I know someone who as a teenager was in an abusive relationship, insecure about themselves, pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months. The doctors and therapists just handed over the prescription, not questions asked. They now sorely regret ever having taken blockers, and are hoping it hasn't damaged their fertility too much.

> pushed into taking these experimental treatments for a few months

It's a shame that this person was in such a difficult situation, but, barring some extraordinarily rare reaction, a few months would not cause long term problems. The full impact takes several years, by 3-6 months the very first changes are only starting to become visible and many of them are things like changes to skin quality and fat distribution which revert after cessation.

It's still possibly a failure that your acquaintance got on HRT or Lupron in the first place. Given that long term follow ups show, consistently, that less than 2% of trans youth "desist" and are happy with their treatments, the reasonable solution to that failure would be to require some sort of evaluation by a therapist who has been trained to spot when someone has gender dysphoria and belongs to that 98% of happy transitioners versus someone from the 2% group that will desist because their issues came from somewhere else.

Instead of that sort of reasonable response, we see calls for outright bans on all treatment with many also calling for banning treatment for adults and a reversion to conversion therapy as the only "treatment" - it's not a treatment because it doesn't work and just hurts people.

The reason for this, is that the vast majority of people who suddenly have such strong opinions on trans health care are not actually concerned about people's health. They've just found a way to make their prejudices against transgender people sound like reasonable concerns.

A few months of blockers won't do much of anything in the long run. The risk of osteoporosis in the absence of sex hormones is well-known to endocrinologists, and they account for it. Even a few months of cross-sex hormones will do very little. It takes at least six months before anything irreversible happens.

And "someone who did this under duress regretted it hence no one should do this" isn't a sound argument.

I'm talking about children. Look at the charts here. [1] Why is the number of children experiencing this "gender dysphoria" skyrocketing? It should be linear, not exponential. There is a mental craze driving this, which is extremely profitable for the medical industry. This industry is preying on children to make a profit, justifying all the research on the small percentage of trans adults that actually need this treatment.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...

Why would it be linear? The reasons it's increasing is because people no longer feel as much pressure to hide their true identity. It's the same reason that the number of left handed people doubled from 1920 to 1960 [1], it's not a conspiracy it's just the way social norms work

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/07/americas-...

Right, it's not like mental illnesses can spread memetically:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/tics-and-tiktok-can-soci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime

> Why is the number of children experiencing this "gender dysphoria" skyrocketing

because it's more socially acceptable to discuss these issues than it was 50 years ago...

that goes both ways though

it is also undoubtedly true that it is more rewarding on a political level to not have any doubt on these issues than it was just 10 years ago.

Entire careers have been built on it. On both sides.

But, incredibly enough, the ones on the "precaution" approach are on the far right side.

If we saw the same increase in cases of kids having mental health issues, which is also more socially acceptable to talk about than 50 years ago, we would be worried sick, we would ask why it happened and what caused it, not simply treat the symptoms and call it a definitve solution.

studies would also show that their life is better than when they were not treated, but is relying on anti depressants really a good life?

is asking the question proof that the person asking hates (or is phobic of), for some reason, people with mental health issues?

Yes, I have. Some trans adults really need these treatments, but that does not explain the 1000% increase in so-called "trans kids" over the past 2-3 years.