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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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If you can only provide one example, that's hardly supporting your case. If anything, that suggests the opposite: this is so incredibly rare that it made the news.

Originally you said it doesn't happen, and the reason why authorities do it, is because the child is denied medical care. At the very least I'd expect you acknowledge that it happens sometimes given the evidence. The reason this was such a big story was it's particularly egregious nature (the double sex-trafficking part), but there were other stories of custody disputes based on nothing more than pronouns / identity affirmation. It was almost enshrined in law in California but for a veto.

The medical community, the scientific community, and the community of people who have actually undergone the process all recommend it, so I'm not sure on what grounds you would claim that it's not a valid medical treatment.

This is false. Anybody that made a comprehensive review of evidence came to the conclusion that the evidence is of poor quality. This includes WPATH, which commissioned several systematic reviews, and refused to publish them when the evidence didn't say what they wanted to say it.

Originally you said it doesn't happen

No, I said no one is getting mutilated. That has nothing to do with custody. I expressed skepticism about the idea that the majority of these cases, or even a significant minority of them, are really just "failing to support".

The California law said that pronouns could be a factor, not that they were the only factor. That seems reasonable to me. If I kept misgendering you, I'm sure you'd consider it insulting. I'm not sure why insulting your kid and being generally hostile to their medical needs wouldn't be a factor in such a decision.

A custody case also isn't a locale "taking a kid", it's a court deciding which parent provides the better environment for the kid. The whole process is initiated by the other parent, not the courts. If courts were just swooping up and fostering kids because a teacher reported a pronoun violation, we'd be having a very different conversation.

There's a recurring theme here, where responsibility is out-sourced from the people actually initiating things. "Schools" don't transition kids; kids transition. "Courts" don't take away kids, the other parent is bothered enough to demand a divorce and argue for full custody. The courts aren't responsible for someone's wife thinking they're a shitty husband. This doesn't just happen out of the blue. Another adult, one deeply involved in the situation, looked at it and said "I need to protect my child from this person".