OPINION:
Some things are wrong regardless of intent or a claimed level of authority.
If laws conflict with the ultimate authority — God — they are invalid, as the great British legal scholar Blackstone (and later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) observed.
In most situations, parents have the God-given right to direct their children’s upbringing. But there are limits to that authority, such as evidence of child abuse.
Exhibit A is the lawsuit by parents, doctors and lawyers who are trying to get the Supreme Court to strike down Tennessee’s law banning what is oxymoronically called “gender-affirming care.”
That term means plying minors with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and surgical removal of healthy body parts. In other words, experimental treatments that leave these kids sterile and scarred for life in many ways — mentally and physically.
It’s child abuse on a scale unimagined until recently.
If the same parents, doctors, and American Civil Liberties Union lawyers in this case were instead arguing a parent’s right to approve cutting off a child’s ear, arm or perhaps a leg because the child felt strongly about it, they would be seen as not only perverse but criminally evil.
So why is cutting off a girl’s healthy breasts or a boy’s penis OK because the child is sexually confused at that stage of life?
More than 90% of gender-dysphoric children recover their natural sexuality and identify with their sex at birth unless adults intervene and steer them toward bizarre treatments.
This is why at least 22 states have moved to outlaw interfering with children’s natural sexual development. The laws do not prohibit adults from making these momentous decisions for themselves, but they do protect impressionable minors.
I think that doctors who make a living cutting off healthy sex organs are criminally exploiting vulnerable people and should be prosecuted, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Defending the transgender medical industry, proponents make ludicrous claims, such as this statement in the ACLU’s Tennessee filing: “A delay in treatment … can result in significant distress, including anxiety and escalating suicidality, as well as permanent physical changes from puberty that can be impossible to reverse.” That last phrase is an alarmist reference to natural sexual development.
Research has caught up with the lucrative transgender medical community. It turns out that young people who take drugs can be permanently hurt and need continual care. And those who undergo the surgeries are more likely to kill themselves.
Many people have regrets later and are telling their stories, like Walt Heyer, who has testified to the damage from his ill-conceived decision years before to abandon his masculinity for faux womanhood.
“No one has ever biologically changed genders. It is intellectually dishonest for doctors to claim (as if they were God) that they can change anyone’s gender or sex. It’s balderdash,” Mr. Heyer wrote in The Daily Signal.
European countries are moving swiftly to outlaw these unconscionable “treatments.” Clinics for youngsters are being shut down, and not any too soon.
The “woke” media have zealously pushed the concept of “gender-affirming care.” An Associated Press article, for instance, said this: “The family of a transgender boy in North Carolina is suing state health officials to block implementation of gender-affirming care restrictions that they say will force their son to undergo a traumatic wrong-gender puberty.”
The “son” is a girl. She will go through normal puberty if she does not become a guinea pig in a bizarre process that will sterilize her and force her to undergo years of drugs and more lucrative treatments from quack doctors.
Just as radical feminists have framed pregnancy as a sort of illness to be treated, the same mindset is being applied to puberty, one of the most natural of human conditions.
In North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill barring this gender-bending lunacy. The Republican-led General Assembly overrode the veto.
In Arkansas, U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr., an Obama appointee, struck down that state’s first-in-the-nation protective law against gender experimentation on children.
His ruling last June repeated talking points from the pansexual left, which, boiled down, say that reality is whatever you think it is.
The biased “research” proves it. Never mind that other studies show great, irreversible harm. If you think the public was misled by some of the later debunked claims by health officials regarding COVID-19, they had nothing on the transgender industry.
Science, however, is catching up. Sweden and Finland have banned gender interference on minors. On April 1, England’s public health system stopped prescribing puberty-blocking hormones to minors and advised caution after a major report found no evidence to support the practice.
In Tennessee, the state’s brief offers a succinct summary: “It is undisputed that these hormonal and surgical interventions carry serious and potentially irreversible side effects, including infertility, diminished bone density, sexual dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.”
The huge push to persuade youths to identify as transgender is just the latest demand from the LGBTQ movement, which is working to transform society in its own image.
Its main tool is lying, abetted by a lying media. By redefining marriage to dispense with the universally recognized male-female union, the movement has engineered a legal juggernaut that criminalizes common sense and Judeo-Christian morality.
“Capitulating to evil leads only to more darkness,” Walt Heyer writes. “Thank God for the parents, lawmakers, pastors, athletes, and others who are standing up for truth and against this evil deception.”
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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