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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.
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.
But these are not the options on the table. They are parents against their kids' transition. I'm no fan of anti-vaccine sentiment in general, but they are very consistent: Trans, just like vaccines, are to them an imposition by the government, trying to supersede their parental authority "for their own/their kids good". It's not surprising that the same people oppose both. It just happens that they are correct on one count, and incorrect on another (at least from my vantage point), but there is no hypocrisy involved here.
Not to mention that of course the parents critical of trans-ideology and the parents critical of vaccines are not actually the same group, there is merely a significant overlap due to low government trust being a common reason for both.
I'm 100% convinced that if it really was entirely about liberal parents transitioning their own kids, the same people would consider that foolish and bad, but there would be very little resistance, just let them do what they want. The problem entirely comes from government institutions trying to push trans ideology as settled science and threatening & slandering any parent who is not 100% on board with their kids' transition.
When parents and children actively disagree on something, it's a far more difficult discussion that gets into balancing the rights of the parents to control their child vs the child's own right of autonomy. Personally I'm pretty strong in children having that right and but the trend has been consistently towards more and more helicopter parenting and coddling children so much even teenagers aren't allowed to leave their neighborhoods so that's just been lost.
Like come on, my parents told me stories of when they were in elementary school biking out miles away without supervision. Now even with phones, kids that same age can't even go to a different aisle at the grocery store. We have completely forgotten how independent and free our children can be once we start expecting it from them. It's happened to the youngest kids too! Now we just have a bunch of immature brats acting like they're still babies and aren't even potty trained yet. 12 year olds can't go to a different aisle and 5 year olds can't use a toilet.
Sure, so what about the attempts to ban transition in situations where the parents and children both agree to do it? Support for big government overruling parents and their children can't be motivated by opposition to big government.
You think parents not letting their kids leave their neighborhood, and parents not letting their kids chop off healthy body parts belongs in the se category?
We can probably work out some sort of a compromise. Say, we make it illegal for doctors to put pressure on parents with made up nonsense like "would you rather have a happy daughter or a dead son?" or lie about the reversibility of the procedures, but otherwise allow it for people who know what they're signing up for.
There's lots of possible compromises, but it requires the other side coming to the table. Currently, they still refuse, and insist on censoring us instead.
Finally, what I want to know why is this literally thr only subject where people's libertarianism comes out? Why haven't I seen your principled anti-government libertarianism around during the Covid era?
You don't understand how parents overruling children's autonomy is in the same category of parents overruling children's autonomy?
I've literally argued on this site for legalizing drugs and not caring when addicts overdose because it's their responsibility. I've argued against banning kids from phones and the Internet. I've argued against vaccine mandates. I've argued for free markets and getting rid of government regulations on everything from smaller government control like zoning to larger government control like the FDA which drives up costs and hurts people with long delays or immigration restrictions or anti discrimination laws (which are also unnecessary anyway in modern society to begin with) on large companies which prevents them from proper meritocratic hiring. I've consistently said that I am a fan of people like Reagan, Thatcher and Ayn Rand.
Almost every place that government exists, I say it should be scaled back. Sometimes I acknowledge that there are benefits to some government action (tradeoffs do exist!) like I see how welfare has personally helped a person in my life while also being against welfare overall. Or how I think that social security should have never existed, but since it did exist, it should fulfill the implicit promise behind it to the people they stole money from. Even Ayn Rand famously took her social security, because being against the program doesn't mean you can't ask the government to at least fulfill the promise it made when it took your money from you. She didn't think it should be stolen to begin with, but it's not hypocritical to say "then at least do what you said you would" right?
But generally I'm pretty damn consistent here, government out individual responsibilities in.
Yeah. Parents overrule children's autonomy all the time, arguably that's what they're for. Overriding it to the point where they can't leave their house unaccompanied is so extreme that it does belong in a separate category, in my opinion.
Really? You were here during the Covid era? My memory isn't great but I feel like I would have made a note given how vicious the Blues were at the time.
So you're assuming everyone else is a Randian / bordering on ancap? Because I don't see where's the hypocrisy otherwise.
That's true for younger children. But once you get to the teens, historically parents didn't have that much control! Especially the older teens. Their children would have had a job for a number of years and might have already moved out of the house for an apprenticeship as a page or a midshipmen or traveled along as a cowboy or did general work at a factory or whatever was fitting of the time period.
It's very recently where we've started coddling teenagers like we do with babies and toddlers.
No, I didn't know the site was around back then. I am not those other people, I am just saying that I am consistent.
No, I'm saying that if you're for one form of government coercion against the parent's and child's choices, but for another where it's only the parent, despite the latter also being more severe then there's not a good explanation for that besides politicizing and hypocrisy.
On every front anti vaxx is worse.
Autonomy? Parent alone choosing for a baby vs parent and teen.
Severity? 1.5% of the newborns died with just measles alone in Samoa.
Externalities? Anti vaxx can directly spread to people with weak immune systems or help disease evolve, where as a kid choosing to get their breasts removed and regretting it only hurts them.
Reverseability? While neither are wholly reversible, death is a lot worse than getting breasts removed and regretting it.
An argument that government coercion should overrule parents that cares about transition choices but not antivaxxers is not motivated by saving lives or helping people because the latter is far worse.
Ok, do you want to give 12 year olds the right to sign contracts, join the military, etc?
Also, if you want to RETVRN, I'm pretty sure that wanting to chop parts of your body off would be grounds to limit even an adults autonomy, due to lunacy and/or demonic posesion.
Not really. Even you accepted that in case of babies, it's normal for parents to override autonomy, we already accept the parents will be making. Also, there's a difference between forcing a procedure on someone (vaxx), and banning it. We do the latter all the time, but there's a taboo on the former.
Only a tiny minority (if anyone), of trans activists is in favor of a complete abolition of all medical regulations, so I'm not sure why you're seeing hypocricy in only one side.
Uh, are we talking about transitioning kids in Samoa? Why bring them up?
Sure, I'll even grant that in extreme enough circumstances, mandatory vaccinations could be justified.
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