Dr. Susan Bradley, who helped pioneer “gender affirming care” in Canada, has now spoken against the popular model of “gender affirming care” by placing children on puberty blockers, according to an interview with the Daily Caller.
Dr. Bradley founded the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity clinic in Toronto, Canada in 1975 began to issue puberty blockers to children around the early 2000s. Prior to the medication, she used more traditional forms of therapy such as talking with her patients. In her interview with the Daily Caller, Dr. Bradley stated in regards to the puberty blocker medication:
“We were wrong. They’re not as reversible as we always thought, and they have longer term effects on kids’ growth and development, including making them sterile and quite a number of things affecting their bone growth.
We thought that it was relatively safe, and endocrinologists said they’re reversible, and that we didn’t have to worry about it. I had this skepticism in the back of my mind all the time that maybe we were actually colluding and not helping them. And I think that’s proven correct in that, once these kids get started at any age on puberty blockers, nearly all of them continue to want to go to cross sex hormones.”
Despite the recent push to “affirm” children’s gender identity by use of puberty blockers, the safety of such drugs is relatively unknown. According to the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved puberty blockers in 1993. They were originally approved to temporarily stop puberty in children who were going through it too early.
Researchers have not finished studying how safe puberty blockers are in the long term. So, there might be some risks that doctors do not yet know about.
Dr. Bradley participated in the “largest sample to date of boys clinic-referred for gender dysphoria with regard to gender identity and sexual orientation” with the most recent follow-up in March 2021. The study found that 87% of male participants assessed at a mean age of 20.58 years were deemed “desisters.”
A parallel study of girls showed similar results: only 3 out of the 25 participants were judged to have gender-dysphoria at the mean age of 23.24 years.
In the interview, Dr. Bradley conceded:
“These kids are not fairing well with the current affirmative approach. I don’t know that any kids actually could, given the capacity of a 10 or 12, or even 14 or 15 yar old to understand the complexity of the decision that they’re making on their long term sexual and life function. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Blocking the sexual development of children is a highly authoritarian intervention. Children are asexual, and so they can’t understand the impact of impaired sexual function. We are roughly 10 years into this large-scale experiment and already we have reports on issues with cognitive development, bone mineral density, and fertility. All the up-to-date evidence shows that puberty blockers are neither safe nor reversible.“
Despite Dr. Bradley’s long term study suggesting that children eventually grow out of their gender dysphoria, there is still a widespread push to start children on puberty blockers at a young age. In the case of social media influencer Chloe Cole, 18, she was told that “gender dysphoria would never resolve itself” by doctors. The Gateway Pundit reported on a lawsuit filed by Harmeet Dhillon’s Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty on Cole’s behalf.
Source: TheGatewayPundit
