A surgeon who has performed thousands of sex change operations has publicly said that, in their observation, “every single [male] child or adolescent” who takes puberty blockers before puberty, in preparation for later changing their sex, will never have normal adult sexual function or experience orgasm.
Dr Marci Bowers, an American surgeon who specialises in sex changes, made the comment during a recent symposium at Duke University. The Dr said that ““Every single child who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 has never experienced orgasm…I mean it’s really about zero.” Tanner stage 2 refers to the Tanner scale, which measures the development of primary and secondary sex characteristics – stage 2 marks the beginning of puberty, usually at around 11-14 years old for males.
Duke University describes Bowers as “a pioneer in the field of Gender Affirming Surgery” who has “performed more than 2250 primary MTF Gender Affirming Vaginoplasties and more than 3900 Gender Affirming Surgeries.” Dr Bowers is themselves transgender and is President-elect of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Dr Bowers said that this lack of adult sexual function is because boys who begin taking puberty blockers prior to the natural start of puberty, are “never exposed to testosterone.” Dr Bowers said that these adolescents, as they become adults, are “going to have some sensation, there’s no question about that.”
Dr Bowers told the symposium that the observation had been a “red flag” to them and that “we need to have our eyes open about this.”
The Irish Independent has reported that Tte HSE has sent children as young as 5 to the Tavistock Clinic in the UK for assessment and treatment, which can include the usage of puberty blockers. In December of 2020 the High Court in London, in the Bell v Tavistock case, ruled that puberty blockers were an “experimental treatment” with “non-existent” evidence for their usage in young children, that it was “highly unlikely” that children under 16 were able to consent to such treatments, and that the treatments could cause “irreversible” changes to a child in the most “fundamental way possible.”
Following this judgement, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which is part of the English Department of Health, was commissioned to carry out research into the evidence behind administering puberty blockers to children. That review said that the evidence available was of “very low certainty” and that studies into the area are “not reliable.”
All the studies considered by the review were deemed to “lack reasonable controls; to be “subject to bias and confounding”; to be “of very low certainty”; and all reported “physical and mental health comorbidities and concomitant treatments very poorly.”
Loading ...