Raise enough doubt about the effectiveness of trans health care for youth, and you can convince plenty of parents who might even live in otherwise progressive havens, says Nat Hunter. They tried to come out at 14 but were pushed back into the closet at every step by their purportedly progressive parents. Now they have a relationship with their parents, who finally accepted them after years of transition, but the damage was done in the moment they failed to accept their child.
People create the scenario that they fear through their own actions. They dont want to say, I hate my child. I dont accept them. They want to say, I dont want my childs life to be worse, and Im scared of them being trans, Nat says. But acting that way is what makes kids feel unloved, and that is what causes them to be hurt. People need to understand that once you open that door, thats it for the rest of your kids life. They know that you wont love them no matter what.
The conversation around trans kids has now stepped fully outside of the home. Anti-trans laws use the power of the state to strip both childrens and parents agency completely, and the medias discussion of trans kids and trans people in general too often focuses on the wrong questions.
The center-left media and the right-wing media are having the exact same conversation about trans people [right now], which is: Are there too many? What number of trans people is the right number? Thats a really strange question to be focused on, says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America.
What might happen if, in this conversation, we centered the voices of those whom its actually about? As a society, we struggle to listen to children when they tell us what they need. This problem extends beyond trans kids to queer kids of all stripes, to children who tell us about abuse in their homes, to even the archetypal son who wants to play music when his dad wants him to play football. We claim to prioritize children, but we actually prioritize the idea of them, an imagined ideal that allows them as little autonomy as possible.
We dont listen to children. We treat children as manifestly inferior to adults. We give them less rights, says Gill-Peterson. We make them economically and politically dependent on adults. We put them in dangerous and vulnerable situations all the time. They have no control or participation in authoring the world they live in, the schools they go to, the doctors offices they visit, the adults theyre left alone with. And then we say theyre incapable of knowing anything. Therefore, they have no ability to hold adults to account. Thats a very disturbing way to treat a group of people.
I'll never not share good articles on this subject, because they're so depressingly rare. Kudos to Vox for calling out other outlets for their transphobic screeds and two-faced whataboutism on an issue that's settled, at least so far as the facts are concerned. But most of all for centering actual trans people: it's really weird and really telling how most outlets post articles which are a bunch of cis people debating our existence, while couching the facts as conditional.
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I'm Queen of Tomorrow baby! Remember: heat from fire, fire from heat! She/her