Tbh i think my main concern if we start telling kids that they could change their gender at a young age it might just confuse them? Because i feel like a lot of kids have felt at some point where they wish to be the opposite gender because of small things like wanting to be able to play with girly/boyish toys or feeling that their sibling with the opposite gender is getting more attention than they are. Children rarely knows what they want for sure and I don't think they should be given the opportunity to go through things such as transitioning since it would leave permanent effects and they might change their minds in the future (im aware that transitioning doesn't always mean taking hormones, but there has been more cases recently where parents are giving younger kids hormones and I don't want the number to increase). Idk would love to hear your opinion on this though.
This is actually a very good question because I think this is a common concern for people not super involved in trans circles.
The short answer is that there is a framework already in place for transition under the age of 18 that is designed to have limited to no permanent impacts on someone who decides to stop treatment after medically transitioning as a child. The way it works (at least in the U.S. which is what I'm familiar with) is that if you are in a state that allows children to medically transition (should be every state but that's a separate issue) there are essentially three sets of rules based on the age of the person trying to transition:
Before puberty there are no options for medical transition. If a little kid wants to wear different clothes and go by a new name and pronouns they can do that, but they're not getting prescribed anything until later.
Starting around their teen years, trans youth can be prescribed a type of medication called a puberty blocker, but still can't receive hormone replacement therapy or any kind of gender affirming surgery. Puberty blockers, the most popular of which is Lupron, are a class of medications that, when taken by a pubescent child, halt the onset of puberty. In case you don't know, the way that hormone replacement therapy works is that it's essentially a way of medically enducing a male or female puberty. Transmascs take testosterone shots which gives them more body hair, a deeper voice, and a more masculine fat distribution, while transfems take estrogen, which gives them less body hair, some breast growth, softer skin and a more feminine fat distribution.
Lupron does not have these effects. Instead of giving trans kids the puberty of their desired gender, it just stops them from experiencing the puberty of the gender they were assigned at birth. This allows their body to go either way depending on their next steps: they can either stop taking blockers and go through their AGAB puberty, albiet a little late, or switch to HRT when they turn 18 and go through their desired puberty. This gives trans teens time to think it over before they commit to a course of treatment that might have longer lasting effects (though even the effects of hormones wear off to an extent if you stop taking them like maybe I'd keep my boobs if I went off e and spiro but the rest would probably revert back to how I was when I was a man).
There's a lot of scaremongering about Lupron but the funny thing is, it's already prescribed to a lot of cis children and no one bats an eye at that. Lupron is also used as a treatment for "precocious puberty" which is when a child goes through puberty before they're supposed to, which can have some negative side effects. Lupron has been used to treat this for a while now, and while transphobes will tell you it's some sort of dangerous experimental drug with terrible side effects, the serious side effects are no more common than in any other medication we give to teens (which is to say, pretty rare), and no one was putting up a stink about it when we were giving it to cis kids. GEE I WONDER WHY š¤š¤š¤
Once a teenager reaches adulthood, the full range of options becomes available to them in terms of trans healthcare so long as they meet the requisite psychological and social requirements.
Now there have been cases of teenagers receiving treatment that is, for lack of a better term, ahead of schedule, but these are pretty rare and tend to receive outsize attention because conservatives use them as anecdotes. It's like how, in the 90s, conservatives would point to some horrible murderer and argue that we need more policing and harsher sentences to stop people like that, when in reality, the biggest impact of those policies was that people who committed relatively minor offenses (or in some cases NO offenses) receive extremely harsh punishments. They're cherry picking corner cases and arguing that the whole system needs to be made harsher and more unforgiving to prevent a handful of instances where it failed.
But you know what IS really common? trans teens being *denied* care for arbitrary or outright bigoted reasons. Trans healthcare isn't too permissive in providing treatment to young people, it's the exact opposite: it's too restrictive. That's the real problem with trans healthcare for teens, and that's what people should be concerned about.
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