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But other trans health professionals They are concerned about the sharp increase in adolescent referrals to sex clinics and worry that the desire for hormones and surgery may be due in part to peer influence on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

In 2007, he helped establish one of the first youth gender clinics in the United States in Boston. “Kids applying today are very different from what I saw in the early days,” Edwards-Leeper said.

Edwards-Leeper said she’s more likely to see adolescents who have recently begun to question their gender, a decade ago when her patients had longstanding concerns about their bodies.

These seemingly sudden changes — other mental health issues or a history of trauma — should be flags for providers to slow down, he said. Instead, some sex clinics with long waiting lists “blindly approve” of adolescent patients by offering them hormones without taking these potential problems seriously.

And while it’s unclear how often, some people who transitioned when they were younger reported break the transition later on. Although some people whose transition is impaired more liquid gender identity, others are uncomfortable living with irreversible changes caused by hormones or surgeries.

“These issues of poor appraisal and what I sometimes call hasty or sloppy maintenance resulted in potential harm,” he said. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist working with transgender adolescents in Berkeley, California.

70-year-old Dr. Anderson said she understands the trauma of being deprived of care. She first realized she was transgender in her 30s, but didn’t consult an endocrinologist about hormone therapy until she was 45. “The doctor’s response was, ‘I can’t help you,'” she said. Desperately, he waited a few more years before making a medical transition again.