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Referring to a major medical condition as "aesthetic purposes" also seems pretty uncharitable.
I disagree. A lot of posters here are in fact doubling down on "actual under 18 children ARE having surgeries". "Children are on the path to making a consenting decision, as a legal adult" really lacks the same oomph, but it would be a lot more honest if that's really what you meant to convey.
When people talk about tobacco companies putting kids on the path to a lifelong smoking addiction, I don't think they mean "kids might take up smoking when they turn 18." They're worried that actual kids are actually smoking cigarettes, right now, as kids.
To quote the source: "A total of 209 patients underwent gender-affirming mastectomy between January 1, 2013 and July 31, 2020."
That's 30 people a year. Out of 150,000 trans adolescents, and, what, 25 million adolescents overall. So literally one in a million. I'll admit that's a lot more than I thought, but it's still incredibly, vanishingly rare. Those are exceptional cases, and I'd be extremely shocked to learn that a single one of those was done without parental consent.
I did say "low enough to basically round off to zero", in case you want to argue this is somehow moving the goalposts. I dare say 0.0001% rounds off to zero. Even 209 patients over 150k trans kids gives us 0.1%. So even given your kid is trans, this is still a vanishingly small subset of the discussion.
No--this would require your interlocutor to assume the conclusion under debate. Here you are treating a genuine disagreement as "uncharitable." That is not how charitable discussion works. You should be trying to read the best possible version of the argument being made, without actually departing from the substance of the argument.
Then you are wrong; I just gave you a more charitable reading which adheres to the substance (and literal wording!) of the line under discussion, and you have furnished no warrant for believing your less charitable reading to be true. This may be a problem with your perspective on "charity," since you don't seem to grasp what "charity" means in this context--maybe this is why you also have failed to read others charitably.
Indeed, several have provided you with evidence of this actually happening. You seem to have learned something from them about the world, though you do not seem interested in revising your beliefs accordingly. That's okay, you're under no obligation to do so. But you remain under obligation to read others charitably. I have done my best to explain what that requires; at this point I don't know how I can make it more clear what you did wrong. So hopefully you've figured it out and can avoid it, next time.
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