Puberty Blockers

The "Hormones" Side of my Transition Testimony

[Edited: Rephrasing, additional footnote material, spelling corrections, etc.]

A couple of recent blog posts in my inbox discussed or touched upon “puberty blockers”. This is a subject in which I have a personal interest, and it tends to fire me up. This is the more focused of the two posts:

A dystopian Peter Pan

The issue involves “gender-affirming care”, puberty blockers, and what we used to call sex change surgery, but for minors. If you somehow have not heard of this, the above post could fill you in. It is politically oriented, but the information is there.

I personally don’t care whether it is being promoted by Democrats, Flat Earthers, or Raccoon Dogs. It is centered in the medical industry, and that is where I focus, although I do see it as yet another reflection of society and of the people that make up society — us with our fallen nature.

I have a history with this phenomenon, a history that shapes the way I think and perceive, how I regard the medical industry, and how I relate to churches. I don't think I have said anything about it here in the blog, but maybe it is time to do that.

My medical history begins before I was conceived. That is true of everyone, but this one (me) is medically unusual, to say the least. My mother, in ~1949, was having health problems involving her hormones, and her doctor suggested that she would improve if she had a baby. I want to say something here about that doctor, but I won’t. Not only would it be unkind, but if he had done the right thing, I likely would never have existed, and that’s too much paradox for me to take in.

I don’t know what caused my mother’s health problems. She had served in the Navy as a WAVE in WWII, having a desk job in Washington, DC, but who knows what she was subjected to as a service member. And then the Air Force base, near to where my parents lived when I was born, later became a “superfund” toxic waste site. Who knows what was in the water supply. For that matter, my father, a fighter pilot in WWII and in college at the time, owned a gas station outside the gates to that base, and who knows what that exposed him to.

But back to my main line of speculation. I know about these details either because my father told me about them or because I dug them out of newspaper archives. My mother had nothing to say about almost any of it. The rest is guesswork, based upon whatever I could find, much like a medical diagnosis (also guesswork). My mother went on to have me, and things did not go well. I was born with multiple birth defects, hereditary and otherwise, and that was only part of the problem.

My mother did mention that I was late — I don’t remember now how many days but it was quite a few — and that she was in labor for a long time. She somehow failed to mention what all went wrong or how we both nearly died, or that this was the reason I was an only child, because she was unwilling to ever risk childbirth again. I don’t blame her for that. I wouldn’t want to do my part in it again either. In any case I would have to wait 19 years to learn about any of that, from my father.

I’ll get to the puberty blocking. Right now the keyword is “hormones”. They’re related.

One reason her labor was so long is that when it came time for me to emerge, my head wouldn’t pass through the birth canal. I was postterm and oversized, and she was of slight build. I was also a boy, supposedly. More about that to come. (Hint: what do you get when the genes say ‘male’ but the sex hormones say nothing in particular because something is down-regulating them via a precursor? If you know, please let me in on it.)

The head size problem was solved with forceps. The doctor squashed my head to make it fit. My father seemed to think it was malpractice, two decades later when he got around to telling me about it. I wonder, however, if I wasn’t asphyxiating and the doctor did what he could under the circumstances. Some of my damage would appear to have been from blunt trauma, while other damage might well have been from oxygen deprivation. My father didn’t know about that second part, and I’m not certain about it myself.¹

This is a very different scenario from “gender-affirming care” and puberty blockers, but there is a connection. What went unnoticed, and what I hinted at above was that my endocrine system had (and has) serious problems. My sex-steroid hormones are somehow locked down at minimum sustainable levels. This in itself creates a lot of problems, but there was more. My brain failed to masculinize. I was a transsexual from the earliest days that it would have been possible to tell, and “in the closet”, with no opportunity to talk about it or seek any kind of help. This has a lot to do with my issues with churches, and why I spent half my life avoiding them. It also created other internal problems for me that were awful enough that I have never talked about them and never will. It’s a big deal for me to even mention that they existed. This is no way to treat children.

Not being able to talk about it, however, was a blessing in disguise. It spared me from being subjected to medical treatments that could have made my life so much worse. I met someone once that had Kleinfelter’s (XXY sex chromosomes). He was “treated”, not spared. I’ll say no more.

I was not simply transsexual. I was (and am) trans-autistic. It is a form of autism that today has been lumped under the DSM autistic spectrum umbrella. Nothing was known about it in the 1950’s. Lorna Wing did her research and coined the name “autistic spectrum” in the 1980’s. I ended up with a diagnosis in 1969 of minimal brain damage, one of the buckets used for people like me at that time.²

I could talk just fine. I still remember a conversation I had with my mother before I turned two (my father confirmed my age from my description of where the conversation took place — our back yard in mid-1952). Walking was more of a challenge.

I have a strong suspicion that my mother was given DES³ while she was carrying me. Many of my symptoms are similar to those of others that were exposed to it, and it is a known cause of male-to-female transsexualism, not to mention cancer.

So again, what happens when you reach puberty and your sex hormones are depressed by a down-regulated substrate precursor? Well, a form of partial puberty blocking is what happens. I am thankful that it was only partial, or I wouldn’t be around to write this. What is going to happen to these children that are being given these puberty-blocking poisons?

I don’t know what will happen to them. I know that cancer has been a problem among male-to-female transsexuals taking testosterone blockers. It’s largely ignored by medical doctors, and as far as I know nobody has cared much to study it. Sound familiar?

I also know what low hormone levels did for me. In my early 50’s I was trying to figure out exactly what I was. (I’m still working on that two decades later.) One thing that that led to was having my hormones tested, something to try that had never occurred before to any doctor, in spite of all the lifelong symptoms. When I learned what was going on inside, I started researching and I soon came to realize that people like me with these kinds of problems have a strong tendency to develop cancer, a detail about which my doctors were oblivious. All of them.

Of course the cancer industry profits least from early detection.

By the time I did that research, I had already worked out that I was a transsexual, not that I hadn’t known it my entire life but I hadn’t known the terminology. Given the hormone disorder, “intersex transsexual” might be more accurate, a rare category. But people like me are rare. I’ve met a very few others, two in-person and others online, while attending meetings related to the topic. I don’t bump into people like me on the street that I know of. Not yet, anyway, in 74+ years.

I also understood the autism by then, and I knew that the combination was not a marker of success for transition (or for success in life in general). But I also had a strong premonition about the cancer risk, and I saw transition and surgery as a way to prevent it from happening in spite of doctors not believing in such things.

After much hesitation, I proceeded with transition. And what came next was quite a shock. I started my real-life experience (RLE) year in December 2006 — back then (prior to 2022) they wanted to make sure that we were sure that we weren’t making a huge mistake, and any surgery was delayed for about a year — and I arranged to consult with a surgeon in early 2007. The surgeon, during a simple examination, discovered the cancer. It turned out that my risk was 100%.

I then proceeded to spend most of the rest of my RLE year⁴ dealing with cancer and recovering from the treatment. Not exactly real life at its best. Again, what is going to happen to these children taking puberty blockers?

I went on to complete my sexual reassignment surgery, over 15 years ago, and it worked out OK. Far from ideal, but better than before. I still have the chronic health problems that I had before, plus a few more, but no more cancer, and transition worked as well as could be expected. I’m not sure that that happens very often. I still don’t know what to call myself. Intertransexual? Nah, don’t like it.

The most bizarre part of this experience is that it has been possible for me to be a member of two conservative evangelical churches over the past five years — the standard bearers of the war against the LGBT community! There was a 3rd church in the middle, but they failed my membership inquiry and I didn’t stay. Nice church, but with its own problems beyond what I could deal with.

There has been surprisingly little conversation about my presence. I am not exactly “stealth”, but I come in and begin to participate and volunteer, and I don’t ask anybody’s permission to be trans. I offer commentary on the Greek during New Testament Bible studies. The autism helps. The most visible thing is joining the choir, but I have been in choir for 20+ seasons over the past 30 years, and I didn’t let a little thing like transition stop me.

I do tell people about me on occasion. At the first such church I joined they had membership interviews, and I brought the subject up. The other one didn’t do those so there was nobody to tell, although I have had conversations about it with staff and with choir members and Bible study groups since then.

There’s the occasional slip of a pronoun, so I know other people are thinking about it. It’s all very strange. But it’s also the best my life has been, and in a world that is at the worst stage I have ever seen it.

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Related: Child Sacrifice

1. I actually do have my own memory of the experience, that has manifested in a several ways. When I was seven, and living on an Air Force base in Alaska, there was a public open house and one of the B-50’s that my father flew was available to enter. The only catch was that entry was through the rear cargo hatch, and to pass through to the cockpit and exit there, people had to crawl through the tunnel over the bomb bay. I went out the way I came in. Nothing could get me to crawl through that tunnel.

On another occasion though, with just the two of us and no open house, in a hanger, my father let me climb up through the cockpit hatch of one that he flew, and I had a look around. Pretty soon, at 8-9 years old, I was flying small planes from the copilot seat, with his help. I didn’t land them at that age, but I could take off, following instructions.

Much more recently I have had to deal with that same feeling when getting MRI scans. I essentially have to close up shop and go somewhere else in my mind to get through them. Aother problem was with swimming. I never learned to do it properly. The feeling is too intense. I can swim with a suitable swim mask that keeps the water out of my nose and eyes. Amygdala activity, I assume. Other people with similar birth experiences have reported similar things.

2. I understand that Temple Grandin also received this diagnosis.

3. Diethylstilbestrol. See, for example, DES (Diethylstilbestrol) Research, and Diethylstilbestrol

(compound). Search the latter page for “transsexual”.

4. Actually, 10 months — the “year” could be shortened if a cancellation opened up an earlier surgery date, and that’s what happened.