As there's currently a Queensland Supreme Court challenge to the Queensland Government's ban on puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for transgender (and only transgender) youth, here is your periodic reminder, that regardless of what the media says:
Puberty blockers are not (by themselves) gender-affirming therapy.
Puberty blockers are the least-worst non-therapy proposed by transphobes as an alternative to actually effective HRT.
Granted, in some cases a young person may be on the verge of puberty, aware that something gender-related is an issue for them, uncertain precisely what this is, but also unwilling to let biological chance settle the matter for them. In those cases puberty blockers are absolutely the thing with which to purchase some time to consider the matter further.
However the majority of trans people devote a lot of thought and sleepless nights (in my rather extreme case, about five years), from first inkling to squaring their situation with absolute certainty, before breathing a word to any close friend or family, let alone a medical professional. While not all trans people decide that HRT is a part of the adjustments they need to make to their lives, most do[citation needed].
Put yourself in the position of somebody like the daughter of the woman who has launched this Supreme Court challenge. Let's assume the puberty blocker ban was not in effect, and by some miracle they have found a practitioner willing to touch trans healthcare with a bargepole (which I can tell you is difficult enough as an adult in Victoria; the political, social, and cultural polar opposite of Queensland). I am taking liberties for satirical effect, but what this girl and her mother will likely be told after a diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been reached, in Australia as in many wealthy secular democratic nations, will boil down to this:
Now I'm wholly convinced, based on what you've told me and the assessments of the specialists I've referred you to, that there's no legal or medical reason not to start you on HRT, which is a perfectly safe and effective way to let you go through the appropriate puberty at the appropriate time. Indeed it would be medically negligent of me to do otherwise.
However, due to the possibility of legal action by organised transphobes, or extra-legal action by some random fruitcake with a gun, or future fascist government, et cetera, I feel obliged to completely ignore the available contemporary evidence and instead trust the judgement of somebody who, on or about the day of your birth, took a quick look at your downstairs bits and presumably hasn't clapped eyes on you since.
The good news is that, in place of the teenage years which by rights you ought to be able to enjoy, what I can prescribe is puberty blockers. These do pretty much what it says on the tin. As you watch your peers blossom into adulthood, you'll be sitting on the sidelines, which I'm sure won't be all that awkward or traumatic, until you reach an age where you cease to be a possession of society and achieve the status of a person worthy of moral concern. Whereupon I'll be happy to do for you what I could easily do now.
Which is pretty cruel, and doesn't at all reflect professional consensus on best practice for trans youth, but for the governments of Queensland, the UK, and the godawful mess that is the US, this is the wild extreme of insane transgender ideology and criminal child mutilation that must be stamped out.
Bear in mind that nobody is calling for a ban on HRT for cisgender people. Nobody ever argued that middle-aged cis women were vulnerable to "social contagion" and "sudden-onset menopause". A cis man with low testosterone won't automatically be sent for a psychiatric assessment, just in case he's overreacting to a totally natural and normal biological process. Nobody is calling for a ban on puberty blockers for children with precocious puberty. You wont see a doctor telling an 8 year old boy:
Well, maybe you'll come to enjoy being the only kid on the primary school playground with a full folk-singer's beard. It's distinctive! A conversation starter! And if you really find it so upsetting, we can always prescribe anti-depressants.
I'm sorry, I really can't prescribe something so untested and experimental as puberty blockers.
Yet this is basically what the Cass Review, and similarly dodgy policy-based evidence, advises should be done with trans youth. The expert consultation upon which the Queensland puberty blocker ban rests was a single 21-minute Microsoft Teams meeting on the morning the ban was announced!
Personally, in the forty years between the wrong puberty and the right puberty, I ran the gamut of all the antidepressants on the market, and a series of self-accredited therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists. These were supplemented by a frightening intake of alcohol, among other basically unhealthy, self-flagellating habits that I used to relieve my awkwardness and self-loathing while punishing myself for being fundamentally wrong in a way I couldn't understand. All of this has of course had permanent, irreversible physical and psychological consequences, but compared to many of my peers, I've had a gentle ride.
In the 21st century no child should have to suffer anything like this in the name of a purported due caution which, it is increasingly obvious, merely masks a fascist eugenics program.
Any patient presenting with gender incongruence, regardless of age, should in the absence of compelling contraindications (Ooh! Get her, with her jargon!) be given the same gender-affirming medical treatment offered to anybody else with a hormone imbalance. To argue for anything else is to argue for a "natural" gender binary which implies at best the suppression, but ultimately the eradication of nonconformity.