Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Jesse’s piece is incredibly measured & well-researched. At no point does he remotely imply that trans kids be ignored or discouraged from exploring their identity — to the contrary, that clinicians really need to understand the extreme complexity of this experience for many kids.

the entire article is objectively ok. people are mostly reacting to the cover, and the first few paragraphs (which frame transness vaguely as a cult that you can be seduced into by a "charismatic" youtuber) -- 95% of readers will bail then with their "trans is a trend" priors up.

the general point that most of my twitter noosphere is making about how dozens of trans writers could have written even better-researched pieces is also valid; said writers wouldn't have allowed their well researched articles to be marketed as if they were terfy clickbait, though

besides, there's a broader point here -- online rage can't make doctors of trans teens less or more cautious. doctors are gonna doct.

Admittedly, I’m coming at this as a cis woman who wants to have children soon & would be horrified to (a) prevent an optimal transition through delays OR to (b) watch my kid be pulled along an irreversible trajectory that wasn’t ultimately right for them. Either way, horrifying.

Those are both horrifying options for sure -- where I think many parents go wrong is in treating them as equally likely. Among adults, transition regret is perhaps at very roughly 1%, 1/162 in one study (https://genderanalysis.net/2015/07/walt-heyer-and-sex-change-regret-gender-analysis-09/ …).

Further: not all of that 1% specifically regrets loss of fertility; not all medical interventions for trans teens *cause* loss of fertility. Yes, adults are different from teenagers, of course. But we're starting from a baseline of transition regret being really unlikely.

I’m talking primarily about hormonal transition through puberty blockers followed by immediate hormonal treatments — I’m under the impression that this is *very* likely to cause infertility, & it also wouldn’t show up in a lot of studies because it’s relatively new