Subtitle: "The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care."
Here "weaponize" means use evidence to reach policy conclusions the author does not like.
No it doesn't, it means cited in a misleading manner to make marketing campaigns and drive policy counter to the actual take-aways of the study. Go look up the "trans women have a male-pattern of violence" study as a perfect example of weaponizing scientific results to the point where the author had to come out to correct folks that that isn't at all what the study said.
If you want gross misinterpretation of scientific results in a different field go look up the "99% of people don't become addicted to oxy" study whose weaponization for policy outcomes is credited for starting the opioid crisis.
Your priors for "how puberty blockers affect mental health outcomes" should be glued to "doesn't make it better (how could it), doesn't make it worse" and that's what they're claiming the study showed.
> their concept of women typically consists of a collection of sexist stereotypes
Perhaps despite my better
judgment, I'm willing to give this one good-faith reply. Your observation is correct, you're identifying something real but you have the explanation wrong. There is another group of women who also fit this description— children. Girls and teenagers also fall into a lot of sexist stereotypes. I certainly did when I was little playing house, dressing up as a princess. I wore way too much makeup when I was first allowed to. But that process is how we grow, and it's okay because we're kids and everyone else is going through it too.
Trans women, whether they want to or not, go through the same phases except as adults. Only worse because after so long of denying themselves any kind of femininity they tend to overdo it a bit. And because newly out trans women are the most visible it becomes all people really know. And look, it's super cringe I agree with you, but they're learning how to be adult women just like we did, and they grow out of it and into their own just like we did.
"Are Jews more predisposed to financial fraud than non-Jews?"
Do you want the answer to that question? How confident are you that you want it? What do you think are the odds that launching that study will benefit the world? What statistical test would you prefer, and what is the balance between type 1 and type 2 error rates? What sort of group is likely to want to fund that study? If you perform 30 of these studies and find that for P>0.05, 3 of them do show a statistically significant result, how do you think that is going to impact society? Do you think it will mean the same thing to scientists as to non-scientists?
Acknowledging that society incorporates a longstanding war of dueling narratives, and that scientific studies are a part of that, becomes an unfortunate necessity. I have watched geeky friends go from "Science must prevail over politics" to alt-right eugenicists, and I have watched alt-right eugenicists weaponize "Science must prevail over politics" for the sake of promoting what looks more than a little bit like ethnic cleansing.
It is often easier for a group to make obviously poor decisions due to internal conflict, than for an individual who can consolidate a worldview. As a collective group, we have gotten a lot dumber than we were in recent memory.
This is one of the problems I have with modern discourse.
We're suppose to trust institutions based on the idea that institutions are inherently trustworthy.
Having dealt with a few I honestly think they're marginally more trustworthy _but_ are better at hiding and obscuring their biases... which is worse in some ways.
Best example in the article:
> “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
> That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.
Also this study is funded by the government (our taxes) and has received almost $10 million. Not releasing the results is wild and the reasoning is worse. I have almost no faith that this team won't try some sort of p-hacking to get the results they wanted to see.
That only works with a web of independent and constant verification.
These days no one checks their sources, and whole networks of people make decision to benefit their views and wants, and not to disclose facts no matter the findings.
The issue is that none of this stuff is objective but everyone has to pretend that it is.
You have to say that people are depressed because they can’t transition, because the alternative would be to say that people who are depressed or otherwise mentally ill are more likely to do crazy things, and that’s taboo, so instead you make up a series of bizarre non sequiturs because using logic would lead to saying “banned” things.
It’s like some sort of weird Soviet Union joke, 2+3=6 because we have to report that we have made 6 units of grain, even if we only made 2 in one field and 3 in another, we made 6 units of grain, it doesn’t make sense because it can’t.
Same as in COVID. Masks have an effect, but we originally said they didn’t because we wanted to avoid shortages. It wasn’t factual, it was a narrative with a goal, if you look at it like a logic problem and assume that every statement is truthful you’re going to have issues.
My problem with this discussion is that when research is published backing the affirming approach to gender dysphoria, it doesnt make it to the media. But when person who published 28 papers about safety and good results of puberty blockers in dysphoric kids withelds one piece because they are worried media will grab it and run with it, exactly this happens.
A scientist that only publishes results supporting a political agenda and keeps quiet about the the rest is obviously not doing science and should be ignored.
That of course doesn't mean you invalidate the whole research field.
> In case anyone missed it, I'd like to point out the obvious: her professional reputation, and her paycheck (i.e. her grants), depend on a continued supply of unhappy gender-transitioning children.
This kind of knee jerk conspiratorial nonsense is exactly why reactionaries share blame for making this into a needlessly politicized shit show.
It is indeed anti-scientific to hold back the study, just like it's anti-scientific to latch on to one result and use it to support the reactionary panic narrative. Just like covid and climate change before it, once we're here we've all lost. Do better and maybe we can manage to walk the fine line of truth at the heart of the matter, because neither extremist camp has it right.
Regardless of literal truth, it puts the focus in the wrong place. Your emphasis makes it so the only conclusion is that no experts can trusted. With the complexity and interconnectedness of modern society this is essentially untenable, but yet the simplicity appeals to people's gut feelings. Meanwhile compromise and middlegrounds are boring.
This is the basic anti-intellectualism powering the cancer that devoured the republican party [0]. So despite your seemingly only trying to criticize the excesses of your closer camp, you've inadvertently added to the polarized environment. If we can no longer assume that people who have spent their careers studying things and developing nuanced opinions are closer to right than wrong, then for every question there is but two possible answers.
[0] and one of the main reasons it's no longer appropriate to call them conservative so instead I use Moldbug's own word reactionary. Meanwhile the democratic party is checking most conservative boxes these days. This also trivially explains things like the "hyper liberalization" of college campuses and tone policing in general - it's actually a standard hallmark of conservatism.
> If we can no longer assume that people who have spent their careers studying things and developing nuanced opinions are closer to right than wrong
What are you talking about? You really express yourself in a convoluted way - it doesn't help your case.
I'm not questioning her science. I'm questioning her decision not to publish a study that she did using public money, because she didn't like how it turned out. At least, that's what the article says.
> This is the basic anti-intellectualism powering the cancer
I'm quite familiar with the world of R1 universities. And I used to be a huge fanboy of Dan Ariely, amongst other "charlatans," to quote one of his peers. If anti-intellectualism is on the rise, then arrogant, narcissistic, dishonest academics should look in the mirror for the explanation.
There is no single "the" explanation for a breakdown in societal trust. It's a mutual process.
Yes, dishonest academics share the blame. Yes, authorities lying about straightforward things to fit political conclusions (eg covid masks) shares the blame. But also narratives implying that no experts can be trusted, as every expert will inherently have conflicts of interests, share the blame.
That is where you majorly stepped over the line in your original comment. It's literally true, but it's true for everyone across the board. By emphasizing it and assuming bad faith you've made it so there can be no such thing as an expert opinion or consensus. That leaves nowhere to go besides non-nuanced pro/anti positions on everything, or "doing your own research" which ends up being mostly being sifting through the politicized tripe to feel which is more convincing.
I've always though people are voting for Trump because there is quite a lot of disillusioned people who consider Trump the anti-establishment choice, whatever the system they are imagining is. Hence "drain the swamp" and "you will be in jail" things. If far left is such an issue, why focus polls keep bringing up economy as top issue for his voters and things like abortion or trans rights come up last? Why conservative candidates who run on mainly anti-trans platforms or anti-abortion platforms lose to conservative candidates that pitch economy as their focus? Why those claims fail to mobilize voters?
I'll just make the observation that what people "say" is important to them is often not reflected in how they actually vote. E.g. you can find countless stories of red-state voters who are on Obamacare, and who say that healthcare is a top priority ... who nevertheless vote Republican.
> there is quite a lot of disillusioned people who consider Trump the anti-establishment choice
I agree with you here, although I think this is an idiotic choice by entitled, lazy, out-of-touch people. And I'm not willing to give them a pass.
I'm just spitballing, but I think you could explain it that the disillusioned people aren't anti-trans by itself, but rather anti what they perceive is so much attention being spent on the issue rather than the "real problems". So "culture war" fuels negative condemnation of the other side, while not directly creating positive support for their own politicians.
Of course that's still totally disconnected from reality given that if you're concerned about inflation you shouldn't be voting for the guy that oversaw the printing of trillions of dollars (monetary inflation) that caused immediate asset inflation (his goal) but price inflation spread over several years as monetary velocity went back up. And if you're concerned with taxes going up, you shouldn't be voting for the guy that signed those tax increases into law. So I don't think rationality actually has much to do with where we're at.
"The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria."
I notice a trend of comments that contradict the most basic facts of an article. Are you a bot? Is lying a fetish?
> Results:
>A total of 95 youth were enrolled in the GnRHa cohort. Mean age was 11.22 years (SD=1.46), and the majority were white (52.6%) and designated male at birth (51.6%). Elevated depression symptoms were endorsed by 28.6% of GnRHa cohort youth, and 22.1% endorsed clinically significant anxiety. About a quarter (23.6%) endorsed lifetime suicidal ideation, with 7.9% reporting a past suicide attempt. A total of 316 youth were enrolled in the GAH cohort. Mean age was 16.0 years (SD=1.88), and the majority were white (62%) and designated female at birth (64.9%). Elevated depression symptoms were endorsed by 51.3% of the GAH cohort, and 57.3% endorsed clinically significant anxiety. Two-thirds (66.6%) endorsed lifetime suicidal ideation, with 24.6% reporting a past suicide attempt. Life satisfaction was lower amongst both cohorts compared to population-based norms.
Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.
“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
Ok so there was no "improvement" because they were doing fine already. What's the problem here?
If they were doing fine before then why was a significant medical intervention with possibly irreversible effects warranted? I can't make sense of the premise.
Puberty blockers are not irreversible. Children who experience precocious puberty have been going on puberty blockers for decades. They take them for a few years and then get off them to start puberty at a more appropriate age.
Puberty blockers are intended to be reversible. Their purpose is to defer puberty until the point that it would be more appropriate. They are commonly used with children who begin puberty too early, like single digit years. The child is then take off of the blocker and things proceed as normal. This has decades of study and use.
In trans kids the purpose is to buy time in a way that is reversible. Reversibility is the point. If a child says “I might want to medically transition” they can defer their normal puberty think on if they want to make an irreversible decision and then if they don’t the blockers are ceased and they continue life as normal.
Edit:
I missed the point about the premise as well. We do this for the same reason we encourage self expression in all children. Expressing yourself and playing with that expression is an incredibly important part of childhood. Puberty blockers enable a child, an incredibly small number of them who’ve already shown a lot of interest in it, to explore a side of themselves that is potentially going to be erased without much risk at all.
For puberty blockers, "reversible" just means that discontinuing the blockers will unsuppress the hormones that the blockers suppress, allowing them to gradually reach normal baseline levels. It doesn't mean that the downstream effects of doing this are reversible.
There is a developmental window that opens during puberty that cannot be returned to later on once closed. That is, the blocked part of this pubertal window is not deferred: it's forfeited.
If a child is on puberty blockers for a significant period of time during this, they risk lifelong infertility and anorgasmia, underdeveloped sexual organs, undermineralized bones leading to osteopenia and osteoporosis, and potential brain developmental defects.
None of which is reversible in adulthood.
As an analogy, hypothermia is "reversible" up to the point you're about to die of it. This means that you can raise a hypothermic person's body temperature back to its normal setpoint. However, this does not mean that if you get gangrene from hypothermia, the dead tissue can be resuscitated and brought back to normal function. This is not reversible.
I had initially included the phrase "largely reversible." You're not wrong that if used for too long, or outside of specific windows there are effects that cannot be reversed. But that's not how they are used in this context. They are used in the context of providing time to decide if you want to make the irreversible decision.
No reasonable health provider is going to leave a child on blockers so long that they end up functionally a eunuch. Is it possible for problems to occur? Of course. Is that the intent and the way they are usually used? No. Has it happened to a non/0 number of people? Maybe? Being technically correct here doesn't help anyone.
We're not talking about the difference between "almost dead" and "dead" we're talking much more about something like a tattoo or an ear gauge. Ear gauges are reversible up to a point. You experiment with them and if you enjoy having the ability to adorn yourself that way you do so. If you don't you stop increasing the size before you have to spend the rest of your life with a giant hole in your ear.
> They are used in the context of providing time to decide if you want to make the irreversible decision.
That is the claim made by proponents of this treatment, but the evidence base for this is remarkably weak.
Recently, the Cass Review examined the available research and concluded that "the most significant knowledge gaps are in relation to treatment with puberty blockers, and the lack of clarity about whether the rationale for prescription is as an initial part of a transition pathway or as a 'pause' to allow more time for decision making."
Even more concerning, they make the point that there is "no way of knowing whether, rather than buying time to make a decision, puberty blockers may disrupt that decision-making process."
The Review further explains that there are indications that brain maturation may be disrupted by puberty blockers, meaning this could be a significant factor in reducing the ability of the individual to reach such a decision, due to the potential of causing neurocognitive deficits.
Because of all this, puberty blockers are actually banned in the UK now for this purpose, except when being offered under a strictly controlled research protocol.
I think maybe this is because you don't understand how someone can be gender non-conforming and also happy. Maybe you are having a hard time with the asymmetrical and temporal aspects (child is happy, child chooses their puberty path, child is happy during and after puberty). Isn't that a good path for care?
Because people struggle with reading comprehension and are willing to twist anything and everything to take autonomy and liberty from gender diverse people.
Aren't puberty blockers primarily meant to prevent children with gender dysphoria from experiencing the physical disadvantages of going through the puberty of the wrong sex? Obviously a study where children are given the puberty blockers won't be able to measure the impact of all the harmful effects that were prevented (neither physical nor mental health-wise).
The way the article is worded, it almost sounds like they were expecting them to work like mood enhancers. I mean, it's somewhat interesting that there were different outcomes in both studies, but it doesn't speak in any way against the use of puberty blockers.
The study that got published included children from 12 to 16 at time of starting on blockers.
A child at 16 is going to have gone through a substantial portion of the 'wrong' puberty already. Are their outcomes better/worse than children who start them earlier? If this study found that it makes no difference, it would suggest that blockers are not achieving the very thing you say they're intended for.
55 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadHere "weaponize" means use evidence to reach policy conclusions the author does not like.
If you want gross misinterpretation of scientific results in a different field go look up the "99% of people don't become addicted to oxy" study whose weaponization for policy outcomes is credited for starting the opioid crisis.
Your priors for "how puberty blockers affect mental health outcomes" should be glued to "doesn't make it better (how could it), doesn't make it worse" and that's what they're claiming the study showed.
Perhaps despite my better judgment, I'm willing to give this one good-faith reply. Your observation is correct, you're identifying something real but you have the explanation wrong. There is another group of women who also fit this description— children. Girls and teenagers also fall into a lot of sexist stereotypes. I certainly did when I was little playing house, dressing up as a princess. I wore way too much makeup when I was first allowed to. But that process is how we grow, and it's okay because we're kids and everyone else is going through it too.
Trans women, whether they want to or not, go through the same phases except as adults. Only worse because after so long of denying themselves any kind of femininity they tend to overdo it a bit. And because newly out trans women are the most visible it becomes all people really know. And look, it's super cringe I agree with you, but they're learning how to be adult women just like we did, and they grow out of it and into their own just like we did.
"Are Jews more predisposed to financial fraud than non-Jews?"
Do you want the answer to that question? How confident are you that you want it? What do you think are the odds that launching that study will benefit the world? What statistical test would you prefer, and what is the balance between type 1 and type 2 error rates? What sort of group is likely to want to fund that study? If you perform 30 of these studies and find that for P>0.05, 3 of them do show a statistically significant result, how do you think that is going to impact society? Do you think it will mean the same thing to scientists as to non-scientists?
Acknowledging that society incorporates a longstanding war of dueling narratives, and that scientific studies are a part of that, becomes an unfortunate necessity. I have watched geeky friends go from "Science must prevail over politics" to alt-right eugenicists, and I have watched alt-right eugenicists weaponize "Science must prevail over politics" for the sake of promoting what looks more than a little bit like ethnic cleansing.
It is often easier for a group to make obviously poor decisions due to internal conflict, than for an individual who can consolidate a worldview. As a collective group, we have gotten a lot dumber than we were in recent memory.
We're suppose to trust institutions based on the idea that institutions are inherently trustworthy.
Having dealt with a few I honestly think they're marginally more trustworthy _but_ are better at hiding and obscuring their biases... which is worse in some ways.
Best example in the article:
> “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
> That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.
Also this study is funded by the government (our taxes) and has received almost $10 million. Not releasing the results is wild and the reasoning is worse. I have almost no faith that this team won't try some sort of p-hacking to get the results they wanted to see.
Trust-based systems and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
These days no one checks their sources, and whole networks of people make decision to benefit their views and wants, and not to disclose facts no matter the findings.
You have to say that people are depressed because they can’t transition, because the alternative would be to say that people who are depressed or otherwise mentally ill are more likely to do crazy things, and that’s taboo, so instead you make up a series of bizarre non sequiturs because using logic would lead to saying “banned” things.
It’s like some sort of weird Soviet Union joke, 2+3=6 because we have to report that we have made 6 units of grain, even if we only made 2 in one field and 3 in another, we made 6 units of grain, it doesn’t make sense because it can’t.
Same as in COVID. Masks have an effect, but we originally said they didn’t because we wanted to avoid shortages. It wasn’t factual, it was a narrative with a goal, if you look at it like a logic problem and assume that every statement is truthful you’re going to have issues.
That of course doesn't mean you invalidate the whole research field.
Ray Barone gets the hots for the mailman
https://youtu.be/9TEjtdIbdCw?si=0CYvBLMLn4DSQH3F
This kind of knee jerk conspiratorial nonsense is exactly why reactionaries share blame for making this into a needlessly politicized shit show.
It is indeed anti-scientific to hold back the study, just like it's anti-scientific to latch on to one result and use it to support the reactionary panic narrative. Just like covid and climate change before it, once we're here we've all lost. Do better and maybe we can manage to walk the fine line of truth at the heart of the matter, because neither extremist camp has it right.
This is the basic anti-intellectualism powering the cancer that devoured the republican party [0]. So despite your seemingly only trying to criticize the excesses of your closer camp, you've inadvertently added to the polarized environment. If we can no longer assume that people who have spent their careers studying things and developing nuanced opinions are closer to right than wrong, then for every question there is but two possible answers.
[0] and one of the main reasons it's no longer appropriate to call them conservative so instead I use Moldbug's own word reactionary. Meanwhile the democratic party is checking most conservative boxes these days. This also trivially explains things like the "hyper liberalization" of college campuses and tone policing in general - it's actually a standard hallmark of conservatism.
What are you talking about? You really express yourself in a convoluted way - it doesn't help your case.
I'm not questioning her science. I'm questioning her decision not to publish a study that she did using public money, because she didn't like how it turned out. At least, that's what the article says.
> This is the basic anti-intellectualism powering the cancer
I'm quite familiar with the world of R1 universities. And I used to be a huge fanboy of Dan Ariely, amongst other "charlatans," to quote one of his peers. If anti-intellectualism is on the rise, then arrogant, narcissistic, dishonest academics should look in the mirror for the explanation.
Yes, dishonest academics share the blame. Yes, authorities lying about straightforward things to fit political conclusions (eg covid masks) shares the blame. But also narratives implying that no experts can be trusted, as every expert will inherently have conflicts of interests, share the blame.
That is where you majorly stepped over the line in your original comment. It's literally true, but it's true for everyone across the board. By emphasizing it and assuming bad faith you've made it so there can be no such thing as an expert opinion or consensus. That leaves nowhere to go besides non-nuanced pro/anti positions on everything, or "doing your own research" which ends up being mostly being sifting through the politicized tripe to feel which is more convincing.
I'll just make the observation that what people "say" is important to them is often not reflected in how they actually vote. E.g. you can find countless stories of red-state voters who are on Obamacare, and who say that healthcare is a top priority ... who nevertheless vote Republican.
> there is quite a lot of disillusioned people who consider Trump the anti-establishment choice
I agree with you here, although I think this is an idiotic choice by entitled, lazy, out-of-touch people. And I'm not willing to give them a pass.
Of course that's still totally disconnected from reality given that if you're concerned about inflation you shouldn't be voting for the guy that oversaw the printing of trillions of dollars (monetary inflation) that caused immediate asset inflation (his goal) but price inflation spread over several years as monetary velocity went back up. And if you're concerned with taxes going up, you shouldn't be voting for the guy that signed those tax increases into law. So I don't think rationality actually has much to do with where we're at.
I notice a trend of comments that contradict the most basic facts of an article. Are you a bot? Is lying a fetish?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7897328/ This abstract is linked in the article
Ok so there was no "improvement" because they were doing fine already. What's the problem here?
In trans kids the purpose is to buy time in a way that is reversible. Reversibility is the point. If a child says “I might want to medically transition” they can defer their normal puberty think on if they want to make an irreversible decision and then if they don’t the blockers are ceased and they continue life as normal.
Edit: I missed the point about the premise as well. We do this for the same reason we encourage self expression in all children. Expressing yourself and playing with that expression is an incredibly important part of childhood. Puberty blockers enable a child, an incredibly small number of them who’ve already shown a lot of interest in it, to explore a side of themselves that is potentially going to be erased without much risk at all.
There is a developmental window that opens during puberty that cannot be returned to later on once closed. That is, the blocked part of this pubertal window is not deferred: it's forfeited.
If a child is on puberty blockers for a significant period of time during this, they risk lifelong infertility and anorgasmia, underdeveloped sexual organs, undermineralized bones leading to osteopenia and osteoporosis, and potential brain developmental defects.
None of which is reversible in adulthood.
As an analogy, hypothermia is "reversible" up to the point you're about to die of it. This means that you can raise a hypothermic person's body temperature back to its normal setpoint. However, this does not mean that if you get gangrene from hypothermia, the dead tissue can be resuscitated and brought back to normal function. This is not reversible.
No reasonable health provider is going to leave a child on blockers so long that they end up functionally a eunuch. Is it possible for problems to occur? Of course. Is that the intent and the way they are usually used? No. Has it happened to a non/0 number of people? Maybe? Being technically correct here doesn't help anyone.
We're not talking about the difference between "almost dead" and "dead" we're talking much more about something like a tattoo or an ear gauge. Ear gauges are reversible up to a point. You experiment with them and if you enjoy having the ability to adorn yourself that way you do so. If you don't you stop increasing the size before you have to spend the rest of your life with a giant hole in your ear.
That is the claim made by proponents of this treatment, but the evidence base for this is remarkably weak.
Recently, the Cass Review examined the available research and concluded that "the most significant knowledge gaps are in relation to treatment with puberty blockers, and the lack of clarity about whether the rationale for prescription is as an initial part of a transition pathway or as a 'pause' to allow more time for decision making."
Even more concerning, they make the point that there is "no way of knowing whether, rather than buying time to make a decision, puberty blockers may disrupt that decision-making process."
The Review further explains that there are indications that brain maturation may be disrupted by puberty blockers, meaning this could be a significant factor in reducing the ability of the individual to reach such a decision, due to the potential of causing neurocognitive deficits.
Because of all this, puberty blockers are actually banned in the UK now for this purpose, except when being offered under a strictly controlled research protocol.
As for anorgasmia, I was able to have one long before puberty so idk, I feel like it's not true.
I think maybe this is because you don't understand how someone can be gender non-conforming and also happy. Maybe you are having a hard time with the asymmetrical and temporal aspects (child is happy, child chooses their puberty path, child is happy during and after puberty). Isn't that a good path for care?
The way the article is worded, it almost sounds like they were expecting them to work like mood enhancers. I mean, it's somewhat interesting that there were different outcomes in both studies, but it doesn't speak in any way against the use of puberty blockers.
A child at 16 is going to have gone through a substantial portion of the 'wrong' puberty already. Are their outcomes better/worse than children who start them earlier? If this study found that it makes no difference, it would suggest that blockers are not achieving the very thing you say they're intended for.