Mayo Clinic Study Raises Serious Questions about ‘Reversibility’ of Puberty Blockers
Sex Change Surgery for Minors Could be ‘Greatest Ethical Scandal in the History of Medicine’’.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that in 2022, I did a safety assessment of drugs known as “puberty blockers” that were being given to children were staring “gender affirming care”. I specifically looked at the 2 compounds Planned Parenthood cited in their ads glamorizing the treatment and concluded:
I find it difficult to believe that the shrinking of organs, and effects like bone loss, are either “safe” or “irreversible.” Tweaking hormonal biochemistry in someone’s body on that scale is likely to affect blood pressure, sleep patterns, weight, and many other impacts. Just ask anyone who has experienced significant changes in their hormone levels via menopause!
Now a team at the Mayo Clinic has published a study that aligns with many of the same concerns I had over these questionable claims.
Mayo Clinic experts say puberty blockers can lead to withering testicles, fertility problems and even cancer among the trans kids who take them, in the latest study to raise alarm about transgender medicine.
The findings cast doubt on the ‘reversibility’ of puberty blockers — a key claim of the trans activists who promote the drugs, saying they only ‘pause’ puberty and buy time for trans kids to make decisions about their gender.
Instead, researchers say puberty blockers hurt the development of testicles and sperm production in ways that are not fully reversible and could affect users’ ability to have children when they grow up.
The drugs also lead to changes that have been linked with certain cancers.
In the case of one 12-year-old boy who was treated with puberty blockers for 14 months, nearly 60% of his sex glands became “fully atrophied,” and small clusters of calcium formed in his testicles, according to the study.
These calcium clusters are linked to cancer, several studies have found, although it is not clear whether they are a risk factor by themselves.
The study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and was published on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s BioRxiv. BioRxiv sees two-thirds of its papers later published in peer-reviewed journals.
The samples used for the study come from the Mayo Clinic’s Pediatric Testicular Biobank for Fertility Preservation. The research aimed at focusing on identifying the actual impacts of puberty blockers on the young.
To address these unknowns, the Mayo Clinic has established the largest collection of testicular samples for patients aged 0-17 years, including those with gender dysphoria who have and have not yet received puberty blocker treatment, creating a database of over 130,000 individual cells for analysis.
Using a novel approach, the research team meticulously analyzed testicular tissue samples from youths undergoing puberty blocker treatment, with those not on puberty blocker treatment serving as controls. This comparison provides important insights into the potential cellular and molecular changes induced by these drugs.
Per the Mayo Clinic research team found mild-to-severe sex gland atrophy in puberty blocker (PB) treated children.
….[C]ombined with the noted gland atrophy and abnormalities from the histology data raise a potential concern regarding the complete ’reversibility’ and reproductive fitness of SSC [spermatogonial stem cell]. The biorepository, data, and research approach presented in this study provide unique opportunity to explore the impact of PB on testicular reproductive health.
Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, cites other studies that also challenge the woke messaging on puberty blockers.
…The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones.
Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percent of kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.
There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.”
I will conclude this piece with the assessment of the French Senate on push for sex change procedures on youths.
French Senators want to ban gender transition treatments for under-18s, after a report described sex reassignment in minors as potentially “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine”.
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Comments
You take a chemical sledgehammer to a person’s normal hormonal development at a critial moment, they’re never going to turn out the way they should. Anyone with an iota of cognition should realize there’s nothing “reversable” about that. It’s all finely tuned and specifically timed.
This. And anyone who says otherwise is either evil or an idiot.
And I doubt that very many of them are idiots.
It appears that taking puberty blockers does not make you a female. It makes you a eunuch.
And that’s the best case scenario. Another scenario – and perhaps the more likely scenario – is it makes you a eunuch who’s now predisposed to a number of hormone-related ailments, including cancer, that will manifest themselves at some future point.
It’s also the best case scenario for the globalist swamp. Depopulation is a primary goal of theirs.
What they say: Gender Affirming Care.
What they mean: Mutilation in furtherance of mental illness.
Why they do it: They are evil.
Transgenderism is just a fad.. It’s just a passing fad that will leave a trail of mutilated, broken and mentally ill people in its wake for others to deal with. Unfortunately, there’s no way to fix them and what they have is all they’ll have for the rest of their lives. There’s no way to fix it. It isn’t reversible.
In other words, it is a “suicide-enhancing” measure.
One would hope they would be able to get the proper mental treatment that they need and should have had from the start to accept what cannot be changed and be a able to have some kind of life going forward. Not a great end to it all but at least they’d have something at this point.
When I was 19, I tried to get a vasectomy. No doctor would give me one, being a childless young man. They were afraid of future lawsuits. Each and every one of these ‘doctors’ need to be sued into penury and have their licenses revoked permanently.
Wow. What a surprise. Giving young pre-pubescent male children puberty blockers does them developmental harm and isn’t reversible. Who would have thought such a thing when all the transgender advocates in the medical establishment were making the opposite claim. Now expect the gaslighting and denial from the medical establishment as they desperately attempt to avoid the massive lawsuits heading their way when these “transgender” children get older and realize just what was foisted upon them. Hope they sue the medical establishment and the doctors into oblivion.
Yes. We needed an expensive Mayo study to conclude — years too late — what every detransitioner ever interviewed has been telling us for years.
Yep. Every detransitioner has been telling us that for years in interviews. And nobody has paid one bit of attention to them. Perhaps now with actual scientific papers and data people will begin to pay more attention to the subject and we can finally put an end to the barbaric practices of administering puberty blocks and performing mutilative surgeries on pre-pubescent children solely for the purpose of changing their gender.
Funny. The stock market works exactly the opposite way. If it didn’t, I’d own Arizona by now.
They continually talk about how you brain development is not complete until you are 25. I wonder how adding this garbage to a child affects that. It sounds like you may never develop adult anatomy, are you also mentally forever a child? Is that the point of all of the this?
The other odd thing is the Mothers of these children. The person who is almost certainly the one pushing it. They, most likely, would be the same ones worried about rBGH in milk and what plastic if any they should drink from while being fully on board with massive amounts of random hormones being injected directly into their child.
With regard to the mothers:
You are correct. This is a form of Munchausen by Proxy.
But you’re not allowed to say it (and keep your license)
Anyone who has ever worked with children and their moms finds out quickly that a lot of not-mentally-healthy women have sole custody of a lot of American children.
It’s one thing for sole custody assigned to the mother almost always.
But it really is another thing for these moms to be able to put their child through these treatments.
No sane society would so blithely permit what is happening to these children.
Wow I came here to say the exact same thing…Absolutely this.
Brilliant minds think alike? It’s funnynotfunny right that in America today
a child applying for admission to a private school
will likely get a more thorough evaluation than a child brought in to be castrated
Oh well
🤷♂️
During puberty, there are major changes in the brain. Denying a child puberty and keeping them essentially in a prepubescent state for the rest of their life is criminal.
They can always have a career making Shriners’ ads.
All good points but regarding the mothers they are also heroes in their local group-think based communities (eg Cambridge and Somerville MA) and, perhaps most importantly, on social media where they will be worshiped by millions of soy boys and blue haired, fat non-binaries who think that mutilating children is the only option to prevent millions of suicides by “gender non-conforming” kids.
They carefully avert their gazes from the obscene, documented suicide / attempted suicide rates of those who DO transition.
Not to mention that these procedures are being foisted disproportionately upon children whose brains are relatively addled in the first place.
I would delighted to read that some of these abused children hired the law firms who won against the tobacco industry to sue their parents, counselors, therapists, and agencies that neutered them.
The lawyers who represented the first states got $8.2 billion in fees. Tempting.
As I recall, there was one attorney who won a cool billion all for himself.
Of course, they had the Cathedral’s winds at their backs since tobacco is consumed by low-status people, whereas suburban moms with Munchausen-by-Proxy syndrome are much higher status. But maybe we’ll soon see a preference cascade, which would be great for any firm that’s Johnny-on-the-spot.
Doctors (medical malpractice insurance companies), hospitals and drug companies. You’ll find a few billion there. The victims, unlike tobacco smokers, are/were actually defenseless children.
Insurance companies have an out: they were required by ObamaCare to cover “gender affirming care”.
It’s going to be legal warfare the likes of which we haven’t really seen. Unlike the comeuppance that Big Tobacco received, Big Pharma and Big Medical will have allies in some states that will work feverishly to indemnify them. That will probably work to some limited degree in state courts. It’s federal court where the real war will rage. It will be fascinating to watch liberal jurists contort themselves to protect big business interests from the claims of thousands upon thousands of transition victims.
Big Tobacco had Virginia and the Carolinas behind them… it just wasn’t enough
Has a similar study been done on the effects of puberty blockers on females (biological women, XX chromosome 23)?
Stop doing queer frankenstein medical experiments on children not old enough to give legal consent.
That’s the thing!!! They COULD HAVE proposed carefully designed prospective studies of these phenomena — but they did not.
They STILL could start a carefully monitored prospective evaluation of these kids, their parents, maybe even their schoolteachers. With a control group (I know, what a concept) Then, in a few years we’d actually have useful information.
But no ………… it would seem that they all just skipped right on past all norms of honest inquiry , and went directly right to DRUGS & SURGERY, SURGERY & DRUGS. Then more drugs and more surgery
If I didn’t know better , I might come to believe that dedicated public servants running our government …… are in fact working to destroy America.
No … that would be the lies and deceit and forced mandates to drive everyone – hundreds of millions of Americans – into dangerous and completely unknown medical experimentation with genetic treatment that was paraded around as a “vaccine”. Of course, both of these criminal acts of the worst sort of twisted barbarity humanity has ever seen were led by the same people.
I have said it before and I will repeat it – the Western Left are sick, deranged lunatics. They are the worst errors that the “trial and error” of evolution has ever puked onto this Earth. The sickest people who have ever been.
In a decade nobody will ever admit to having supporting this crap.
“Mistakes were made” with your children’s wedding tackle.
After reading this article’s headline, the only thing that came to mind was, “Duh!”
Making “Duh!” profitable is a researcher’s Golden Fleece.
To quote that great American philosopher, Gomer Pyle: “Surprise. Surprise. Surprise.”
Ya need a surgeon general’s warning that putting smoke into your lungs might not do them any good as well?
I would say go after not only the medical quacks who are enriching themselves at these kids’ expense, but go after the teachers and school administrators who are planting these ideas in the kids’ heads as well. They’re effectively practicing psychiatry without a license.