Less than 0.1% of U.S. minors take gender-affirming medication, study finds

“The public understands that not everyone will receive gender-affirming care when they go to the doctor,” said Landon Hughes, lead author of the report and a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It’s very important.” “It’s not as prevalent as some people would like us to believe, especially among young people.”

“We’re not seeing a massive influx of people accessing care,” Hughes added. “This treatment is definitely accessible to a very small number of people, and it certainly consumes much of the public debate in the current political and legal climate.”

This study found that the use of puberty blockers and hormones was more common among trans minors who were assigned gender at birth as female than among trans minors who were assigned gender at birth as male. It turned out that. The authors noted that this may occur because the onset of puberty occurs earlier in people assigned female at birth.

Puberty blockers are used to delay the onset of puberty or pause the progression of puberty. The drug is designed to give children experiencing gender dysphoria more time to decide whether they want to take more permanent steps to transition. Once the medication is stopped, puberty begins again. Gender-affirming hormones are usually prescribed to replace hormones that a person’s body naturally produces, but that hormones do not match the person’s gender identity.

Most major medical institutions in the United States support Gender-affirming care for minors. The American Medical Association, which publishes JAMA, calls this care:medically necessary”

Dr. Alex S. Kuroglian, director of education and training at Fenway Health, an LGBTQ health care provider, who was not involved in the study, said the findings are important because access to transition-related care can be difficult. “I’m not surprised,” he said. limited.

“This particular type of care is so stigmatized to provide that not all transgender or gender diverse youth who would have benefited from it in this dataset necessarily received it. I doubt there is,” he said. “We see it in action in the communities we work with, even in privileged communities where there is private insurance. For that child to receive gender-affirming care, , there can be many barriers at the family and practice level.”

In December, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case over state bans on puberty suppressants and other forms of transition-related care for minors. The court is considering the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for minors, and the justices appear to be leaning toward upholding the law. Tennessee is one of more than 20 states in the U.S. that restricts such care.

Last month, Britain indefinitely banned new prescriptions of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria in minors. The indefinite ban comes months after an independent study commissioned by Britain’s National Health Service concluded that the medical evidence on transition-related care for minors was “remarkably weak”.