Yet another study showed regret rates are minimal, so yes. https://www.advocate.com/health/transgender-health/transition-regret-extremely-rare

I struggle with this.

I want to be supportive of anyone struggling to be who they are, but at the same time, I remember just how difficult and how long it took for me to really find who I am and what I see as my place. (I still struggle with that. My midlife crisis is that I no longer feel like I know who I really am anymore.)

So I hesitate when it comes to supporting someone to make a permanent, irrevocable change during a period of life that is considered the most in flux.

Both my daughters have traveled the spectrum, calling themselves straight, to bi, to gay, to pan, to trans, and back. It started at 8 and while not as dynamic now, they have settled a little bit at 14 and 12. The 12 year old likes girls and seems trans curious, while the 14 year old goes between liking boys, sometimes girls, or feeling asexual.

I wasn’t sure how to support them but at the same time, I was afraid they would make decisions that would affect a good part of their lives, based off something that was potentially transient.

I ended up telling them that I support them. That I am not telling them they are not who they say they are, but they should avoid jumping into assigning themselves a label. I tell them this age is about self exploration and finding that identity. But they have the luxury of time to explore and experience, and that the moment they box themselves into a label, then that is what they will become to the world.

My fear is them getting trapped into a supposed identity before they really know who they are.

I do not have personal experience with children who express gender dysmorphia at a young age to such an extent they want an externally driven change, so I don’t feel like I can argue in good faith.

And I also understand that the quality of life of someone who truly is trapped in the wrong gender would be much greater, were they able to transition much earlier.

So how do you know? How can you help and support someone, at that age, when everything about individual identity is still so new and unknown to them?

I think puberty blockers should be an option for those with genuine uncertainty, but trans kids should definitely be allowed to start hrt early.

It is honestly such a great example of how disingenuous liberal support of trans people is when our “rights matter,” but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t suffer an intensely traumatic childhood for no other reason than the comfort of bigots. I can’t even begin to explain how much easier my life would have been, and so many of them do just think that’s a natural and inevitable thing that trans people have to experience and not like, an arbitrary and pointlessly cruel form of systemic violence.

I just… I don’t have a horse in this race. I’m a cis dude. This should just be between some other family and their doctors/therapists to decide what’s best.

I’ve never understood that thinking. Well, I guess the whole point of it is the lack of thinking tbh.

Why would you not want every tool available for your kid? If blockers are what they need, they should get them. If they need different hormones than what their body is producing, they should get them. If they need different levels of what they’re producing, they should get them.

Shit, birth control pills are used for some very young people, and nobody freaks out at the fact of it. The freaking out is usually at the implication of someone very young having sex, not that the medication is useful in general.

We know that the outcomes are predictable for HRT, and that those outcomes are better when the person has access as early as medically possible (there are edge cases where delaying start allows for other medical care to occur first, but those are very rare). So what’s the big damn deal? There’s plenty of data on outcomes now. There’s plenty of data on regret now. Those rates are lower than cosmetic procedures for full adults getting them for non medical reasons (like nose jobs and facelifts, not reconstructions post injury).

It’s safe. It’s effective. It gives the highest probability of your kid, of anyone’s kid growing up as healthy as can be predicted. We know this because it is so much the majority outcome, and the drawbacks so minimal, that nobody that can be bothered to read the data could think otherwise. And it’s out there; might have to pirate some of it, but still.

It’s infuriating. The whole puberty blockers but not transition idea is so dumb. It’s so depressingly, boringly dumb.

Isnt puberty reversible with hrt for adults? The whole point of hrt is to reverse one hormone to another, even after puberty already happened?

Edit: Okay, i now understand. The problem with puberty is not that it is irreversible, but that it is difficult and expensive to deal with reversing those changes. It is important for trans kids to get required treatment, to not deal with those problems as adults, as trans adults must do.

Edit 2: I did a mistake in wording about my question in changes reversible with hrt, while i should have asked about more difficult and expensive surgeries. Also i want to mention, is that i did end up enough androgynous after puberty, to get biased towards thinking that it is not a big issue, which is not the case, as many trans people can get more severe effects of puberty, which are more difficult to deal with, both emotionally and finacially.