Puberty-delaying medications should be banned for teenagers who are experiencing gender ambiguity or gender dysphoria, said Peter A. McCullough, MD. MPH, on Courageous Discourse, a podcast he does with John Leake. He also expressed concern about prescribing androgens or estrogens for teens post-puberty.
“Best treatment for gender ambiguity/dysphoria is to let the child go through normal puberty. This process clears up internal discord and allows the adolescent to move into adulthood. I agree with @NHS, puberty blockers should be banned,” McCullough wrote in a tweet in which he embedded part of his podcast.
In the podcast, McCullough added, “Puberty not only changes the eternal appearance and the genitalia, et cetera, hair patterns, but it actually changes the mind. So normal male puberty makes a male brain. The brain is not yet actually a male brain until we go through puberty. The same thing for a girl to be a woman’s brain. So all children should go through normal puberty.”
“What we’re seeing now, is the use of interrupting that with puberty blockers," McCullough said in the podcast. "These are ganadotropic-releasing hormone agonists that affect the pituitary, and then post-puberty, we’re seeing the use of androgens or estrogens, which are very disruptive,” McCullough said.
The administration of puberty-blocking medications has become a red-states/blue-states battleground in the U.S. “Thus far this year, 12 states have either banned or severely limited gender-affirming care for minors. It’s expected that more Republican-led states will soon follow suit. At the same time, five Democrat-led states have passed legislation designed to legally protect transgender healthcare coverage and access for minors,” Forbes reported on June 6.
The Forbes article also said many European medical authorities are backing away from or outright banning the use of puberty-blocking drugs for teens.
“In March, for example, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board announced it would revise its current clinical recommendations with respect to “gender-affirming care” for minors. The updated guidelines would restrict the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transition-related surgery to clinical research settings. Norway joins other European nations, such as Finland, Sweden and the U.K., in introducing limits on the provision of gender-affirming care to minors,” the Forbes article said.
Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare only allows children to receive puberty blockers in clinical trials and requires that they be at least 12, Forbes reported. And in England, one of the reasons for shutting down a controversial Gender and Identity Development Service at Tavistock, a London clinic, in 2022, was that physicians were concerned that some patients were referred to a gender transitioning pathway too quickly, Forbes said.
McCullough is an internationally recognized medical researcher in the field of the interactions between kidney function and heart function and related diseases, with more than 1,000 articles published, according to his biography at the information website Radcliffe Cardiology.
However, McCullough was forced out of Baylor University Medical Center over his non-mainstream views on COVID. He has advocated ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 and has made many public statements saying true mortality rates of people who received vaccines for COVID were being covered up. He was sued in 2021 by Baylor Scott & White Health and the HealthTexas Provider Network, for continuing to use his former professional titles, including "vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center" in the media after he’d been forced out for his COVID views, Medpage Today reported.
