The Risks in Depriving Trans Kids of Gender-Affirming Care

Stuart K. Hayashi

Over the past several years, the hottest topic of controversy has been the rights of transgender people, especially those among them who are still minors. Among opposition to trans rights, there are two basic kinds — explicit and implicit. The explicit sort is open hostility. It involves the outright proclamation that the idea that anyone can be transgender must always be stigmatized — that people who say that they are of a gender opposite to the one they were assigned at birth must be, at best, delusional. This is the approach of political commentators like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles.

The implicit opposition to trans rights is more subtle. It is expressed by those who claim sympathy for trans people and claim to understand that legal adults who identify as transgender should be allowed by law to live as such. Yet the implicit position refuses to remove all stigmata from trans people; it would maintain the stigma under the guise of protecting children. This is the commonest position taken by those who claim to support freedom of enterprise. It is also the position expressed by J. K. Rowling when she is at her most discreet, such as in her well-known “TERF Wars” essay online (it is on Twitter where her hostility becomes more explicit and she sounds like Matt Walsh).

For this essay, I will not bother to argue against those who express explicit opposition to trans rights. These people are very much committed to that opposition; it has become part of their identity. An essay such as this one will not sway them.

I do think there may be hope, though, for some people who have the implicit opposition. After all, I was one of them.

 

 
“I’m Not Against Trans People; I Just Want Minors Protected”
On the matter of those who have the implicit opposition to trans rights, what they usually cite is what they call the protection of minors. The rhetorical spiel about minors is what I call the TransSkeptic Position. It goes something like this.

I’m not “transphobic.” If you’re an old adult and set upon it, the government should not stop you from getting the surgeries that would help you feel more comfortable in your own body. But children, by definition, are not consenting adults. For that reason, the government is right to prevent children from receiving the body-changing medical procedures that go with what you call “gender-affirming healthcare.”

You know how children are. Sometimes they say impulsively that they want to marry their favorite teacher. And a lot of them are very confident and certain of that feeling when they say it. And it’s common for kids to go through phases. When I was little, I knew a boy who, for three years, was obsessed with dinosaurs and rock-collecting. For those three years, he told everyone he wanted to be a paleontologist. But then he moved on — to telling everyone that he was going to be a professional baseball player. Well, today he’s neither a paleontologist nor a pro baseball player and he’s very happy in his job. You know that you can’t take everything your children say at face value or give in to every demand they feel strongly about. If you did, you would be serving them nothing but ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And yet we are told that we must take it at face value when our kids, in their normal childish confusion, tell us that they are the sex opposite to the one that they really are. Hell, we’re not just told we have to take this at face value. We are being emotionally blackmailed into it by teachers, the media, and touchy-feely Woke psychologists.

I am going to describe for you what is really going on. Children impulsively say they are the opposite sex. They have no idea what they are in store for. Because parents have been indoctrinated or cowed into being “accepting,” they take the children at their word. They therefore “affirm” and reinforce to the children what they have said about being the opposite sex. Whether the parents intend it or not, this sort of attention acts as a reward to the child. The children are thus signaled what sort of role to fill to get this positive reinforcement. They act accordingly. Both the parents and the children play the parts expected of them. In turn, they reinforce one another’s actions in their respective assigned roles.

This goes on and on. The children are conditioned and pressured further and further into acting according to a preassigned “trans identity.” Hence, the children are pushed into “gender-affirming care.” Their bodies are changed with puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and eventually surgery. Plainly, this all goes too far. And, as adults, many of these former children recognize they were not truly transgender. Yet they have permanently changed their bodies. As adults, they wish they could have children. They cannot, as they have sterilized themselves. They are left with regret. All this happened because the parents were too afraid — cowardly — to put their foot down and say no, on pain of appearing “intolerant” and “invalidating.” And it happened because the children were afraid of disappointing their parents — they felt they were already in too deep.

Is it possible that the child really was transgender? Yes, there is that possibility. But that child is not old enough. Even if that child really is trans, that child does not have the mental capacity to commit to the permanent body changes that go with “gender-affirming care.” To have a minor make such a commitment, absent of contractual capacity, is too great a risk. It is better to be safe than sorry. To err on the side of safety means that only a legal adult can receive “gender-affirming care” and to “transition.”

The government is right to intervene to protect children from abuse by their parents. That includes sexual abuse. As children are not of mental capacity, they cannot consent to sex even if they say they do. On that same basis, even if children say they want “gender-affirming care” and to “transition,” they are in no position to offer consent to it. If the parents authorize gender-affirming care on the child, that is just as nonconsensual as sexual abuse.

If you believe you’re transgender, wait until you’re a legal adult before transitioning or doing anything about it to your body. If you reach eighteen and are still convinced that you are the gender opposite to your sex assigned at birth, then — fine — I will relent. At that point, I can’t do anything about it. I will call you the pronoun you want to be called. But before you reach eighteen, I can and will do something about it. And if that means that the government must do some manhandling on parents trying to push gender-affirming care on minors in their custody, then so be it.

That TransSkeptic Position is already loaded with assumptions. We should clear up some misconceptions. Many people alarmed by the prospect of gender-affirming care for minors are under the misapprehension that it involves surgery on prepubescent children. False accusations by the internet personality “LibsOfTikTok” have people believing that hospitals have been providing surgeries on the genitalia of prepubescent children, or giving them hysterectomies. That is completely false. For many years the guidelines of WPATH — the professional association for trans health care — said clearly that such surgeries could not be performed on those younger than eighteen. In late 2022, WPATH changed its language on the matter. That prompted anti-trans campaigners such as Matt Walsh to shout, falsely, that the professional association was now making it explicit that prepubescent children would be receiving surgeries.

The actual reason for the change in wording was that the professional association opted for health care to be more personalized and on a case-by-case basis. More pertinently, WPATH still specifies that particular medical treatments should not begin until specific points in the child’s physiological development. It specifies, for example, “Hormone therapy is not recommended for children who have not begun endogenous puberty.” As noted by the YouTube vlogger Jessie Earl, “The WPATH may not give specific ages, but it will mention certain particular points in a child’s development where it might be OK to consider certain treatments.”

Much of the confusion comes over mentions of a prepubescent child starting a “transition” to another gender. Opponents of trans rights have seized on this confusion in order to insinuate that gender-affirming care consists of body-changing treatments. The confusion comes from a conflation between “medical transition” and “social transition,” both of which belong to the broader category of gender-affirming care. Medical transition involves treatments to the body, such as the administering of puberty-blockers and cross-hormones. That is not provided to prepubescent children.

When prepubescent trans children do transition, it consists of a “social transition.” It involves helping children grow accustomed to living as the gender with which they identify themselves. Likewise, it helps acculturate their family and friends in school so that the adjustment is easier for everyone. Most of the healthcare administered at this stage comes from child psychologists and psychotherapists.

Gender-affirming care does begin to have a physiological effect on trans children, however, when they begin to experience puberty. In this respect, gender-affirming care can contribute to the trans child’s body developing differently than it otherwise would. Although there is no surgery on any reproductive organs, it happens that the puberty-blocking medications and cross-hormone therapy can still make people skittish.

The taker of the TransSkeptic Position will then assert that even if no surgery takes place prior to age eighteen, someone receiving hormone replacement therapy at age sixteen does lead that person down that troubling path toward surgery. Such patients, the TransSkeptics continue, are under pressure to finish what they started. For such reasons, conclude the TransSkeptics, there is still a great risk to staring gender-affirming care for someone younger than eighteen. Always the TransSkeptics insist that to err on the side of safety is to forbid gender-affirming care to anyone who is not yet a legal adult.

That TransSkeptic Position was one that I myself held for many years. Much of this essay will explain why I changed my mind on it. The TransSkeptic Position talks up the alleged risks of allowing a minor to undergo gender-affirming care but conspicuously fails at acknowledging the risks of depriving gender-affirming care to a minor who wants it. In the end, gender-affirming care for minors should be allowed legally and be recognized as a worthy option.

 

 
The TransSkeptics’ False Assumptions About What Is at Stake
First, we must disabuse some misconceptions. We start with those about puberty-blocking medications, better known as “puberty blockers.” Those wishing to discredit gender-affirming care frequently trump up the alleged dangers of puberty blockers. They propound that puberty blockers destroy a person’s bone density. Worse, they go on, trans-rights activists are so zealous in pushing gender-affirming care on minors that trans-rights activists and doctors unconscionably downplay the dangers of this medication. Rather, continues the narrative, the real beneficiaries of gender-affirming care are the greedy pharmaceutical companies that are paid for puberty blockers, and these companies are Manufacturing the Consent of the trans minors. Such scary rhetoric about these chemicals commonly appears in the Wall Street Journal.

There is irony in the Wall Street Journal peddling this narrative about greedy corporations contaminating people with a toxic chemical. It is that, years ago, the Wall Street Journal published a fact that this same paper now overlooks in its scare stories about puberty blockers. The fact is that when it comes to exposure to any chemical that is not monotonic, the dosage will matter a great deal in determining how much of a danger it poses.

In the early 1990s, environmentalist activists put even more emphasis than they do today on the threat of microscopic residue of alar and pesticides on foods. The Wall Street Journal editorial board interpreted that as an attempt to malign the reputation of big business. The WSJ and free-market think tanks thus found scientists who admonished the public to remember something important. It is that unless the chemical in question is a monotonic toxin, the public has to take the dosage into consideration. A monotonic toxin is a substance that poses a danger no matter how tiny the dose; examples are cancer cells and HIV. Unless it is a monotonic toxin, it is the dosage that makes the difference between safety and danger. Too much oxygen is a carcinogen; too much water is toxic. 

Likewise, the presence of microscopic particles of alar and synthetic chemicals have not been shown to be large enough to pose a major risk. More recently, there is great irony in people who consume alcoholic beverages — a major carcinogen — being scared of the artificial sweetener aspartame, a smaller potential cancer risk. The WSJ and free-marketers frequently quote the Renaissance-era scientist and philosopher Paracelsus: “the dose makes the poison.” You can read that argument advanced in the Wall Street Journal here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The principle holds consistently, and the Wall Street Journal and free-market think tanks were not wrong for pointing that out. Yet the Wall Street Journal, suspiciously, does not apply this same logic to the dose of puberty-blocking drugs received by minors in gender-affirming care. The WSJ publishes vague alarmism about how puberty-blockers harm bone density, suspiciously without accurate considerations about dosage. You can see examples of that here, here, and here. In reality, minors who receive puberty-blockers cannot receive the treatment for more than two years. By contrast, for puberty-blocking drugs to have a significant impact on bone density, someone would have to be taking them regularly for decades on end. In short, the WSJ disputes the narrative about greedy corporations poisoning their customers with relatively small doses of chemicals . . . except when that narrative proves politically convenient for the WSJ’s socially conservative readers.

The TransSkeptics’ misrepresentations of the risks of puberty-blockers — which they frequently repeat even after being corrected about this — is one among several factors that led me away from the TransSkeptic position concerning gender-affirming care for minors.

Another misconception that must be cleared up has to do with false figures. Fans of the TransSkeptic Position often parrot J. K. Rowling’s proclamation that “through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60–90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.”

That figure comes from a 1995 study by Susan J. Bradley and Ken J. Zucker. And J. K. Rowling misrepresents the nature of that sample. Among the large percentage of gender-nonconforming youths who were referred to the clinic and showed improvement absent of medical intervention, transgender youths suffering from gender dysphoria were a small minority. A larger percentage of the youths referred consisted of gays and those whom the study described as having “transvestic fetishism.” To be clear, “transvestites” are not the same as those who are transgender; transvestites wear the opposite sex’s clothes but, more than half the time, are cisgender; many are heterosexual. Contrary to J. K. Rowling’s misrepresentation, the “60–90 percent” figure does not actually tell us the percentage of prepubescent youths who say they are transgender and then change their minds later.

With that out of the way, I can tell you which seemingly subtle event contributed to my eventual break from the TransSkeptics.

 

 
How a Reversible Medication Made Me Reverse Course in This Controversy
For years, even as I thought of myself as respectful of the rights of transgender people, I agreed with the TransSkeptic Position. I had also been casually curious about the commercial success of J. K. Rowling. Ever since I was a little boy, I had wanted to be a writer. I thought that job would make me rich like Ms. Rowling and Stephen King. Haha; how naïve! “Writer” is what economist Steven Levitt identifies as a “tournament job” — only a few people in the profession become truly rich, whereas most do not. Other tournament jobs include those of “actor,” “beauty queen,” “professional athlete,” “musician,” and “drug dealer.”

Even after I learned that only few writers become wealthy, I had wondered if there were aspects of Ms. Rowling’s career that I could emulate. I had also appreciated her standing up for the rights of Syrian refugees, much to the ire of Alt-Right personalities like Ian Miles Cheong who, at the time, disparaged Ms. Rowling as a social justice warrior and woke-scold. It therefore became concerning to me when, in her promotion of her then-new book, The Ickabog, Ms. Rowling had been showing signs that she nursed some sort of grudge against trans women.

Eventually, Ms. Rowling came out with her essay “TERF Wars,” where she gave her reasons for opposing the trans rights movement. I had not previously heard much of the particular issues she raised. Even then, the supposed evidence that Ms. Rowling offered — such as that most trans boys ultimately “grow out of” thinking they are trans — seemed suspicious. All in all, I did not feel confident at the time to come to a conclusion about it. I decided to explore the matter further.

On that topic I came across the well-known YouTube vlogger Jessie Earl, who uploads as “Jessie Gender.” She came out with a video to rebut Ms. Rowling. And in that video Jessie Earl underscored something I had not previously given much consideration. It is that when prepubescent trans children start transition treatment, that transition does not consist of

irreversible transition steps like surgeries or hormones. Instead, most youths are actually given puberty-blocking drugs that stop the irrevocable effects of puberty on their bodies. By taking these puberty-blocking drugs, it allows them longer time to come to terms with their own gender identities and decide later on if they want to transition when they are most able to consent to more definitive actions like surgeries. And, by the way, puberty-blocking drugs are 100-percent reversible, whereas, by the way, the effects of puberty are not.

And as a study by the Massachusetts General Hospital found, 90 percent — again, I say 90 percent — of transgender adults who are denied these puberty blockers faced suicidal ideation in their lifetime because they had to go through puberty: an experience that is honestly really, really horrible for many trans people. Believe me as a trans woman who had to go through male puberty, it gets honestly really hard. It was one of the hardest times in my life. I personally spent much of my puberty wishing I was a girl, and spending a lot of that time crying in the shower to hide my tears from my family. 

It is something that I wish I could change but I can’t. It’s my life and I’m happy with how things turned out, but going through [male] puberty — something that I wish I could have stopped by taking puberty-blocking drugs — was hard. By taking the — again, reversible — puberty-blocking drugs, you can greatly increase the chances for trans men and -women to avoid that outcome and enable them to have the choice later on in life if they want to go through a normal puberty or take hormones to transition irreversibly when they are older. [Italics are Jessie’s; boldface is mine.]

That is worth repeating. The effects of puberty-blockers are reversible. The effects of puberty are not.

This is something that had not been addressed by the intellectuals I had been reading online, such as the Intellectual Dark Web circle of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Steven Pinker. I decided to look further into this. What Jessie Earl said checks out — it is well-corroborated in the medical field. As one of the simpler explainers puts it, “The effects of puberty blockers are reversible. If a person stops taking puberty blockers, the effects of puberty will return or resume.” The Public Health Service Authority of Canada likewise says, “There are no known irreversible effects of puberty blockers. If you decide to stop taking them, your body will go through puberty just the way it would have if you had not taken puberty blockers at all.” The Mayo Clinic uses language that is a bit more technical. “GnRH analogues don’t cause permanent physical changes. Instead, they pause puberty. . . . When a person stops taking GnRH analogues, puberty starts again.”

When children repeatedly insist they are a gender opposite to their sex assigned at birth, and their parents and doctors both take this seriously, this is how the process goes. To the extent that they are not stopped by red tape, prepubescent children can receive gender-affirming health care and might be able to start a gender “transition.” But, contrary to smears by the likes of Matt Walsh and LibsOfTikTok, that transition does not entail any type of surgery. For those who have not reached puberty, the transition is merely a social transition.

The children are verbally affirmed by their parents — and, ideally, by their teachers and classmates — in identifying themselves publicly by the gender by which they interpret themselves to be. To the extent that they want, they are allowed to dress and behave in ways consistent with what is normally associated with their gender. That is, if she wants, one who was assigned male at birth (AMAB) can wear dresses. At this stage in the process, the professionals with whom the child has the most contact in gender-affirming care are child psychologists.

When the child begins puberty, the ideal is for the child to be able to access puberty-blocking treatment. Contrary to the scare stories, doctors and the healthcare system are not dispensing puberty-blocking medications willy-nilly. Puberty-blockers remain far less accessible than is claimed, and are, more importantly, far less accessible than they should be. In the year 2020, Jack L. Turban and his associates went over a survey of adults, then aged 18 to 36, who had received gender-affirming care as children. Of those who, at the time of their gender-affirming care, had wanted puberty-blockers as part of the program, no more than 3 percent received that medication.

Let’s look at what happens with those children who actually get to receive the puberty-blocking treatment. It is not to go on longer than two years. Once those two years are up, the child will need to have committed to a decision. At this point, either the child is to discontinue gender-affirming treatments that address physiology, or the child is to proceed with cross-hormone replacement therapy. The effects of hormone-replacement therapy can be compared to undergoing the puberty associated with one’s actual gender, as opposed to the sort of puberty that would be associated with one’s sex assigned at birth. Even in this duration, the patient is not to have surgical alterations to genitalia.

Increasingly, upon hearing people in my circle repeat the TransSkeptic Position, I tentatively brought up the consideration about how puberty-blocking drugs are reversible whereas puberty is not. Consistently, I was met with two different types of reactions. In many cases, the person who expressed the TransSkeptic Position would act as if I said nothing at all, and then just continue the same old spiel.

In the other instances, the person would just repeat the talking point about puberty-blockers being a danger to bone density — as if the denial of gender-affirming care was not itself a great danger — and without concern for how much the dosage level affects the riskiness or safety. When these people bothered to cite some source about bone density, it would always be the same old go-to people for anti-trans talking points, such as Helen Joyce and Abigail Shrier — go-to people whose conclusions are at odds with the wider context of study and conclusions by medical professionals.

At this point, the assertion about bone density is recited as a thought-stopping cliché. The glaring incuriosity of TransSkeptics, in light of my raising the consideration I did, really gave me pause. That they were so persistently incurious is what first led me to doubt that the TransSkeptics know what they are talking about. This is how I became skeptical of their skepticism. Since then, I have come to notice many logical inconsistences in the TransSkeptic Position.

Even if people admit that puberty-blockers do not pose a greater physical danger to trans minors than does the denial of puberty-blockers, many people will probably still be horrified by the idea, as such, of minors transitioning in gender. This has much to do with unfamiliarity. It is a cause of culture shock. They fear it because they do not know what it would look like, and often that fear drives them to form preconceptions.

Therefore, I think I should give an example of what it looks like when someone is accepted as transgender very early in life and is allowed gender-affirming care as a minor. That is the case of Rebekah Bruesehoff. Despite being assigned male at birth, before age ten she was already very consistent in informing others that she was a girl, and in behaving in a manner that would be expected of one. Rather than dig in their heels, her deeply religious parents — her father is a Lutheran pastor — accepted the reality of the situation and listened to their doctors. As I said, the process began with a “social transition.” Eventually, Rebekah was allowed to receive puberty-blocking medication. 

By the end of those two years, she had already decided on completing the transition. She received the cross-hormone replacement therapy, allowing her to undergo a female puberty rather than the default, the puberty of her sex assigned at birth. As I type this, Rebekah has completed high school and is thriving. I have to admit that if she didn’t say she was transgender, I would not have guessed that she was. [ 1 | 2 ]

We are constantly told that once a trans person gets hormone treatments or surgeries, that trans person is largely stuck with many of the results. Glossed over is the fact of another great risk. Trans minors who qualify for puberty-blocking treatments have an opportunity to avoid a puberty that is not right for them. For you to urge the law to deny them this treatment is therefore, in effect, to force them to undergo a puberty that does not align with the gender that their minds happen to be. And, upon being forced into this wrong puberty, the trans person will largely be stuck with many of those effects. The life of Rebekah Bruesehoff shows us an example of a trans person being able to dodge the default form of puberty that is not right for her and instead undergo hormone treatments that provide a form of puberty more suitable.

And yet, as if these considerations do not exist, the TransSkeptic Position demands that the risks of transitioning are the only risks acknowledged. The TransSkeptic Position therefore falls prey to the same fallacy as Pascal’s Wager.

Conclusion: The Anti-Trans Version of Pascal’s Wager

For those who may not be familiar with Pascal’s Wager, here is a summary. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and philosopher of the Renaissance. He was also devoutly religious and intent on converting others. In his mind, if you followed his religion, you would go to heaven. But if you did not follow his religion, you would be denied this beautiful afterlife. He therefore offered a challenge to nonbelievers. First he asked you to think over what would happen if you disbelieved his religion, and he turned out to be correct about it. Then you cannot go to heaven. That is a major risk. By contrast, if you do convert to Pascal’s religion, and it turns out his religion is fake and it won’t get you into heaven, you still will have lost nothing. Therefore, regardless of whether Pascal’s religion is right or wrong, the only safe, risk-free bet is to convert to Pascal’s religion.

A major fallacy in Pascal’s Wager is the false presumption that there is no adverse consequence of converting to Pascal’s religion if it turns out that his religion is not the right one. If you follow Pascal’s religion, you must follow its dictates. That involves a lot of self-denial in life — denying temptations that are nonviolent but considered sinful according to Pascal’s creed. If you live according to the self-denying rules of the faith and it turns out there is no heavenly reward for that, then the penalty is that you gave up the opportunity to have lived the happier life you would have chosen otherwise.

The TransSkeptic offers a similar wager with a similar implicit assumption. He says,

You and your child believe your child is transgender, and you want to start gender-affirming care before your child reaches puberty. But I wager that your child is probably not trans. This is just a phase that your child can grow out of, as J. K. Rowling has suggested. Consider what would happen if I’m right and you’re wrong. You will let your child “transition.” Upon reaching adulthood, your child will recognize that this never should have been permitted. Irreversible damage has been done. Your child will regret it.

But now consider what would happen if you’re right and I’m wrong. Your child grows into a legal adult and is still talking about being transgender. Well, it’s not as though your child has lost the opportunity to “transition.” Your child can do so now. Therefore, you all can wait until then. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Always implicit in the “You all can just wait until the child is eighteen” line is a false presumption. The presumption is that forcing the trans minor to wait until eighteen is safe. Allowing the trans child to begin transitioning before the onset of puberty is not perfect but, everything else being equal, it will allow the trans person to avoid a lot of long-term trauma that will beset the trans person if forced to undergo the default form of puberty associated with the sex assigned at birth. Notwithstanding the vociferations of the Abigail Shrier whom the TransSkeptics often cite, it is forcing the trans child to undergo the default — and, in this case, wrong — form of puberty that can result in “irreversible damage.”

Yes, we know that people who insist that the law should not allow trans people to begin transitioning until adulthood — an insistence I once agreed with — claim that the insistence is chiefly out of concern for the well-being of the child involved. But if that truly were the main priority, then the person with that TransSkeptic Position would have to confront and concede the fact of the major risks that come with denying a trans child the opportunity to start the transitioning process prior to puberty. Caring for the well-being of the child means that, rather than write off such concerns, one weighs the risks of both action and inaction.

When TransSkeptics say that they are all about the child’s well-being, only to dismiss those concerns, it makes me wonder if something else is at play. This is what I suspect is really going on. I think that TransSkeptics are still very viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of someone transitioning to a gender that is different from the sex assigned at birth. They are even disturbed to learn of legal adults, such as the actor Elliott Page, transitioning, and they actually would not be sad if this was forbidden by law as well.

But they believe that we have reached the point where it is unlikely that the transitioning of adults will ever be illegal again; they are resigned to this being legal. However, they notice that there is still a chance that the transitioning of minors can be legislated against. Hence, they take that opportunity. But they know they will be looked askance upon if they admit that this mostly has to do with finding trans people, as such, to be icky. Hence, this has to be reframed, sanitized, and rationalized as protecting the trans children from something they will regret. When a woman says of someone else who is not even a family member, “I must caution you against ‘transitioning,’ because I fear that this will be a cause of great discomfort for you in the future,” often what she really means is that this will be a cause of discomfort for her in the future.

In response to that, we must remember an important truth. It is that, whether you are trans or not, your life rightfully belongs to you alone. That even applies if you are a minor. It makes sense if, legally, you cannot yet commit to any and every contractually binding decision without authorization from an adult looking out for you. But, even in that case, you must be the final judge over what is best in the course of your life, and you do have rightful say over a matter as important and pivotal as this. Literally, your life is at stake.

Those who take the TransSkeptic Position, and then refuse to take into account the risks that inhere in forbidding any transitioning to minors, make it all too clear that they do not know what they are talking about. Worse, the refusal demonstrates that they do not want to know. If these people are as rational and live-and-let-live as they claim to be, it is best that they butt out. Leave these matters to the families whose lives actually are directly affected by these decisions, and the doctors whom these families trust according to their own judgment.