Education Policy & Culture

They Are Not Your Children

On the surgical mutilation of minors, the deliberate exclusion of parents and the legal machinery being built to enforce it.

There is a word for adults who work systematically to separate children from their parents, build secret relationships with those children around their sexual identity and convince them that their family is the enemy. That word is groomer. It does not matter what credential follows the adult's name. It does not matter whether the activity happens in a clinic, a classroom or a school counselor's office. The behavior is the behavior.

We are told this is about compassion. We are told that children who identify as transgender are at extraordinary risk and that any delay in affirmation is itself a form of harm. That argument has become the load-bearing wall of an entire policy architecture. Pull it out and the structure collapses. So let's pull it out.

The compassion argument requires us to accept that a child under 18 has the cognitive and emotional maturity to make permanent, irreversible decisions about their body while simultaneously lacking the legal authority to vote, sign a contract or buy a beer. We are asked to honor a 13-year-old's certainty about surgical castration while dismissing that same child's stated preference for a tattoo. The inconsistency is not an oversight. It is a choice.

What These Procedures Actually Are

Puberty blockers are not a pause button. The research on their long-term effects on bone density, brain development and fertility is thin and contested. When you give a child puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, you have set them on a path toward sterility in most cases. That is not a side effect. That is a predictable, documented outcome.

Surgical interventions go further. Double mastectomies performed on teenage girls. Orchiectomies on teenage boys. Vaginoplasties and phalloplasties on young people who are still legally too young to rent a car. These are not minor cosmetic adjustments. They are irreversible alterations to healthy tissue. Once that tissue is gone it does not come back.

You cannot sue your way back to the body you were born with. The knife does not owe you an apology.

Defenders of these procedures point to studies showing improved mental health outcomes among trans youth who receive affirmation and treatment. Those studies deserve scrutiny. Many rely on self-report, lack control groups, have high dropout rates and were conducted over timeframes too short to capture long-term regret or de-transition. The evidence base that is being used to justify permanent surgical intervention in children is weaker than what the FDA would require to approve a new allergy medication.

The Deliberate Removal of Parents

Here is where the conversation becomes something beyond a policy disagreement. Schools across the country have adopted policies that instruct staff to use a child's chosen name and pronouns without notifying parents. Some of those policies explicitly direct teachers not to inform parents if a child is presenting a different gender identity at school. The rationale offered is that the home may not be safe.

That rationale proves too much. By the same logic schools could decide not to tell parents about a child's drug use, pregnancy, gang involvement or mental health crisis on the grounds that the home might not be supportive. We do not accept that reasoning in any other context. We accept it here because the people pushing these policies know that parental knowledge is the single greatest obstacle to what they want to accomplish.

A policy that hides your child's identity from you is not protecting your child. It is replacing you.

The social transition that happens quietly at school, without parental knowledge, is not a neutral act. Research on desistance is clear that a significant percentage of children who express gender dysphoria in early adolescence will, if not socially transitioned and medically intervened upon, grow up to be gay or lesbian adults comfortable in their natal sex. Social transition appears to lock in the trajectory. It is the first domino. The school counselor who helps a child pick a new name and new pronouns without telling the parents is not staying in their lane. They are making a clinical decision with lifelong consequences while hiding it from the people legally and morally responsible for that child.

When Parenting Becomes a Crime

The next step in this progression is the one that should alarm everyone regardless of where they stand on the underlying question. Several states have passed or attempted to pass legislation classifying a parent's refusal to affirm a child's gender transition as abuse or neglect. Courts in custody disputes have weighted gender affirmation as a factor, with some judges restricting or removing custody from parents who would not support their child's transition.

Read that again slowly. A parent who says "I love you and I'm not going to let a doctor remove your healthy organs while you are still a teenager" is being treated in some jurisdictions as an abuser. A parent who seeks a second opinion, who wants to slow down, who believes their child's dysphoria may be related to trauma or undiagnosed autism or social contagion, is having their parental rights threatened.

The state does not become a better parent by criminalizing yours.

This is not hypothetical. Parents have lost custody. Parents have been referred to child protective services. Parents have been told by courts that their skepticism is harmful. The machinery for punishing dissent from the affirmation model is already operational in parts of this country. It is being expanded.

The Social Contagion Problem No One Will Name

Abigail Shrier documented what the data show. Among adolescent girls in particular, gender dysphoria is presenting in clusters. Friend groups, classrooms and online communities. The historical pattern of gender dysphoria was predominantly male, onset in early childhood and persistent. What is being seen now is different. It skews heavily female. It emerges in adolescence. It tracks with social networks and online exposure.

Calling this observation transphobic is a way of not engaging with it. Rapid-onset gender dysphoria as a hypothesis was attacked not because the underlying observation was false but because the implications were inconvenient. If social and environmental factors can drive gender dysphoria in a population that historically showed low rates of it, then the affirmation-only model is not just incomplete. It is potentially causing harm at scale to a vulnerable population of young women who deserve better than a prescription and a referral to a surgeon.

Skepticism about a treatment is not hatred of the patient. Sometimes it is the most serious form of care available.

When the State Becomes the Enforcer

New York Attorney General Letitia James made the coercive structure of this movement visible for everyone to see. When NYU Langone Health chose to shut down its pediatric gender program earlier this year, citing the current regulatory environment and the departure of its medical director, James sent the hospital a letter demanding it resume services immediately or face legal action. Her office declared that a hospital's voluntary decision not to perform these procedures on minors constituted discrimination under New York state law.

Read that carefully. A hospital exercising its own medical and institutional judgment to stop a contested program for children is now, in the view of New York's top law enforcement officer, a civil rights violation. Doctors who decline to perform puberty suppression on a 13-year-old are discriminators. The state has decided it knows better than the clinicians in the room.

When a government threatens doctors for not operating, that is not advocacy for children. That is compulsion wearing the language of care.

The DOJ stepped in and told James plainly that the law does not require any hospital to offer these services. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote that NYU Langone's decision was an exercise of sound medical discretion and warned that the federal government would defend the hospital if James moved to sue. She pressed forward anyway. That is not legal advocacy. That is a power play against institutions that chose to stop.

There is more. James fired a consumer fraud attorney from her own office, Glenna Goldis, after Goldis raised concerns internally and publicly about the harms of pediatric gender medicine. Goldis had appeared at an FTC roundtable in a personal capacity, specifically disclaiming any representation of her employer, to discuss the consumer fraud dimensions of this industry. James's office terminated her. An attorney whose entire career was built on protecting vulnerable people from fraud was removed for questioning whether minors were being defrauded. That is not a coincidence. That is what institutional capture looks like from the inside.

You cannot demand that doctors operate against their judgment, fire your own staff for raising safety concerns and then claim the mantle of child protection. Those things do not coexist.

What We Owe Children

Children deserve protection. They deserve adults who take their pain seriously without treating an irreversible medical pathway as the only possible response to that pain. They deserve parents who are included in their care. They deserve time. The adolescent brain is not done developing until the mid-twenties. Identity is not fixed at 14. We know this. We have known this for decades of developmental psychology research.

What we owe children is not unconditional affirmation of every stated preference. What we owe them is careful, unhurried, honest engagement with their suffering combined with the humility to acknowledge that we might be wrong about what is causing it and what will resolve it. We owe them parents who are in the room.

We do not owe them permanent surgery before they are old enough to vote. And we do not owe the institutions pushing that surgery our silence or our deference.

A society that would cut a healthy child before it would allow a parent to ask questions has lost its way. That is not medicine. That is ideology with a scalpel.

The parents who are fighting back are not monsters. They are parents. They are doing exactly what parents are supposed to do. They are standing between their children and something irreversible, buying time, demanding evidence and refusing to let institutional pressure substitute for sound judgment. That is not abuse. That is love with a spine.