In relation to the recent Indiana ban for transgender youth care, some thoughts that I think have a broader outlook as rebuttals of a commonly held trope that adolescents can’t give medical consent to gender treatment.
Also consider this BBC article about a judge deciding under 16s might not be able to consent to gender care in the UK AFAIK this had been later overturned on appeal . As for one of the cases explored in the dishonest Reuters article debunked by Vaush it turns out one of the cases (the trans boy one) under Ontario laws where he lives, he had medical consent since he was 15. So Why is it different for transgender care specifically?
Here are my thoughts:
Adolescents presented as “technically kids” always gets my gears grinding, since it is dishonest to equate adolescents and children on so many levels. For example they might have medical consent which should be enough. They might drive in some places, and also they can have intimate relations to another adolescent. Toddlers can’t do any of that. There are grades of consent that are legally and rationally different between adolescents and kids, so “technically a kid” is a far fetch, a dishonest prevarication, and just plain wrong on so many levels.
They just don’t say that when kids of essentially the same age are allowed to get married and become “technically” parents. They don’t say a word for actual infant mutilation in the cases of intersex genital normalization surgeries, nor circumcision. They did not get out of the way to ban breast enhancement in teenage cis girls. They just never fucking uttered “they are technically kids” in any of these equivalent cases.
And there is another underlying problem, that most advocates fail to bring up while they are distracted by bullshit like the “technically kids” fallacy. That in contrast to strictly sexual orientation and needs that start during and after puberty, gender identity is something that manifests way earlier, typically in early childhood. This is extensively documented before the 2020s craze with transgender condemnation.
Mind you, transphobes have dealt with and exploited this fact for a long time. It is not that they do not know it. They do, but they strategically suppress it all the same. There are at least two ways they know and leverage this fact: in separating trans people into genuine and fake, like with the “homosexual transexual” pseudoscience; and in developing and popularizing concepts of social contagion of transgender ideation in adolescent. Even though implicitly, both notions require that true transexuals manifest themselves during childhood, but none of the real trans people we hear about are true trans. This is in turn the True Scotsman fallacy.
This is exactly why we need youth liberation, so that younger folks have access to information they need to make choices for themselves and be able to legally.
Imagine a world in which older folks could not just automatically expect to make all the decisions for younger folks, I think at least it would be a lot fairer with a lot less abuse and fewer/no shitty laws meant to gatekeep/control them specifically.
It’s not about “maturity” or “protecting kids”, they don’t want anyone to transition. They just focus on youth because it’s easier to take human rights away from people who have less rights already.
Exactly. It’s the same tired rhetoric of “won’t someone PLEASE think of the children” that these charlatans and mountebanks always trot out to sell their unpalatable evil.
Cis guy here (pardon the intrusion). From my perspective, the stupidest thing about the “debate” – and the thing that really reveals the bad-faith agenda of the anti-trans people – isn’t the age/capacity for consent aspect directly. It’s the fact that (if i’m not mistaken) we’re mostly talking about puberty blockers. That’s the opposite of “gender-affirming” care; it’s “gender-delaying!”
If the people making the “adolescents are too young to make the decision” argument were doing so honestly, letting trans kids take puberty blockers to buy time until they can decide in adulthood is exactly the kind of thing they should enthusiastically support, not oppose.
I couldn’t agree more. This is another aspect of it. Puberty blockers are an artificially induced delay (by a pharmaceutical means that is well studied/established in precocious puberty cases) because of not trusting trans adolescents gender expression, not because they are accepting it, let alone accepting it blindly. Puberty blockers were originally intended to give time to a pre-adolescent to desist being trans. The argument is simple, puberty blockers are not gender affirming care because no sex hormones are administered. The fact that puberty blockers have been framed as gender affirming care is a success of the Republican propaganda apparatus, and there is little we can do about it now, because conservatives have already moved the goalposts. They already have established that even talking about this direction as viable to a minor is demonic, and they will soon outlaw it too.
That’s why we need to talk more about actual hormones for adolescents too: By compromising the goal post always gets moved. The evidence that hormones work is there, if the bigots than manage to limit it to blockers, it’s at least doing less harm, even though proper medication would still be best.
Aren’t there some medical side effects of taking them for many years? If they’re starting at like 11 years old, then its probably best to make a decision about which hormones they’re going to take by like 15 IIRC.
Ultimately though, even if the idea effects are actually just a dog whistle of transphobes, adolescents are taking hormones with or without medical intervention and taking the wrong one can do permanent damage to the body. The only person who can even remotely know which is right is the person themself. If we allow and adolescents to go through puberty, we"re already admitting that hormones are something adolescents should be allowed to take and the only difference in which ones they are allowed is because transphobia.
Cis guy here (pardon the intrusion).
The validity of an argument is not decided by whether the person making it belongs to a minority. It’s such an awful failure of leftwing discourse to engage in all this identity-politics bullshit, when what counts should be the arguments. Like yours. Because it is good and correct! And not made worse by you being presumably cis. (And if you figure out one day that you aren’t and come back here, that is also fine and it doesn’t change the validity of the argument. And lived experience is not a substitute for data, because if we were to go by my lived experience there is essentially no transphobia in the Netherlands outside the healthcare system… (spoiler: there is!))
Sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. In short: You and your arguments are welcome with me!
On the topic of true trans being in childhood, I’m just figuring it out in my 30s. I do have memories of the feelings all the way back to when I was 4 or 5, which gives me relief, but also, who cares?
Even if someone’s gender identity changes when they are older, who cares if they transition? Who cares if they do it just because they think they’ll like it? Who cares if they do it just to try it out? Also, with non-binary folk and gender nonconforming folk coming out, it suddenly truly doesn’t matter if someone is “real” anymore. Our current understanding and categorizations just don’t cut it anymore.
I would have loved being able to grow up in this generation and having the chance to explore my gender. To say that kids don’t know or can’t tell is such hogwash – my brain has only ever pushed me in one direction on this topic and everything else has been conscious effort to fit into the box I was told to. Now, in transition, I’m finding people just want me to jump into the other box. Gender is much more complex than the binary makes it out to be and I think a lot of anti trans sentiment is over the fact that trans people make it clear that gender is very important and way more complex than society writ large makes it out to be.
Sorry for the rambling thoughts!
I’m just figuring it out in my 30s
I understand this. I did not advocate for the “true trans” theory. I point out that it is used for gatekeeping. All those people coming out in their 30s and 40s are valid as well. Some may have been consciously closeting themselves, others might have been misled by extreme gender normalization. I think some might also have overcompensated, like Chelsea Manning said she joined the military to overcompensate being trans.
There are people who were dragged to psychiatrists like Kenneth Zucker: he and his PhD students used to publish and review tens of studies with GNC kids and present statistics of “persisters” and “desisters”.
The sample sizes of these studies were typically in the hundreds. Who knows how many of those kids were subjected to some kind of conversion therapy? Many come out now and say they had been talked out of it by doctors and others. The figures alone speak of the real volume of GNC expression in childhood.
(This is not to mean that every GNC child is trans. This simply isn’t true. But some are!)
There are also people who have fallen prey to the homosexual transexual / AGP gatekeeping, and have themselves thought they weren’t “true trans”, like the guy in the transfem literature novel Nevada.
But who is counting? Republicans have moved the goal posts of this discussion to a degree that to the average person it just sound insane to “push hormones and surgery onto a kid” because they played with a doll like once or sth. They say that this could not be happening if the Democrats were not evil lizard people and so powerful that medical organizations parrot their insane talking points.
So there is that. To sum up, I am making a list of the above reasons a person possibly does not realize/come out as early as psychologists say gender identity is formed:
- behavior normalization efforts from the parents
- psychiatric intervention in childhood
- self gatekeeping
- overcompensation
- knowing but being closeted because of averse reactions of parents/peers to GNC behavior, anticipation of averse social outcomes [1]
- outright conversion intervention
- denial
- not having realized due to lack of representation, lack of a conceptual framework, or overly negative representation of trans people [2]
