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There's a "protect trans kids" poster on Gwen Stacy's bedroom wall in Across the Spider-Verse. This is the second time I've seen this exact phrase, after Don Cheadle wore it on his shirt when appearing on Saturday Night Live.
Okay, my curiosity is piqued. What does this phrase mean?
I assume this message is in reference to a specific threat that exclusively, or at least disproportionately, impacts trans children. Specifically, my assumption is that it relates to bathroom bills and/or gender affirming care, but I have a close friend who insists that it refers to hate crimes, and he says that I'm "living in a bubble" if I don't think it refers to hate crimes. But I really haven't heard anything about a hate crime surge against transgender children, real or exaggerated. I heard plenty about the supposed hate crime surge against Asians three years ago, so if there was a similar narrative going on with trans kids, I figure I'd hear about that too.
Which isn't to say that I never hear people complain about hate crimes against trans people! But when I do, the discussion is about transgender people of all ages, not specifically children. The only activist movement I hear about that specifically relates to trans children is their supposed right to medically transition, but my friend says I'm being uncharitable if I assume that that's what is being referred to.
I'd appreciate it if you guys help clear this up for me.
Edit: When I told him about this post, my friend clarified that he thinks the ignorance is that I think it implies exclusively to these issues and not to violence.
That you are woke and not a deplorable thoughtcriminal and want everybody to know it. That you are fully in sync with the latest agenda updates, and will execute whatever instructions are going to be uploaded next.
The current release (as far as I know) of the agenda specifies that any child that expresses any interest or ideation about himself being transgender, should be immediately medically, socially and surgically transitioned, parents have no legitimate way to react to it except fully supporting and enabling it, and in case they do anything else, they should be immediately and irreversibly striped of all parental rights. Failing to do this will inevitably and imminently be leading to the child in question killing himself, and it would be the fault of everyone who did not do enough to enable it. That's what "protect" operationally means right now. But for somebody who has such a poster, it usually doesn't mean they reflected on all of that, considered all advantages and costs of such approach, and their own personal opinion, after deep reflection, is that this is what must happen. More likely, it means they are signaling their non-dissent from the agenda and willingness to lend their support to whatever is declared to be the right thing.
I'm not sure this even rises to the level of a weak man, though maybe you could point me to someone actually espousing precisely this position. My suspicion, though, is that this is a full fledged strawman. Please work harder to portray your outgroup's views in a way they would be likely to recognize and agree to, or barring that, at least in a way that brings strong argument/evidence that this is what they actually believe in spite of their protestations to the contrary.
Here's one case: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10612285/California-mom-claims-LA-school-encouraged-daughter-transition-blame-suicide.html
Let's check:
A kid having depression and confusion in puberty - check
Government workers insisting on transition as the only way - check
Exclusion of the parent - check
Using suicide as the weapon to justify taking over - check
Ideological zeal reinforced by governmental coercion - check
The kid is getting worse and ultimately dies - unfortunately, check
Everybody in the system driving the kid to suicide patting themselves on the back and thinking they did everything right - check
Is this enough to prove my point that there are people that are believing and doing all the above? Because if not, unfortunately, this is in no way a unique outlier.
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To be clear, I think a fair read of v7 and v8 requires at least some graduated timeline from social presentation and hormone therapy to (some) surgical interventions (albeit 'suggested' as six months for adults in v8), rather than "immediately", and that in practice hormone therapy for now does tend to have a short delay after initial diagnosis. These standards do still leave the possibility that some people will either discontinue or stop at only social or social/hormonal therapy without surgical intervention (not explicitly stated as a non-binary thing, but it's sometimes a non-binary thing), though v8 does look to largely preclude a efforts to mitigate dysphoria without at least social transition.
It's a little messy because "[if] you spend a lot of time wondering if you might be trans, those are all pretty good signs that you are in fact trans" and "I had a gender crisis and end up back where I started" are things that absolutely common and compatible positions for a lot of the modern progressive movement. I think this is more a matter of failures of communication than a true or deep paradox, but in turn I'm not sure the social conservative complaints to an integrated syzygy of those two statements would look terribly different.
For parental rights... the situation depends a lot on jursidiction. Most cases tend to involve general Bad Parenting in addition to gender stuff, though it's hard to tell whether that's a legal principle or hard cases making messy law or simply divorce courts and child services taking the better part of valor.
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Pretty much every "yeet the teets" doctor and their support teams. I've just last month read a number of stories where parents turned for help to doctors like that and were pressed into doing hard meds at the explicit threat of imminent suicide (and probably surgeries too, I just didn't read a specific example of it lately). In fact, this specific threat was just quoted in this same topic, I did not invent it at all (I wish that wasn't the case, but it is).
They are already agreeing to it. Moreover, they are already doing it. Moreover, they are already calling people that object to it hateful bigots. How far along it should be going before I'm allowed to notice it?
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