TRANSSEXUAL children as young as 12 should be given drugs to postpone puberty and make it easier for them to change sex at the age of 16 if they still want to. That's the suggestion of controversial draft guidelines, the first of their kind, issued last week by the international Endocrine Society.
The guidelines state that transsexual children and young teens who have begun early puberty should be given puberty-blockers to avoid inevitable changes to their bodies, which they perceive as out of line with their true gender. In the worst cases, these changes can drive children to self-harm or even suicide.
The idea is to buy thinking time for young people so they can decide if they want to begin a sex change using hormones when they are older. Puberty-blockers would also make life easier when transsexuals become adults. Male-to-female transsexuals, for example, will not have the ...
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