The Ethics of Navigating Teen Gender Transitions
Transgender teen Theo Zachariah began identifying as trans at age 13, and now at 16, takes testosterone.
At first, Miriam Zachariah's teenage nephew Theo, who was born female, came out as gay. But he "presented as very gender fluid," she says, which suggested that he hadn't made "a clear choice one way or another."
Families, physicians, and psychologists have pondered whether it's better, neutral, or worse to postpone gender transitions until adulthood.
Zachariah decided to ask her nephew, "Do you think you might be trans?" While he answered "no," the question "broke something open for him," she recalls.
A month later, at age 13, he began identifying as trans. And at 14 1/2, he started undergoing gender transition with an endocrine-blocking injection. More recently, at age 16, he added testosterone injections, and soon he won't need the endocrine blocker any longer.
"His voice is deepening, and his muscle mass is growing," says Zachariah, a principal of two elementary schools in Toronto who became her nephew's legal guardian while he was starting to transition.
There are many medical and bioethical aspects associated with the transition to one's self-identified gender, especially when the process involves children and adolescents. Families, physicians, and psychologists have pondered whether it's better, neutral, or worse to postpone the transition until adulthood, while remaining cognizant of the potential consequences to puberty suppression with cross-sex hormones and the irreversibility of transgender surgeries.
Studies have found a higher prevalence of mental health issues among transgender and gender nonconforming youth, particularly if they are unable to express themselves in the self-identified gender. Research also has shown that transgender adults in the process of transitioning initially experienced worse mental health problems than their adolescent counterparts.
The Endocrine Society, a professional medical organization that provides recommendations for clinical practice, stipulates in its guidelines that the diagnosis of gender identity be limited to qualified mental health professionals for those under age 18. This is important because children are still evolving in their thought processes and capacity to articulate themselves, says endocrinologist Joshua Safer, inaugural executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
A transition can begin safely in gradations, by allowing young children to experiment with haircuts and clothes of either gender before puberty. "If it just ends up being a stage of life, we haven't done anything permanent," says Safer, who is president of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health as well as steering committee co-chair of TransNet, the international transgender research consortium.
After changes in appearance, the next step would be to try puberty blockers. Also used to halt precocious puberty, the injections are "a reasonably established intervention" for transgender youth, although there are some concerns that the drugs could interfere with bone health in the future, he says.
From a mental health standpoint, "hormones for youth who qualify for them have offered a tremendous boost in well-being and also a reduction in anxiety, depression, and suicidality that often plague transgender youth when they experience their bodies as totally discordant with their self-knowledge of their authentic gender," says psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health in the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at Benioff Children's Hospital of the University of California at San Francisco.
Many of these youth have either known about or have been living in their authentic gender since early childhood; others discovered their true identities in adolescence, often with the onset of puberty, says Ehrensaft, associate professor of pediatrics. The effects of gender-affirming hormone treatments are at least partially reversible, she adds, whereas surgical procedures are irreversible. Regardless of reversibility, best practices include careful consideration of all interventions to ensure they are in a youth's best interests in promoting gender health and general well-being.
When a child exhibits signs of gender dysphoria, parents and guardians should at a minimum take these feelings seriously.
In determining readiness for a transgender operation, an assessment of maturity is as important as chronological age, says Loren Schechter, plastic surgeon and director of the Center for Gender Confirmation Surgery at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago. With the consent of a parent or guardian, he commonly performs mastectomies on adolescents at age 17 and sometimes earlier, based on the clinical circumstances and along with a multidisciplinary team that includes a primary care provider and a mental health professional.
"Typically, before surgery, people have had the opportunity and time to consider their options," Schechter says, observing that "the incidence of regret or changing one's mind is extremely low." Others may opt to transition socially but not surgically. "We recognize that gender is not binary," he explains. Some individuals may not "discreetly fit into male or female" in how they perceive themselves.
When a child exhibits signs of gender dysphoria, parents and guardians should at a minimum take these feelings seriously, not dismiss them. They may want to enlist the assistance of a gender identity clinic to address the social environment and guide the child in exploring activities with the self-identified gender, says Kelly McBride Folkers, research associate in the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University School of Medicine.
At one end of the spectrum, some parents and guardians are overzealous in supporting their child's gender-identity pursuits while the youngster is still in an early phase of decision-making. On the flipside, other parents and guardians are not at all supportive, leaving the child at risk for long-term psychological effects, says Folkers, who is also associate director of the High School Bioethics Project at NYU, an educational program that aids teachers and students in examining ethical and conceptual concepts across various areas, one of which is gender.
"It's important to help children navigate through this process early, so that they have all of the social and familial support they need if and when they choose to seek medical options for gender affirmation later," she says.
There are various reasons why children and adolescents want to explore the opposite gender when they reach puberty. "It's a small percentage who will persist and insist and be consistent with that opposite gender identity," says Nicole Mihalopoulos, adolescent medicine physician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City.
Turning to a social work support system can help bring clarity for teens, parents, and guardians.
For those youth, it's appropriate to start the conversation about a medication to block puberty, but without actually promoting a hormonal transition to the opposite gender, in order for the child to further explore living as the opposite gender. "Children need to start at puberty because we need to know that their bodies are physiologically normal," Mihalopoulos says.
A lack of breast development in girls or a lack of testicular development in boys could point to an abnormality in the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, or ovaries/testicles. "That needs to be identified and corrected first," she explains, "before I would say, 'Let's start on the medical transition path of the alternate gender.' "
For parents and guardians, says Theo Zachariah's aunt Miriam, it's very tempting to misinterpret a child's struggling attempts to articulate being trans as an adolescent identity crisis. That's when turning to a social work support system can bring clarity. A youth mental health agency with experience in trans issues made a positive impact on Theo's family through one-on-one counseling and in groups for teens and parents.
"The dialogue they were able to engage in with my nephew, his mom and us," she says, was very instrumental "in helping us all figure out what to do and how to navigate the change."
Urinary tract infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year.
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”
MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history
A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital prepares a pig organ for transplant.
Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.
The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.
As a last resort, Slayman’s kidney specialist suggested a transplant using a pig kidney provided by eGenesis, a pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Mass. The highly experimental surgery was made possible with the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” initiative, which allows patients with life-threatening medical conditions access to experimental treatments.
The new frontier of organ donation
Like Slayman, more than 100,000 people are currently on the national organ transplant waiting list, and roughly 17 people die every day waiting for an available organ. To make up for the shortage of human organs, scientists have been experimenting for the past several decades with using organs from animals such as pigs—a new field of medicine known as xenotransplantation. But putting an animal organ into a human body is much more complicated than it might appear, experts say.
“The human immune system reacts incredibly violently to a pig organ, much more so than a human organ,” said Dr. Joren Madsen, director of the Mass General Transplant Center. Even with immunosuppressant drugs that suppress the body’s ability to reject the transplant organ, Madsen said, a human body would reject an animal organ “within minutes.”
So scientists have had to use gene-editing technology to change the animal organs so that they would work inside a human body. The pig kidney in Slayman’s surgery, for instance, had been genetically altered using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to remove harmful pig genes and add human ones. The kidney was also edited to remove pig viruses that could potentially infect a human after transplant.
With CRISPR technology, scientists have been able to prove that interspecies organ transplants are not only possible, but may be able to successfully work long term, too. In the past several years, scientists were able to transplant a pig kidney into a monkey and have the monkey survive for more than two years. More recently, doctors have transplanted pig hearts into human beings—though each recipient of a pig heart only managed to live a couple of months after the transplant. In one of the patients, researchers noted evidence of a pig virus in the man’s heart that had not been identified before the surgery and could be a possible explanation for his heart failure.
So far, so good
Slayman and his medical team ultimately decided to pursue the surgery—and the risk paid off. When the pig organ started producing urine at the end of the four-hour surgery, the entire operating room erupted in applause.
Slayman is currently receiving an infusion of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the kidney from being rejected, while his doctors monitor the kidney’s function with frequent ultrasounds. Slayman is reported to be “recovering well” at Massachusetts General Hospital and is expected to be discharged within the next several days.