"Puberty blockers and hormone therapy, the two treatments primarily given to minors, are most effective around the ages of 8 to 14, as they can prevent the need for future surgeries in adulthood..."

"... for example, a transgender boy who took puberty blockers might not need a mastectomy later. There are risks to the drug therapies, including slowed bone growth and fertility loss, but evidence suggests that denying the care to adolescents who need it raises the risk of depression and suicide. The push to outlaw such care altogether gained momentum last year as Republicans across the country adopted the issue.... A week before the [Arkansas] law was to go into effect, however, it was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in response to the A.C.L.U.’s legal challenge. The trial is set for July. Transgender adolescents and their families are now living with uncertainty. 'It’s pretty excruciating as a parent to be told by the state that it will become illegal to give your child what she needs to exist,' Jasmine Banks said. Zara added, 'It’s not, like, other people’s decision who I am and what I’m not.'" 

 From "In Arkansas, Trans Teens Await an Uncertain Future/Even as the medical community grapples with how best to provide care to transgender adolescents, some states seek to ban it outright" (NYT).

 

ADDED: Here's a London Times article from 2020: "Giving puberty blocker to ‘trans’ children is a leap into the unknown/A landmark legal review will examine claims that confused young people are being subjected to a giant medical experiment, says Janice Turner." 

An 11-year-old child is probably years from his or her first kiss. Yet the drug they are about to take will almost certainly lead to a medical pathway which will leave them sterile. Since their gametes will never be allowed to mature, doctors will not even be able to harvest their sperm or eggs. Can any 11-year-old understand the gravity of ruling out ever having children? 

Moreover can this child, for whom sex is an unimaginable, probably rather revolting adult business, consent to a treatment which will depress their future libido to the extent they may never have an orgasm? (Imagine trying to explain the concept, let alone the desirability, of an orgasm to an 11-year-old.) These are the ethical issues which make puberty blockers the most controversial of medications.... 

Triptorelin is presented by gender clinics as a “pause button” which need not stop puberty for ever but can give a “breathing space” while a young person decides whether they wished to proceed to transition.... The problem is that almost everyone who takes puberty blockers goes on to transition. Frozen Peter Pan-like, they see classmates develop into adults. Many have already “socially transitioned”, assuming opposite sex names and clothing. Going back is scary, so inevitably they press forward into cross-sex hormones. But would they have transitioned anyway? Most likely not.... 

Doubts about puberty blockers have come from senior clinicians, from LGBT campaigners worried that gender clinics are performing “gay conversion therapy” on future homosexual kids, and from feminists appalled that girls who do not conform to sexist gender stereotypes feel they cannot be girls....

"An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week."

"The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind. Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: 'Clinicians are divided' over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: 'It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just 'sloppy,' sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.' Oof."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "The Trans Movement Is Not About Rights Anymore/It's about a cultural revolution and the abolition of biological sex."

Also: "What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it."

ADDED: I just want to print out the top 3 highest-rated comments at the NYT article (linked in Sullivan's piece):

Anon bc the potential for Vitriol

Palo AltoJan. 13

As a parent of a "trans" teen, I ask you: In what other medical area would it be possible for the patient (an adolescent, no less!!) to not only self-diagnose but also prescribe treatment, including drugs and surgery that are potentially irreversible and for which the long-term effects have not been studied? The social media-fueled trans contagion among adolescents, particularly girls - further exacerbated by activists (no matter how well-intentioned their support for trans people) - has gotten out of control. Especially among the white upper-middle class youth and their enabling schools, psychologists and psychiatrists. True gender dysphoria is one thing. This craze is another thing entirely. YES, teens need to be screened thoroughly, if not to say aggressively, NOT just affirmed.

Lauren K commented January 13

L

Lauren K

Havertown, PAJan. 13

If you can't, as a doctor, answer how many children will later want to detransition ("it's thought to be rare" is shoddy data), and there is no formal system for tracking this data, you're running an uncontrolled experiment.

Maria commented January 13

M

Maria

SFJan. 13

Simply stated, it should be against the law to let any person under 18 years of age have gender reassignment treatments of any kind. As a gay boy, most of my friends in school were “sissies” or “tom boys” and were very seriously into hacking the opposite gender, as expressed by all sorts of behavior that in this climate would likely be called “gender fluidity.” Not a single one if asked today would say they wanted a sex change. It’s bizarre and unthinkable to take developing adolescent minds and imaginations so seriously as to prescribe such treatments.

"Male puberty makes you taller, confers greater muscle and bone mass, larger heart and lung capacity relative to your size, and more hemoglobin...."

"Most people will never have what it takes to compete at the elite levels of high school, college or professional sports. That’s not an argument for kicking the genetically blessed out of the league so that those of us who are slower and weaker can experience the thrill of victory. One might add that it is particularly not an argument for kicking out people who face as many other disadvantages in their lives as trans athletes do. But if you like that answer, you should probably ask whether women’s sports should exist at all. After all, we didn’t create separate leagues to reinforce the special feminine identity of female athletes; if anything, women’s athletics was supposed to break down such divisions. The separation is a nod to biology: After puberty, biological women can’t compete with similarly gifted biological men.... [Do we] think it’s important for cisgender women to have a place where at least a few of us can experience the thrill of victory. Maybe that isn’t an important social goal. Or maybe it is, but just not as important a goal as trans inclusion. Either way, that question will have to be asked and answered — out loud, where everyone can hear it."

Writes Megan McArdle in "We need to be able to talk about trans athletes and women’s sports" (WaPo). 

The easiest solution is not to talk about it. Not only does it seem undesirable to say anything that could feel hurtful toward transgender people, but it's also quite unpleasant to need to say anything about the physical inferiority of women. The only way even to consider excluding transwomen from women's sports is to forefront the athletic inferiority of the female body. To have this conversation is to be transformed into a bunch of Bobby Riggses. But to fail to have the conversation is to say we don't need a special category for the female body and the whole women's sports movement was about nothing.

I thought maybe it would facilitate the conversation to speak of "the female body" instead of "women" or "ciswomen" or "natural women." As McArdle points out, women's sports isn't about how much "like a woman" the athletes feel inside. Indeed, it seems probable that many of them don't identify with what the culture traditionally considers feminine. And the women's sports movement was about transforming traditional gender roles: You could feel very very boyish and you're as womanly as the girl who revels in girliness. Isn't that the ideology of the women's sports movement?

The separate category exists because of the bodily differences and not at all because of inward feelings.... or does it? Maybe sports is really only about how people feel inside. You have to do something outwardly for it to be sports, but you do it for the feelings. If the women's sports movement was about boosting the feelings of women — women, who are inherently inferior at sports! — then how can you turn around and be unkind to the transgenders?