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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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#”We’re coming for your children.”

The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.

The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme

The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.

As chronicled by NBC News:


In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.

But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.

Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”

“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”

The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.

Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.

“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”


This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.

Holly Math Nerd (by her accounts a victim of rape as a child, and hence hypersensitive to this kind of thing) has argued that child gender transition is a covert attempt to normalize paedophilia/child rape by alternate means. Her argument goes: if you think a small child is mature enough to consent to a mastectomy, surgery which will permanently sterilize them, and hormones with a host of side effects - why wouldn't you then think that they are mature enough to consent to having sex? Having sex with someone (even someone twice their age) seems like small beer compared to sterilization.

A few years ago I'd probably have scoffed at this argument as a paranoid far-right conspiracy theory. After learning that a senior member of Mermaids, a widely praised* UK charity for trans children and teenagers which has received public funding, is an outspoken pro-paedophilia advocate, I'm not so sure.

There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on. The baptists are people who sincerely believe that trans children are in immense psychic distress for whom medical transition is the best option available. The bootleggers are the medical and pharmaceutical companies who stand to make a packet off surgeries, puberty blockers and lifetime hormone prescriptions; and people like the Mermaids guy above, pursuing the agenda for ulterior reasons.


*By everyone from Emma Watson and Harry & Meghan, to Starbucks and Wagamama.

There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on.

(1) I think the paedophiles (and I'm not messing around with any soft euphemism like Minor Attracted Persons; if the idea of sex with kids is what gets your motor running, it's a problem and you have to face up to it) will try and use any excuse, any cover they can get in order to normalise their pathology. So when it was all sexual liberation and gay rights and "it is unjust that the age of consent for gay sex is higher than the age for straight sex", they crept right in with "oh yeah we are all about adjusting age of consent laws on the basis of justice!"

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're trying to infiltrate the trans activism movements either, especially the creepier/nuttier ones.

(2) Mermaids, or the people running it/the public face of it, always struck me as crazy and creepy. Susie Green was way too pushy about using her influence at the Tavistock and other public bodies to get what she wanted (a woman who brought her 16 year old out to Thailand for sex change surgery). No surprise someone else there turns out to be dodgy.

(3) Not the only 'real trans person' to be dodgy, either. The best move trans rights groups could make to help raise the view of their movement in the public eye is put out an announcement that "no, someone who is visibly male looking just calling himself a woman now does not mean they're trans and we disavow them".

And, to note, this seems to happen in every iteration of the LGBT+ movement- there are a bunch of assorted bigwigs who say creepy sounding things, claim they’re just trying to trigger the normies, and then turn out to actually be giant creeps who were 100% serious. And the LGBT+ movements seem to have no interest in preventing it from happening in the future.

Say what you will about the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts of America’s history, they did improve and take significant efforts to keep this from happening again, and senior leaders seem to have been genuinely horrified and have a sincere intention to make sure it doesn’t happen again because they don’t want kids to get raped. Various LGBT bigwigs seem to simply not care.

How much of the activist segment isnt at least on some level prone to being creepy? I mean in order to be a full time activist of any cause you have to have made it a rather large portion of your identity. You cannot be a pro-gay activist and have the “gay” part be some minor part of how you see yourself. It’s also true of other things; being an advocate of science means that science and science education are central to your identity more so than other parts of your whole. If it wasn’t, you’d probably be finding other ways to spend your time.

The other part is that radical overstep is a useful tool. If I have people in my movement that are 5-6 steps ahead of where I want society to end up, I can push forward with my real agenda and it won’t seem that radical. I can advocate for using AI in crafting legislation to vote on and have a much easier time if some guy over there is saying “let’s turn over all government decisions to AI.” I can call him crazy, but at the same time, I can sane-wash my position of having AI write the laws and giving Congress only the power to vote up or down on those laws. I could advocate for radical police reform— and sound much saner than the people saying “disband the police and replace them with social workers.”

I can understand the LGBT movement to an extent; first, a lot of the activism and politics came out during the 60s/70s when sexual liberation was a big thing (even for normies, you may have missed the thinkpieces about parents should be naked at home around their kids so that the kids can become familiar with what human bodies look like and will grow up without hangups. Them were wild 'n' woolly times, my friend!)

Laws about age of consent were out of line with the age for gay sex being a lot higher, especially as for straight sex it got lowered but the gay sex was unchanged. So age of consent laws were up for revising, there was the psychological/social/political/liberationist guff around children being sexual beings and sex being normal and natural and stop calling non-vanilla sex perversions and all the rest of it. You must also bear in mind that the politics of the sexual liberation movement and the gay liberation movement were not at all interested in being conventional or fitting in with wider society, they wanted to break it all open (marriage was slavery, the roots here of 'sex work is real work' and 'queering the paradigm' and so on).

Of course the paedophiles jumped aboard the bandwagon and used the excuses of "you're oppressed and we're oppressed, we should make common cause!". LGBT (more so the gay movement) also being accused of being paedophiles and under legal restrictions, on top of all the social attitudes need to be changed stuff, weren't going to start acting like morality police themselves about someone's messy, kinky, queer sex life. They didn't want to be forced into the closet of "look like and act like the straights" anymore, they wanted to be accepted as-is. Gay marriage was not on the agenda, it wasn't even favoured (until time passed and it became more politically advantageous to present the nice picket-fence view of gay life as 'we are just like you and just like you, we want the right to marry the person we love' in order to get social approval and acceptance).

So the weird and the perverted came in under the umbrella of the movement because you can't afford to turn away any allies. Besides, you normies are accusing these people of being kiddy-diddlers? Yeah, you say that about us too, and it's not true, so why should we believe you?

This led to a lot of egg on certain faces later on, and a lot of whitewashing the past (see Peter Tatchell for one such "I never said anything like that, if I did I was tricked into it, and I'll sue if you keep bringing this up" reaction.

So there's the lingering attitudes of "we can't afford to throw anyone under the bus because we too were considered disgusting perverts back in the past" when it comes to not condemning the trans (who are busy re-writing history themselves about Stonewall in order to lay claim to historic legitimacy) and the MAPs types who are still sneaking around.

There still remains the fear that "if we agree with the bigots about this issue, then they'll turn on us afterwards".

made a concerted effort in the 80s to purge all pedophilic elements

Again, once the evidence and pressure became overwhelming.

The Church has put policies and safeguards in place. The response, whenever the next trans or gay person is found to possess child porn, is still "but what about the Catholic church anyway???"

We've changed. You have no excuse now not to clamp down on self-identified trans people who are also paedophiles. Better in the long run to admit it, own it, and do something about it than to deny it happens and cover it up. Take it from a Catholic.

It's kind of ironic in a way. Conservatives have long argued that conservative organisations ought to be hypervigilant against entryism, to prevent themselves being subverted from within by bad actors or undercover enemies. Throughout history, organisations have come up with various countermeasures designed to prevent entryism e.g. gang tattoos (especially on the face) are an expensive signal that you're not a cop.

To the extent that those "trans people just trying to live their lives in peace" we keep hearing so much about are an organized faction, insisting on self-ID as the preferred standard for demarcating the trans from the cis was an incredibly short-sighted unforced error, as it left the group wide open to entryism by all manner of bad actors. "Anyone who says they're a member of this group is a member of this group, no questions asked" means no countermeasures against entryism at all. If the trans community hypothetically eventually came to be made up of "1 trans person trying to live their life in peace for every 99 perverts", the architects of self-ID will have no one but themselves to blame.

I find it impossible to consider it an unforced error. Not unlikely or improbable, impossible. Leaving aside the fact that this outcome was obvious to anyone with even an autist's grasp of social psychology, it was spelled out by advocates over a decade ago. Those advocates were called bigots and transphobes even if they were themselves trans - they simply became truscum. They knew what they were doing.

Mmm... no... It wasn't a coincidence, but- here's my model.

The queer community is made up of people who were rejected by society and decided to make their own society. Trans people are used to being gatekept by doctors and not allowed to get the procedures they want.

Their cultural norms are a reaction to their life experiences and that reaction is "gatekeeping=bad"

They call it "transphobic" because "you're just doing to them what everyone did to me!" is the most salient connection to them.

It's a reactionary overcorrection to gatekeeping. You can also model wanting kids to be allowed to transition the same way. It's a reactionary overreaction to gatekeeping.

('over'reaction insofar as it causes more problems than it solves. I do think society 50 years ago had too much gatekeeping on this issue. And personal grievances about having been gatekept too much remain valid. But there are tradeoffs at the societal level to consider.)

I'm sure that was the issue for some people, and as a nerd I sympathise. But the thing is, every trans person didn't overreact in that way, and of those who did not, practically 100% were the ones who had the professionally diagnosed medical condition the entire movement was built on. Kicking a bunch of gender dysphoric people out of the only support system they had as an overreaction to gatekeeping would be completely insane if the trans movement was about providing care and compassion for trans people. Less insane though, for a genuine community of sufferers co-opted by narcissists with a fetish.

So you think the self-ID policy was dreamed up by the bad actors, and the good actors, somewhat reductantly, came along for the ride (at least for awhile)?

The rather obvious problem for the LGBT community and the rest of us is that we cannot even point out the bootleggers without being labeled. No matter how nicely you point out the connection between letting small children make sexual decisions (or that the adults are pushing, often covertly for sexual discussions and books without parents consent) the answer is you are a horrible bigot for even thinking like that. Which means either you have to reject the Baptists outright or accept them and everything they want to do. This hurts the Baptists because people don’t want strange adults teaching their kids sexual content, especially without their consent.

The rather obvious problem for the LGBT community and the rest of us is that we cannot even point out the bootleggers without being labeled. No matter how nicely you point out the connection between letting small children make sexual decisions (or that the adults are pushing, often covertly for sexual discussions and books without parents consent) the answer is you are a horrible bigot for even thinking like that.

Not only can we not point it out, but they can't point it out either. I've seen numerous L's and G's trying to point out the bootleggers, only to find themselves kicked out, because it turns out the bootleggers are the core of their coalition. Turns out after you get all the rights you always wanted, the people who stick around and don't go back to living their normal lives like all the slogans claimed, are bootleggers.

The metaphor just fails completely. The whole point is that babtists and bootleggers are manifestly opposed to each other. Not that one is a less extreme form of the other. That's a motte and Bailey.

A better example of a babtists and bootleggers coalition in this space would be "Sex Ed is bad because I don't want my daughter to have sex and get knocked up" aligning with "We need to get birth rates up."

Or more hypothetically, "Sex Ed is bad because it teaches kids about sex" lining up with a covert faction of Dr. Pedofascists' friends saying "sex Ed is bad because it teaches kids about consent and boundaries."

The whole point is that babtists and bootleggers are manifestly opposed to each other.

I would assume that the baptists in my metaphor would be horrified were they to learn why the bootleggers were so gung-ho on normalizing medical transition for children, or were they to learn about the mixed evidence on the efficacy of same, or the rate of desistance without medical intervention etc. I've personally met several advocates for trans children, and while I don't agree with all of their policy proposals or arguments, they seemed like earnest and well-intentioned people: I never suspected they were Big Pharma stooges or closet paedophiles.

Perhaps a more illuminating metaphor would be that the "baptists" are useful idiots carrying water for the bootleggers.

The more appropriate historical metaphor is probably racist Union soldiers, many of whom went Copperhead after the Emancipation proclamation. "We didn't fight for this." Or maybe German traditionalists who picked Hitler to defend against communism, only to lose it all.

Maybe the reason why I keep getting baffled by all those "actually this elite progressive is a pro-paedo" is that on the ground level, I see pretty much no increase in tolerance towards paedos. In fact the age gap taboo keeps expanding to cover age gaps between adults. If all those elites are pushing LGBT for the nefarious purpose of adding P, they don't seem to be doing a good job at all. Their successes, if any, of 50-100 years ago are completely negated.

Maybe the reason why I keep getting baffled by all those "actually this elite progressive is a pro-paedo" is that on the ground level, I see pretty much no increase in tolerance towards paedos.

Tolerance and enacting justice against are not always the same. If the surrounding edifice of the movement means one guy gets 10x the sentence he would have, but 100 that would have been detected slip on by, the criminal movement, as a whole, prospers. And that seems to be the result of the LGBT ideology. They engage in actions indistinguishable from true sexual grooming and molestation, unless you have a mind probe and a camera in the room.

Be specific. What actions and how are they connected to the LGBT movement?

Distributing erotic literature featuring sex between adults and children, that is so raunchy that members of the school board interrupt reading from it, out of concern for the children who might be present at the meeting.

It is connected to the LGBT movement because the literature is written, published, distributed, and defended when it comes under criticism, by LGBT activists.

Sounds more like 1 guy slipping by reading raunchy literature, while 100 guys get 10x sentences for anything more serious.

I don't follow what you're even saying? The person reading was a woman trying to raise awareness about the books available in school libraries... how did she slip? Who is getting 10x sentences? What does that have to do with actions indistinguishable from grooming?

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It's not baffling to me. If a 30yo dating a 20yo becomes taboo, it is essentially put in the same category as a 30yo dating someone even younger.

It's already there in some ways with the taboo on admitting attraction to literally anyone younger than 18. Both a person attracted to a 16yo and a person attracted to a 6yo are called pedophiles.

That baffles me. A 12 year old is mature enough to be sure of their gender identity and sexual orientation and so can ask for puberty blockers.

A 22 year old woman who sleeps with a 40 year old married man who, surprise surprise, does not dump his wife and kids to marry her is a poor little blossom who was groomed and taken advantage of by an older man.

Make up your damn minds. If 14 year olds are mature enough to fuck, get pregnant, and get abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent, then 22 year women are mature enough to realise that 30-50 year old men are not interested in them for their brains.

You're looking for consistency on the wrong axis. It's not "children are mature, adults are vulnerable". It's "this claim suits my agenda, and this separate claim suits my agenda too".

It appears to me that their mind is made up and it says that old trad white male capitalist able-bodied neurotypical cis hetero normative patriarchal [progressive stack intensifies] is the enemy; the source of all that is evil. It's a totalising blend of identity politics plus politics as identity. It's "are you with us or are you one of them?"

That's true. Incoherence is no barrier, it's a weapon.

Isn't this more a problem with the overloaded term "groomed"?

I feel comfortable saying that the 22yo was taken advantage of, that it was a bad thing, and also that there should be no criminal and limited social consequences. That's because, as you note, she had the maturity to know better, or at least to carry on without lasting damage.

Calling that "grooming" is fine, but it doesn't make it equivalent to the other use of the term: soliciting underage kids for sex. The same 40yo hanging out by a playground and convincing children to get in the van is categorically different and should be condemned in the strongest terms.

These two positions are consistent. It's conflating the two terms, or defending against such a conflation, that leads to mental gymnastics.

I don't think that a 40 year old guy having sex with a 22 year old woman is grooming in any sense. It might be taking advantage of her, it might be even murkier depending if she's a vulnerable person (is emotionally fragile, has been misused in the past, etc.) or if the older man is in a position of power/authority (I don't think Bill Clinton was right in what he did with Monica Lewinsky, even though Monica was old enough to know that fooling around with a married man was wrong).

Grooming children is a much more serious matter.

Agreed on all counts.

I'm saying that misuse of the term "grooming" is a side effect of the definitional fight, rather than people refusing to make up their damn minds.

So is this elite person a 16yo-pedo advocate or a 6yo one?

Ultra progressives still believe the latter is worse than the former, and this is reflected in the law, in discourse, in wider society.

No. That's a vulnerability towards fake trans claims, not towards paedos.

It's a vulnerability towards fake trans claims which numerous paedos have benefited from.

Nevertheless, it does not benefit them because they are chomos. This sounds like a soldier argument against LGBT policies and not a real attempt to get at the mechanism of what it does.

Well, it would put my and a lot of other people's minds at ease if male convicts serving time for sex crimes were expressly forbidden from applying for transfers to women's prisons, a policy which was recently implemented in England and Wales. There is precedent for more women-friendly and less pedo- and sex offender-accommodating revisions to these policies. The failure of other jurisdictions to do the same does little to assuage my concerns that the trans lobby takes concerns about the effects of their policies on women and children seriously.

No, because I doubt any protagonist thinks of being housed in a women's prison as a perk or mercy or thinks much of the involved perpetrator at all. The thinking is that this is a great opportunity to grandstand for the principle of trans acceptance (further amplified by toxoplasma), and anyone trying to distract from this by making other considerations more salient (such as the nature of the crimes committed and what other principles they may pertain to) is concern trolling/not arguing in good faith.

I don't understand your comment. A convicted paedophile doesn't think being housed in a women's prison is a perk or mercy compared to being housed in a men's prison?

I contend that those in society that approve or argue for such housing don't think of it as a perk or mercy (because they don't think about the reason the person was imprisoned to begin with at all). Therefore it being offered does not imply a softening of societal attitudes towards convicted child abusers.

I think if you took a poll and asked people "would you prefer to spend 1 year in a men's prison, or 2 years (or 3, or 5 etc.) in a women's prison?", you would be hard pressed to find a respondent who would willingly select the former. Everyone knows they'll have an easier time in a women's prison. Child molesters presumably weren't the intended beneficiaries of the policy of housing trans women in women's prison, but they're often beneficiaries nonetheless.

If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk? The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack, but in any case progressives (and many non-progressives besides, myself included) believe that extrajudicial prison violence is an embarrassment on the US prison system anyway, so that’s not a specific enough argument.

If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk?

The canadians put a guy who raped a baby to death in a prison housing mothers with their babies. And then threatened the mothers who reported that he was telling them how much he wanted to rape their babies, because they were being transphobic, which is a crime.

There is no limiting principle to any of this. Any extreme thing you can imagine is already happening.

The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack

Sounds like a pretty big perk to me!

"Alright, but apart from completely negating my likelihood of being penetrated by a fellow inmate against my will; effectively nullifying my likelihood of getting beaten up or murdered by a fellow inmate; and affording me copious opportunities to intimidate, assault or rape fellow inmates - what have the Romans ever done for us?"

in any case progressives (and many non-progressives besides, myself included) believe that extrajudicial prison violence is an embarrassment on the US prison system

Even if these groups think it's an embarrassment, progressives need to justify why, in determining whether a given male inmate should be exempted from the possiblity of this happening to them, the sole deciding factor is "do they have the audacity to claim to be trans?"

If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk?

Child molesters don't necessarily target children exclusively, and several of the people listed above had been convicted of raping/assaulting both children and adult women. "Karen White", for instance, has convictions for raping/assaulting both children and grown women, was incarcerated in a women's prison, and then (shockingly) assaulted several of his fellow inmates.

The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack

????

That's a big perk.

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Straight women (who play a critical role in setting progressivism’s sexual agenda) are incentivized to keep the acceptable age gap range as narrow as possible. A 30 year old doesn’t want to have to compete on the free market with a 21 year old. So that’s another reason to expect LGBT to not turn pro-P.

There’s plenty of room for straight women to support, condone, tolerate, or turn a blind-eye to big P Pedophilia while playing the bootlegger when it comes to older-man younger-woman relationships, especially when there are LGBTQIA+ or other ipdol considerations in play. Hence why online discussions of Henry Caville, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Elon Musk often feature female seething, but it was crickets from the women when it came to discussions on Rotherham. Always funny when the guy who literally plays Superman, a generation-defining actor known for smashing supermodels like clockwork, and the richest man on the planet and father of ten get accused of being creepy de facto incels for dating younger women.

Targeting pre-pubescent children is the central example of pedophilia and the actual dictionary definition. However, pre-pubescent children are not a source of sexual competitive threat and anxiety for 30-year-old women like 21-year-old women are.

Just-so arguments can easily be made on a Who? Whom? basis. Drag queens wanting to mix with preschoolers is Stunning and Brave, because drag queens are valid and beautiful and children (especially those of other people) should learn as such. Thirty-year-old men wanting to mix with 21-year-old women is Gross and Problematic; such men are pathetic losers who can’t handle a woman their own age so they just want someone easy to manipulate (but at the same time, young women are totally Strong and Independent #GirlBosses). After all, everyone who’s not a creepy incel knows that 30-year-old women are just as beautiful and fertile as 21-year-old women, plus their additional education and experiences only make them more desirable partners.

This argument seems like begging the question. We allow some classes of minors to do tons of things without reflecting on attitudes re sex: a fifteen year old can consent to a colonoscopy (sometimes requiring guardian sign off), without the law or morality throwing away any concerns about sexual abuse with physical parallels.

Two points:

  1. A colonoscopy is a routine medical examination which, under ideal circumstances, has no permanent effect on the child's body. As the child is generally sedated during the procedure, it is entirely painless and the child will have no conscious recollection thereof. This is quite obviously not the case with mastectomies, penectomies, phalloplasties, puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

  2. You are correct to note that the child's parent or guardian must give their consent before the child undergoes a colonoscopy. Trans activists are notorious for their belief that medical transition is a fundamental right for children, which any child can and should undergo even without their parents' knowledge or even in specific contravention of their wishes. For instance, the aforementioned Mermaids charity was embroiled in scandal when they agreed to send a chest binder to a journalist posing as a fourteen-year-old trans boy, who had explicitly stated that their family did not accept their trans identity and were unaware of their desire for a chest binder. California just passed a law which makes affirming a child's stated gender identity (or not) a factor governing whether parents are entitled to custody of their children. Again, there's a big difference between "we support the right of children to undergo this medical procedure provided their parents consent to it" and "we support the right of children to undergo this medical procedure even if their parents are unaware that their child wants to undergo it, or knows about it and has explicitly said they don't want their child to undergo it."

On the latter point, one could draw an analogy with children being taken into care because their parents don't consent to their receiving life-saving treatment (as in Jehovah's Witnesses) and the child's doctor seeks a court order to overrule their guardianship. The analogy doesn't quite work, however, as a) the extreme trans activists I'm talking about generally support a child's right to transition regardless of whether they have been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria (in which case medical transition might be medically indicated) and b) most children with gender issues desist without any need for medical transition, the evidence base for the efficacy of medical transition in alleviating psychic distress and suicidality is decidedly mixed, and trans activists have consistently overhyped and muddied the waters on the efficacy thereof (e.g. "I'd rather have a live daughter than a dead son"). For the above reasons, taking a child out of their parents' custody for refusing to "affirm" them is nothing like taking them out of their parents' custody because the parents don't consent to a lifesaving blood transfusion.