It's insanely tragic to be able to immediately pick up on how "simple" the kids put on puberty blockers are as they get older.
Again. It’s not completely understood what triggers puberty.
Plus, older kiwis like myself, can probably point to the year when their opinions changed on certain matters or other things made sense in a deeper way.
It’s not that any meaningful or new information was uncovered, more that things just started to click into place.
Personally I point to 25-ish, then early 30s and now post 40.
A common example I like to use to illustrate this is remember being a child and back then people were basically, children, grown ups and old people.
All grown ups were assumed to be about the same age, and then they became old people, who were also about the same age.
Like we didn’t fully comprehend that a 20 year old isn’t a similar age to a 40 year old, but they were to us.
Then once you get to over 10, early teens, it becomes clear that 20 year old are not really interested in the same things as 40 year olds in a lot of ways.
They talk about different things, have different priorities, and get treated differently by other adults.
I would hazard a 100% unqualified guess that puberty and the resulting chemical changes begin this kind of process in the brain and it keeps on happening.
Puberty blockers presumably would interfere with this, and therefore in turn with a key part of social development and capacity for interaction.
It’s not just dependent on experience. With all respect to people who have had brutal childhoods, despite appearing more mature than their peers in certain areas, twelve year old with the “experience” of a 40 year old is still very childish and immature in most meaningful ways.
Removing key body parts and giving developing children the wrong hormones in the guise of therapy must also mess with their brain development in ways we don’t fully understand either.
Chinese Eunuchs were reported to be erratic in their behavior. Perhaps that was the social situation, but no one was really observing them on a pure behavioral basis.
People around would have just accepted that’s how eunuchs behave presumably.
I half remember some accounts of western castrati being peculiar in their behavior, while again they were not especially expected to behave like normal people, it would have been interesting to compare their maturity and reasoning.