alt Hacker News> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
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It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing