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I have no opposition to making every reasonable effort to expose people to reality. Of course, with the matter as politicized as it is, easier said than done. There are just as many people committed to cracking eggs at all costs as there people who will claim that puberty blockers gave their cancer cancer.
At any rate, if I had solutions for people making bad decisions, I'd probably be accepting a dozen Nobel prizes right now. All I can say is that we should let people make their own choices, and if they're hard and risky choices, do our best to ensure they're exposed to the facts they need.
I don't think that's true. Or at least, my impression is that almost every elementary through high school teacher in north america who talks about the issue gives the impression that it's basically possible to successfully transition.
I don't think I'm willing to bite the libertarian bullet here. E.g. I don't want my kids to have the option to do heroin, even if it's paired with a pamphlet explaining the real likely outcomes. However, I don't even think that that's a viable option. Seems like our options are: ban and demonize heroin, or legalize it and subsidize its use (as was recently done in British Columbia).
Same with transitioning kids: I don't see how we ever get to a world where it's both legal and the pros and cons are presented honestly. So I think I'd rather throw the few kids who could conceivably benefit from it under the bus and ban it for everybody.
What if they need surgery and a helpful anesthetist asks them if they'd like some diamorphine for the pain and hands them a brochure? That's heroin.
I like neither option, or at least not the "subsidize its use". We live in a world where heroin can be legally used, in the appropriate context. I reject all the bad options and advocate for the good ones. If that doesn't suffice, then I'll choose the least bad one, as I presume you would too.
There are plenty of psychiatric interventions I grapple with at work that require careful scrutiny and vetting! Electroshock therapy was highly controversial and demonized. It's still being used as ECT, and saves lives.
A prospective filter would have to be very expensive to outweigh my other goal, which is to increase personal liberty. Someone who doesn't value the latter is entirely correct if they have a lower threshold for giving up early. We would have the issue of having similar values, but weighting them separately depending on the context.
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