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If you consider children to be actual people with rights, then you reject the fundamental right of the parent to mold them into whatever they please.
Forget trans, every cultural standard that removes agency from children is up for review for exclusion from the eschaton.
Parents as the only role model and as an absolute force in a child's life is a single point of failure, at best it's a benevolent dictatorship and at worst its tyranny.
I find that framing disingenuous. If you take away the children from their parents, because you don't like the way they're raising them, you're not respecting the child's rights and actual personhood, you're merely transferring the right to mold them on to a bunch of bureaucrats.
It's funny how the "nature vs. nurture" stuff flips political valence when gay/trans issues come along. The right is skeptical of the state's ability to improve test scores and career outcomes for women and (non-asian) minorities but thinks the state is quite capable of convincing people to cut off their own genitals. The left thinks that representation and role models are hugely important in convincing women and minorities to enter male-dominated career paths, but can't possibly influence kids gender or sexual identity.
Is this not just the empirical reality we observe? Black test scores remain low despite decades of effort and millions of dollars thrown at the problem, but the incidence rate of people cutting off their own genitals has skyrocketed in the last 10 years.
Yes, and you can explain that as either a) the government is really bad at getting black kids to study and really good at convincing them to chop off their genitals or b) the state isn't actually very influential over either and culture/genetics is the driving force in both cases.
Or the government isn't magic. They can only perform the possible.
Getting black kids to want to perform better, possible.
Getting kids to want to cut their dicks off, possible.
Getting black kids to actually perform better, not possible.
I think it's possible. It just requires indoctrinating them into the culture which The Experts (TM) currently consider "white supremacist". And this is not something that will be done, especially as making black kids perform better would mean also making them and their kid middle class, with middle class voting patterns. And who needs that trouble? Certainly not people who are now in power in places where there are a lot of black kids. They already have the votes locked in, thankyouverymuch, and they don't need to mess with a working system.
I don't know that the "high-low coalition vs. the middle" concept applies to your assertion, though. Surely the counterargument is that black people and families will be loyal to the party whose policies gave their children better opportunities, i.e. delivering tangible progress?
I don't know. I suppose if I was an East Coast machine politician who was never in any real danger of losing to an R candidate, I like to think I'd have enough electoral free reign to do what I thought would objectively improve things for my constituents.
Delivering an "opportunity" is not the same thing as delivering "tangible progress." An "opportunity" can be failed, and if you actually buy into the fairness of the opportunity, the failing actually is an insult - you weren't good enough to measure up! The person who gave you the opportunity only gave you an insult! Screw opportunity; you have a grievance - you don't deserve an opportunity to be told "haha you suck", you deserve the actual prize!
I submit that this is a far better match for what we're seeing with regard to, e.g. increasingly-explicit hiring quotas, racially-based benefits and payments programs, medical preferences, and the corresponding attacks on and decline in color-blind casting, merit-based examinations, grading, honors programs, etc.
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