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The argument there would be that amputation is such an irrecoverable harm that a child can't possibly consent to it, not that I find amputees aesthetically or philosophically revolting.
Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities. Prosthetic arms are nowhere near the capability of a real arm but a child born from stored eggs and sperm is genetically your child. You don't lose the capacity for fertility even if you lose some genital tissue. I also grew up in a church with many loving adoptive families and and I'm not inclined to view having to adopt a kid rather than having a genetic one as a loss of capability as significant as losing an arm. Reducing children to a means of gene perpetuation flattens one of the deepest and most transformative human relationships possible.
It also seems significant that many adults choose never to have children, where there are no adults I know of who spend their entire lives without using one of their arm. If there is human capability that a large share of the population voluntarily never exercises then I'm inclined to think it's okay for a tiny sliver of the population to modify their bodies such that they lose that capacity.
I'm not unsympathetic to the concern. There's clearly some level of social contagion going on and gender care providers need to move from a model where if a kid has any cross gender identification that must mean they're trans because there's nowhere in mainstream culture where they could have picked that up to one where they're far more skeptical of it. But I also think Gender Dysphoria is not wholly sociogenic and so I would prefer families be allowed how to approach trans children on their own rather than having it dictated to them by the state.
Minnesota's law says it will not enforce Texas's law which makes gender affirming care legally child abuse, strips parents of custody and potentially imprisons them. The idea that Minnesota would emancipate trans runaways is a conclusion posters in this thread have reached by assuming that a state claiming jurisdiction to do a custody proceeding also means it claims jurisdiction to terminate parental rights which is not in the bills text.
Amputees are not revolting, the voluntary amputation of a healthy limb is.
Stored sperm or eggs that you may decide to use later - assuming they aren't lost or tainted or destroyed, and at great expense - is a dramatic loss of capability compared to the old in out in out, which is so simple even animals can do it. You don't just lose a bit of tissue, you lose the capability to produce sperm or ovulate. Hell I struggle to think of a clearer portrayal of destroyed capability than castration - one of its synonyms, neutered, is simultaneously defined as 'make ineffective'.
Edit: either SwiftKey's auto correct is getting shittier or I am losing my mind, but I keep finding grammatically incorrect or just plain wrong words in my posts. Changed straight to simultaneously, which I meant to write.
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There is good reason to believe that puberty blockers permanently hinder brain development, which hormones during puberty play an important role in. Unfortunately there are zero randomized control trials examining this, and even less evidence regarding using them to prevent puberty entirely rather than to delay precocious puberty a few years, but they have that effect in animal trials:
A reduction in long-term spatial memory persists after discontinuation of peripubertal GnRH agonist treatment in sheep
That study also cites this study in humans which found a 3-year course of puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty was associated with a 7% reduction in IQ, but since it doesn't have a control group I wouldn't put much weight on it.
Similar concerns were mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
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By moving the argument to puberty blockers, are you agreeing that all gender confirming care for minors that is more aggressive or less reversible than puberty blockers should be banned?
Otherwise, I assume you'd move the argument to those instead, right?
What if the children just wanted their ears removed? This wouldn't render them deaf, just leave them visibly mutilated by prevailing standards. Is that irrecoverable harm? Who is to decide what constitutes harm, and what constitutes the realization of one's inner truth however aberrant by wider standards?
The harm must be weighed against the harm of not engaging in a particular intervention. The argument from those in favor of permitting teens to receive gender affirming care is that puberty is going to cause their bodies to change in a way that causes them severe psychological distress for the rest of their lives and greatly increases anxiety, depression, and suicide, and that this likely isn't just some adolescent phase that they can ride out or that they'll come to regret in the future if interventions are performed. And the reason we know this is because people such as this exist in significant enough numbers and throughout a long enough timespan that they can be studied and we can determine which kinds of interventions are likely to succeed and which aren't. I don't know enough to know if these claims are true or not but I suspect that whether or not one believes them to be true is solely a function of one's politics. However, at a certain point this becomes more a scientific question than a moral one. Children wanting their ears removed or some other medically benign but socially damaging procedure only becomes a relevant question if the child in question is suffering from a well-recognized condition from which having the procedure done is an effective treatment.
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Existential conflict over values, and determined knife-wielding teenagers.
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