You are aware that it what is in the child;s best interest may not always be what the parents want.
I think transitioning to another gender is a serious business that should be taken seriously by everyone involved - especially medical professionals.
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So a 13 or even 12 year old girl getting mastectomies is in their best interest? Apparently some regret it and it isn’t possible for their breasts to produce milk again.
"Some regret" a lot of medical decisions; nearly
everyone who undergoes chemotherapy regrets it at some point. Should we ban chemotherapy for minors?
False equivalence. One is a potentially life saving procedure, the other is a choice by parents to quite possibly alter the child forever before the kid has any idea of who they are. This goes for all kids, btw.
When my sister was 5 she said she wanted to be a boy because she had two older brothers.
When I was around 5 I told my mom girls were gross and that I was going to marry a boy.
My youngest told me she thought she was gay, when she was 13 and wanted to change her name to Alaska. I was supportive of her stated lesbianism, but I sure as hell didn't let her change her name. I told her she could do it when she was 18 if she wanted. By the time she was 18 she dating boys and the idea of changing her name was long forgotten.
The common thread here is that by the time adulthood was reached, none of what we said as children was what we wanted when we had the bare minimum of maturity to introspect.
Hell, adults well into their 30s oftentimes don't know who they are.
Leave the kids alone. When they're old enough to decide if they want to through X process then it'll be their right to make the decision.
Finally, why are these young people not encouraged to accept who they are rather than going through a procedure they can never undo? What if a kid said he had an amputee fetish, would any sane person hand him an axe, show them to a tree stump, and then support them as they chopped off their own hand?
Sorry, but this is pure ignorance on what is going on here. It's not about a kid being whimsy and thinking "I want to try being a boy or girl" and then suddenly they get pumped full of chemicals and have parts chopped of. These are the right wing lies and anyone who cares about truth should consider anyone advancing an argument like that to be evil (like the Chris guy the OP is so fond of posting). On par with a KKK member and dismissed just as quickly.
We are talking about those specifically that have a diagnosed condition called gender dysphoria. Being born a girl and wanting to be or act like a boy is not sufficient to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and fuck anyone who claims otherwise.
Gender dysphoria applies to individuals experiencing a _strong_ and _persistent_ (at least 6 months or more) incongruence between their birth sex and their experienced/expressed gender, manifesting in various ways.
More importantly, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
In other words, this individual is suffering active and regular harm in their lives as a result of their gender dysphoria.
You can have a boy feeling and wanting to act like a girl, play with dolls, put on girls clothing, etc and not be suffering strong and persistent psychological distress and impairment in their lives. These kids do not have gender dysphoria, and are not the kids we are talking about here receiving the kind of medical care you apparently object to.
It takes a pretty cruel and heartless individual, as a guardian or, even worse, as an uninterested third party, to then come in to say any child suffering this harm should not get evidence based medical care to treat the harm. In fact we need to pass laws to ban the practice.
When you say "leave the kids alone", you are effectively saying "Sorry kid, just shut up and deal with your psychological pain and life impairment. You may only have the medical treatments I personally approve of. I don't give a shit if the treatment works or not and that there may be more effective treatments for your situation. That doesn't matter because you can't consent (or whatever other reason you want to insert here)."
Not only that, but it is almost certainly 100% hypocritical, as you would not take this position on basically any other kind of medical care for a child that happens routinely and you don't even bat an eye, which would be the same with respect to all the essential elements you object to (possible side effects, irreversible change, lack of ability to consent, chance of later regret). Jarhyn and I have both brought up multiple examples of this, and not a single person said they were against medical care in those cases. So then the question becomes, what is the underlying reason for this hypocrisy?
