Study Finds Almost No Good Evidence on Gender Dysphoria Drugs for Young People
Based on current evidence, it’s impossible to say whether puberty blockers and hormone therapy are helpful or harmful for young people with gender-related distress, according to two new papers published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood journal.
In these two meta-analyses, Canadian researchers looked at prior studies on puberty blockers and “gender-affirming hormone therapy” (GAHT) in minors and young adults up to age 26.
Puberty blockers are hormonal medications meant to suppress sex hormones in adolescents, with the aim of delaying puberty and its associated physical changes. Hormone therapy for gender dysphoria uses masculinizing or feminizing hormones to induce secondary sex characteristics that align with one’s gender identity.
Both interventions have become popular for treating young people who express discomfort with the sex or gender to which they were born—aka gender dysphoria. Proponents say such treatments are vital for the psychological health and social acceptance of transgender youth. Detractors worry about potential long-term effects and suggest that doctors are too quick to prescribe these medications, handing them out to people for whom psychological interventions (or simply the passage of time) may be a more appropriate remedy.
In the first of the two new analyses, a team of researchers led by McMaster University’s Anna Miroshnychenko looked at evidence from 10 studies on the effects of puberty blockers. Three of these studies compared patients given puberty blockers to those who were not, while the others assessed patients before and after being treated with puberty blockers. In both sets of
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