Uninformed Consent: The Transgender Crisis. Children cannot make these choices and should be protected from them

Commentary ^ | September 2021 | Paul McHugh and Gerard V. Bradley

[karpov]

Willful arguments are gaining favor today over rational ones, as revealed by the clamor to provide “affirmative” support to those making transgender claims. Despite the given character of one’s sexual makeup, with its biological intelligibility and its natural place in every individual’s life, American culture has become ever more open to the idea that a person’s sex is mostly a matter of what he or she wants it to be.

Specifically, the champions of the transgender campaign rest their arguments on an essentially solipsistic view (“my truth”) that endorses the individual’s will, sense, or sentiments rather than on what is demonstrably real. The posture extends far into today’s bureaucratic culture. Many official surveys and job applications do not ask whether you are male or female, but rather with which gender you identify. In business and academic settings, it is fashionable to signal support for the transgender cause by adding to one’s own signature a parenthesis enclosing “my preferred pronouns” listing them as “he, his, him” or “she, hers, her” or even “they, theirs, them.” Note that “identify” and “prefer” are words linked to will, wants, and desires, as distinct from those such as “am” and “is,” which are linked to being, nature, and existence.

This cast of mind extends even to supporting the willfulness of prepubescent children (ages 8 to 14), supposing for them not only a right to decide on their sex but the still more radical right to demand and gain the medical and surgical procedures (“affirmative treatment”) to shape their bodies to match their wishes and presumptions.

This extension of the cultural supposition about transgenderism to include the medico-surgical treatment of youngsters is the subject of intense debate and legal argument across America.

[karpov]

The author correctly asserts that children cannot give informed consent to a sterilizing procedure. He does not mention that "transgenders" are doomed to loneliness. No heterosexual woman wants anything to do with a man who chopped of his gonads. Nor does any heterosexual man consider such a mutilated man to be a woman and a possible partner. I periodically read about "transgender" men being killed by men they deceived into thinking they were a woman. Murder is wrong, of course, but lying to a sex partner about your sex is playing with fire.

[Pearls Before Swine]

There is a reason we don’t permit minors to enter into binding contracts. Why should a lifelong decision be treated differently, or even encouraged?

[Scarlett156]

Attention-wh0ring parents are, a lot of the time in this day, behind a kid insisting that it’s whatever it was not born as. And of course little kids are easier to influence, so why not start tranning them out BEFORE they can make any kind of decision about it? I see a lot of parents getting sued by their kids in the not-too-distant future.

[DoodleBob]

On this matter, interestingly the most rational comment I've read is from gay art film provocateur John Waters (who is hardly a conservative):

Have you ever done drag? I was only in drag once, and that was as the Wicked Witch at a birthday party when I was 8 years old. That ended my drag career. You have to be so careful of what you say. My friend told me this story, “You know, every gay man once tried on their mother’s shoes.” You did it once; you never did it again. But now, if you have a very liberal mother and they catch you, you have sexual reassignment lessons at 8 years old. And you might not really wanna do that.

[Jumper]

Sins of the father (parents) visited upon the children and grandchildren.

[Catfan15]

I dare you, if you haven’t heard, to look up Chris-Chan. He perfectly sums up the mentality of the typical tranny. It’s about as bad as it gets.

[DoodleBob]

Need...bleach. But...Messed-up adults are nothing new. Many of them sit in D.C.

This is about minors. As such, I'd like to hear from a statist why we need to regulate homeschooling to death, but surgery on a child from which there's no turning back requires no such regulation.

[Gay State Conservative]

If you can kill a child with a beating heart why can’t you mutilate him/her?

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

In my 12 years of schooling back in 1952-1964, I never saw a boy who wanted to become a girl. Never.

A couple of them went gay but no boy went “girly”.

This must be some new phenomena caused by pressure from Leftists.

[silent majority rising]

Great point. If a five year old can decide to determine his own sex, then why not lower the age of consent to five? Of course, it is an affront to every thing that we have stood for in this country, and puts on a level with the Taliban.

[BitWielder1]

We teach our children to stand up against peer pressure.
But the transgender pressure comes from adults. That makes it even more dangerous.

[Sir Bangaz Cracka]

I shall claim to be young, and I demand much needed face lifts and other procedures to transform my body into what I claim that it represents. IE a young they. This is not a request, I demand it.

[Trillian]

Attempting to do this to a child should be an automatic prison sentence.