‘force them to undergo puberty for the wrong gender,’ which is traumatic and has effects as permanent as taking HRT.
Going through puberty with HRT as a trans person isn’t any more inappropriate than going through natal puberty is for cis kids. Natal puberty is having permanent, unpredictable effects on their bodies as well, except we just call that growing up. Trans teens also deserve to grow up like their peers, without spending most of their waking hours managing their dysphoria because some third party who’s never met them is uncomfortable.
The big things to remember with this discourse is that one, the regret rates for going through transition are exceedingly low. Like so low it’s virtually unheard of for almost any other medical intervention. This heavily implies that not only is the current standard of care very good at weeding out people for whom transition is not the correct treatment, but that it might even be too good and there’s a significant cohort of people for whom transition would be the best treatment but they get filtered out because they don’t present as being trans enough. Furthermore when you dig deeper into those regret and detransition rates you find that most of the time the reason for detransition was external. Meaning things like can’t afford the medication, discrimination, getting kicked out of housing, etc.
The second big thing was already mentioned and it’s that there isn’t a neutral option. Imagine telling a 13 year old girl “how do you know you’re not a boy unless you go on testosterone for a few years?” Just because we’re talking about the puberty that they’d naturally go through without intervention doesn’t mean that it’s good.
But realistically the most any kid younger than ~16 is gonna get when they show up to the gender clinic saying they’re trans is therapy, social transition so things like trying out a new name, pronouns, and/or clothes, and at most puberty blockers. Puberty blockers by the way have been proven safe for trans kids since the 90s. Then if they still want to transition they might start HRT after months if not years of this therapy.
The important thing to remember with trans kids is that there isn’t a ‘do nothing’ option if they want HRT. ‘Nothing’ is actually ‘force them to undergo puberty for the wrong gender,’ which is traumatic and has effects as permanent as taking HRT.
Going through puberty with HRT as a trans person isn’t any more inappropriate than going through natal puberty is for cis kids. Natal puberty is having permanent, unpredictable effects on their bodies as well, except we just call that growing up. Trans teens also deserve to grow up like their peers, without spending most of their waking hours managing their dysphoria because some third party who’s never met them is uncomfortable.
The big things to remember with this discourse is that one, the regret rates for going through transition are exceedingly low. Like so low it’s virtually unheard of for almost any other medical intervention. This heavily implies that not only is the current standard of care very good at weeding out people for whom transition is not the correct treatment, but that it might even be too good and there’s a significant cohort of people for whom transition would be the best treatment but they get filtered out because they don’t present as being trans enough. Furthermore when you dig deeper into those regret and detransition rates you find that most of the time the reason for detransition was external. Meaning things like can’t afford the medication, discrimination, getting kicked out of housing, etc.
The second big thing was already mentioned and it’s that there isn’t a neutral option. Imagine telling a 13 year old girl “how do you know you’re not a boy unless you go on testosterone for a few years?” Just because we’re talking about the puberty that they’d naturally go through without intervention doesn’t mean that it’s good.
But realistically the most any kid younger than ~16 is gonna get when they show up to the gender clinic saying they’re trans is therapy, social transition so things like trying out a new name, pronouns, and/or clothes, and at most puberty blockers. Puberty blockers by the way have been proven safe for trans kids since the 90s. Then if they still want to transition they might start HRT after months if not years of this therapy.