UK gender medicine report on puberty blockers prompts reflection, outrage in Australia [Video]

It’s often argued that puberty blockers are urgent and necessary to prevent mental health harm, up to and including suicide. But Cass also found the evidence was weak regarding their impact on mental health conditions and gender dysphoria – a feeling of distress that your gender identity does not match your physical form.

The second phase of treatment – the use of masculinising or feminising hormones – in those under the age of 18 “also presents many unknowns”, according to Cass. Hormone treatments can have irreversible effects, such as a permanently deeper voice and facial hair for people born as women. They can also lead to infertility.

Cass said hormones from age 16 should be an option but recommended “extreme caution” and a “clear clinical rationale” as to why the person could not wait until they were 18. Clinicians, Cass wrote, were unable to determine with any certainty which children …