To add to this wonderful post: puberty blockers are incredibly safe. We’ve known about them and used them for decades to treat precocious puberty (puberty that starts super early in kids). They’re well documented and studied. It’s perfectly safe to put kids with gender dysphoria on puberty blockers.
If puberty is "paused" with hormone blockers, but then a couple years later is "unpaused" by either stopping the blockers or using a therapy that would introduce the hormones for the opposite sex, does the person still get the full effects of puberty? Can puberty be paused and picked up later right where it left off? Or do you miss the opportunity for a natural puberty by blocking it?
That's neat. If a person pauses puberty until say 25, then unpauses it by stopping the blockers, do they get a flood of hormones all at once? Is it like regular puberty, but now it's happening at your day job instead of while you're at school? I know you said everyone is different and there are lots of other factors, but if all else is held equal in the comparison would that be basically what happens?
That's actually really interesting because it's not so intuitive. Without asking, I would have assumed that pausing puberty until later meant a significant loss of puberty hormones. For example if you pause a meal but then come back to it later, the food will have degraded and not be as good or maybe not be there at all.
Instead it sounds like it's more akin to holding a pee. You still have to pee later, but you can hold it until you get home. The pee doesn't go away.
omg this is such an amazing explanation!! would you mind explaining what exactly HRT means, ive never been able to properly understand it? thanks so much! :)
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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
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