By Christina Buttons
•
Oct 13, 2022

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The director of the pediatric gender clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital admitted that puberty blockers cause infertility and are given out to children “like candy” to a “skyrocketing” number of new patients in a recently uncovered video conference.

Dr. Jeremi Carswell, pediatric endocrinologist and current director of Boston Children’s Hospital GeMS (Gender Management Service), spoke of the permanent loss of fertility and unregulated frequency at which puberty-blocking drugs are administered to children at a 2020 Advancing Excellence in Transgender Health (AETH) conference, according to a recorded webinar called “Puberty Blockers and Hormone Therapy for Gender Diverse Youth and Adolescents” on the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center website.

“This is probably no surprise to everybody who is listening: the number of adolescents who have been coming into gender programs over the last several years has really kind of skyrocketed,” began Carswell. “This is a worldwide phenomenon and we’re not really quite sure what the story is behind that, but we do know that a lot of people have been presenting [with gender dysphoria], mostly assigned females.”

In the following slide, Carswell shows a graph displaying “new patient volume by year” at the GeMs clinic, showing a sharp increase in the number of patients it sees.

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Carswell begins by referring to puberty blocking drugs as a “reversible therapy,” but then goes on to discuss the “risks/consequences” of prescribing them to children at the first signs of puberty to stop the development of secondary sex characteristics. Children who begin taking puberty blockers during the first signs of puberty and go on to take cross-sex hormones, which constitutes the vast majority, will become sterilized and may never be able to achieve orgasm, as Carswell explained:

If you are giving something that shuts down your estrogen or shuts down testosterone entirely, you’re going to stop either — if you had already been producing sperm or eggs, you’re going to stop doing that — and if you never started, you’re not going to be able to advance the gonads to be able to do that.

Additionally, puberty blockers stunt development of the male genitalia and have been shown to have serious side effects, which include a decline in bone density, neurological effects, and psychiatric problems. Doctors have prescribed puberty blockers off-label as a “treatment” for gender dysphoria on an experimental basis. There are no long-term studies to support its use in this context and they are not FDA approved for their off-label use.

The FDA recently issued a warning for puberty-blocking drugs after identifying a serious potential side effect that may cause a dangerous surge of spinal fluid pressure in the brain for some children. This build-up can cause headaches, nausea, double vision, and even permanent vision loss.