The Courts’ Role in the Use and Application of Puberty Blockers for Gender Affirming Care for Adolescents in Aotearoa New Zealand

Specifically this dissertation is focused on the use of puberty blockers for gender affirming care in adolescents, and what the courts could and should do when faced with making decisions on their use and legality.</strong></p><p>The use of puberty blockers as gender affirming care has become a point of significant political interest in the past few years, but no research has been done on the legality of their use, and of the regulations governing their use.</p><p>By analysing existing literature from multiple disciplines this dissertation has been able to take the varying perspectives of this issue and condense them into a singular coherent legal argument.</p><p>The key finding of this dissertation is that medical literature and legal reasoning align well in court, and that the major complicating factor in court decisions is therefore primarily political in nature.</p><p>The implications of this are that there is a generally clear legal answer to how courts should handle questions around puberty blockers, and that the courts must be careful not to deviate from this purely on political grounds.</p>