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Puberty blockers

(LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the enforcement of Florida’s law prohibiting puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, declaring that those who support the law should “put up or shut up.”

Judge Robert Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction against the recently enacted Senate Bill 254, which bans transgender surgeries, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children. The law was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May as part of a broad legislative package to protect the state’s kids from transgender ideology, dubbed “Let Kids be Kids.”

“Any proponent of the challenged statute and rule should put up or shut up: Do you acknowledge that there are individuals with actual gender identities opposite their natal sex, or do you not? Dog whistles ought not be tolerated,” Hinkle wrote Tuesday.

Hinkle’s ruling follows a lawsuit by the parents of two 11-year-old girls as well as an 8-year-old boy who argued that banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. According to the Independent, the parents maintain that such interventions are “safe” and “medically necessary healthcare.”

The children will be able to proceed with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones following the ruling.

While vaguely conceding that puberty blockers (GnRH agonists) have “attendant risks,” in his ruling, Hinkle fails to address the permanent, irreversible sterility that results from the use of puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones, which are admittedly taken in succession the “vast majority” of the time by minors who wish to “change” their sex.

However, evidence suggests that a high percentage of children who take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones would otherwise have gone on to accept their biological sex if “left alone.”

Gender clinic founder Dr. Susan Bradley and other doctors have found that a whopping 87.8 percent of boys referred to their clinic for gender identity issues eventually ‘desisted,’ meaning they accepted their biological sex, by an age averaging 20.6 years.

This suggests that a high percentage of children who take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones would otherwise have gone on to accept their biological sex if “left alone.”

Such evidence lends credence to the claims of critics of “transgender” interventions for minors that it is child abuse to allow even a 16-year-old – who isn’t considered old enough to vote, join the military, or consent to most medical treatment – to be permanently sterilized, as if they were capable of informed consent to such a decision.

“I don’t know that any kids actually could, given the capacity of a 10- or 12- or even 14- or 15-year-old to understand the complexity of the decision that they’re making on their long-term sexual and life function. It just doesn’t make sense,” argued Dr. Bradley, who shared earlier this year that she regretted her clinic’s involvement in administering puberty blockers for gender dysphoria.

Judge Hinkle also fails to address the links of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, cancer, stroke, infertility, and drastically increased instances of suicidality.

He argued instead that “there are risks attendant to not using these treatments, including the risk – in some instances, the near certainty – of anxiety and depression and even suicidal ideation.”

“The plaintiffs’ adolescent children will suffer irreparable harm – the unwanted and irreversible onset and progression of puberty in their natal sex – if they do not promptly begin treatment with GnRH agonists,” Judge Hinkle concluded.

However, the “largest existing study” on the subject, according to JAMA, has been corrected in 2020 to conclude that there is “no mental health benefit from gender-affirming surgery after comparison with a control group of [gender-confused] people who had not yet undergone surgery.”

In fact, according to research that surveilled actual outcomes spanning three decades, people who obtained so-called “gender-affirming surgeries” were “19 times more likely to kill themselves” than the general population.

SB 254 suspends the licenses of healthcare practitioners arrested for “committing or attempting, soliciting, or conspiring to commit specified violations related to sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures for a patient younger than 18 years of age.” 

The law also allows Florida minors who received the mutilating interventions without consent to sue for damages.

Hinkle, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida by former President Bill Clinton, issued a ruling in Brenner v. Scott that found that Florida’s bans on same-sex marriage were federally unconstitutional.

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