Politics is downstream from culture

"I don't think it's apples and oranges. The treatment is the same." Short-term and long-term use are not "the same" especially if taken to the point of opting out of puberty permanently as you are advocating. "breaking up the monopoly would have to come first for such a culture to develop." That's backwards. You can't transplant a bunch of Spartans into the modern world and expect them to respect anyone's rights. Every serious social scientist from Tocqueville to Dewey has understood this and the erosion of free speech by cancel culture is a testament to how much political freedoms are at the mercy of cultural forces. Freedom doesn't come from the top down. The way things are now, the trans-kid issue is a partisan wedge issue that creates echo chambers around these two camps of the culture war and that's inimical to making informed choices. "If you can't change the system one drug at a time, you will never change it at all." Oh, by all means, go ahead and change it one drug at a time. I didn't mean to imply that that wouldn't work (it more or less has for cannabis), just that the case of puberty blockers in particular is intractably bound up with the trans-kids issue. "And the argument about "special privileges" for a "protected class" comes straight out of the anti-trans playbook." I don't know where you're getting that playbook. Or are you just lumping all dissent under one umbrella as a smear? "The class of people at risk of experiencing puberty is everyone who hasn't already." Sure. But there's no way around the trans-kids issue. Otherwise, the number of people who see puberty as a problem or "risk" to be avoided is very very small and the interests of dirty ol' men who want perma-boys in their beds don't really carry a lot of weight.