Conversion Therapy, Blockers and a Big Brain Mystery

Anneliese Dodds says she wants a "conversion therapy" ban. It would almost certainly lead to a rise in puberty blocker prescriptions. Yet astonishingly no one knows their impact on the teenage brain.

The announcement by Anneliese Dodds that she wants to bring in a “Conversion Therapy Ban” revives a terrifying scenario: that therapists and clinicians might be forced to affirm “trans identity” in troubled teens. This is bound to lead to more teens being medicalised because adolescents who seek out gender identity specialists tend to do so in order to gain access to the medical interventions they have been told online or by their peer group will alleviate their dysphoria.

Prime among those are puberty blockers. This despite the growing evidence that advocates have shown a cavalier disregard for long-term outcomes from the get go. If you want proof of that lack of foresight you only have to look at the experience of Jazz Jennings. He was prescribed blockers but -whoopsadaisy - no one anticipated the problems he would face in surgery because his genitals never matured.

We now know that any teen who has their puberty stopped at Tanner Stage Two (as secondary sex characteristics begin maturation) and then moves on to cross sex hormones (as almost all kids on blockers do) will be left -like Jazz- without functioning genitals, sexual sensations or the ability to orgasm.

Jazz’s own surgeon Marci Bowers admits as much and he just happens to be the new President of WPATH, the global trans “health” organisation. I know I’ve posted this video before but it can’t be repeated too often. Here’s Bowers confirming WPATH’s decade-long recommended medical approach deprives adolescents of any possibility of a future sex life.

You may ask why anyone is surprised. Wasn’t the point of blockers to stop development? Why then didn’t anyone in the field guess that….these kids would be left asexual? Questions like that assume trans healthcare is a normal area of medicine. It isn’t. And if the refusal to think through even the most basic physical effects of blockers isn’t proof enough of that, let’s turn to …the brain.

The thing that has always troubled me about both the advocacy of blockers, and the ‘ban conversion therapy’ campaign which is really an attempt to enforce them is how little advocates say about the potential impact of blockers on the brain. I’m not a scientist but with 30 years of researching and covering scientific subjects my instincts tell me this will turn out to be the nub of the blockers scandal.

Off and on my work has touched on brain science. I made documentaries about the brain with the likes of Susan Greenfield, whose special subject was brain physiology.

I also developed a series about the teenage brain for Channel 4 which required me to speak at length to two experts whose work has been groundbreaking in this field, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and perhaps the world’s leading expert on the adolescent brain, Professor Laurence Steinberg. His work was quoted by the US Supreme Court when it decided to abolish the death penalty for young people. It’s this familiarity with their work that convinces me the research gender identity medicine relies on is wholly out of date and wilfully ignores some of the most important and remarkable discoveries about adolescents. And their brains.