I’m not a parent. I dislike most kids. I share George Carlin’s view on them as expressed in his final HBO special I re-watched last night.
But one thing I’m sure on is that they are your kids, and if freedom means anything, it means you can raise then any way you like, short of abusing them.
And even then, we’re usually only talking about severe physical or sexual abuse. Plenty of parents still spank kids. Far more raise them in ways I’d classify as psychological abuse.
So, it is infuriating to see a repeat of the 2006 anti-gay marriage map repeating in 2023 as an anti-trans healthcare for kids map.
Look, I’ve admitted to my transphobia, and I’m working to understand an issue I may never fully grok. But even if you think the whole idea of transgenderism is nutty, why do you care how other people raise their kids?
My birth state of Idaho is one of many that are criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. Even though the kids want it, the parents want it, and all the major medical organizations approve it, state reps and senators whose districts contain more cows than people don’t like it, so ban it they have.
They say they are concerned about the wellbeing of the kids. As usual, “What about the children?!” is the rallying cry for the latest bit of anti-liberty posturing.
Let’s consider that harm. Is it wrong, when a parent’s little boy comes to them, explaining their desperate need to live their authentic life, for his parent to spend the time taking him to numerous practices, the money on all that protective equipment, knowing that allowing their boy to follow this path the rest of their life will very likely lead to lifelong brain damage and shortened lifespan, all so they can carry a ball across a line on a field?
Oh, whoops, sorry. Got distracted by the parents of Idaho high school football players, regularly allowing their kids to come to harm. My bad. We were talking about the parents of trans kids.
So, let’s talk about these parents who have this crazy ideology they’re foisting upon their kids. Is it right to raise their kids believing in things that are demonstrably untrue? An anti-science belief system contrary to most people’s, where they will never take their children to a doctor for any medical care, believing instead that their telepathic entreaties to a two-millennia-dead executed Jewish carpenter is all that’s needed to heal their sick child?
Whelp, there I go again. I was reading this article about how Idaho parents are protected by a faith-healing exemption when their God decides the parents didn’t pray hard enough to save their kids from something a doctor could have easily fixed. A law these very same legislators who are fixated on saving trans kids steadfastly refuse to abolish.
I could go on with the parents who let their kids work in the fields (a far more dangerous job than being a cop), ride BMX bikes, join Scientology, enlist in the military at age 17, or use social media, and other dangerous physical and psychological acts.
But I won’t, because the care we’re talking about for trans kids isn’t even that dangerous. Psychologically, it’s helping them. Physically, we’re taking about puberty blockers and hormones that are largely reversible of one chooses. Genital and top surgeries aren’t done for minors, I believe.
Even if they were, so what? If a kid wanted to tattoo his face and the parents approved, is it your business to prevent this tragic mistake that will likely dim the kid’s employment prospects? If the parents stage manage their little girl into a modeling career that produces in her a severe eating disorder, is it government’s place to ban child modeling?
Enough. MAGA needs to MYOB.