There Is No Crying In Baseball!*

And there is no two sides in our health care.

There is no debate over the medical treatment for us, every medical and mental healthcare association supports our healthcare.

With trans health care, ‘There are not two sides to the story’

Two New Hampshire health care providers talk about what the media gets wrong when it comes to covering care for transgender youths.

Boston Globe 

April 18, 2023

An attempt to ban gender affirming care for trans kids in New Hampshire was defeated in March. But providers are still seeing the fallout, even though the proposal failed.

[…]

Transgender kids are paying attention, and there are studies showing that their lives are on the line. Trans youth have higher rates of suicide and depression than young people overall, and gender affirming care has been shown to improve mental health and decrease suicidal ideation.

[…]

I spoke with pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Frances Lim-Liberty and Jessica Smith, an endocrinology nurse practitioner, who work at the pediatric and adolescent transgender health program at Dartmouth Health.

The right-wing conservatives are trying to label the healthcare that we receive as “experimental” and near having been done before. I think that the Republicans are not elephants because they have an awful short memory… they can’t even remember back to the 1950s that they so love. Do you remember Christine Jorgensen? She had Gender Confirming Surgery back in 1950 and she was called the “Blonde Beauty" by the press.

The Boston Globe had a companion article on the interview of the doctors.

Lim-Liberty and Smith addressed the most-common myths surrounding trans health care, how this care helps young people, and how terrified patients are of losing access to it.

Q: You say there’s no lower age limit about when you’ll start seeing patients at the clinics. When it comes to families with younger children, why are they seeking care?

Lim-Liberty: Many have questions. They want to know how to support their kids. They are seeking therapists and mental health specialists who understand childhood and gender identity development.

We spend a lot of time counseling. The biggest gender affirming medical care we provide is guiding the family to resources, answering questions about puberty, where to find gender neutral clothing, where to find an understanding hairdresser. We have support groups, and a library with books and educational guides. We’re trying to fill the gaps.

[…]

Q: How do you talk to parents who might not understand gender affirming health care?

Smith: Usually those kids are really hurting by the time they see us. We try to engage parents by bringing in the mental health team and talking about the importance of treatment and what that’s going to look like. When we have a young person struggling with distress related to gender dysphoria, we have to treat that in the same way we treat any other medical diagnosis. Outcomes are good.

Lim-Liberty: The most important part is sorting out the myths they’ve heard, and the biases that they hold.

So unlike the picture that the Republicans try to paint, the first treatment that a child receives is counseling. Not hormones. Not puberty blockers, but therapy.

Q: There’s a lot of talk about puberty blockers. What are they and when are they used?

Smith: There’s a big spread of disinformation about puberty blockers. Folks who have an anti-trans agenda are trying to use this as a scare tactic to say we are harming young people and that’s absolutely false.

Puberty blockers have been used in pediatric endocrinology for decades to treat precocious puberty so there is a very good amount of data demonstrating safety and efficacy. We use puberty blockers to pause puberty for young people who are exploring their gender identity.

These are completely reversible medications. If a young person wants to stop the blocker and go through their natal puberty, we can do that safely with no bad outcomes. If somebody decides to transition from a puberty blocker to gender affirming hormone therapy, we can also do that.

Lim-Liberty: There’s lots of studies showing positive impacts on mental health: dropping depression rates, dropping suicidality and suicidal ideation. Jess and I experience that every day when we’re in the transgender clinic. We see these kids change, we see them blossom, we see them become the people that they talk about wanting to become at that first visit. We see them go from being reserved and quiet to being interested in activities or opening up about something they really like.

But the right-wing Republicans do want to hear that, it doesn’t fit their narrative. They want people to believe that the first thing that happens to a child questioning their gender is to shoot them up with hormones and puberty blockers.

This is a tried and true medical approach that has been developed over decades even before Christine Jorgensen had her surgery, back all the way to the 1920s with Lili Elbe.

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*Can you tell that I just watched “A League of There Own” the other night.