The Best of Genspect: Why Puberty Blockers?
How did blocking puberty become an accepted treatment for Gender distress?
Puberty blockers were first used to treat children experiencing gender distress by clinicians at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, Netherlands, during the 1990s. This approach, later known as the 'Dutch Protocol,' was pioneered to address gender dysphoria in adolescents. How and why did these clinicians initially conceive the idea of halting puberty?
In this video from The Bigger Picture conference in 2023, Zhenya Abbruzzese, a co-founder of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), explores the origins of medical transition for minors and critiques the flaws in the research that led to its widespread adoption.
The Dutch in Their Own Words
It is a testament to how swiftly puberty blockers gained acceptance that Thomas Steensma and Annelou de Vries, two key researchers instrumental in developing 'the Dutch Protocol,' remain active in the field and joined Stella and Sasha on a pre-video episode of Gender — A Wider Lens. This episode provides eye-opening insight into the mindset of two original clinicians whose seminal studies helped establish puberty blockers as a standard treatment for gender-distressed youth. What were their goals? How did they assess success, and what are their thoughts on the 15 participants excluded from their final study—including one who died due to complications from cross-sex surgery?
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