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Notes -
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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