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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.
That's fair. I don't think children should be "taken away". I think children should be free to go where they want to and systems should be configured such that roaming children remain supported.
Since this is not what is actually happening in the top post- it's fair to say I disagree with present implementation.
But I do absolutely think- what most parents who are afraid of transgender role models are afraid of- is their kids making the choice.
I claim the resistance to my ideal would consist of mostly the same people for mostly the same reasons.
Child liberation is opposed mainly by people who want the power to ensure that their children become the upstanding ideal of their culture, and are uninterested in any compromise that would free their children to pursue becoming the upstanding ideal of a different culture. See "Groomer" rhetoric.
And if they all end up on Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, is that a good thing?
That is a hell of a bad thing. However, if kids have a realistic view of how likely something like that is...and they decide that winding up there in the pursuit of their desired life choices is preferable to not being able to pursue something like transition...
I mean, it's a kind of mutually assured destruction. Someone that sits down and decides that they would rather wind up in this kind of hellhole than not transition is one hell of a determined motherfucker and as such deserves respect.
Are you of the opinion that children are just as capable of mental analysis as Adults but just in a small form factor?
No. I am of the opinion that when it comes to individual issues children can be surprisingly capable, although they often fail to consider the big picture. When they examine long-term consequences the analysis often lacks nuance and depth, and may miss certain important issues entirely. However, it is often surprising what children - what people in general - achieve when [they believe] their life or bodily sovereignty is at stake.
I know a couple of children who more or less invoked MAD when they were quite young - ten or eleven. In one case this was extremely deliberate and carefully planned. The kid called a family meeting and discussed the terms of their conflict about a week after it started. In both cases it left them with lifelong side effects that they weren't able to predict at the time but which most mature adults would be able to foresee. That being said. They were fairly impressive in their resourcefulness, determination, and resolve; that is to be admired. This is a sort of power that is not given but taken by the simple and desperate expedient of being willing to suffer terribly, or even to die, for the strength of your personal or philosophical convictions. Only the very determined, or the very scared, or the very maladjusted will go this far in attempting this, and make no mistake about it - it is a terrible thing, sometimes. It alters relationships and changes people for life.
To say nothing of the kids that invoke MAD and wind up with one side overplaying their hand. This being said: I still believe that it takes an exceptional level of willpower or determination to risk the abyss. It turns what might have been bullshit power struggles of a generation ago about wearing your hair short or even dating the same sex into genuine straight-up goddamn existential battles that are far likelier to have deleterious lifelong consequences. But in the end it is ultimately a battle of human will against human will, and I've seen some damned strong-willed kids...at that point it is very much a naked power struggle, everything else be damned. Who has the power? Who is genuinely okay with being buried, rather than not getting what they are after?
I may be rambling. But I am of the opinion that if your child is old enough and wants something badly enough to be okay being maimed or raped or killed over it - and they're unwilling or unable to desist - that needs to be respected even if you deeply disagree with it, perhaps especially if you deeply disagree with it. It's kind of...invoking a state of war or at least some kind of extraordinary circumstance where the usual rules do not apply in the same way, or apply only in the sense that they are part of the power struggle.
Game theory is a motherfucker. Anyone who wants can pull out a live hand grenade, though this takes a lot of willpower and is almost always inadvisable.
The way to deal with this is long before your 14-year-old has decided that they are trans, that they will pursue medical treatment by any means necessary, and that they consider it a straight up life and death struggle. You may be able to win that battle by force or threat of force, to be honest. But if they don't get the memes that if they're gender-nonconforming, they're trans...or if they're not good at performing gender roles, they're trans...they are a hell of a lot less likely to wind up playing Mutually Assured Destruction: Trans Edition.
This sounds much more epic and reasonable until you realize kids will regularly get into this level of game of chicken over liker Katy Perry tickets and the weaker willed parents will cave. You really really don't want to set standards that encourage brinksmanship like this.
I may not have been sufficiently clear earlier:
I do not endorse MAD; I am merely describing a dynamic that anyone that is determined and desperate enough can access. Even if the child wins this struggle, it is likely to be a Pyrrhic victory in many ways and may leave lifelong scars. To say nothing of the dead and maimed people that will be the result of one side or the other overplaying their hand. I've heard it said that war is a dirty, nasty business, and while this isn't Vietnam, it's still a bit nasty and ugly. I hope that most kids will realize this...and that most parents will find ways to make it clear that irreparably altering your relationship with your parents isn't worth Katy Perry tickets.
I mean. In some instances of MAD you need to have plausible deniability. What's Sarah going to do if she doesn't get Katy Perry tickets? Jump off a cliff? If you're a middle-class parent, you just reply that if she's for real, she needs psychiatric care, and she's going to go for a vacation in the grippy sock hotel. Which, coincidentally, is expensive and is going to leave them unable to afford concert tickets. That is fairly likely to work...especially if she's told about all the horrible things that sometimes happen in psych wards, or the side effects of antipsychotics. For this to work you need the credible threat of mutual annihilation.
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