You imply in your article that kids could end up having surgery without their parents’ knowledge and consent. I’d like to counter some of the arguments he used to bolster his case.ĭata coming out from well-run gender clinics show that early support for gender identification and early treatment can ameliorate and largely normalize the mental health of adolescents with gender dysphoria. I am a doctor and a transgender woman, so I have both lived experience as well as lived expertise in the area that Ross Douthat writes about. There was no truth to that but, in this case, there may be truth to the harm caused by giving children hormones and puberty blockers before they are old enough to properly make those lifelong decisions.
Look at the made-up stuff in the 2016 election accusing Democrats of sexual abuse of children at a pizza parlor in D.C. Authoritarians have often come to power by accusing more liberal citizens of harming children. a new culture war megaphone on a silver platter. Second, the progressive transgender rights movement, by insisting on “gender affirming” care for children, is handing the right-wing G.O.P. These children can make a decision to change their gender and engage in medical treatments to do so when they are adults. Helping ensure this is about limiting government interference and respecting the family.įirst, young children should not be encouraged by “gender affirming” medical professionals to make decisions that will affect their whole lives, sometimes involving medical treatments like puberty blockers that may cause irreversible physical damage. They only want to survive and to hope for a future. These kids and their fiercely protective parents want no part of these culture wars. It is traumatic and really hard and they wish it on no one. Accepting being trans for these kids and their families is never a default, go-to position. We must not allow these most vulnerable among us to become collateral damage to anyone’s “culture wars” - from the left or the right. I am awed by the bravery of their parents, especially those from very conservative backgrounds, who have sacrificed so much out of the love only parents can have to help save their kids, as, notably, the conservative governor of Utah eloquently recognized in denouncing an anti-transgender bill. But there are many well-documented instances where from an early age the kid knows they’ve been misgendered. I’m sure there are instances of kids for whom their trans status may be a phase or motivated by external forces. Culture War,” by Ross Douthat (column, Sunday Review, April 17):
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Re “ How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q.
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