Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Transgender adolescents strongly experience themselves as another gender. A popular explanation of brain development in transgender individuals is that it is shifted in the direction of the experienced gender rather than the birth gender. Transgender adolescents are often recommended puberty blockers (and potentially cross-sex hormones at a later stage) as part of their therapy. Puberty blockers delay the start of puberty, including development of secondary sex characteristics. Surprisingly, even though puberty blockers are widely used to help transgender adolescents go through gender transition, their impact on brain function during this critical stage of brain development is largely unknown. This project will use state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques and behavioural-cognitive experiments to examine transgender adolescents' brain function. First, brain function will be assessed prior to puberty blockers to test whether transgender adolescents' brain development is more similar to the experienced gender (Objective 1). Then, 6-10 months after starting puberty blocker treatment, their brain function will be re-examined to evaluate impacts of puberty blockers (Objective 2). At each time point, comparisons will be made to a group of non-transgender (i.e., "cisgender") adolescents, whose birth and experienced gender align. Given that adolescence is a time of rapid brain maturation that is influenced by hormones, this project will provide critical insights into transgender brain function and how it might be influenced by current standard-of-care hormonal treatments. This project's findings will elucidate important scientific and clinical insights into transgender development and the potential impacts of hormone therapy on brain function during treatment.