Families in Texas are worried that supporting their transgender kids will lead to a report of child abuse. We are already seeing families being investigated. Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, saves lives, and shouldn’t be the subject of an investigation.
Supporting transgender kids is one thing, and letting them get amputations and/or puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones is another. The ACLU does not know that what it calls “gender-affirming care” (i.e. amputations, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones) is medically necessary, nor does it know that it saves more lives than it puts at risk. This is all new territory and it’s just not obvious, let alone established, that there won’t be thousands of people who regret making drastic permanent changes to their bodies when they weren’t old enough to evaluate the consequences. The ACLU is being horrifyingly reckless with the lives of other people in this stampede to say it’s just fine for teenagers to wreck their bodies because they think they’re the other sex.
Chase Strangio writes:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton told trans youth in Texas last week that they considered their health care to be a form of child abuse. This is dangerous, dehumanizing, and terrifying to trans youth and their supportive families.
But it isn’t “health care” as commonly understood. It’s pretty dangerous to give youth puberty blockers, too, but Strangio frames the issue as entirely good v evil.
The declaration will have devastating consequences — and we are already seeing them. Abbott and Paxton, along with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, want to investigate families simply for following best practice medicine and supporting their trans kids through lifesaving, medically necessary health care.
But it isn’t “medically necessary.” It may be psychologically necessary, or desirable, or better than the alternative, in some cases, but medically necessary it isn’t. It’s not “best practice” medicine, and there are plenty of detransitioners who can explain why. It’s isn’t “lifesaving” unless you make dangerous and reckless assumptions about suicidality.
The Texas law sounds intrusive and harsh, and I don’t trust Republicans to make good laws, but the ACLU/Chase Strangio take is manipulative and melodramatic and inaccurate.
In addition to being outside of the scope of their authority and clearly motivated by partisan politics, this policy is wrong and is opposed by health care professionals and child welfare experts. It also isn’t isolated — while particularly extreme and cruel, Texas politicians are part of a coordinated effort to shame, dehumanize, and attack trans kids. The end result won’t be that fewer kids grow up to be trans, it will be that fewer kids grow up.
“Give us what we think we want in this moment or we’ll kill ourselves.”
Chase Strangio is dangerous.
Comments
12 responses to “Gender-affirming amputations”
I’m against this law for the same reason I’m against the State removing trans-identified kids from “non-affirming parents.” First, there’s no reason to assume that the mother &/or father isn’t acting out of concern for the child’s best interest. And second, the swirling propaganda and rhetoric around this issue absolves the parents from the charge of ignoring what an ordinarily prudent person would know. I can’t simultaneously bewail the institutional capture of a medical establishment which primarily endorses this, looks the other way, or shuts down dissent and treat the parents who trust it like alties trying to cure childhood leukemia with crystals and prayer.
Ironically, many of the TRAs furious at this governmental intrusion into a family’s medical decisions are gung ho when it comes to criminalizing GC parents. I’ve been told that the two groups aren’t the same because it’s absolutely positively 100% clear that trans kids exist & surgery and hormones are necessary, “life-saving” treatments.
If anyone saw that disgraceful exhibit of what happened when a father who lost custody for refusing to “affirm” his child was invited to speak at a University (the TRA audience screamed itself hoarse) that’s probably the level of discourse we can expect in investigating this debacle. That on one side, and Texas Republicans on the other. Kids in the middle.
Perhaps America should let the lawyers and insurance companies sort it out.
Start by recognizing that children can’t really give consent.
End by suing the baby butchers into the poorhouse.
I’d have considerably more sympathy for the TRA’s position that surgery and hormones are vitally necessary for ‘trans’ children, if they weren’t simultaneously claiming that expecting ‘trans’ adults to go through surgery and take hormones is a crime against their bodily autonomy. The vast majority of men claiming to be ‘trans’ do not get their reproductive equipment removed.
I wonder how many rapists would claim to be trans in order to be transferred to women’s prisons if the rule were ‘only after castration and penis removal or inversion’, given that we know of at least one who immediately ‘detransitioned’ (desisted) upon release.
From r/detrans on Reddit; posted eight days ago:
This is so, so sad.
And what would TRAs respond? They’d probably say that this Redditor is lying and made up the whole story in exchange for money from far right organizations.
I call them TAs. They don’t deserve the “R” in their acronym.
Do you call MRAs MAs?
Oh dear god – I hope that case (if it’s real) is a rare one.
Just to be clear, I don’t support the Texas law, or Abbot’s directive. I’m not saying that in this post. I am saying the ACLU’s advocacy is staggeringly reckless. I kind of hope some teenager sues them into the ground in a year or two.
Oh I already basically said that in the post. Anyway…there it is again.
My gender is headless gender, and my pronouns are decap / decaps. If I can’t get the decapitation surgery, I’m going to kill myself!!!! Taxpayers had better pay for it!
I wonder why they don’t speak to the parents of gender nonconforming children and children suffering from gender dysphoria who are breathing easier because this law may end the state-sponsored grooming of their children into the trans cult of self-mutilation.
The woman whose post on r/detrans I quoted above is sadly not alone in experiencing very bad reactions to testosterone.
After stopping testosterone: