If you pay attention to the transgender debate, it’s been obvious for a while now that the trans movement is interested in children. The specter of state lawmakers or even parents hindering or discouraging children from “transitioning” seems to haunt trans activists, who view recent political efforts to ban so-called “gender-affirming care” in some states as the worst sort of tyranny. Children, in their view, have a right to transition, and any obstacle placed in their way, even by parents, is a gross injustice crying out for redress.
Up until recently, this argument was simmering just below the surface of the transgender discourse in America. It was the subtext first of the bathroom debate, then of the debate over girls’ sports, then of the debate over the role teachers and public schools are playing in transing kids socially without informing parents, and finally of state laws restricting transgender surgeries, puberty blockers, and other treatments for minors. In each case, the unstated argument was that minors who believe they are trans should be allowed to transition, socially and medically, and no one, not even their parents, should have the right to stop them.
Now that argument is out in the open — declared in bold black letters against a blood-red field on the latest cover of New York Magazine: “Freedom of Sex, the moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.”
The author of the piece is a man named Andrea Long Chu, the magazine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic and a self-identified lesbian “trans woman,”
