Define “therapy”
A federal judge in Georgia has temporarily blocked part of a state law that prohibits hormone replacement therapy for transgender minors.
But is “hormone replacement” actually therapy? Or is it medical malpractice? Or something in between?
Calling it therapy puts a big thumb on the scale in this contested issue. What if it’s quackery rather than therapy? What if it’s the new thalidomide, driven by trendy but magical ideas about people “born in the wrong body”?
Judge Geraghty, who was appointed by President Biden, said in her ruling that the ban “is substantially likely to violate the Equal Protection Clause.”
But maybe the equal protection needed is protection from quack medicine sparked by wack ideas about magic gender?
The Georgia law, Senate Bill 140, prohibits doctors in the state from providing gender transition surgery and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in people under the age of 18.
The law does allow minors who were already receiving hormone therapy to continue their treatment, and it allows doctors to prescribe puberty blocking medications to minors.
On June 29, the families of four transgender children filed an emergency request asking the federal court in Georgia to block the law from taking effect.
The plaintiffs said the ban violated the rights of parents to make medical decisions regarding their children; they also said it violated the “guarantees of equal protection by denying transgender youth essential, and often lifesaving, medical treatment based on their sex and on their transgender status.”
The only sense in which this “treatment” can be “lifesaving” is if it prevents kids who are convinced they’re trans from committing suicide. It’s not lifesaving in a medical sense at all. The whole thing is in the head: it’s about ideas, feelings, thoughts, concepts. Sometimes medical treatments do help with broken or distressing thoughts and moods. Depression can respond to medical treatment, for instance, and that’s a good thing. The situation with “gender dysphoria” is different, and the “treatment” is drastically different. Prozac is one thing and cross-sex hormones are another.
The legal challenge to the Georgia law will move forward. During the litigation, transgender young people in the state will still be able to receive hormone therapy, but not gender transition surgery.
“It is vital that, as a family, we have agency in our own medical decisions that are in the best interest of our child — that includes gender-affirming care,” said Anna Zoe, one of the plaintiffs, in a news release after the emergency request was filed.
But maybe “gender-affirming care” is not in fact in the best interests of her child. Some people who have had it have massive regret.
Hey I know this isn’t on topic but thought you’d want to hear – oil drilling has been rejected in Yasuni National Park!
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-ecuador-oil-drilling-referendum-yasuni-5c72a325755976c47a3ec138bdab8537
These sound like similar arguments to parents who let children die rather than taking them to the doctor because they are praying instead. Parental rights…what about the rights of children?
I am not a big believer in parental rights, at least not in the ways it is usually used. The child has rights to be safe and brought up properly; any parental rights that fail to meet that are not actually rights at all, or shouldn’t be.
@iknklast if not parents, who? City Mayor? State Governor? Sherriff? Children themselves?
Parents works as good as anything I can think of. If something a parent does causes harm, then they should take the consequences of their actions.
” The child has rights to be safe and brought up properly;”
As defined by whom?…
Society. The Community. The child’s wider family.
Perhaps you’ve missed the other law changes where we don’t send kids down coal mines or force them to work in factories anymore. We insist that children get at least a rudimentary education. We prevent them from undertaking potentially harmful actions, such as drinking alcohol driving cars, and getting tattoos. In fact, we don’t even let them try out their sex organs before they have them chopped off, mutilated, or just made ineffective.
Dana, I’m going to be kind here and assume you have reached the age of majority. You now have the right to vote, the right to exclusive use of your property, and to be safe walking down the street. As defined by whom?
Dana, the parents of course have a lot of decisions to make; not every parent will define a child’s best interest the same way. But there is a problem with ‘parental rights’, because it assumes the parents have the right to bring the children up to be little thems. They really don’t, because the children have rights from the moment of birth.
Yes, I think the community and society DO have something to say. If you exercise your parental rights to bring up your child as a serial killer, that would be bad for the community. If you bring them up to evangelize on people’s porches, that has an impact on the community.
But the main thing I’m talking about is the actual “right” to do harm to your children in the name of your religion or your political beliefs. This includes anti-vaxxers, parents who pray for kids when they need to go to the doctor, parents who mutilate their children in the name of religion, parents who allow their children to be mutilated in the name of the new cult of transgenderism, parents who homeschool their kids so they won’t hear anything about evolution…
All of these things have an impact on the child that violate their rights to health and education that are basic mainstays. They have an impact on society.
Parental rights is also an argument used by courts in putting abused children back with their parents. I understand the need to be cautious, the overstepping in the past with assumptions that certain parents couldn’t be good parents even though they were, but we have swung too far the other way. My sister got her kids back every time, because “good Christian woman”. Four of them ended up dead because of her doing something the judge said was okay…tying them to the bed and ignoring them. Did she have parental rights to do this? The judge said yes. Child Welfare said no. Parental rights stripped those kids of their right to life.
And that’s a really difficult metric to get right. First, because it’s hard to establish causation—just think of all the things that people claim with complete sincerity to have saved their lives, from Jesus to the Twelve Step Program to Dark Souls, of all things. Second, because reduced chance of suicide is a low bar. Taking away someone’s coping mechanisms and addictions increases likelihood of suicide in the short term; enabling those mechanisms and addictions has the opposite effect. Ought we give alcoholics more booze?
Holy shit iknklast – your sister killed four of her kids???
Russell Blackford’s 2012 book, “Freedom of Religion and the Secular State”, contains an excellent section on parental rights. He argues, if I recall correctly, that the state has a compelling interest in safeguarding the rights and welfare of children, and that, while parents can usually be assumed to have the interests of children in mind, in a number of cases they do not, and the state has the moral authority to step in. That is, parents are not the ultimate authority in these matters.
iknklast, I think you’d find this section in agreement with your #5.
“Who decides?” comes up in pretty much every conflict like this, but somebody has to, even if we disagree on the decision.
@iknklast
“Parental rights is also an argument used by courts in putting abused children back with their parents. I understand the need to be cautious, the overstepping in the past with assumptions that certain parents couldn’t be good parents even though they were, but we have swung too far the other way. My sister got her kids back every time, because “good Christian woman”. Four of them ended up dead because of her doing something the judge said was okay…tying them to the bed and ignoring them. Did she have parental rights to do this? The judge said yes. Child Welfare said no. Parental rights stripped those kids of their right to life.”
These are a common expression of community and society, and not representative of most parents.
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@Rev David Brindley
First see comment #5.
Second the community and society in say St. George, Ut, is very different from what I grew up in in Los Angeles, CA.
And 73 BTW.
#7 – yes. She had 8 adopted children, 6 of them with multiple handicaps. Only four are still living, one with multiple handicaps.
Four died because they were tied to beds and ignored?
Two died that way. They had a respiratory illness, and vomited. Because they were on their backs, it choked them. One died because she was given too much salt for a condition she had. The other one? I’m really not sure, because I was in California at the time visiting.
She nearly killed me a few times, but somehow I managed to survive, grow up, and move out of the house.
God almighty.
Reminds me of the horrible death of Hana Williams at the hands of her adopted parents in 2011.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/12/just-because/
Nothing really to add except my own, “Holy Hell.”
Re-read that post you linked to. Homeschooling, in my opinion, shouldn’t really be permitted. I have had students in my classes who were home schooled. They had a lot of strange ideas about things, especially science. Some of them had never written any kind of paper. And they absolutely could not work in groups with other students. They had no idea how to do that. They always asked if they could do the project alone, but I think it’s important to be able to work and play with other people. I’m not great at it myself, and I can tell how much it stunted me to have few social skills; I hate to see kids being brought up without being able to interact with and do projects with other kids.
As for regulating? We don’t even regulate Christian schools. We have an infrastructure in place that could do that, but we don’t. Because…well, religious. Must not interfere. So students get abused as much in their schools as they do in homeschooling settings…maybe more. The stories are just awful.
Someday maybe I’ll write a play about my sister; I actually have, one, but not about her parenting. Right now, it’s still too raw.