Watch Out for This Catchphrase Among Anti-Trans Loons

What is chemical castration and is it an accurate description of any form of gender-affirming care?

by Evan Urquhart

a person's hands slicing an eggplant on a wooden cutting board

When young people experience persistent, consistent gender dysphoria one potential treatment is to temporarily prevent their natural sex-hormones from causing permanent changes and give them time to understand, decide on, and consent to the more permanent changes that come with cross-sex hormones. The drugs used for this approach are colloquially referred to as “puberty blockers” by normal people, but the right seems to be set on using a new phrase.

The phrase is chemical castration. Oof! Yikes! Yee-ow! You can, uh, really see why the sort of people who are determined to remove any nuance from the conversation on trans issues would want to use such a scary-sounding and inflammatory phrase. The use of chemical castration in the context of gender transition isn’t brand new (Ron DeSantis reportedly used the phrase in a debate last October, so it’s been floating around), but it appears in J. D. Vance’s recently proposed bill to ban gender-affirming care for youth nationwide, it cropped up yesterday in an article for Fox News describing an interview WPATH president Dr. Marci Bowers did with CBS, it can be found in an article on Christian media from a few weeks ago which quotes a right-wing activist’s tweets, and generally seems to be very much on the rise.

The phrase chemical castration is most commonly used to describe medications used to suppress the sex drive of men who have been convicted of child sexual abuse and other crimes. For example, in Louisiana drugs that artificially suppress testosterone can be imposed involuntarily on men convicted of raping children and other violent sexual crimes. The chemical castration of sex offenders is controversial, and the specific laws differ widely, with many places allowing offenders to voluntarily undergo the process in exchange for less jail time. Chemical castration has also been used to describe androgen deprivation therapy, which is an established treatment for prostate cancer, however this usage seems to be infrequent. On the website for the Prostrate Cancer Foundation, a search for the phrase “hormone therapy” returned 194 results, “androgen deprivation therapy” returned 175 results, and “chemical castration” returned 12.

In addition to sounding generally icky, the word castration tends to imply permanent sterilization, though none of the drugs that suppress testosterone cause sterility in actual fact. This association with permanent infertility seems likely to be intentional on the part of those using the phrase to describe aspects of gender-affirming care. Anti-trans activists routinely attempt to present gender-affirming care as routinely and necessarily sterilizing, although this is far from the case. Trans people the world over have fought for the right not to undergo sterilization as part of a legal transition process, with Finland being the most recent countries to remove a sterilization requirement from their laws.

Puberty-blocking medications are considered fully reversible and do not result in sterility at all, although for youth who block puberty early and proceed directly to cross sex hormones permanent sterility is believed to be one possible side effect. (For that reason, fertility counseling is required for such youth by the WPATH standards of care.) While it’s true that by delaying the onset of puberty these drugs can also delay the flowering of a teen’s full sex drive, that’s not their purpose or intent, and is a temporary, rather than permanent, side effect. Some doctors, including Marci Bowers, have raised concerns that some transgender girls who suppress puberty early and move directly to feminizing hormones afterward may not experience a full sexual response, though this does not seem to have been the subject of any formal studies and remains speculative at this point.

As with other examples of unhinged hyperbole from the right, we predict we’ll see increasing use of “chemical castration” to refer to reversible puberty blocking medications, despite the phrase being rarely used outside of controversial punishments for violent sex offenders. A highly stigmatizing, misleading, and offensive phrase, it seems par for the course for opponents of trans rights.

Evan Urquhart

Evan Urquhart is a journalist whose work has appeared in Slate, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, and many other outlets. He’s also transgender, and the creator of Assigned Media.

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