It doesn’t really matter if you get offended or disagree when people say that giving young children puberty blocking drugs because they think they’re another gender is equal to child abuse. Heck, a person’s brain isn’t fully developed until they’re 25-years-old, so why are adults listening to children about things they simply don’t comprehend the consequences of?
In a recent interview with The College Fix, Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Paul McHugh intimated that “many will regret” the decision to be transgender at such a young age.
“They’re [trans kids] going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives, many of them are going to be sterilized not able to have their own children, and many will regret this,” McHugh said. “Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything, just to live? Getting your hormones checked, getting everything checked. That is something doctors should like to spare people of.”
Exactly. Listen, be whatever you want to be. But, understand the risks of your decision. Don’t just wake up one day, think you’re another gender, and go ahead with a life-altering choice. Know that for the rest of your life you’ll need special medical treatment — and most likely mental health treatment — should you go through the process at such a young age.
Just don’t go blaming everyone else for your problems if things don’t turn out exactly as you’d hoped they would.
McHugh brought up another point to The College Fix that could raise some eyebrows.
“Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it’s an experiment,” McHugh said during the phone interview with The Fix. “You need evidence for that and this is a very serious treatment. It is comparable to doing frontal lobotomies.”
McHugh comparing going through the trans process at a young age with having a frontal lobotomy brings us back to the point of the human brain not becoming fully developed until the age of 25.
According to the University of Rochester Medical Center website:
In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
In teen’s brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not always at the same rate. That’s why when teens have overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.
There are most likely exceptions to the passage above, but they’re just that — exceptions, not the rule.
If the predominant motive behind making such a decision at a young age is emotion, without the involvement of reason, common sense and logic, should kids be making the choice to go through with this type of process?
As said earlier, do what you like with your life. Make the decisions that make you the most happy, as long as they’re within the law. But don’t expect everyone to cater to you when you begin regretting what was a horrible decision to make in the first place.
McHugh echoed some of the sentiment above during the interview.
"My aim isn’t to stop people," McHugh said. "It’s when they draw medical people in. That’s when I insist on evidence and what makes more sense."
H/T: The Blaze