The Supreme Court’s decision upholding Tennessee’s ban for minors on transgender surgery and puberty-blockers — United States v. Skrmetti — has already triggered a cacophony on the left of the “cruelty” and “discrimination” that will follow in its wake. But I want to address one objection that’s also likely to be pushed — and to explain why what might seem plausible isn’t.
So far, most of the attacks on Skrmetti have been directed at its impact on children: how minors may now want to commit suicide absent the opportunity to have their genitalia and/or breasts amputated in their home states. But I soon expect the left to try to turn the tables on conservatives by claiming we’re really not committed to parents’ rights.
If we were, they’ll argue, we’d be on the side of Vanderbilt, making tidy profits off parents “affirming” their child’s changed identity by putting them under the knife. “Parents’ rights” means parents should make choices, not legislators. Legislators should have no role in medical matters. Conservatives, they’ll claim, are “only for parents’ rights for transphobes, not parents rights to love their ‘trans’ kids.”
That’s just not true. But it’s what The New York Times wants you to believe when it published this op-ed from the parent who brought this case against Tennessee.
First, “parents’ rights” do not mean anything parents say they are. Not that long ago, parents from parts of Africa and many Muslim countries claimed they should be able to genitally mutilate their daughters. Their reasons were usually religious (painful sex is a deterrent) or cultural (it’s part of their “heritage”). Nobody bought that, and bans were enacted. So is “partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons” (UNICEF’s definition) a “human rights violation,” whereas doing the same thing “for medical reasons” is laudable?
The very definition of “medical reasons” here is as loose as worn out elastic. There is nothing therapeutic about removing a healthy female teenager’s breasts (“top surgery”). There is nothing healthy about splitting a functional male penis to create an imitation, non-functional illusion of a vagina.
What underlies such word games is the same broad definition of “health” that has long bedeviled the abortion debate. If “health” means whatever does not “distress” a person, then “health” is a label to cover anything and everything you want to do. You could drive a Mac truck through that “definition.”
If a parent asserted, for cultural reasons, that a daughter’s foot should be bound, and the girl agreed, should the state simply step back and yield to “parents’ rights”? No — because parents’ rights do not encompass permanent deformity of a child’s limbs out of some cultural aesthetic.
Likewise, if a parent and child thought a healthy limb should be amputated because the child now identifies as “handicapped,” should the state allow it? Should such a parent be immune from accountability for the “choice”? Or should the state not pull the quack’s license who did it?
Underlying the attack on the Tennessee law is a bizarre notion that there can be no such thing as objective medical standards of “healthy” and “pathological” in the sexual/reproductive area. The upshot, however, is that any intervention involving the reproductive system becomes a kind of cosmetic surgery: patient wish fulfillment. After all, people after plastic surgery also “feel better” about themselves. Isn’t that then “health care”?
No, parental rights never extend to harming one’s child. And whatever “psychological relief” might be temporarily gained from such procedures, it occurs at the cost of a permanent loss. Such parents permanently deny their child the opportunity to become what they themselves are: parents.
The state has a legitimate interest in saying that’s a bridge too far — especially amid hotly disputed questions about the “therapeutic” nature of such practices — when it come to a minor.
Let’s even consider a lesser case: puberty-blockers. Their advocates that claim their effects are reversible, another disputable claim. But let’s even consider what that claim does and doesn’t answer.
Perhaps normal fertility can be restored after puberty-blockers. But puberty is not just a stage of biological development: the ability to produce ova or sperm. Puberty — as any parent who’s gone through it with a child — is a whole complexus of psychosexual development. Puberty’s effects are not confined to genitalia.
That’s an issue Ryan Anderson identified in his long censored book, When Harry Became Sally. As the Bible and the Byrds both said, “there’s a time for every matter under heaven.” Normal human psychosexual maturity occurs sometime from 11 to 14, which means going through puberty at 21 instead of 12 is not just a question of being a “late bloomer.” It involves three questions:
(1) What are the effects of separating physical puberty non-onset from its socio-psychological components?
(2) What are the effects of artificially inducing psychosexual puberty of a different sex from the biological identity of the person?
(3) What was the basis for the psychosexual ideas (sex/gender stereotypes) of the prepubescent child prior to such “gender-affirming care”?
The truth is that the only way we can answer these unknowns is to experiment on children. And the effects of any intervention in the reproductive system is arguably not known for one, even two generations — i.e., until the subject of reproductive experimentation reproduces, and his offspring can. The only way you get away from that is by arguing that reproduction is not the normal measure of the healthy and normal reproductive system — which means you have to engage in long-term experimentation on people (far longer than Vanderbilt’s been lopping off breasts). Not that long ago, you would not have found professionals calling that “therapy.” They more likely would have called it barbarism.
So it’s not as simple as saying “parents’ rights” mean whatever a parent says — especially if “affirming” of what a child wants. Let’s not let the gender ideologues try to sell that bill of goods.
Image via Pxfuel.