Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I know someone who as a teenager was in an abusive relationship, insecure about themselves, pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months. The doctors and therapists just handed over the prescription, not questions asked. They now sorely regret ever having taken blockers, and are hoping it hasn't damaged their fertility too much.



> pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months

It's a shame that this person was in such a difficult situation, but, barring some extraordinarily rare reaction, a few months would not cause long term problems. The full impact takes several years, by 3-6 months the very first changes are only starting to become visible and many of them are things like changes to skin quality and fat distribution which revert after cessation.

It's still possibly a failure that your acquaintance got on HRT or Lupron in the first place. Given that long term follow ups show, consistently, that less than 2% of trans youth "desist" and are happy with their treatments, the reasonable solution to that failure would be to require some sort of evaluation by a therapist who has been trained to spot when someone has gender dysphoria and belongs to that 98% of happy transitioners versus someone from the 2% group that will desist because their issues came from somewhere else.

Instead of that sort of reasonable response, we see calls for outright bans on all treatment with many also calling for banning treatment for adults and a reversion to conversion therapy as the only "treatment" - it's not a treatment because it doesn't work and just hurts people.

The reason for this, is that the vast majority of people who suddenly have such strong opinions on trans health care are not actually concerned about people's health. They've just found a way to make their prejudices against transgender people sound like reasonable concerns.


A few months of blockers won't do much of anything in the long run. The risk of osteoporosis in the absence of sex hormones is well-known to endocrinologists, and they account for it. Even a few months of cross-sex hormones will do very little. It takes at least six months before anything irreversible happens.

And "someone who did this under duress regretted it hence no one should do this" isn't a sound argument.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: