Top pediatricians who promote gender ideology previously admitted that puberty blockers are not as reversible as many claim, newly surfaced videos show.
The videos come from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) educational sessions held back in September 2022, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, which obtained the clips.
On Puberty Blockers being more invasive than portrayed in media:
“Oh puberty blockers are just reversible and it’s a very noninvasive treatment,’ I would say it’s more invasive than often times the media makes it out to be or other people.” pic.twitter.com/2yXXysSvzH
— Meg Brock (@MegEBrock) January 16, 2024
On calcium deficiency:
"The puberty blockers slow that calcium accrual back into the bones quite a bit, back to the prepubertal level."
"This is a concern that not everybody is getting their piggy bank completely filled up with calcium.” pic.twitter.com/b8DBNHOet2
— Meg Brock (@MegEBrock) January 16, 2024
WPATH issues Standards of Care that are seen as the gold standard for transgender medical treatment. The Standards recommend that children be put on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and receive gender surgery. The filmed educational sessions were part of an optional transgender medical certification program for WPATH-licensed clinicians.
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One doctor voiced concerns with how “reversible” puberty blockers really are — Dr. Scott Leibowitz, who is a WPATH board member and helped lead the development of the adolescent chapter of the WPATH Standards of Care.
“I think when we just say, ‘Oh puberty blockers are just reversible and it’s a very noninvasive treatment,’ I would say it’s more invasive than often times the media makes it out to be or other people,” Leibowitz said.
“There’s challenges with puberty suppression that we have to acknowledge and that’s why it’s ‘reversible asterisks,’” Leibowitz said. “One cannot be on puberty suppression endlessly. You get to a place where physiologically, we need hormones.”
Leibowitz added that evidence is only one consideration in treating trans-identifying people. Other concerns are “ethics” and “justice for trans people.”
“We don’t rely on evidence for every single treatment we do in medicine,” Leibowitz said.
In another one of the educational sessions, Dr. Daniel Metzger, a WPATH-certified pediatric endocrinologist, describes how puberty blockers can prevent children from building up the calcium they need in their bones, potentially putting them at risk for osteoporosis.
“Normally puberty is the time of putting the calcium into your piggy bank. This is how I explain it to families. You’ve got a piggy bank for your calcium and you better get it all in by 25 because at 25 you’re going to live off that piggy bank,” Metzger said.
He continued, “The puberty blockers slow that calcium accrual back into the bones quite a bit, back to the prepubertal level. We do know that even if you look at people now age 22, if you’ve done all of this and you’ve gone off and then you go back on the hormones that you want to have, you have not caught up by age 22. Which is about the time you need to fill up your piggy bank. This is a concern that not everybody is getting their piggy bank completely filled up with calcium.”
Metzger also said more research is needed on how puberty blockers affect children’s brains.
“Obviously teenagers, their brains are changing. They’re unwiring, they’re rewiring. And if we’ve started one kid unwiring and half rewiring, and then we changed their puberty the other way and we’re unwiring, people have been trying to figure out what this does for kids’ brains,” said Metzger.
“They seem to do reasonably the same as their friends, but we’re not looking at their IQ and their learning ability and lots of other things,” the physician said.
Metzger also said that for boys, puberty blockers can prevent enough genital tissue from growing and cause problems later when they want to get a vaginoplasty, but there is not enough tissue.
The effects of puberty blockers on fertility also need more research, Metzger admitted. Puberty blockers stop boys from developing sperm, and for girls, it is unknown whether girls in early puberty would have eggs mature enough to preserve for fertility before they are put on puberty blockers.
“Kids have zero idea about their fertility,” he said.
Both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones come with serious health risks. Puberty blockers can affect bone growth and density and cause sexual dysfunction, voice damage, and infertility, among other issues. Cross-sex hormones can cause infertility, deadly blood clots, heart attacks, increased cancer risks of the breasts and ovaries, liver dysfunction, worsening psychological illness, and other serious conditions.
Meanwhile, it is more popular than ever for youth to adopt new gender identities. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year, and that number has only continued to grow.