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Notes -
But they can meaningfully consent to having one?
You must have interesting trolley problem outputs.
Listen. Sex with kids is bad because it traumatizes and wrecks them. It's not that complicated. Bad things are bad.
We care about consent in adults so much because we've seen the consequences of people not using it. It's the same thing, those people are traumatized and wrecked. Bad things are bad. It's not that complicated.
If you want to argue that early transition traumatizes and wrecks people-
I can appreciate that argument. I might not agree but I recognize it as an argument rooted in a sensible definition of the Good and the Bad.
Though, there are also people who swear by the early transition they went through and became FAANG programmers or whatever. (namely my in-group). And I am always going to be on the side of those people being able to have done what they did. Because everything turned out great for them and they were clearly not traumatized and wrecked by transition. The only thing they tend to be working through is the time their parents sent them to gay deconversion camp, or some other mistreatment by anti-trans normative society. Which I will fight against because it is traumatizing and wrecking people.
Consent is about locus of control. If you think parents can rob teenagers of that locus and not risk doing the same sort of damage...
I don't think you understand why rape is bad.
Surely throughout human history there are some child-adult sexual relationships which went well for both parties? Say they did have a respectful, gentle, loving relationship.
But generally, sex between adults and children is harmful to the child, they don't really know what they're getting into, don't understand the long-term consequences. It might go well or it might go very badly. Because we can't judge beforehand whether the parties are mature, sensible and so on, we blanket-ban a huge swathe of child-adult sexual relationships on the basis that the vast majority are predatory and bad. That there might be some such relationships that end well is not a sufficient argument for them to be legal.
Tattoos are illegal for children to get in many jurisdictions - yet nobody goes full Event Horizon and says children can't consent to having skin. Many consider that the increased autonomy isn't worth the danger of making choices that will be later regretted.
And what about Chesterton's Fence - not changing complex biological equilibria we don't really understand.
Chesterton's Fence is a fine heuristic but at the same time, your species will never learn to fight bulls if it always respects fences.
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