Oklahoma Enacts Law Banning Gender-Transition Procedures at Children’s Hospital

I’m surprised that the recent exposure of a number of hospitals that perform gender elective mastectomies and chemical castration on minors hasn’t warranted a headline up to this point on Sharper Iron.

Then again, when one of SI’s revered “thinkers” considers providing parents the option to permit their underage children to undergo radical, irreversible surgeries yet another “blessing of liberty,” I can understand not wanting to publicize it.

One wonders when David French will have crossed a bridge too far for some in this audience. Considering he doesn’t issue mean tweets, it will be a while.

Lots of Filings posts on this topic, going back a couple of years: https://sharperiron.org/tag/gender-transition

As for David French… what’s he got to do with it exactly?

I can say this much on that topic: French is a long-time religious liberty defender and a key to his success in that arena (as a lawyer) has been emphasizing the larger context of civil liberties that support legal defense of religious liberty in particular.

To put it another way, he sees liberty for all a key to liberty for religious expression.

If he makes an argument anywhere on allowing parents to direct gender transition surgeries/etc. it would be on a parental-rights basis. He might be wrong, I can see the logic of that. I’ve wrestled with it a bit myself. If we argue that the government can tell parents what sort of medical treatment they’re allowed to obtain for their children, where does that lead?

Of course, it’s not really “medical” treatment, but my point is this: you don’t have to agree with a civil liberties/parental rights argument to see that it is worthy of respect.

It’s not easy to see how you can ask the government to intervene in parenting decisions and bring the same government to a hard stop at some point to avoid overreach.

But not easy doesn’t mean impossible or not worth doing.

There is a history of government intervening to require medical treatment for kids who’s parents are basically killing them on religious grounds. But getting government to intervene in parental decisions is always a perilous thing.

Not all ‘wrong’ things need to be illegal—partly because illegalizing things comes at a cost. There are almost always unintended consequences.

(And I imagine Josh P saying ‘this is why I’m a anarcho-capitalist!’ and others saying ‘this is why I’m a libertarian!’ … I get it. I really do. I can’t quite go there, but I get it.)

The parenting issue is a tough one for sure. I rejoice when the government steps in to protect its citizen. That includes children being abused by their parents. Even though I don’t think they do it perfectly, there is an effort to restore the children to their families if possible. Sometimes they do so when they shouldn’t have and other times they don’t when they probably should have. It’s impossible to do perfectly.

The issue is even more complex when it comes to medical treatment. However, I hope most people can see the difference between an elective surgery and a life-saving one.

[KD Merrill]

One wonders when David French will have crossed a bridge too far for some in this audience. Considering he doesn’t issue mean tweets, it will be a while.

KD, I agree with David French a lot less than Aaron does, but I do (very) occasionally find what he writes to be useful and even insightful. However, I read a lot of authors for which that is true, even when I have great disagreement with a lot of what they write.

However, I have to pretty much agree with Aaron’s post above. Liberty is not easy to handle well, and impossible for humans to do so perfectly, and there will always be a tension along the line where government steps in to protect a citizen from himself or others. Doing so inside a family is fraught with landmines. This is why many who love liberty fight with much of what social services agencies do, even if those agencies do serve a useful purpose in cases of obvious abuse.

My children are grown and married now, but I definitely am in favor of the ability of parents to make choices for their children, even when they won’t always do so wisely. The alternative is to have the government raise my children (“it takes a village”), and I wouldn’t want any of the supposedly “good” state and local governments to do that for me, let alone our current federal administration or even my purple state government.