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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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.