In Brief: The Truth About ‘Puberty Blockers’
The FDA hasn’t approved them for gender dysphoria, and their effects are serious and permanent.
Some states are becoming “sanctuaries” for “gender-affirming care,” and there’s even a push to take away or hamper parental rights when it comes to hormone therapy or body-altering surgery for minors. Gerald Posner, author of Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America, argues that using puberty blockers on kids “borders on child abuse.”
We only disagree in using the words “borders on.”
The fashion for transgenderism has brought with it a new euphemism: “gender-affirming care,” which means surgical and pharmacological interventions designed to make the body look and feel more like that of the opposite sex. Gender-affirming care for children involves the use of “puberty blockers”: one of five powerful synthetic drugs that block the natural production of sex hormones.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved those medications to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, certain types of infertility and a rare childhood disease caused by a genetic mutation. But it has never approved them for gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the belief that one’s body is the wrong sex.
Thus the drugs, led by AbbVie’s Lupron, are prescribed to minors “off label.” (They are also used off-label for chemical castration of repeat sex offenders.) Off-label dispensing is legal; some half of all prescriptions in the U.S. are for off-label uses. But off-label use circumvents the FDA’s authority to examine drug safety and efficacy, especially when the patients are children. Some U.S. states have eliminated the need for parental consent for teens as young as 15 to start puberty blockers.
Advocates of using Lupron and the like “contend there is little downside,” Posner writes. They insist the effects are “reversible,” pose no threat, and been used safely for decades, though they ignore or suppress evidence to the contrary. “These drugs ‘effectively 'lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,‘ according to a report by Britain’s National Health Service.” Another example, he writes, is this:
The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed in 2017 that the FDA had received more than 10,000 adverse event reports from women who were given Lupron off-label as children to help them grow taller. They reported thinning and brittle bones, teeth that shed enamel or cracked, degenerative spinal disks, painful joints, radical mood swings, seizures, migraines and suicidal thoughts. Some developed fibromyalgia. There were reports of fertility problems and cognitive issues.
The FDA in 2016 ordered AbbVie to add a warning that children on Lupron might develop new or intensified psychiatric problems. Transgender children are at least three times as likely as the general population to have anxiety, depression and neurodevelopmental disorders. Last year, the FDA added another warning for children about the risk of brain swelling and vision loss.
Fortunately, a number of Republican-led states are working to ban such science experiments on children. Many European countries likewise are protecting the kids. Posner concludes:
Gender-affirming care for children is undoubtedly a flashpoint in America’s culture wars. It is also a human experiment on children and teens, the most vulnerable patients. Ignoring the long-term dangers posed by unrestricted off-label dispensing of powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, combined with the large overdiagnosis of minors as gender dysphoric, borders on child abuse.
