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Notes -
Personal intervention? Not unless I was literal family to the kid, or similarly close due to other events. Adults trying to slyly undermine a parent’s agenda is a nasty thing even when well-intentioned. The kind of bond needed to trust that from the kid’s perspective is significant. Otherwise, it’s either not going to stick, or you’re gonna have erratic results because the child has no training or instinct to defend against grooming. From what you say, the parents do seem to be abusing the poor boy, but being quite frank, child abuse is a fairly common thing in various gradations and breaking out of the abuse is usually going to happen in or after puberty if it’s going to happen at all. Trying to break a five-year-old’s trust of his parents sounds like it could lead to some much darker places.
As for the state. Essentially never, outside of truly bright lines, like permanent mutilation or death. The state is so ponderous and ignorant that bringing its power to bear on something as delicate as personal relationships is incredibly unwise and guaranteed to yield destruction. So forbidding hormone poisoning and surgical mutilation of a minor who cannot consent to such things (which adult consent would lower them to merely, in my eyes, deeply unwise self-experimentation) well within the state’s purview, with little possibility of overreach.
Of course, this is from the perspective of one who would rather other moral busybodies and the cruel state stay out of the serious business of how he does good for his children and is willing to yield some theoretical power over the families of others for political consistency on that point.
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