Yes, Protect Trans Kids
Dear Weekend Jolter,
When the rest of the Western world is beginning to take a more cautious approach than America to an all-consuming issue concerning our kids, it should at least drive some curiosity as to why.
First the New York Times and now the Economist have devoted serious reportorial resources, and ink, to the debate inside the medical profession surrounding gender therapy. The latter’s cover this past week minces no words: “What America Gets Wrong About Gender Medicine.” It details how numerous European countries want to curb medical interventions for minors to allow for more study and declares, “The Europeans are right.”
If you read Maddy Kearns and others here at NR with regularity, the details won’t be a surprise. But, until recently, they had gotten little attention in the mainstream press, owing no doubt to the third-rail nature of the debate.
Few policy disputes in America today register at this level of intensity. After the Covenant School shooting, the Trans Resistance Network decried the “virtual avalanche of anti-trans legislation” and those supposedly seeking “the genocidal eradication of trans people.” Any attempt to do what Europe is doing is denounced by the White House as an “attack” on families. One young school-board trustee responded to Idaho’s bill barring gender-reassignment surgery for minors by vowing that when Governor Brad Little dies, “I’m pissing on your grave.” A week ago, swimmer Riley Gaines reportedly was assaulted and forced to take cover in a room by a mob of screaming college students. The offense? Talking about the disadvantages that female athletes could face against transgender opponents.
A real debate is coming on this issue, whether those invested in the absolutist view like it or not. Polling indicates at least a plurality of Americans favor restrictions on medical interventions for minors, and the coverage has started to reflect that the matter is not, in fact, “settled” science. But to succeed in the arena, where even a trace of skepticism gets branded as “phobia,” sponsors of these so-called “anti-trans” bills are going to have to flip the script that unfairly casts them as tormentors — that is to say, adopt, at least in spirit, the very slogan wielded by their critics: “Protect Trans Kids.”
They can reasonably lay claim to it; some already are. A newly published piece on NRO frames a Nebraska bill on gender surgeries in this way. Governor Little, in signing Idaho’s, also spoke of “protecting minors” from life-altering procedures. The bill itself is called the Vulnerable Child Protection Act (other state bills have similar titles) and focuses on the trinity of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. Its opening text bars doctors from knowingly doing the following to a child in most circumstances:
Performing surgeries that sterilize or mutilate, or artificially construct tissue with the appearance of genitalia that differs from the child’s biological sex, including castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, clitoroplasty, vaginoplasty, vulvoplasty, ovariectomy, or reconstruction of the fixed part of the urethra with or without metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, scrotoplasty, or the implantation of erection or testicular prostheses . . . [or] performing a mastectomy.
If that’s not “protecting trans kids,” what is?
To be clear, overheated rhetoric on the right about “grooming” and point-scoring legislation that nitpicks over pronouns are not helpful or focused on what matters. As Nate Grasz with the Nebraska Family Alliance wrote, the “fundamental” question is whether doctors should be allowed to perform sex-change procedures on kids: “Do we protect children who cannot consent to elective, permanent, and irreversible surgeries? Do we allow their bodies to be mutilated in the name of ‘gender-affirming care,’ or do we not?”
Plain language, reinforced by the emerging accounts of minors who grew up and now regret undergoing surgeries facilitated by adults, are the antidote to the intoxicating power of euphemisms in this debate. They make clear that “affirmation” does not equal “protection.” Maddy reported recently on a lawsuit filed by Chloe Cole against the entities that arranged for her transition, culminating in a double mastectomy, starting at 13; she needed love and therapy at that point in her life, “not cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgery,” it states. The Economist described the haste with which some teens were ushered through the medical regimen, with one saying she had a single “15-minute appointment” before being given testosterone. Meanwhile, the underlying research faces scrutiny. Many studies of cross-sex hormones lacked a “control group”; estimates of detransition rates vary drastically, underscoring the need for better data; even the stats on suicide risk sometimes used to justify medical action are in question. A 2022 article by an Oxford sociologist calculated a suicide rate of 13 per 100,000 using data from a since-shuttered transgender-youth clinic in the U.K. — higher than the overall rate among adolescents, but low enough to reassure parents and counsel against “irresponsible” exaggeration.
Seeing this properly as a live and unsettled debate, more countries are realizing the obvious: We owe it to the adult versions of our kids to keep them from carving up their bodies based on medical advice deriving from shoddy data, while they are still kids. That doesn’t mean ignoring or denying their dysphoria; it means supporting them, short of irreversible surgeries and treatments that carry unknown physical risks.
State lawmakers in America who support these bills are allies, not enemies, of “trans kids,” and they shouldn’t be hesitant to say so.
