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I find both sides of this CW rather tiresome. The pro-trans "well, if half of the class in fifth grade wants puberty blockers, just let them have puberty blockers" is obviously wrong, but the anti-trans side is just as bad.
With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states. Or a 17-yo (with PC) can enlist in the army and get blown to pieces in some war on another continent. Or he could murder someone domestically (without PC) and be executed for that, until the liberals in the SCOTUS put a stop to that in 2005. And of course every 10-yo has the ability to kill themselves (without PC), not granted by the SCOTUS but by physics (i.e., God). Sadly, suicide is the second or third most common cause of death for teens (though homicides are ahead of suicides in the 15-19 group, second only to accidental injury, which I find even more fucked up).
I think that the bodily integrity of people whom we don't consider to have the ability to fully consent is an important good, and one should not make it too easy for them to get irreversible changes done to their bodies.
That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).
Bottom surgery is a different category, but the fact that you focus on mastectomies likely means that it is exceedingly rare in minors. And while we are discussing genital surgery without medical indication in minors, we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.
With regard to puberty and interventions, I will notice that 'natural' is not the same as 'good'. 'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty, and nobody remotely sane would suggest we go back to that. We have seen how God has planned out human life, and collectively decided "fuck that guy". The natural fate of a 12-yo with no health anomaly is not puberty. It is death through asphyxiation within minutes -- basically everywhere in the observable universe.
That being said, I doubt that most people's lives would be improved by accepting/deciding that they are trans. A lot of kids have issues with their identity around puberty, for most of them accepting their birth gender is likely the best outcome as far as quality of life is concerned. But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.
This means that medical interventions must be made based on trade-offs. Anticipate how the patient would view the intervention with 20 years of hindsight. Try to minimize the excepted reduction in QALYs -- no matter if it is due to suicide, sterility, surgical interventions etc. This involves guesswork, but every moral decision in the real world involves guesswork. Sometimes you will still decide wrongly and mess up a patient's life, either way. It also involves not being in the trenches of the CW. If you think that every trans-related intervention in minors is either good, you have not grasped the complexity of the situation. If you think every intervention is bad, likewise.
As others pointed the entire culture is against such marriages, and even sees pregnancies from low age gap relationships as something to be prevented. I don't know how it is now, but it looked like a sizeable amount of money was being spent when I was an adolescent, to stop this from happening.
I'm sorry, that's deranged. That's the sort of stuff that makes me want to go to the local feminists and say "I'm sorry, you were right". What you said only makes sense if you believe the breasts' only function is decorative, for the enjoyment of men.
Yes, circumcision is barbaric, next question.
That's a pretty absurd argument, if that's where you want to leave it at. When a kid loses their baby teeth, we don't try to halt that process because "natural is not the same as good". When a kid grows, and experiences growing pains, we also don't try to halt the process no matter how much he whines about it. These things are a normal part of healthy development, and we recognize an argument needs to be made to intervene in it, not to defend the process from taking place.
If it's certain, what sort of evidence do you have for the claim? Every systematic review of pediatric gender care that I'm aware of, came out saying the evidence is of low or very low quality. As far as I recall the history of these interventions, this isn't even a case of small studies showing promising initial results, but failing to scale, the results have been pretty poor from the start, but we went ahead with it for ideological reasons.
Ok, and when it turns out they're not doing it, can I point that out? When it, in fact turns out that they might be maximizing the reduction in QALY's, can I point that out? When it turns out they're not even so much interested in figuring out whether any of these things are medically justified to begin with, as they are an autonomy and self-expression, can I point that out? When it turns out that the approach you're proposing is not only not being followed, but is pretty much impossible under the current framework, because by definition anyone who wants a trans-surgery is trans, and thus justifies the surgery being performed, can I point it out? Can I point all of these things out without being called "just as bad" as the side that's doing them?
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It appears your problem is a dislike of making value judgements. A 16 year old getting pregnant is pretty normal. Getting an irreversible (and implants don't fix a breast to normal function) surgery is abnormal and bad. Enlisting in the Army has risks, many permanent, but it also has virtues, whereas cold blooded murder does not.
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The two are far more similar than I think is commonly realized, because the 15 year old getting her breasts removed is also doing it for reasons that have a lot to do with the dominant civil religion. This is more apparent when the kid's younger, and just like the Christian Right of the '80s, it's always the moms [including teachers, who are just state surrogate moms] pushing the kids into doing it.
It's also why the "consent" argument doesn't work here, since the "but they can't consent" has the same valence as the "don't allow children under the Age of Consent to be exposed to the destructive memes of religion" of the 2010 Atheism Wars. That didn't really get off the ground; it's an argument that's plain unworkable outside of full societal restructuring (and most people have a vague sense it's being made in bad faith), since a parent's worldview inherently influences what their child does. That is ultimately true of the same assertion when applied to kids engaging in transgenderism.
Every boy has the physical ability to chop off his own dick, and every girl has the physical ability to bind her breasts.
If the moral framework around "consent" led directly to a society where transgenderism would be declared sacrosanct, that's pretty clear evidence that this framework has serious and fundamental flaws, and should be either refined or done away with.
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In the same way as your other examples, I find it really funny that the mainstream right wing opinion is the anti vaxx naturalism bullshit, something that can and likely will kill and harm many more children than trans idealogy ever has. In just a single year, in just Samoa there was 83 newborn deaths thanks to RFK and other anti vaxxers. Samoa only has "Approximately 4,800 to 5,500 newborns" a year, which means over 1.5% of the newborns just straight up died from anti vaxxism. And some of the survivors of course may have long term damage to their lungs or brain or die from something else cause their immune system is disrupted.
Hell if you take a longtermist sort of approach, him stalling medical trials could be responsible for hundreds of thousands or millions of unnecessary preventable future deaths once we add things up like the cancer research and other tech with whatever roughly 4 years worth of deaths that could have been prevented just a little earlier if they didn't have to pause now.
Now I'm a staunch anti government libertarian and think it's wrong to force parents into vaccinating their babies, but the hypocrisy on display is ridiculous. Actually, it's worse than hypocrisy, vaccines are a settled science, at least the trans issue is still rather unexplored. Another plus also being that it's opt in from the kid themselves unlike vaccines where the kid doesn't choose illness, long term injuries or death when the parent ignores it.
Be consistent, you either think government should be used to supersede parents and childrens choices for health reasons, in which case you should oppose RFK and MAHA and things like Florida's move to end vaccine mandates vehemently or you don't and you should let kids and their parents choose transitioning if they want. Level of severity isn't an argument, the former is way more dangerous and way more proven.
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I have no problem at all with the idea that the age of consent for marriage and military service should be 18.
That being said, I think there's an important difference: So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever. However, there is a principle that in a free society, adults are given a lot of liberty and autonomy over their bodies. Therefore, at a minimum, "transitioning" can and should be banned for anyone under 18.
By contrast, marriage and military service are not necessarily dumb ideas.
I'm extremely skeptical of this. What is the evidence for this claim?
It wasn’t a dumb idea for me, I’m very happy with the results and it has been overwhelmingly positive for me in my personal life. What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?
Dismissing an entire medical/psychiatric treatment out of hand is itself a dumb idea. This is a common attitude beyond transgenderism, I’ve heard similar takes about depression, anxiety, ADHD (another medical issue that involves children!) but if all you have to offer as alternatives are facile suggestions then you don’t really understand the level of distress some psychological conditions cause.
I'd need to dig out the study where this came from, I think it was one of the early Dutch ones (so definitely from pro-trans side), but I recall someone making a remark that it's very typical for transgender people to report satisfaction with the procedure, but that it doesn't seem to be reflected by their mental health actually improving.
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We don't have a culture that encourages 16-year-old girls to marry. This is a holdover from an earlier (healthier) era; no congresscritter would vote for something like that today. All relevant changes to these kinds of laws in modern times have been to raise the age upwards.
By contrast, we do have a culture that encourages teenagers to transition. It's in media and schools and therapists and discord mods. I have never seen a married 16-year-old girl; I see trans people all the time (trans prostitutes are common at my hotel; I also saw a transwoman at an SSC meetup).
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I mean the issue is that once you get on the transition train, it’s very hard to get off. And I’m not just talking about surgeries, but cross-dressing and hormonal treatments as well. Kids just don’t have the mental capacity to understand that whatever they do today their 80 year old future self will have to live with. Most 15 year olds cannot imagine being 80. They can’t even imagine being 30. Ask them about their plans for a career and it’s not based on things that athirty year old would think about like pay and owning a house and having kids and wanting time off etc. kids at 15 just think about a job that they think sounds cool or unique. They want to study stuff they like even if there’s no real prospects for a good middle class job from a lit major. They like books, and they want to study books.
So I think trans stuff, because it’s permanent and kids dont understand that, needs to be treated with extreme caution. I’m not going to say absolutely nobody should ever let a kid get surgery. But this is the same psychiatric system that manages to massively over diagnose lots of other mental illnesses to the point that it’s crazy. I don’t think the WAPATH model works because it’s done by a system that assumes that because someone said it, that it’s a reality.
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