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[–]jet199[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Here's the actual paper. Look who's the author. No excuse for not knowing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243894

[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They really fudged the data by not separating it out by sex. The original data from this study that Michael Biggs obtained via a FOI request was separated by sex, and showed that girls on blockers in particular experienced a decline in mental health and an increase in thoughts of, desires to, self-harm, including suicide.

Also, IIRC, the sex-specific data from the Tavi GIDS that Biggs obtained showed that girls on PBs suffer a more significant failure to develop age-appropriate bone density than males do. Which means the related health problems the females will likely suffer starting in their 20s will probably be more severe than the ones the males on blockers will experience.

Moreover, the data Biggs looked at showed that most of the marked stunting of height occurred in females, not males, who still continued growing in height. Which mean as "transmen" the female patients who took/take blockers will be shorter than they would've have been had they not been put on blockers.

Since short stature and "feeling small" (and weak) often seems to be a major factor in girls' and young women's desire to become male, the stunting of these girls' growth in ways that are and will always be clearly evident to themselves and others (as opposed, say, to stunting bone density or brain development) should be a major concern for girls who think going on blockers will help them better "pass" as the opposite sex.

I think it's safe to assume that Carmichael et al decided to mix all the data for the two sexes together for the final paper in order to obscure how terrible blockers are especially for females - who happen to make up the majority of patients the Tavi GIDS is seeing and treating nowadays.