Removing the Possibility of Normal from Children

Your “trans kid” is never going to give you grandchildren

If you trans your prepubertal child, this will never be you. Photo by Daria Trofimova on Unsplash

One fact that the trans lobby tries very hard to hide is that if you have put your child on puberty blockers, the chances of them going onto cross sex hormones is nearly 100%. The cumulative endpoint of this is that they will end up reproductively sterile, due to primary infertility. Once they are chronologically adult, they will never have to wrestle with the question of “do I want to have (biological) children?” because they will be unable to produce eggs or sperm and as chronologically adult women, they will be permanently menopausal, so unable to gestate and carry a baby to term.

If as teens or young adults, people get cancer and need treatment or procedures that are going to affect their future fertility, they may be offered fertility preservation (FP) techniques in the hope of restoring their ability to become parents once they are older and returned to a state of good health.

This is only possible in those who have actually experienced their developmentally normal puberty, so excludes those children who have had their life course stunted by exogenous hormonal treatments, designed to prevent them from experiencing puberty altogether.

Use of the so-called Dutch protocol for “gender affirming care” as a reason to mutilate the bodies and minds of legions of young girls (and boys) is on a par with the Tuskegee study of syphilis in Black men, which was started before syphilis could be treated, but left to continue for decades after a cure was found, leading to agonizing health problems and deaths for these men, their wives and their children. I wrote about this here:

Looking Back from the Future

Pediatric cancers are an unwanted family tragedy, but a gender dysphoric child is not

The only existing model for FP comes from the practice of oncology (the medical specialty that treats people with cancer). Clearly this is easier in adults than in children, as (except for men with autogynephilia), the majority of adults today are too old to have been irreparably damaged by “gender affirming care”. Adults who have their bodies intact and have gone through normal puberty have options that children don’t have when it comes to their future reproductive choices following cancer treatments that can leave them sterile.

One of the advantages in dealing with adult patients is the fact that adults have a better understanding of adult issues, including having children, than any child ever can have. (As an aside, your average nine-year-old cannot have any conception of what life would be like as an adult without any ability to have a pleasurable sex life.)

A reproductively able male can provide sperm, which can be frozen and used later to make him a dad, and adult females can have their eggs harvested and frozen “as is” or combine them with a partner’s sperm which gives them frozen embryos that later may be implanted back into their uterus for gestating a baby.

According to this source, “research among adolescent and young adult cancer survivors reveals that 80% and 68% of male patients can recall being offered information about potential fertility impairment and referral to fertility preservation service, but the figures for female patients are only 48% and 14%, respectively”.

In part, this lack of discussion about an uncertain future makes sense when you are just praying to stay alive; focusing on something as obscure as future parenthood rather pales into insignificance when it’s being weighed against survival.

Children who come out as transgendered are not in this category. If their “gender dysphoria” is not “treated” with hormones and surgery plans, they are not going to die the way that young untreated cancer patients will. Despite the propaganda of the trans lobby, suicide is not the likely outcome of failing to receive “gender affirming care”.

This myth has been used to bully, threaten and cajole many people into believing that rejecting the confused thinking of children is a death sentence for them. It is not.

This systematic review looked at the desire for future parenthood in gender diverse adolescents and found it was around 50%; this included those who had no interest in biological parenthood. (I am guessing that the number of teens not under the influence of gender dysphoria would have similar interests in future parenthood.)

The bit that no one says out loud

Reading through the research on FP in children, two things are soon apparent. That the pediatric cancer studies are the template for those children who are going to end up infertile thanks to the irresponsible adults who celebrate “trans kids” and that the TRAs who push this crap are not being honest with either the child patients or their parents around the topic of their future reproductive opportunities.

Puberty/adolescence is a unique stage of mammalian development, and it is the gateway to full adulthood. It is vital for a species’ reproductive success because the maturation that occurs during this phase prepares brains, bodies and gametes for parenthood. As with every other phase of normal development, in humans this takes longer and it happens within the environment of families, unlike some other animals, where their “teen” time is when they leave home to find their own personal space away from their families of origin.

Starkly stated, “gender affirming care” and future parenthood are often totally incompatible.

The limits to Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART)

The amazing features of ART and advances in cryobiology (freezing and successfully thawing human tissue) have enabled infertile men and women to become fathers and mothers who previously never would have been able to be biological parents. Additionally, the same technology has been successfully employed in endangered animal breeding programs and in creating breeding diversity in small, endangered populations. It has also given hope to many cancer patients who are aware that the gonadotoxic drug therapies, essential for saving their lives, might reduce their fertility or even cause permanent infertility.

But enough about adults, let’s talk about the kids, specifically those who have been denied the human right of normal development because the adults caring for them have prevented them from experiencing puberty. For those who decide later on that perhaps they weren’t trans after all, what are their choices in regard to having their own biological children? Here is a video where detransitioner Chloe Cole explains in detail about how her supported transition harmed her and her sadness when she realizes that she may never be able to have children.

It needs to be understood that puberty is an amazingly complex phase of development; there is so much more going on than girls getting breasts and boys getting facial hair!

In my opinion, the most profound loss caused by puberty blockers is that these children will live forever with immature brains, which I wrote about here:

Time Critical Brain Development

You can’t fool Mother Nature and puberty blockers work so well that unless children quit them fairly soon after starting them, the damage is permanent. Their gametes (ova and sperm) will remain forever in a prepubertal stage of development so will be reproductively useless.

Fertility preservation in boys

I’m talking about boys first because their options are limited to none if they begin their gender transition at the recommended point of Tanner stage 2 (any time from age nine to fourteen). At this point, they are not yet producing viable sperm, so there is nothing to collect by way of either ejaculation or by surgically extracting sperm. In theory, there is an experimental technique which involves freezing slices of testicular tissue, but this is not done as it is highly invasive and so far, has never worked in humans; there has been some limited success in mice.

Fertility preservation in girls

Girls face similar problems in that the eggs (that all human females are born with) are immature until puberty changes them into ova that can be released and fertilized, but by starting puberty blockers at Tanner stage 2, they remain in their prepubertal state.

In vitro egg maturation uses harvested immature eggs that can be (sometimes) matured outside of the ovaries, but this only works for fully adult women who cannot safely undergo the ovarian hyperstimulation that is required in the normal egg retrieval used in IVF. However, even this technique only has a chance of working on eggs that have not been frozen, so is ethically impossible to perform this procedure on prepubertal girls.

Ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) involves surgically removing a strip of ovarian tissue, which is frozen and transplanted back into the woman it was taken from as a girl. So far, there have been four live births to women who underwent cancer treatment as girls and successful ovarian tissue transplants as women.

There are no methods that can come close to guaranteeing that live babies will result from any of these FP techniques.

So, what does the pro-trans research tell us?

This study on access to FP talked about the need for discussions to take place before the commencement of “gender affirming care” in an informed consent model, but the youngest participants in this text-based survey were 14 years old, so were in essence, too old for puberty blockers.

This follow up study (by two of the same authors) was a qualitative exploration of 13 trans/nonbinary young people and their experiences of FP options. The study participants ranged in age from “late teens” to “early 30s”, so once again were not part of the puberty blocker/cross sex hormones sterility cohort.

This in-depth article looks at FP options for trans and nonbinary individuals and lists the options for prepubertal children. These all involve surgery requiring a general anesthetic and admit that these procedures are experimental, will not work now, but at some point, in a far distant future, might be possibly successful.

This literature review of the ethics of FP in those people who identify as transgendered found (like every other source I could find), that the only FP options for prepubertal children receiving “gender affirming care” are experimental and question the ethical framework around young children’s “informed consent” abilities to participate in procedures which yield such uncertain outcomes.

It needs to be understood that in the context of all of this research, “experimental” is a code word for “these methods don’t work”.

Said no parent, ever. All those social media posts celebrating “my kid’s on blockers!” are really saying this. Photo by isaiah thomas on Unsplash

Removing your child’s choice to be well

Clearly, I made up the caption to the above photo, but one does not have to put any effort into finding similar pictures from parents ordering the world to “celebrate” the discovery that their children are “trans”.

The prime parental duty is to safeguard our children, which sometimes means telling them “no”. Those parents who facilitate the process of “being trans” are neglecting their primary responsibility to their kids, cementing in any uncomfortable feelings they may have about themselves and greatly limiting those children’s future decision making options.

As I wrote here:

“There Is No Way to Live a Life Without Regret”

“[N]o parent should have the right to make a decision to allow children to chop off healthy body parts in a vain quest to ease mental discomfort that may only be temporary”.

That goes for making decisions that mean that your children will never be able to feel the sheer joy of their own children.