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I don't want to engage with most of this analogy, but I think your view is impoverished if it doesn't account for children's questionable ability to provide informed consent, and the seeming purpose of the law in attenuating their parents' ability to act as stewards for their children's interests. The question of what is truly voluntary is the heart of the matter.
My point is less that the decision should rest with the parents, and more that it shouldn't rest with the child.
Sometimes we leave the decision with the parents... whether to attend a parochial school, whether to allow the child access to Instagram, etc.
Sometimes we decide for the family; children aren't allowed to have sex with adults, for example, regardless of what the children or their parents think about it.
What we never do (other than with this trans issue -- at least, I cannot think of any other examples) is leave decisions of momentous lifelong consequences fully up to the child, and attempt to disintermediate the parents in favor of the child's own judgment.
So arguments premised on a child's voluntary and insuperable consent in high-stakes decisionmaking seem rather anomalous.
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I’m personally sympathetic simply because this is a situation (and I think trans human will be like this as well) where once you start there’s pretty much literally no going back. As such, I think there is a need to pump every break possible and really think about it before doing anything. Especially given that the person driving the entire process is a child who isn’t fully developed, doesn’t really understand how serious of a decision he’s actually making, or just how long he/she will have to live with th3 results.
There’s just simply no way that a child of ten years old being asked to consider puberty blockers has any idea what they’ll want ten years from now, let alone 30 or 40. There’s no way that a child who is too young for a PG13 movie can think about whether he will want to have sex or children. He can’t possibly understand this because he’s 10, and ten years is doubling of his entire life experience. And to basically remove any potential for someone to come alongside the kid and say “you know, in a few years you might want to be male and date girls and marry and have a family. You might want to be a father. You might want to live as a man as you grow into your body. Likewise there’s no potential that someone sits down with a child like this and says “this decision you’re making is one you’ll be dealing with forever. You’ll likely live to be 70 years old, and a decision you’re making right now, at ten years old — you’re making it for life. You’ll be living with it when you’re going off to college. When you get a job, when you turn 50, when you retire. There are lots of things you simply have no context for that you’re permanently closing off here. You cannot have sex in the normal way. You will be sterile and thus will never have biological children. If you get a neo-vagina you’re going to have to dilate it for the rest of your life. If you get a neo-penis as a girl, the muscles they take from your area won’t grow back.
I think we’re coming from different places here, and I think a big part of it is that I’m older, old enough that my mother was pregnant with me when she saw Star Wars: A new Hope. And looking back on being a kid, on making decisions even up to age 25 or so and a lot of them were bad decisions made because I didn’t think long term about them. I didn’t really think that way until much later — well into high school. They’re a moment in high school somewhere around 15 where it hits you like a ton of bricks that life is about to get serious and the decisions you’re making will impact you forever. I’m fortunate that I didn’t really fuck up too badly. But this is why I’m leery of allowing kids under 16 to make permanent changes to their bodies. It’s easy for a young kid to think they want something right now that they won’t want later. Even as adults, something you think is a good thing ends up not working for you later.
For that reason, I think I’d personally not want medical interventions before 16. Only a maturing brain can really understand the choice of “you will be sterile, you’ll have these medical conditions forever, and after you sign up, you will never again be able to go back to your old life.” Social stuff, fine. Changing hair and clothes are both easy. I think the blockers might be harder, or might permanently limit height or something. But beyond that, I think such permanent changes shouldn’t happen until the child is reall old enough to understand the decision and what it means.
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The horse left that barn 40 years ago with the criminalization of kids walking down the street or playing in their front yard (yes, they'll take your kids away for this too). Red states are slowly fixing this, but progress is slow, inconsistent, and not politically glamorous.
And sure, I trust that the parents, police, and social workers prosecuting these "crimes" are taking their roles seriously and not just being flippant either... but "taking one's role seriously" and "going through extensive thought and counseling" is not a guarantee that what they're doing isn't also extremely disruptive or that their conclusion is correct.
This standard of State intervention is the current room temperature; yes, strictly speaking it's worse for the people who legitimately do have this problem, but we're already comfortable enforcing worse outcomes in measures stretching far beyond the 0.01% of kids that would actually benefit from doing this because of crippling risk aversion... so why would we stop now?
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The idea here is that there are some things that are outside even a parent’s right to choose (eg blood infusion and Jehovah witness cases). It might be true that transitioning (ie eliminating sexual function) are so fundamental to a person that their parent cannot consent for them to eliminate such things.
That usually is the argument made- that medical transitioning is a form of mutilation that can’t be consented to, so it nullifies the parent’s rights to make medical decisions for their kids. Parents rights are more of an argument about social transitions.
Those things aren’t about parents or the trans kids; they are about all the other kids.
It is one thing to allow a boy to pretend to be a girl. It is another thing to allow a boy into a girl’s locker room with a swinging dick and naked girls.
Ditto with sports, specifically female sports.
I think if you are framing those issues in terms of how it affects the trans person you are missing the reason behind the red state bans; it is about the effect on the non-trans person (typically girls). I guess stopping social transition is icing on the cake.
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Because those decisions are seen as so intrinsically damaging to the child that the decision to proceed should not be allowed at all. We take the same approach (correctly, IMO) with respect to the question of whether the child should be permitted to have sex with adults. We can disagree at the object level (i.e. whether in fact social transitions are damaging to the child), but if one accepts those states' belief at the object level for the sake of argument, then there is nothing anomalous about their policymaking approach to the matter.
Some red states believe that social transition is a question that should be left to the parents. Others believe that it should be forbidden. Blue states seem to adopt the mirror image of the latter view, that it should be required (for children who demand it) without the parents' approval. The second and third groups of states would seem not to care much for parental rights on this topic. The first does. That seems to be the lay of the land. I'm not sure how it would improve one's understanding to insist that any particular argument is "complete bullshit," unless you believe that it is somehow illegitimate for different states to adopt different policies.
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Yes, it is bullshit. We are not in ancient Rome any more, parental rights have not been absolute for a long time.
Parents are, for example, not allowed to deny their children necessary health care.
Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.
Court Says Ill Child's Interests Outweigh Religion
The debate is not about parental rights. If you make it about parental rights, you lose, because this cause - absolute power of parents over their children - was settled long ago.
The debate is about gender affirming health care.
Is it medically necessary lifesaving treatment, or not?
And if it is not necessary for children, is it necessary for adults?
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It seems reasonable that transitioning is so extreme that at a minimum parents should need to be on board. It could be reasonable to say that even if parents consent the process is too extreme and therefore State A won’t permit it. That is, there are three potential states:
Transition solely based on kids decision
Kid and parent decision
Not permitted for kids
These states go from most permissive to least permissive. While I favor 3, it also means I favor 2 to 1. Therefore I can object to the Minnesota law on parental rights ground not withstanding that I generally would support 3.
Yes and no. One can see transition is inherently bad and therefore what ever argument prevents transition is great.
But (and here is the key) one can generally believe in parents right with setting limits on them. Thus, there is nothing inherently wrong with respecting that a parent can give religious instruction (and indeed force certain religious mores) into kids, while saying it can go to far (eg rejecting life saving blood transfusion). That is, there are limits we can put on our parental rights when it goes too far.
So states that ban physical transition aren’t saying “we don’t like parental rights.” Instead, they are saying “there are limits to parental rights” as parents are acting as a fiduciary for their kids. Different states (another competing value) may have a different view on what constitutes the appropriate limitation on that fiduciary duty. But it isn’t inherently contradictory to claim Minnesota is rejecting parental rights (when they allow minors to evade parental control) while at the same time championing laws to limit the authority the fiduciary can exercise in one direction.
Seems like it all depends on the baseline.
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