Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

(Reader note: not all trans people are infertile, even after years of treatment with cross-sex hormones. But if you don't go through puberty, your gametes do not mature, and we currently have no reproductive tech that can do anything with immature gametes.)

I think nearly all trans kids have mature gametes by the time they start blockers or cross-sex hormones? Gametes mature early, thus how some ten-year-olds can get pregnant. Definitely agree we should automatically preserve gametes as part of the standard of care for trans kids.

Nope, neither males nor females produce mature gametes sans puberty. Some children become pregnant at age 10 because some children go through puberty prior to age 10.

"Five children were prepubertal, no hormone therapy was considered, and they were therefore excluded." It sounds like their inclusion criteria excluded children who had not gone through puberty.

I parsed that as their criteria excluded children for whom hormone therapy was not being considered. If hormone therapy is not considered until puberty has begun, and most kids at the stage where hormone therapy is considered have mature gametes, then that's the pop we care about

FWIW, it's exceedingly dofficult to figure out what clinicians are actually doing, the guidelines that call for Tanner stage 2 development do *not* indicate mature gametes, and many of these kids are rendering themselves infertile for life. I'm really uncomfortable with this.

AFAICT, spermarche occurs at variable Tanner stages, but often not prior to Tanner stage 3; menarche is typically at Tanner stage 4. I keep trying to not throw myself back into this because there is absolutely nothing for me to gain here, but it is what it is.