I was a gender-dysphoric male child, who believed I was supposed to be a girl. At puberty, I overcame dysphoria and intense feelings that I was a girl in a boys body, and simply became a gay man. I am relieved that was never exposed to the euphemistically named treatment we have today called “Puberty Blockers”. I have written of my childhood experience, and to close the circle I want to cover some adult experience, and instead of feelings about PB’s, some science about PB’s.
Initial disclaimer. Again, for everyone, I’m speaking exclusively of my experience and feelings as a gay cis-male man, and what I view as an abomination of chemical experimentation perpetuated on children exactly like me. I speak for or about no other groups and any interpretation of such is entirely a figment of the reader’s imagination.
People who responded, well, interestingly to my prior posting
www.dailykos.com/...
confused frequently the subject of my discussion, which is exclusively my experience as a girl-identifying, effeminate, female-play modeling male dysphoric child who became a relatively happy gay cis male, and my feelings personally about “Puberty Blockers”, which because the idea nauseates me, I’ll refer to as PB’s. Llikewise, it’s boring to type gender-dysphoric later-gay cis male child constantly (in other words an unhappily-gendered child, and since everyone feels more comfortable using euphemisms, I’ll use the term guppy. I was a guppy. I find it difficult to be brief about such a, well, impressively emotional subject.
Gay Men I Have Known and Loved
As an adult gay man, I went on after my teenage years to enjoy gay sex and love relations for perhaps an entire 10, 15 minutes let’s say, after high school, because I was immediately plunged into crisis. The men I had sex with (I moved from the Appalachia’s to Los Angeles), and enjoyed romantic relationships whith tended to disappear. Well, they tended to up and die on me. To use broad mixed metaphors, testosterone unlocked my prison cell, and I stepped out of the frying pan straight into the fire of a raging HIV/Aids epidemic hell from the early 80’s, now that’s karma for you!
Nevertheless, I had a lot of sex, safe sex eventually when it was understood what was going on. I’m one of the fortunate and guilt-ridden from that period who never developed HIV. I tended however, when most of the people I had relationships with died, to flee the emotional graveyard.
In the remaining 40 years, I lived and worked in at times London, Paris, Shanghai, Munich, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Riyadh, Sydney, Singapore, Dubai, Bogotá, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Miami, Houston, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Kuala Lumpur… you get the idea. I met an awful lot of men for intimate relations, I’m probably what researchers would put on the “more than several thousand lifetime partners” scale. I’ve played with men of all sizes, shapes, walks of life, religions, marital statuses. I’ve played with men the full range of hyper-masculine (silly term) to quite effeminate, from dominant and top to passive and bottom, and all ranges of kinky specialties. And when I say played, I also mean I talked to them, quite intimately.
Everyone Wants To See and Feel Love
And when I say I talked to them, I also talked about them – I write compulsively, like “Harriet the Spy” from childhood. And sharing my writing with friends, at one point I had 30,000 – 40,000 men reading and responding to my adventures, which fill today about two dozen books. Gay men saw themselves in the quite vividly described real people – all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds and marital situations - I had relationships with, pleasurably enjoying sex with another man, and likewise I confessed my fears and mistakes and learnings during sex, and about my many perceived physical inadequacies, while still having a lot of fun. Generally very honest and real.
Gay men frequently reached out to me generally anonymously at this time to ask about feelings of getting old; about being fat and wanting to feel loved and sexual; about their own feelings of inadequacy as a lover, or even lack of basic knowledge of sex; about their penis size; about erection problems; about fear of intimacy; about their butts. Men from rural areas wanted to know what it was like to have unbridled horny freedom. Young men wanted to know if things would get better when they got older. Many men were shocked at my representations of intimate relations with people of differing ability, race, or age because I never fetishized the differences, which I understood was quite common.
Likewise, another thing I they talked to me about which was quite common was that many, many gay men I met had profound gender "dysphoria" as children – guppys like me. So among the lifetime sex partners, and the thousands that wrote to me, it was extremely common. Even microscopic fractional presentation of anything except masculine behavior was punished by their parents, in school, in religious institutions, in legal settings (try being effeminate in Saudi Arabia). I'm not speaking of 10's or 20's of gay men, but over 40 years of being intimate with men I've heard it hundreds and hundreds of times. And as much as we want convince ourselves that today things are really better, they are only marginally. As black people clearly endure systemic racism, LGBTQ people endure systemic gender bullying, period.
It Gets Better But It Hasn't Yet
It's not even remarked on a lot in the gay community anymore, I mean we have “It gets better” www.itgetsbetter.org . Which is why a lot of gay kids may not feel, lets say, wonderful, maybe even neglected by older gays. It's assumed that a child who will become a gay man is entirely unhappy with their gender, profoundly so; it's assumed that a gay man irrespective of their presentation had a profoundly unhappy gender experience as a child. It’s almost a kind of ‘rite of passage’. All I can say is that I was a guppy in a Red state, and talking to lots of young men, I still hear the stories. Lots and lots of them.
It doesn't take any special medical or psychological research to have then this insight: Who wouldn't be unhappy with their gender if their behavior was were punished all the time precisely because of their gender. And when I say all the time, in my case, probably 8am – 4pm daily, 5 days a week, from elementary school through high school. That gender-dysphoric child was me, along with hundreds and hundreds of gay men I met.
Adjusting frame, let’s talk science, and what would have happened to me with PB.
Gender-dysphoric children are primarily LGB
For children with gender dysphoria, the data, gathered now for decades, is growing more and more certain. The vast majority - I don't mean like 55%, but closer to 95% of children with gender unhappiness (more than the 60% - 80% I quoted) are quite simply LGB – Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual. Don’t take my word for it having spoken personally, intimately to thousands of gay men over 40 years, lets look at studies on gender dysphoria in children — look at the Cis column, the percent that resolve to a cis-gender LGB.
Year
Sex
Sample
Cis
Study
1972
Males
16
75%
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4111167/
1978
94%
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010440X78900196?via%3Dihub
1979
9
100%
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-33886-001
1986
8
88%
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3800642/
1987
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3614045/
44
98%
https://www.amazon.com/Sissy-Boy-Syndrome-Development-Homosexuality/dp/0300036965/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=green+sissy+boys&qid=1584793922&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-1
1995
Mixed
45
80%
https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Disorder-Psychosexual-Adolescents-Hardcover/dp/B00ZT0C7WU/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=zucker+bradley&qid=1584793813&sr=8-1
2008
77
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23449293_Psychosexual_Outcome_of_Gender-Dysphoric_Children
Females
25
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5657572_A_Follow-Up_Study_of_Girls_With_Gender_Identity_Disorder
2012
139
https://images.nymag.com/images/2/daily/2016/01/SINGH-DISSERTATION.pdf
2013
127
71%
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23702447/
96%
Nobody reads the stuff, but I do, that's part of my being annoying and precise. There isn’t any scientific criteria for absolute differentiation between the 95% LGB cis children like me, and the other 5% children, both with identical clinical gender-dysphoric symptoms (like mine). I’ve been reading on the subject for decades. If there is, I’d love to see the data. It’s a problem. People in the medical community don't like to admit there are problems.
Puberty is the signal event which changes most dysphoric children into their adult cis-male state.
As I wrote previously:
That means for profoundly unhappy guppys like I was, there would be a 90-95% chance of shuttling them into a program involving PB’s, which would create simply perpetuate the dysphoria. Consider me now through the next passages, because this is my feeling, and nauseating experience reading the science.
Chemical Experimentation on Children
If you are extremely sensitive, I suggest avoiding the next section because I’m going to be using scary, specific, textbook-type medical terminology for exactly what happens to a guppy on PB’s, the guppy like me who will turn into a gay male adult. No euphemisms and flowery phrases.
First understand that the entire purpose of PB is to eliminate all primary (genital) and secondary (muscle, face, larynx, bone, hair) development in a child. These traits develop because of puberty, ergo a PB quite specifically “blocks” genital, muscle, face, larynx, bone, and hair pattern development in the child entirely, to give them ‘time to assess’ their gender, which presupposes a child of 10 or 11 has the wisdom of some combination of Solomon and Hal-9000, but I’m being snarky aren’t I.
An injection of a long-release chemical under their skin starts the process, which creates a chemical signal to their pituitary gland. Lupron and similar chemicals are the most frequently cited for use, which is technically an “off label” use, meaning it’s never been assessed by the FDA for efficacity or safety for that use as PB. Yes, non-FDA approved drugs, but I digress.
Testicular atrophy
The pituitary gland, which governs, coordinates and harmonizes phased body growth, ceases to stimulate a chemical pathway nudging the male child’s testicles to progress along their natural growth path. They stop growing and what little growth they have made atrophies, the little beans that were becoming hazelnuts shrink away. That’s actually why these hormones are so vital for prostate cancer, because a cancer stimulated by testosterone rages on, a Chemical Castration agent, otherwise known as a PB in this context, halts testosterone. Likewise, estrogen produced by a process called aromatization from the child’s testosterone simply disappears. The child’s source of estrogen vital for bone growth and maturation, also disappears, and a mild form of osteoporosis begins (think of commercials for elderly women and treatments for osteoporosis).
Micropenis
At 10 or 11 years old, in absence of testosterone due to the PB, their penis ceases to grow. Don’t take my word for it, check Seattle Children’s Hospital, they’re a bit more honest. https://www.seattlechildrens.org/pdf/PE2572.pdf The gay cis male child is frozen at what is called a Tanner stage 1 or 2 for genital development. Note, growth doesn't slow down, it halts completely. Between around 10 and 11, the child has probably 4-5 years when the penis grows to adult size, where normal testosterone production is harmonized with other growth hormone regulation. It doubles, and doubles or triples in size again up to around age 16 or 17, while in some children it may continue to grow a little beyond that.
The effect of the PB in precisely these years is to render the genitals child-like permanently – they cannot spontaneously grow again after their natural age-aligned growth period has passed. Ask a pediatrician, don’t take my word for it. Ask for a study on specifically “PB Reversal outcomes”. There really aren’t any. None. Zero.
Parents have now intentionally medically induced a physical abnormality in their gay cis male child (me, let’s say) called "micropenis" or "microphallus". This is called, a great word, iatrogenic disease, meaning medically induced. Ask a pediatrician, don’t take my word for it. Let’s add the mild osteoporosis at this point, and begin Estrogen, or “cross-hormone” therapy to improve bone fragility . With the estrogen but not testosterone now, the male child can become completely sterile for life, even with halting the so-called “Puberty Blocker”, because the penis will not really grow, and with application of estrogens, well call it a day for the testicles.
People can assert over and over and over that PB are “reversible”, and I completely agree! Just as, you know, Adderall is reversible, as well as Aspirin. You just stop giving it to the child. But the dissembling statement is to say the effects are reversible, because the effects on growth during this crucial window are irreversible. The effects on genital growth, for starts, aren’t reversible. Realize that the entire logical premise of puberty blockers is to irreversibly halt all primary and secondary sexual characteristics of a child, that’s why it’s called a PB. I’m wrong? Show me a chart of Tanner progress for children after 16 with reversible blockers. It’s not a complex idea.
If it was a “Puberty Delayer”, why don’t they call it that?
Now, what kind of a parent wants to effectively eliminate the genitals of their gay cis male child? I mean, you’re bullied and unhappy guppy just like I was, but to make it all better now your genitals are intentionally medically atrophied.
Slightly nauseated, I am. I’m quite a bit more than nauseated, but the PB side-show just keeps on going.
That just the outside of the genitals folks.
Failure to Orgasm
With a micropenis, and no testosterone to complete maturation of the nerve system in the genitals as well to develop sexual responses – the guppy on BP doesn’t get erections, it's not unusual to have the case that the gay cis male child cannot have orgasm - not just sterility (the testicles are non-functional), but never having masturbated to orgasm, never having the nerve pathways developed, the child may possibly never have an orgasm ever.
Forget being bullied, you’ve been zeroed out down there! Wow, didn’t see that.
You know what? There’s no research on this. Nothing! I can’t find a single piece of research on orgasmic response of cis gay male children which have had PB’s withdrawn, none. I can’t find a single piece of research on the resumption of penis growth for gay cis male children who stop PB. None. Zero. I can find ample anecdotal problems of people who have had PBs, and who now have dysfunctional sexual response, but anecdotes aren’t research. I speak for gender dysphoric gay cis male children not a large number of others who have gone through PB.
That is, the 80%-95% of dysphoric children, like I was.
If you don't develop the nerves when they are supposed to be growing by stimulation, those neural pathways don't connect, and can atrophy, as well as the brain pathways of sexual response and orgasm. The child is never allowed to synchronize ordinary sexual maturation, exploration, harmonization between external and internal mind-body models, non-genital maturation, for a body configured to expect testosterone as the consequence of ordinary growth phases.
The old saying "use it or lose it" is more than metaphorically relevant.
What kind of a parent would risk their child never having orgasm?
Forget being bullied, you’ve had your sexual life cancelled – what a caring response. Wow, didn’t see that coming!
I’m now both nauseated, and angry, as well any human with feelings should be. Dramatic? I hope so. Consider the stakes. I have a lot of emotion about this.
Total Lack of Data on Efficacy and Safety as PB
Now, about efficacy and safety of “puberty blockers”. First, there are no statistically reputable studies which reasonable medical researchers would consider scientific in methodology to find supporting PB as a means to help with gender dysphoria. Surprising, of course, because so many medical organizations have given their imprimatur of “it’s a good thing”. I mean, medical doctors participated in calling for essentially ignoring COVID, why they were in the CDC last year, what could go wrong with doctors!
Let me speak as a scientist by training, thought of course I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist, endocrinologist but I can read standard written english.
Typically, in study on a medical treatment with such life-altering effects you’d organize to take two or three randomized groups - say two sets of 1000 children with gender dysphoria at the same age, mental wellness, family support, and a host of demographically leveled other variables. Three sets because you also probably need a randomized group of children for which there isn’t any kind of specific dysphoria, other than the general unease that all teenagers have during puberty, more on that in a moment. No currently available study actually has randomized sample groups, they’re all referred or self-selected, or other maximally biased sample leading into therapeutic study. Why is this important?
Biased “Studies”
Imagine you wanted to test for prevalence of, say, Covid infections in a population last April, and you put an ad on Facebook for people who wanted to be tested for infection as part of a study. You’d of course expect a massive bias towards people who present symptoms, are worried, and if that were your study, you’d surmise that maybe 10% - 20% of the population actually had Covid. That’s precisely what happened for a study which was undertaken, overseen by a Stanford Doctor in infectious disease economics. And the study was laughed away as failing even elementary arithmetic, much less study design. Imagine, a biased Republican medical doctor, from Stanford no less!
Back to PB. For those sets of children you’d provide randomized neutral counseling ensuring that the therapist set must be variety of cis- and non-cis, gay, straight, bisexual, male and female in permutations to assure that therapeutic mindset bias due to gender confirmation, actual gender, and sexual preference is not a confounding variable. That is something which changes the outcome in a way unrelated to the actual question at hand. The therapists and adjunct mental health treatment must be carefully designed specifically to help them cope with and manage the feelings of dysphoria through puberty. You’d have to be quite clever in the treatment protocol, because often non-affirmational therapy, which is to say neutral therapy, is often perceived as hostility. Fascinating, I can’t find any “non-affirmational therapy” studies.
This therapeutic clinician randomization is quite important in my view. Imagine you had a study on abortion and mental health outcomes for women who undertook abortion or didn’t, and the therapists were all Christian fundamentalists who claimed to have neutral bias outlooks on counseling. I think we all know where those studies go!
Children and Suicide
You’d choose a critical measure for both groups, say suicidal ideation, rage indices, there are many to measure unhappiness. Since suicide is the third leading cause of death for teenagers, it’s vitally important that you have a reference set of children (the third group) who are randomly sampled to test for prevalence of suicidal ideation, so you understand how often children contemplate it irrespective of their dysphoria, which is quite often. You do know what I’m going to say. Studies in PB don’t normalize for population prevalence of suicidal ideation. Perhaps PB increases suicidal ideation compared to typical teens over the length of the study. We don’t know!
At the beginning of the study period you’d sample the children for your measures, then sample them as they go through the process of puberty in time, and then at the end of puberty. You’d compare the two (three) groups for the critical measures; you’d see how many resolved their gender dysphoria. You’d then do a follow-up after a certain number of years, periodically for quite some time. You then measure the efficacity of the PB drug. You know what I’m going to say. Of course, there are no measures of efficacy.
Remember the 94% number for Covid vaccinations for Moderna, and 80% for J&J, and so on? In a randomized sample population of 30,000 people who got the vaccination, 11 got COVID while in the placebo population 185 got Covid, so the efficacity lets see: (185/15000) – (11/15000) / (185/15000) = 94%.
You compare outcomes in our guppy experiment exactly the same way – for group A with PB, compared with group B without PB, what was the efficacity of PB – 100%? 50% Or would you find that A and B were identical – 0% efficacity of PB. Guess what. There’s no data on PB therapy like this, no reports, nothing. Zero.
What there is consists of non-randomized experimentation on children, without controls, or comparative responses. Wow! They don’t tell you that do they. The UK High court found this ethically unconscionable in a recent case.
Medicalization of Child Sexuality
So let’s summarize the science, and read it more like a medical advertisement which is forced legally to disclose realities of treatment, unlike speculative, anonymous social media.
Welcome to this advertisement for PB’s for your male clinically gender-dysphoric child and Suprefact® (Buserelin) / Zoladex® (Goserelin) / Supprelin® LA (histrelin) / Lupron® (Leuprorelin) / Synarel® (Nafarelin) / Decapeptyl® (Triptorelin)
(Ideally, a picture with art-directed rainbow-colors and laughing happy children, and one child moving in incredibly slow motion with a cloudy unhappy expression looking in a mirror glancing down to… then out a window, hey, that’s me!)
You should know that your clinically gender-dysphoric male child, has a 90-95% probability of growing up totally happy and normally as LGB cis male should you choose to let them go through natural puberty.
(Avoid showing a gay male couple holding hands and walking unnaturally slowly, or a laughing attractive photogenic lesbian couple kissing, avoid two women holding hands with a man blowing bubbles).
There are other options. Your child can be provided mental health therapeutic support for the child during this period with or without a hormonal Reversible PB, which is an off-label use unapproved by the FDA for gender-dysphoria due to lack of efficacity, safety, and long-term clinical outcomes.
(speed up the person speaking until unintelligible, show an androgynous teenage child painting nails and laughing)
This Reversible PB therapy for your child has an unknown and unmeasured efficacity in reducing or eliminating suicidal thoughts or feelings compared with non PB therapy or natural puberty alone. Suicide is the third highest cause of teenage death irrespective of gender dysphoria and Reversible PB therapy may not decrease or can increase suicidal thought later in the child’s life relative to naturally maturing similar teenage cohorts. The side-effects of Reversible PB therapy are possible lifetime genital atrophy, osteoporosis, sterility, and loss or elimination of orgasmic response, issues with mental development and maturation.
(child looks out window again at heterosexual couples walking unnaturally slowly)
Deaths have not occurred due to use of PB’s, but long-term effects including depression and self-harm are unknown.
(cut back to androgynous teenage child flipping hair and looking in a mirror)
Suprefact® (Buserelin) / Zoladex® (Goserelin) / Supprelin® LA (histrelin) / Lupron® (Leuprorelin) / Synarel® (Nafarelin) / Decapeptyl® (Triptorelin)
Because it’s never too early.
Final disclaimer. Again, for everyone, I’m speaking exclusively of my experience and feelings as a gay cis-male man, and what I view as an abomination of chemical experimentation perpetuated on children exactly like me. I speak for no other groups and any interpretation of such is entirely a figment of the reader’s imagination.
178
