Always check the label
Texas’ crackdown on gender affirming care for kids follows the chilling strategy the state used last year to limit abortion access, gay rights advocates warn.
Though Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) announcement that gender-affirming care for transgender children is abuse that must be reported and investigated may not survive legal scrutiny, it will likely prevent at-risk children from seeking necessary medical treatment, advocates said. Similar to Texas’s recent abortion law (SB 8), the goal is to scare medical providers from offering certain services.
Ok wait just a damn minute here. Remind us what “gender-affirming care” is? Oh right, it’s surgeries and/or puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones – i.e. permanent changes to the child’s body in response to a nebulous state of mind that has been labeled “gender dysphoria.” It’s a drastic intervention with no actual medical necessity, in response to a claimed psychological state. Is that really such an obvious benefit to the child that no state should enact laws mandating caution?
I don’t trust the current Texas legislature as far as I can throw it, that much is true, but reporting on this subject needs to be careful and precise. Tampering with children’s hormones or genitals isn’t just straightforwardly “gender-affirming care” or any other kind of care. It is at the very least risky, and in some cases it will be a disaster.
Abbott’s letter to his agency heads “is very directly saying ‘members of the public report these families, report these children to the state and the state will potentially prosecute them,’” said Dara Purvis, a professor of law at Penn State Law and scholar of family law and gender identity.
It’s definitely not a great plan but then it’s also not a great plan to have doctors stopping or surgically altering puberty on the basis of a belief in wrong-body puberties.
“This combines the vigilante technique of SB 8 with I would describe it as state violence against families and against children,” she said.
But what about the violence of switching puberties?
Medical guidelines don’t recommend children start puberty blockers until the first signs of puberty or start sex hormones until they have the mental capacity to give informed consent, which is typically 16. Sex reassignment surgeries aren’t recommended under the age of 18, under the guidelines from the Endocrine Society.
That still leaves a lot of room for children and adolescents to make drastic decisions they could regret a few years later.
The problem I have with this proposal is that it puts pressure on exactly the wrong party–the parents, who are already subject to pressure from the trans movement to “affirm” whatever their kids tell them about themselves. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The pressure should be on the professionals who are pushing this “care” to justify it with rigorous scientific study, and if they can’t do that, then it should be outlawed.
Turning in the parents does no one any good.
True. The specifics of the law are crappy, but not because interfering with puberty = “gender-affirming care.”
{Miscellany Room 7 doesn’t appear to accepting new comments. Maybe time for a new room?)
LGB Alliance USA wants to distinguish themselves from efforts like this Texas bill, so they issued a statement:
The Medicalization of Gender-Nonconforming Youth: A Statement on Where We Stand
It’s a good statement, although I have questions about this part:
It’s entirely possible I live in a bubble in this regard, but I’m not aware of many groups who would both refer to themselves as “gender critical” and would seek to uphold gender roles. I suppose someone might have heard the term “gender critical” and associated it with opposing trans ideology, regardless of what form that opposition takes. But the very definition of “gender critical” involves criticizing gender roles, not upholding them; indeed, it is the “pro trans” side of argument that enforces gender roles more strongly if they claim (as they sometimes do) that acting in accordance with “feminine” gender roles is what it means to be a woman.
Am I missing something? Are there groups out there who promote gender roles and also claim to be “gender critical”? Are there many such groups?
That sounds wrong to me too. As you say, that’s what “gender critical” means.