I haven’t tweeted anything since I discovered Twitter was shadowbanning tweet threads I put substantial amounts of effort into. But I do occasionally check on the site and see what is going on, and a New York Times story about schools concealing, as a matter of consistent policy, youth transitions from the parents of young children, even with no showing that the parents are abusive, has generated a ton of discussion. Most of it is about what you would expect, with people manning the barricades of the trans debate as they always do.
But I found one particular aspect of this very interesting. Michael Hobbes is one of the more mindlessly woke people in the Discourse, so it is unsurprising that he is all-in in support of the schools’ position. But what is interesting is the replies that he got supporting that position, including from some very respectable commentators and academics. People like David Roberts, who writes about global warming for Vox, Josie Duffy Rice, the legal commentator, and Political Science Professor Julia Azari. as well as a bunch of randos. You can read the comments by scrolling down in this thread.
Let’s take a step back and understand what the schools are doing. You can imagine a lot of different policies that a school might have when a kid transitions and changes his or her name. And you can imagine significant issues arising if the parents are abusive. But here’s the thing: the vast, vast majority of parents are not abusive. They love their kids. Indeed, the Times story is replete with parents who love their kids and have varying reactions to their kids’ decisions to transition and are pissed off at the schools for not telling them about it.
And if parents are suspected of abuse, the solution to that is not to keep the transition secret— it’s to report the parents to Child Protective Services and engage the substantial tools within the legal system to protect children.
So what we are doing here is refusing to tell non-abusive parents of a fundamental decision of their children in an area that could have substantial mental health consequences. We are endorsing the concept that these young children are better off living double lives under the supervision of schools that have hundreds of kids to supervise and have only a limited amount of bandwidth to care about any specific kid, and while getting no mental health treatment at all, rather than telling the people who love them more than anyone else in the world so that they can help. And we’re not doing this in some special circumstance where we are actually afraid of an abusive parental reaction, but as a matter of course even where the parents— like the vast majority of parents— love their children and would do anything for them.
As a policy, that’s nuts. But what’s telling about the responses in the Hobbes thread is how many people out there with Lefty political views just assume that parents are abusers until proven otherwise. Duffy Rice calls it “dark” and mocks it as “trust me I have their best interests in mind”. Earth to Duffy Rice: parents do act in their children’s best interests, because they love them, and the law contains all sorts of presumptions based on this. For instance, if custodial parents decide to move, the child doesn’t get a veto over it. If custodial parents decide to send a kid to a private school or to transfer the kid, the child doesn’t get a veto over it. If custodial parents decide that tackle football is too dangerous and won’t enroll the kid in it, the child doesn’t get a veto over it.
Here’s Prof. Azari: “literally everyone whose family is from a culture that's not the dominant one waves from the (pretty crowded) corner”. Actually, it’s often families whose cultures are not dominant who take greatest advantage of parental rights. For instance, if you are born to Amish parents, they may send you to sectarian schools and then pull you out of school pretty young and the state isn’t going to stop them from doing it. Muslim and fundamentalist Christian and Hasidic Jews and other minority religious groups often send their kids to sectarian schools, and people often choose to live in effectively segregated neighborhoods where a lot of other people of their same ethnicity live, so their kids can socialize with other children raised in the same culture. The state interferes with none of this, because parents are presumed to love their children.
Now let’s take a comment from one of the randos: “‘That just can't be psychologically healthy’ makes the common error of not comparing to the right alternative. The alternatives are a kid either being forcefully outed to (potentially abusive) parents and/or trying desperately to tamp down on their (possible) gender dysphoria”. But if a kid has possible gender dysphoria, isn’t the proper course to get the kid into mental health treatment— something that requires the parents to get involved and, maybe, pay for it? Is this how we look at any other mental health issue a kid might have? “A kid has a possible eating disorder, so we’ll let the kid throw out their lunch every day and not tell the parent.” “A kid is cutting herself in the girl’s bathroom, so we’ll conceal it from her parents.” Really?
Here’s another one: “‘it fosters distrust between students and parents,’ IF PARENTS ARE NOT TRUSTWORTHY, THEIR CHILDREN CANNOT TRUST THEM. i avoided the worst of it (by lying) but i was always in threat of anti-queer conversion. being a different person at home and with friends is being a teenager!” (The capitalization is in the original.) “If parents are not trustworthy”? If parents aren’t trustworthy, than our entire system of child custody needs to be reformed. Parents are trustworthy.
I think the “threat of anti-queer conversion” gives the game away. Let’s be clear here— the old-style “conversion therapy” directed at gays was disgusting. But when we go from “gay” (i.e., homosexuality, a sexual orientation) to “queer” (a meaningless term that could be anything), and then to “trans” (originally a response/treatment for gender dysphoria and now an ever-broadening identity category), “conversion” loses meaning. The notion is apparently that nobody, least of all your parents, is ever allowed to try and talk you out of anything. And that’s nuts— one of the most important and loving actions of parents can be to talk you out of things, because kids don’t always make great decisions.
I might add that even if we back up and talk about homosexuality, it’s ridiculous to talk about being “always in threat of anti-[gay] conversion”. The whole point of homosexuality being a deeply ingrained sexual orientation is that people can’t really talk you out of it— the record of the “ex-gay” movement is a record of monumental failure, and the reason conversion therapy is so terrible is not because it “works” but because it doesn’t work but meanwhile makes gays feel like perverts and costs them lots of money.
But given that, what’s the real “threat” there? If some sincere but misguided parent did try and “talk” their kid out of being gay, they’d fail. It wouldn’t work. The kid would just go on being gay. And if it rose to the level of abuse, the kid could call in CPS and get away from the abuse.
What I think the actual “threat” here is precisely that unlike homosexuality/being gay (or carefully gatekept adult transition, for that matter), a lot of the “queer”, “non-binary”, and “trans” identities of teenagers are very thin, not carefully thought out, and highly susceptible to outside influence. Indeed, Lisa Littman’s research confirms that there is a peer effect in youth transition— some kids transition because they are influenced by friends who also transition. And that fear correlates with a fear that parents might get these kids into mental health counseling (which many of them may actually benefit from), and one of the byproducts of such counseling might be not only that fewer kids transition but also that some of the things that school officials and activists are currently interpreting as gender dysphoria and “trans-ness” are actually deeper mental health issues that require attention.
But here’s the point— even if I am wrong about that and these are identities with some permanence, it’s not as though telling non-abusive parents about them is going to do any harm. After all, if the identities are permanent, the kids will go to a psychiatrist, or move to a different school, or just talk to their parents about them, and since the identities are permanent, they will persist. Just like none of those things changes the sexual orientation of a gay kid.
Which means, at bottom, to think that telling parents is in general a bad thing, you have to think that parents are the enemy. You have to be the type of person who would mock parents by saying “trust me I have their best interests in mind”.
I grew up among liberals. The bedroom community I grew up in wasn’t full of flaming liberals, but the wider metropolitan area was. California was culturally extremely tolerant. And yet, if someone had proposed my local school system concealing information from parents on some significant mental health issue, it would have gotten about 5% support. Maybe 15% support in other areas of Los Angeles. This idea that parents are the enemy, that all parents are presumptively untrustworthy, has only taken hold among a significant part of the populace very recently. And I think it correlates with the larger societal sorting and polarization we are seeing. More and more, the coastal liberal elites are childless. Parents are becoming more and more constituents of Republicans. And as society becomes more polarized, the childless are less and less likely to even know any parents, and are more and more likely to see parents as a bunch of abusers.
Some of this isn’t new. The Weather Underground told their followers to kill their parents (thankfully this piece of advice wasn’t very influential), Pete Townsend said “don’t trust anyone over 30”, and there definitely was a distrust of parents and authority figures in 1960’s activism. But it was a very marginal part of the picture, and most of America did not take it seriously. Parents were very politically powerful.
I think they still are. But there are definitely a lot of people on the Left, very influential people, who do not have children and think there’s nothing wrong with treating parents as presumptively abusive, as a threat to their children. This controversy is thus very telling.
good article tho the ROGD study is rather contested , but a head one of the orgs himself mentions that social contagion is a factor: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/opinion/trans-kids-privacy-gender-identity.html - so I believe you should include that detail in your article because it'll help cover up for any blind spots in the article's argumentation to have something that's true mixed in with something that's become very politicized. I believe that ROGD is something that happens and that the controversy of the study is a little politicized, but I also believe it's exageratted a bit as these gender clinics are thankfully very conservative from what I heard with recommending transition to kids. Which you wouldn't believe from what the culture war tells you. As for the left's hatred of parents, it's pretty wacky. It comes paired with the rights hatred of teachers. Now I have had bad experiences with teachers so I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter but I know for a fact these changes in principles are purely due to a growing love for authority in the former and a growing jealousy of authority in the latter. So I dont trust people in general lol