• Shrike502
    11·
    2 years ago

    Okay, I have a question and figured this might be a good place to ask anyway. I am confused about these puberty blockers. Are they not dangerous? I understand this sounds like a rightoid dogwhistle, but I am just trying to learn. The human body is a bit tricky, and it doesn’t seem prudent to just forcefully halt a process, especially one as complex as what happens during puberty. Thank you in advance.

      • Shrike502
        4·
        2 years ago

        the process is entirely reversible

        Ah, see, I did not know this part. Thank you

    • TheConquestOfBed@lemmy.ml
      11·
      2 years ago

      Additionally, most transpeople who can finally get permission for actual hormones are still using hormone blockers to keep the new ones from having to compete with the ones your body makes. The hormone that attaches to receptors first will block others from attaching (fun fact: your cells’ hormone receptors will always accept either E or T regardless of your chromosome arrangement, with the more numerous hormone outcompeting the less numerous one). So unless you’ve made adjustments to your bits, you will need to stay on blockers forever or switch to a type that’s more commonly taken with your HRT regimen. The “puberty” part of the puberty blocker is a bit of a misnomer because you can take them at any age or use them to treat reproductive-related cancers.

      One of the neat things about the human body is its adaptability. Once you introduce hormones into the mix that weren’t there before, your cells are just like “oh, okay, new instructions have arrived” and start rebuilding things. Your genes, the ones currently in all your cells, reader, contain the instructions to make both masc and fem bodies. In fact, if you had received different hormones in the womb, but everything else remained the same, you’d have a totally different body regardless of what your genes say you “should” be.

      In adulthood, this sort of change manifests as a “second puberty”, which can happen even in your 30s. A lot transpeople are sort of teenagery in adulthood, partly from social repression (coming out of your shell = really awkward) but also because your head is dealing with a lot of new info. So even if you don’t give trans kids puberty blockers, they’ll still have to do puberty again in their 20s but with the added effect of having to go through the first one they didn’t want.