2018 Gender Odyssey

Transgender tweens and teens and their families often struggle to find appropriate, thorough, and sensitive health care services. Up-to-date, informed medical care can greatly increase the positive effects of physical gender transition and overall mental well-being for youth. This workshop focuses primarily on medical intervention for transgender youth and will cover the use of puberty-blocking agents such as Lupron as well as cross-sex hormones. For gender-questioning tweens who are showing the earliest physical changes of adolescence, puberty blockers can delay the development of physical changes to allow a young teen time to consolidate their gender identity, or avoid them altogether, often obviating the need for expensive surgeries or electrolysis down the road. Puberty blockers—when correctly used—have been demonstrated to improve psychosocial outcomes in transgender youth. Cross hormones may be introduced independently to transitioning teens who have already experienced puberty, or used in conjunction with blockers as tweens head into adolescence.