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I'd like you guys to refrain from responding to this message (the one you are reading right now) unless you either are someone who holds the beliefs I am trying to engage with, or you can steelman how someone who holds those beliefs would respond to what I'm saying. Expressions of agreement are useless to me here. Thank you. (I have tried to get this discussion going on Twitter, but as one would expect, it hasn't worked.)
clears throat
So you, hypothetical person, believe that if a trans child has been on puberty blockers for the maximum of two years, then they should be allowed to switch over to HRT, even if they haven't reached the age of consent. So, for example, if a child starts blockers at age 12, then they should be able to switch over at age 14, even though the age of consent is no lower than 16 anywhere in the United States.
Why should the age of consent for HRT, the "real deal" of transitioning, be lower than the age of consent for sex? If you say that HRT is less harmful for children than sex with an adult, you need to be able to substantiate your claim.
It's pretty straightforward:
The kids want the treatment
The parents want the kids to have the treatment
The doctors are recommending the treatment, or are at least willing to administer it
The overall medical consensus isn't firmly against the idea of administering treatment
So we have a situation where all the relevant parties agree about a personal medical decision, but politicians should be able to override this decision and have the final say? I'm sure you can find studies suggesting this kind of treatment is a bad idea, but I'm sure you can find studies suggesting that a lot of common treatments are a bad idea. If this were the standard for politicians to cut across the grain of medical consensus then I'd expect legislators to propose banning a lot more procedures. But the reason I can't take any of these politicians seriously has little to do with the science; it's because they haven't demonstrated that they are acting in good faith. If a politician is proposing to ban transgender therapy for minors, I'm probably not going to find a history of statements and actions supportive of trans people in general but expressing concern about this particular thing. No, I'd bet dollars to donuts that if such a politician made statements about trans people in the past they were in support of, say, NC's "Bathroom Bill" and other policies directed primarily at trans adults. If a politician has a history of jumping on every bandwagon that's commonly labeled as anti-trans, I have no reason to take them at their word when they say that this is a legitimate concern that can be distinguished from a dislike of trans people or the "woke agenda" in general.
You've completely ignored the comparison to age of consent for sex. Your argument would also imply that if
-A kid wants to have sex with an adult
-The kids parents agree the kid can have sex with an adult
-The adult wants to have sex with the kid
-The overall medical consensus isn't firmly certain that having sex with the adult will be traumatic to the child
then politicians should likewise have no say in overriding this decision. Do you agree with this conclusion? Should there be an option for children and adults to override age of consent laws, maybe with explicit consent forms? And if not, where is the distinction?
The distinction is that we're not talking about sex. Or cigarettes, or tattoos, or lottery tickets, or any of the other things that kids want to do that have laws preventing them from doing, with or without parental consent. We're talking about medical treatment that a large part of the medical establishment believes is necessary. When it comes to age of consent laws, the state's interest is that young people are susceptible to being abused by older people due to the inevitable power dynamic between children and adults, and even if we were to grant that there were some situations where a fourteen year old would be able to have a sexual relationship with a 35 year old that wouldn't be abusive, that wouldn't be the case in the vast majority of situations where that happens. So given that the high likelihood of abuse and the strong state interest in preventing child abuse, the laws can be justified.
The most prevalent argument I hear against allowing teenagers to transition before 18 is that such transitioning can lead to irreversible changes that will have a permanent effect on one's body, and that teenagers are notoriously emotional and fickle and may come to regret making such a drastic decision with regard to what may turn out to have been simply a phase, in the same sense that most adults wouldn't want the clothing and hairstyle decisions they made at that age to be permanent. I'm not unsympathetic to that argument. The problem is that, unlike most phases, this isn't something you can just wait out to see if it goes away; the consequences of not taking any action are similar. If going through puberty as the undesired sex or staying on puberty blockers too long also causes irreversible effects, then the decision to transition has to be weighed in consideration of these effects. If subsequent data shows that a large percentage (i.e. at least 50%) of those who transition as young teenagers go on to regret their decision or retransition as young adults, then the argument for state involvement becomes much stronger. But I'm not aware that any such data exists apart from anecdotal examples, and that's not enough for me to think that the state should be interfering with a personal medical decision.
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First, the argument is an If-Then statement. If A is the collection of four premises, and B is "pedophilia should be allowed", then my claim is that your argument is equivalent to A->B. I don't claim that A is true... at the moment. But is that the only barrier to your endorsement of pedophilia? Do you believe A->B? If pedophiles convinced a non-negligible number of doctors to verbally say "yeah, this is probably fine", would you agree that they're the experts and so that means it is actually fine?
And is it the verbal endorsement or the private thoughts? What if right now, like 10% of doctors secretly think that pedophilia is okay if the child agrees to it, but simply remain quiet because they'd lose their jobs if they said it out loud? Is Overton's window the only barrier between whether something is or is not immoral?
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