Why Do Studies Show IQ Declining After Gender Transition?

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the controversial topic of IQ changes after gender transition, with a special focus on puberty blockers. This episode explores scientific studies on animals and humans, the mechanisms behind cognitive changes, and the social and ethical implications. The hosts discuss both supporting and opposing research, share personal anecdotes, and address the broader cultural conversation around gender transition and cognitive health.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be looking into the phenomenon of not just gender transition, but specifically puberty blockers. Hmm. And a significant decline in iq. This is something that most people are broadly aware of as a thing and that the trans industry has tried to cover up basically all of the studies done on this before 2010.

Found like a one standard deviation decline in iq or like half a standard deviation, but I

Simone Collins: didn’t know it was that bad. And that’s with puberty blockers not like full out Also transition too.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s like it’s, it is typically what I’ve seen. It’s like 15 to seven point drop. So pretty bit no, and, and it, it, it’s even bigger in animals where you almost see like a 50% decline in, in some animals and stuff like that.

So we’re not talking about like a trivial drop in the bucket or anything like that. We’re talking years of lead paint chips.

Simone Collins: My God, you’re right. And when you think about everything that parents do, the excruciating attention they put into trying to keep their children safe from [00:01:00] toxins like this, and then without even thinking about it, they’re throwing their kids on puberty blockers.

Malcolm Collins: Worst kids are being told that this is okay and deciding to do it themselves. Like they take your kids to a psychologist. We’ve talked about this over and over again, and the psychologist will assign these to them and they’ll tell them not to tell their parents. You know, after one meeting we had a friend who this happened to took his kid to a gender psychologist, psychologist, said to the parents and they go, well, we’ll have a follow up meeting a six months where we’ll decide if this is appropriate.

Turns out they had secretly already given the kid the prescription. And so, well even

Simone Collins: if that doesn’t happen, like maybe your doctor’s based and is like, you know what? This is not your problem. You’re looking in the wrong place. The kid can still go online and illegally get all the prescriptions they need with very decent ease.

There’s a very effective, well greased underground railroad for. All sorts of hormones that you need, well happen. Well, it’s because

Malcolm Collins: there’s a community out there. And this is another thing, the trans community that lows to cover up, but I’ll play a clip from Turkey Tom that I always love to play here, where he is going over what was happening in one of the trans servers.

Did they, there was a group of people who get turned on by [00:02:00] the idea of finding kids and convincing them to take puberty blockers.

it’s genuinely really good grooming advice. On April 4th, 2023, Postcard reveals he’s in contact with four minors. Age 9 to 13. I’ve so far sent it to four minors between the ages of 9 and 13. I hope it encourages them to transition. When the Anka Zone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids. Mana Drain and Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones orion was the manager , coercing him every step of the way. This is apparent by how he talked about him to others. Has he started hormones yet? Yes, but not effectively. I guess that’s what you’d expect just telling a r to buy hormones. They bought estrogen, but no anti androgen. It would have been more fun if he started hormone blockers at like 12.

Haha, isn’t that true for everyone? Don’t worry, I’ll make him into a good girl

Malcolm Collins: And I mean, this is a thing, it’s a real thing. You can be like, I’m not like that as a trans person. Fine, you’re not like that. But there, that, that community also exists regardless of whether or not you are like that.

Right. And so what we’re gonna go over in this episode is the various studies on this what [00:03:00] appears to be the mechanism of action here. And then we’re gonna go over the studies that say that this isn’t happening and we are then gonna go over who ran those studies, who said this isn’t happening.

Hmm. Because they become pretty easy to dismiss. When you look at who was involved in them

Simone Collins: Ah what, like their samples and everything?

Malcolm Collins: No the big one that the trans community always talks about in this literally was run by the head of wpath. It was no bias there. No bias, no collusion, literally ran and regularly did.

And their primary source of income and every one of the main authors on it, primary source of income was gender transitioning mine. Mm.

Yeah, I’m surprised that they found no effect here.

Speaker 2: what I do. I talk for a living. What do you talk about? I speak on behalf of cigarettes. My mom says cigarettes kill.

Really?

Now, is your mommy a doctor?

Speaker: No.

Speaker 2: A scientific researcher of some kind? No. Oh, she doesn’t exactly sound like a credible expert now, does [00:04:00] she?. All I’m suggesting is that there will always be people trying to tell you what to do and what to think.

There probably already. Are people doing that? Am I right?

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker 2: I’m here to say that when someone tries to act like some sort of an expert, you can respond. Who says, so cigarettes are good for you? No. No, that’s not. That’s not what I’m getting at. My point is that you have to think for yourself. You have to challenge authority.

So perhaps instead of acting like sheep when it comes to cigarettes, you should find out for yourself.

Malcolm Collins: But I think it’s, it’s really interesting to start by looking at animal models. Because with animal models, there’s no reason to lie about this.

Right. There’s no political motivations or anything. So, well, and at least the,

Simone Collins: the Protran group can just say, well, it’s animal model, so it doesn’t count. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, no. What I mean is you can lose your job. I mean, we know from when Travis stock was closed down that there was a study that they had shut down and, and never published because the [00:05:00] results showed that putting kids on puberty blocker increased their chances of unliving themselves and increased.

Risk of self harm. And they they refuse to publish it. So we now know that like if you are a. Gender transition clinic, and you have data that you, you doesn’t support what you want to support, you’re not gonna release the study, right? And we know people who have had their jobs put on, on the line for publishing research, which could be seen as critical of the trans community because the trans community then goes and tries to get you fired.

But if you’re studying this in sheep or something, or you actually do need to study this in animals or dogs because you know, you might be neutering them or something, what happens when you prevent them from going through normal puberty? You can without any, you know, trans activists freaking out and coming after you really get into the nitty gritty of what’s going on neurologically here.

Hmm.

So let’s start with Hugh Etal 2017. This is a sheep study. We’ll also go into the human studies from a while ago because they, they were also really telling as well, like the pre 2010 months. The study was titled A Reduction in Long-Term Spatial Memory [00:06:00] Persist After Discontinuation of Prepubescent, GNRH, agnostic Treatment in Sheep.

It builds on research examining the effects of gnostic releasing hormones, GNH treatment, which suppresses the hypothalamic pituitary goon axi. On brain function during puberty, the researchers use an OV sheep model to investigate whether impairments in spatial memory observed during active GNH treatment reverse after discontinuation.

So, the, the point here being is it’s taken as a given within sheep studies that eve a sheep. Is is put on puberty blockers, basically. The sheep will have a severe impairment in spatial memory. And what they’re trying to study in this paper is, does that continue after the treatment is stopped, or is that only while they’re on the treatment that this falls.

And

Simone Collins: continues after

Malcolm Collins: they stop. Are they

Simone Collins: sending the sheep through mazes? What are, what are they doing? They do,

Malcolm Collins: yes.

Simone Collins: [00:07:00] Okay. Sheep mazes,

Malcolm Collins: literally through maze. It’s sheep maze. Yes. It’s cute. But, but funny, funny here is, is people might be like, oh, come on. You know, this is a conservative propaganda or anything like that.

Like people don’t get dumber when they gender transition. And I’m like, okay, except watch our video. The Wachowski Effect. Why is it that there’s so many instances of famous individuals who then gender transition and all of a sudden suck. At whatever it is they used to be really good at you know, like the Wachowskis, right?

Like the, the first matrix is awesome. Everything they’ve made since they started transitioning has been hot garbage. Or you look at the, the case of veil guard, which is what we were looking at on that veil guard, this horrible, horrible game. Like, honestly, the, the audience got mad at us for that, for making the clips.

Of of sections from the game. As long as they were too long. Yeah. They said it was particularly painful to watch. The writing was so bad.

Speaker: Oh, um. Ah, . They, they’re still holding it. Sorry. What are you doing? [00:08:00] Pulling a barv. Oh, okay. A barv? There’s not always time for big, drawn out apologies. So, when one of us screws up and we know we’ve screwed up, we do a quick ten to put it right. Pulling above.

Malcolm Collins: The writers who worked on this also worked on mass effect too. They worked on the older veil guards. What changed between those games in this game as they transitioned?

Simone Collins: Oh, no. Yeah. Okay. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: To continue here, the study involved 55 male Scottish Mule X extra cross Rams, born in spring 2013, divided into control in 30 in GNRH recovery. Now note here, this was all done on males. This one here, treatment consi consisted of subcutaneous implants of the, the thing every four weeks from eight to 44 weeks of age, covering the pre-pubertal period puberty onset in male sheep.

Then what happened? Okay, so spatial memory, orientation and learning were assessed using a maze task at multiple time [00:09:00] points. The maze required rams to navigate to a food reward with performance measured by traverse times across zones. Key findings included no significant differences in spatial orientation or learning traverse times between groups at any age.

However, long-term spatial reference memory was impaired on the puberty blocking group at 99 weeks with ran stinking. 1.5 x longer to complete the maze compared to controls. Oh, so that’s 50% worse performance than the controls if you were on puberty blockers than a ram. Now? No. Here, this makes these severe impairments we’re seeing in humans.

Very believable if we know that we’re getting this in Rams. Yeah, 50%.

Simone Collins: That’s really bad.

Malcolm Collins: Despite restored hormonal signaling, suggesting a critical development window during pre binal GRNH signaling for hippocampal plasticity and long-term memory formation, the effect was independent of gonadal steroids as prior work showed similar outcomes even with testosterone replacement.

So basically, [00:10:00] even if you try to. Like recreate puberty and make them normal male sheeps again. Yeah, the cognitive impairment is persistent. Oh boy.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so you can’t, I don’t know, realize the error of your ways or decide that you’re, you’re, you’re okay to go through puberty now and it’s all just gonna be fine.

Because this, the story sold to parents is this just buys you time. Okay. Like even if you don’t support the idea of your kid transitioning, you can placate them by putting them on puberty blockers. They’ll come to their senses and then you can just pick up where you left off. And here is No, no, no. You’ve just done permanent damage.

Malcolm Collins: You’ve done permanent brain damage. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Well, okay. So before we get further in this I, I’m just gonna give a, a bit of explanation for people who are a little confused as to why this would cause such severe permanent brain damage. No.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So the reason why the brain damage is so severe is think about how your body goes through developmental stages at, at like, let’s say at the embryonic level, right?

Yeah. [00:11:00] And then after the embryonic level, you know, you’ve got like a toddler who has very different, like, body proportions than like a teenager or an adult. Sure, right. They are a humans sort of undergo an incomplete metamorphosis as we age. You know, we think of humans as, as not doing that, but we really do a baby.

Like if you size a baby up to the size of an adult, it, it would be monstrous, it would look nothing like an adult.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Parents, like on, on social media, like to post. Pictures of babies not being able to touch the tops of their heads. Yeah, the proportions are super different.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

But yeah, the babies, babies and adults are very, but this is, this is true for the, your, your, the poor parts of your brain as well. Like these morphological differences aren’t only on the outside. If you disrupt this sort of developmental timeline, which is very hard coded, and it’s one of, it was one of the areas I always found really interesting in [00:12:00] biology and I was always surprised that, you know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t get a lot of coverage in like American high schools or anything like that.

But it’s developmental biology. Hmm. Yeah, I never

Simone Collins: got any of that. You did. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: How does your body, and how do the bodies of animals sort of change the signals that are telling cells to change what they’re doing? Right? Mm-hmm. Like how does the cell in this location know that at this age it needs to turn into or start producing this sort of a thing?

Right. Did you learn

Simone Collins: that at St. Andrew’s? That was, they couldn’t have been in high school.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. I learned that at St. Andrew’s. I went really one of those subjects. I mean, I always found comparative biology really fascinating. But it’s a very delicate process. This is, this is not something that you can like button mash, like a heart transfer or something like that.

You know, like literally cut out a heart, just sew it another heart. Hopefully it works. I you know, there’s

Simone Collins: more to it

Malcolm Collins: than that. There’s depress immune. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s, that’s sort of what you’re doing with a purity blocker. You’re, you’re trying to button mash human development.

Yeah. The moment this cycle is disrupted, it can never get back to normal again. Mm-hmm. And this cycle [00:13:00] is in charge of this period of brain development. Mm-hmm. And when you disrupt this period of brain development. I actually think that this is why the Vizient were almost this, this cult that came outta the effect of altruist community were almost entirely trans individuals.

Because if you look at their writings, they weren’t totally logically coherent. They had these weird beliefs about like multiple hemispheres thinking differently. And if you’re in the rationalist community, what I actually think sort of made their community work, it’s they were people who were brought in before they transitioned.

And then they were in the rationalist space, then they transitioned, they had this huge drop in iq and they were able to be. Poached by sort of this mystic cult type figure.

Mm.

But anyway, to continue here. Additional GRNH treatment, altered progression speeds through specific maze zones in a session dependent manner.

Post recovery faster in breeding season to lower non breeding season and exaggerated emotional reactivity. No, they had increased anxiety during task. Which was mitigated by testosterone neurobiological implications point to [00:14:00] potential disruptions in a hippocampal and amygdala function as GRNH receptors are expressed there.

The study highlights concerns for clinical GRNH use in conditions like central precocious puberty or gender dysphoria emphasizing the need to consider treatment during and potentially irreversible cognitive effects.

Simone Collins: So more emotional volatility. Is that a, did, did I hear that right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. More emotional volatility.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. This is really disappointing because you and I like the idea, I mean, not in the context of of gender transition necessarily, but in, in the idea that like we can overcome annoying elements of our human anatomy, right? We can brute force things and. Yeah, this is, this shows that it is more complicated than just that you, you can’t just, as you say, well, what, like button meash things

Malcolm Collins: you can’t, yeah.

Well there’s some things you can button mash. In human biology, there are some things you can’t button meash. In human biology,

Simone Collins: apparently

Malcolm Collins: developmental [00:15:00] timelines are one of the things you cannot button mesh.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, and even thinking about it from what I did to myself in my teen years, I didn’t undergo.

Puberty blockers, but I did starve myself to the extent where I stopped menstruating and definitely stopped getting female levels of estrogen and it never came back. Yeah. So this is, I am like, oh yeah. Huh. Like I even anecdotally, even personally, have seen what turning stuff off during adolescence can do be it through medical interventions or.

Behavioral interventions,

Malcolm Collins: but no, it also seems to affect adults who get it. But when we talk about things like the wwki is getting terrible at everything and the Oh, okay. Because they didn’t take

Simone Collins: puberty blockers. They just took,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So that, so, so that might be the wwki effect may be what we argued in that episode with this, like having to learn to play a new instrument midway through your life, like your brain a bit.

In the female brain. Yeah. Or also just having a different

Simone Collins: hormonal profile will change your reactions to things. It will change your drives, it will change what turns you on. Yeah. So, and you didn’t grow it, change your skillset

Malcolm Collins: up to [00:16:00] that. So you don’t, you don’t know how to use it. So,

Simone Collins: yeah. So it’s not necessarily that they, they’re seeing an impact to intelligence.

You, what you’re finding, at least what you’ve reported so far from the research is that the negative intelligence effect. Are from puberty blockers alone, not exogenous, introduction of testosterone or estrogen. Correct? Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And that’s what we consistently see in the research is it’s mostly if you, if you mess with this stuff during puberty although it looks like

Simone Collins: what I did to myself was a puberty blocker effect.

So maybe I’m dumber now because maybe, maybe

Malcolm Collins: you are. Which means that our kids are gonna be even smarter genetically than I would expect. Oh, isn’t that nice? Well, I was

Simone Collins: never known for, you didn’t marry me for my smarts. You married me from my, you,

Malcolm Collins: I literally did that. I’m the oxen.

Simone Collins: I, I I pull the cart.

Okay. Malcolm admitted you got into a

Malcolm Collins: graduate school of Cambridge. Okay. Cambridge. Who wrote

Simone Collins: my

Malcolm Collins: application?

Simone Collins: Huh?

Malcolm Collins: I may have written Go, go. That now public information that I drafted your application. I mean, everybody,

Simone Collins: you’ve draft so many people’s graduate school applications when they actually get it.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Everybody would come to me. They’d be like, Malcolm and I, and I did, I accumulated a lot of [00:17:00] favors by doing this was my favorite way to accumulate, like undying favor is help people’s kids get into top graduate degrees. Mm-hmm. And they’d come to me and they’d be like, Hey Malcolm, can you help?

Review, you know, edit. Simone wrote the first draft. Of course. Listen,

Simone Collins: we’re a combined identity anyway. It’s not even that dishonest.

Malcolm Collins: Well, you graduated at the top of your class so, you know, hardly, hardly a issue There it is a is a joke. I have because she was technically the top of her graduating class.

‘cause she graduated in a non time period. Oh, oh, no, no. Yeah. Gw, you were literally the top of your entire class. I was the valedictorian of my business school. Yeah. And there was how many people in that? Like thousands. I know

Simone Collins: the graduation ceremony was in their basketball stadium, but I don’t remember how many people were there.

Malcolm Collins: So Simone, if it impaired your intelligence of you’re somehow smarter than this, that is astonishing. No. But when you

Simone Collins: look at our genetic scores. Like on parasite. Oh yeah. I’m like, now I’m about two standard

Malcolm Collins: deviations above the norm. And you’re like 1.5 standard deviations above the norm.

Simone Collins: Exactly, yeah.[00:18:00]

So we know who the smarter one is. Maybe. Anyway, maybe I, I think, I do think that I, I might have, I mean, considering the research here. I think I’m one of these people that may be a little, little, maybe a little

Malcolm Collins: dirt,

Simone Collins: a little dirt, but process.

Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s, that’s why you chose to marry me, right? Yeah.

Clearly it hasn’t worked out the way you planned. You’re,

Simone Collins: you’re my intellectual prosthetic, thank God.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right. All right. Sheep studies neuter written, this is 2014. Okay, so, this was effects of gonadotropin releasing hormone and antagonist agonist in brain development and sheep. And it compiles and expands on previous publications using OV I model to examine prebuttal GNH effects on brain structure and gene expression and behavior.

The thesis involved a same-sex twin sheep 41 per study with one twin treated with goin actin implants every four weeks from pre puberty until 50 weeks. Methods include FMRI for brain volumes, [00:19:00] microwave for drain expression in the hippocampus and amygdala, and spatial maze. Tests for cognition and behavioral tests for emotions.

Key findings. No overall changes in brain volume. So the, and, and we we’ll consistently see this, no changes in brain volume but significant increases in amygdala volume stronger in females, left right. Sex treatment interactions linked to emotional processing. Hippocampal volume unchanged.

But gene expression, altered sex and hemisphere, specifically EEG, females, B-N-D-G-N one for synaptic plasticity, downregulated, VGF and NCA M1, right hemisphere amygdala gene expression showed pronounced. Changes in females. 432 transcripts left 46 right involving micro tubial organization.

They became unregulated and antiotic mitotic processes. Downregulated with no major differences in males. Spatial orientation, hippocampus dependent with unaffected, no treatment differences in maze latency eras though females perform [00:20:00] better. Overall behavioral effects included increased risk taking in treated males and anxiety like avoidance in females.

So. Note here first, what I’m, basically, what you should be taking away is the effects throughout the brain are in the structure of the brain. They’re in the size of specific parts of the brain, and they are in the gene expression that’s happening within the brain. So it’s basically not like you effed up one thing, it’s you effed up the entire system.

Oh, here’s a great way to put it. It’s like shutting down a computer in the middle of installing a game. Oh. And then trying to install it again, or, or no, better than a game, an operating system. You’re halfway through installing an operating system and you shut it down and then you’re like, but I can just start later.

No, you can’t. It messes everything up. Unless the system was specifically designed for that potentiality. Now note this persisted post-treatment in a scepter chapter on Alzheimer’s models was found jn h effect [00:21:00] on amyloids plaque contrasting with earlier studies implications of this study.

Purity is a sensitive period for sex specific brain mutation. GNH disrupts emotional circulation and being love more than cognitive one’s. Hippocampus with females more affected. Molecularly this suggests non reversible changes in neuroplasticity and raises questions for human applications as ethical limits.

Prevent direct studies on use. The species relates to prior work, and then they go through a bunch of other studies that found the same thing. Specifically W shops 2011 on behavior in Evans et all 2012 on physiology. Basically emphasizing that, okay, we can’t look at trans use like amygdala, right?

We’re not dissecting trans people. But if we did, this is probably what we’d be finding. Okay, so let’s look at studies on dogs, because there’s a lot of stuff on dogs because with dogs we spay and neuter dogs. We can get a lot of data on them.

Simone Collins: Oh, of course. Okay. Ah, yeah. [00:22:00]

Malcolm Collins: No. So, ectomy surgical puberty suppression via removal of goads is common in dogs and often performed pre-Uber or parietal puberty.

These studies address cognitive effects in age dogs with conflicting results. A 2001 cohort study of 139 dogs. Aged 11 to 1429 intact males, 47 castrated males 63 s spade. Females used owner surveys to assess age-related cognitive impairment across categories like orientation, social interactions, house training, sleep, weight cycles, et cetera.

Sexually intact males were significantly less likely to progress from mild to severe impairment over 12 to 18 months compared to go alas dogs in both sexes. Oh, this suggests goad directory. And keep in mind, we didn’t do this with our dog. Our dog is is fully intact. Which causes, you know, some problems if you’re taking her out or something like that.

But she’s a very smart dog. So maybe this is in part Y may accelerate cognitive decline, potentially due to loss of protective sex hormones like testosterone. The study hypothesized a similar effect in females from estrogen, but lacked enough [00:23:00] intact females to confirm a 2016 cross-sectional study of 455 dogs.

So again, a, a fairly large sample size. Yeah, that’s super

Simone Collins: decent.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And Akia used a validated questionnaire to evaluate risk factors of canine cognitive dysfunction, CCDS similar to dementia. While age was strongly correlated with CCDS, reproductive status, intact versus neutered showed no significant impact.

This contrast with an another study that showed an increased cognitive decline risk. So interesting here, this is one that shows you’re not at more of a list of Alzheimer’s, at least. In additionally, a 2018 study on spatial navigation, 56 dogs found that gonad or decides dogs, both sexes preferred simpler egocentric strategy.

Its body-centered turns over more complex allocentric ones using external cues in T maze tasks over. Sectorized females were especially likely to use egocentric strategies. While this doesn’t directly show a drop in intelligence, it implies that go ne sector may [00:24:00] bias dogs towards less cognitively demanding approaches, potentially it showing reduced flexibility.

So, not great. Not great. Now we’re gonna get into mice studies and what I’ll notice those mice is we do not actually see a drop in intelligence in, in mice. Did you wanna Oh,

Simone Collins: good for them.

Malcolm Collins: So, so what happens to mice?

Simone Collins: Okay. A

Malcolm Collins: 2021 study treated post puberty mice starting at six weeks was daily lide that’s a GNH agonist for six weeks.

Okay.

No impairments were found in contextual fear discrimination. A hippocampal memory test tied to cognition. However, sex specific behavioral changes occurred. Males showed altered social preference and increased stress responses while females showed increased despair like behavior. And hyperphasia.

This suggests potentially effective impacts, but no direct cognitive drop. So here, no. You don’t get a cognitive drop in mice, but women get depressed and males become incredibly anxious and increase, [00:25:00] increase stress responses. It’s

Simone Collins: fair like behavior that does not sound

Malcolm Collins: good. Just fair. I’ll, I’ll note here.

When people are like, this saves lives. We now know this isn’t true. You can look at our video. The Atlantic or the Left is turning on the trans community. ‘cause there’s on this article in the Atlantic that goes over all of the. Evidence. And it showed that even the number one trans lawyer in trying to defend this in front of the Supreme Court had to admit that there wasn’t a single, reputable study that showed that unliving risks were decreased by either puberty blockers or gender transition.

And we now have an entire country that we can use as a natural experiment because the procedure was banned in Britain and the unloving, percentage has not gone up in a statistically significant manner within this community.

Hmm.

So, nope, nope, nope. And note here, when we talk about, well, does this community have unusually high rates of depression and stuff like that?

We do know they, they, they do. They have a, a, a 40 to 50%. Chance of attempting unli once you join this [00:26:00] community. So it’s really not

Simone Collins: awesome, not good.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so next one multiple studies on pre boal go ectomy and mice and rats examine behaviors like approach avoidance, parental care, or anxiety but not cognition directly, for example.

Oh, they just haven’t looked at cognition in mice. Okay. So it might have been IQ in mice. For example, a 2007 study in mice found pre sham surgery. Stress alone, reduced context memory in adult controlled males, but actual gona surgery enhanced it compared to sham indicating no impairment from hormone loss.

So again, at least here, we’re not seeing it as bad. In, in that and in aged adult rats post puberty, gonad, ectomy, GNH agonist, like lepard dine often improves spatial memory and learning in tasks like novel recognition or elevated teammates rather than impairing it. So here we see, oh, maybe so look.

Maybe positive. Okay. Maybe in sheep and dogs, this is really negative, like a 50% drop pin iq. But in rats we don’t see this. So, maybe, maybe in humans we’re [00:27:00] seeing the same thing. Right. Right. That would be great. That’d be so lovely if that turned out to be the case.

Yeah.

So now let’s go to the human studies.

Hmm. Okay.

Mule Etal 2001. This is a study on adopted girls with precocious puberty. So this is this is a randomized controlled trial involving 30 adopted children, both boys and girls. Though the focus was often on girls due to higher prevalence of precocious puberty in adopted females with early puberty short stature they treated with GRNH agonists, specifically tryptoline.

Either alone or combined with growth hormone for three years to suppress puberty and promote height gain the children. Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. Okay. So this was really not about trans stuff at all also. Totally. Which

Malcolm Collins: removes all of the politics from it. Mm-hmm. With puberty onset before eight or nine psychological evaluations including IQ testing using the watchmaster scale for children or similar were conducted before treatment baseline and after three years.

The study also assess behavior via child behavioral checklist, [00:28:00] self-perception and family stress. Key findings. Baseline full IQ average around one 10. After two to three years of treatment, there was an average decrease of seven points. Oh

no.

With some individuals dropping up to 15 points, this was statistically significant.

The P-value was 0.05, so very significant. And the, the decline was attributed to interrupted puberty brain organization, particularly affecting cognitive maturation during sensitive developmental windows. No major differences were noted between GNH alone versus combined with gross hormone. Conclusion, the author suggest the IQ drop may relate to halted gonadal, steroid effects on brain plasticity, raising concerns for long-term GRNH use in precocious pubity.

However, no consistent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, this is really bad. This is really bad.

Simone Collins: I’m glad you read that off though, because I would never, I wouldn’t have connected the two, like if we had a daughter with precocious puberty and we’re like, ah, like this is too soon. I [00:29:00] could see us getting possibly tempted to,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, all the doctors, they’re telling you there’s no risks to this stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly. So I’m really glad that you pointed that out ‘cause we’ll be like, Nope, let it happen.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So let’s look at the Schneider ETL 2017 case study on gender dysphoric adolescent.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So this is one person. No, the other study actually had a fairly decent sample size as well. 30 children for a study like that is insanely large.

Oh yeah.

Let’s look at this one, which is on a one, one child. Okay. Brazilian adolescent. Okay. The patient was an 11-year-old at baseline, assigned male at birth, transgender girl diagnosed with gender dysphoria put on A-G-R-N-H agonist, similar to, you know, what they’re giving sheep and what we give children at baseline.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Key findings, global IQ dropped from 80, low average to 71 borderline. This, this is borderline retarded.

Simone Collins: Oh boy.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry I didn’t, you can make a

Simone Collins: bad situation worse. This is not good.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s not just in, in [00:30:00] normal intelligence persons. This hits everyone. A, a 10 point decline in 28 months.

Working memory indexes fell from 83, low average to 68, extremely low. At T one at 15 point drop then recovered slightly to 74, putting them in the, again, the borderline mentally impaired category. At T two processing speed declined overall 68 to 74 to 64. These changes were linked to testosterone.

Other findings brain, white metal fractional sphe showcased no maturation increase. Unlike typical male puberty, possibly due to absent testosterone driven changes. Voice fundamental frequency fluctuated, but stayed in the female typical range correlating with hormone levels. No deepening occurred.

W conclusions puberty suppression may impair cognitive maturation, EG IQ in memory and brain development in adolescence with gender dysphoria pointing to testosterone’s role in neuroplasticity. The authors noted low baseline IQ may have amplified actually I would think that it would dampen the effects.

So it is [00:31:00] interesting that it, you know, you see the same level. And note here, this. This case study is showing nearly identical results to the previous study, which would’ve had an average of like around 10 point drop. Yeah. And this is showing around a 10 point drop. It’s not like out outside of the bounds of what we’re seeing from other studies in this subject.

Yeah.

All right. Let’s go to the Van Goen, Atal 1995 cross-sex hormone studies. I don’t, I, I, I dunno if our audience likes this. Do you guys like learning about science and the science? They don’t tell you in school because it’s just too naughty to know. Let us know in the comments. Well, I, you know, if you are surprised and you’re like, wait, if things are really this bad, like the people who are doing these, these.

Hormone treatments are, are genuinely monstrous, right? Yeah, yeah. And telling people that this has no effect. And you can just start this back up again. And what I would note here is look at our Joe Money episode, our John Money episode on the history of this field and how it started. And what you’ll learn is this is actually fairly normal for this field and has been for a long time.

Simone Collins: Yeah, people have [00:32:00] agendas and they’re willing to say whatever they wanna say. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I don’t think it’s, it’s that they always have agendas. Sometimes I think they started for the right reason. And now to acknowledge that this stuff is true would severely like cause them to reflect and be like, oh my God.

All those people I thought were the bad people, were actually the good guys. And I had been mutilating children for decades. And I note here what I, what I find really. Chuckle about this is this hormone that we’re talking about this being given to these, these minors Often this is the same hormone that when a kid in the nineties or eighties presented as the other gender where they would’ve been sent to a gay conversion camp and given these hormones.

So literally the left is now doing what right wing extremists used to do. And I don’t oppose them because I switched sides. I oppose them because my perception had been consistent. You shouldn’t be taking kids and putting them on puberty blockers, you know, whether you’re a Christian conversion camp or whether you are some weird trans movement.

Right. Anyway, [00:33:00] van Gogh and Etal 1985 cross, cross-sex hormone studies on activating the effects of cross-sex hormones in trans. Adults focusing. Oh, this one is looking on adults focusing on cognitive behavior and shifts. What this one found was so they use 35 female to male trans individuals starting testosterone and 15 male to female trans individuals.

Okay. So

Simone Collins: this is our first one where we’re not looking at puberty blockers. We’re looking at,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. We, they were tr tested before three months after hormone initiation. So what did they find? A female to male testosterone showed improved performance, eg better 3D accuracy and male to female on estrogen and androgens declined in their spatial ability.

So here what you’re seeing is just their brains changing from a male brain to a female brain.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And the role that testosterone plays in being a better shape rotator. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, this is something we know men are better at spatial reasoning, right? Totally.

Mm-hmm.

And so when you give a woman.

Nail hormones. They become better at, at shape rotating when you give them [00:34:00] a and I’ve seen this actually with a lot of coders because that requires a, a lot of knowledge that is adjacent to facial reasoning. Mm. And I had a friend I used to know ages ago, and I they have a small YouTube channel that not many people watch, but they transitioned.

And one of the, the shows that I found very interesting, it was. An hour and a half grant, if I remember correctly. So I, I spent a lot of time going through this and learning about this, but they were complaining that as they transitioned into a woman people started to respect their opinions less in, in coding, and started to listen to them less and started to treat them as an authority less and less.

Hmm. And of course, they interpreted this as oh, anti female bias. Anti female bias. But when I was reading it e even at the time, like listening, listening to them talk about this, I just kept thinking, it sounds like you just got bad at coding as you went through gender transition. And they had never considered this.

It was very clear that it had never even entered their mind as a fleeting thought that what [00:35:00] might have happened is that their brain was changing and that they were no longer as good at the things they used to be good at.

Mm-hmm. And so

this is one of these areas where you’ve gotta pay extra attention even if you’re not getting an overall IQ decline because you’re doing it as an adult.

Is your profession and specialization in something that your gender has helped you achieve? Verbal fluency, females to males, it deteriorated fewer words generated on time tasks, males to females improved these shifts. Line was mascul, testosterone versus feminizing estrogen patterns. Now note here is this would indicate that the males who transitioned to females like the wachowski should have gotten better.

At like writing verbal stuff, right? Good dialogue.

Yeah,

yeah. Or the, the writers for veil guard, but they got worse. So I don’t know if I buy this right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. What’s going on

Malcolm Collins: there? Well, the, the very least of your a coder, you shouldn’t be looking at doing this. So, other effects increase aggression and sexual arousal in female to male.

Decreases in male to female. [00:36:00] So it’s so interesting. Male to female, decrease. Aggression in sexual arousal in male to female, increase aggression, sexual arousal. By the way, one person asked me, they were like, how can I, like, I feel trapped in wanting to have sex as a man. I wanted to transition. So they wanted to transition mostly just to decrease how aroused they were all the time.

Right. Oh, interesting. Now they wanted sexuality. Yeah. And I was like, naltrexone buddy. Yeah. Naltrexone. Naltrexone. Naltrexone. Take naltrexone, then masturbate. And you will within a week not wanna masturbate or have sex anymore. It’s, it’s very effective. There you go,

Simone Collins: guys.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah, and you can get it from like Indian providers and stuff like that.

I’m not saying you should, obviously not medical advice. Yeah. This is not medical

Simone Collins: advice. This is not an endorsement, but. It works

Malcolm Collins: and it actually has a bunch of other positive benefits that, like, it protects against COVID. I’ve, I’ve still yet to get COVID. So, you know, there, there’s, there’s many benefits to Naltrexone.

It’s bizarre.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It makes you eat less, like [00:37:00] it’s been trivially easy for me to maintain my diet since I started it. And it prevents you from being happy. So that’s really good too.

Simone Collins: Phew. Because you don’t

Malcolm Collins: want that to corrupt your motivational profile.

Simone Collins: No, God forbid.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Other effects. The, the, the blah, blah, blah, blah.

Okay. So let’s, let’s look at what might be causing this. ‘cause this I find really interesting. Like, it is a, it is a fascinating phenomenon, and obviously in mainstream society you’re not allowed to talk about it. You know, in the same way. We can’t say certain groups are, you know, less intelligent than other groups or whatever, right?

Like, that doesn’t exist. But it’s just so replicated in the research that it’s, it’s worth talking about.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So puberty triggers surges in estrogen slash testosterone, which reorganize neural circuits via synaptic pruning, myelination and hippocampal amygdala growth suppression, halts, this potentially stunting executive function memory and IQ maturation.

Animal mechanisms included alter dopamine, serotonin signaling, and reduced neuroplasticity hedges. [00:38:00] Etol 2018 from cross-sex hormones. Testosterone activates androgen receptors to enhance spatial cognition, possibly via right hemisphere dominant estrogen may boost verbal areas, but suppress spatial ones.

No clear mechanism for overall iq. Drop is clear here, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, dots Simone, before I go further.

Simone Collins: It, it seems clear that the effects are different for if you’re just going on puberty blockers versus as an adult supplementing with estrogen or testosterone, so that’s really useful to know.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So let’s go into the studies that claim that this isn’t a thing. Okay. So A, and this is one of the most frequently cited studies in this space. A 2022 study by Vander Moyen etal on 72 transgender adolescents, including puberty suppression, showed pre-treatment iq, strongly predicted post-treatment educational achievement.

Odds ratio 1.7 per [00:39:00] IQ point matching general population norms, suggesting no negative interference from the treatment. So this guy says no negative interference, okay? Mm-hmm. So. Who was the guy who published this? Every single one of the authors of this were affiliated with the center of expertise on gender dysphoria at Amsterdam, UMC in the Netherlands, a major clinical center providing gender affirming care to use.

Dave Vernes is a prominent figure in transgender use care and co-developer of the Dutch protocol. The guy who literally invented the Dutch protocol. For people who don’t know what the Dutch protocol is, that is the idea that when somebody is experiencing gender dysphoria now typically any form of dysphoria, if somebody is like body dis, dis dysmorphia dysphoria around like weight, like they’re anorexic you don’t treat anorexia by telling somebody to go on a diet.

Right? Right. Like that’s like. Crazy thing to do. You know, you try to work them through that this is a delusion that they’re having and that they will be much more satisfied in the long term if they can get on the other side of this delusion that they’re having. The Dutch method [00:40:00] was the idea, and keep in mind this was a.

F*****g crazy idea that you, you should engage in this one form of dysphoria and only this one form of dysphoria by affirming it, even though it’s not true, even though they’re not actually women or men by affirming it and then trying to transition them into that. So the guy who developed. One of the guys who developed that was one of the people who wrote this and he was co-chair of, or might have been a, she, the WPAs Adolescent Center care for an author of numerous studies supporting it.

So I’ll note here. If you don’t know who the WPATH is or the