You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.

I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing

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Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim.

> I asked Claude...

There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research

Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.

Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.

Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.

So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.

	▲	space_fountain 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned. There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress. If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that. And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18