Can Children Take Medication Anymore?
This post is dedicated to Lauren Southern, who tweeted out a picture simply reading “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers,” on 3/26/2021.
Of course, this would be all well and good, if Lauren showed a basic understanding of how psychological health works. If a child has asthma they take an inhaler, if a child has bipolar disorder they take lithium, and if a child has diabetes they take insulin. None of these are controversial, but for some reason, a child taking medication for gender dysphoria is. It can be argued the child “did not consent” to the inhaler, the lithium, or the insulin, but we all understand that it is better for the child in the long-term to take the medication than to not do so.
For that matter, it’s not the child who gets the medication, so if they can consent or not seems rather unrelated. It is the parents who report the behavior to a professional, and said professional will then make a decision regarding if the child will undergo puberty blockers.
Hey, do you know what else children can’t consent to? Puberty. If a child without gender dysphoria is put on puberty blockers, decides they are cisgender, and goes off of them, nothing will happen. The child will still go through puberty as normal, albeit a rather delayed one. However, if a child with gender dysphoria does not go on puberty blockers and experiences their natural puberty, they can become depressed or even commit suicide.
The suicide of Leelah Alcorn on 12/28/2014 is a good example of what happens when a transgender person is denied transition. After failing to get parental permission for medical transition at the age of 16, Alicorn took her own life out of fear she’d never pass as a woman. As she put it in her final blog post on Tumblr:
I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse. That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me.
It should be noted that Alcorn’s parents were also rather unsupportive of the idea of their daughter transitioning. Her mother even posted about Leelah’s suicide on FaceBook with the following message:
My sweet 16-year-old son, Joshua Ryan Alcorn, went home to Heaven this morning. He was out for an early morning walk and was hit by a truck. Thank you for the messages and kindness and concern you have sent our way. Please continue to keep us in your prayers.
On CNN, she stated:
We [her and her husband] loved [Leelah] unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy
For the record, Leelah had told both her parents about her desire to transition — and they responded by degrading and insulting her and trying to send her to Christian therapists who would back them up.
And she is far from the only one, it’s a well-known fact that without proper transition and societal acceptance, people with gender dysphoria have a rather high suicide rate. (Mind you, their exact suicide rate is rather exaggerated, many think it’s roughly 40% when actually it’s closer to 2%.) As such, it only makes sense that if someone is experiencing symptoms of gender dysphoria, we at the very least take those seriously.
Mind you, many of these people seem to think gender dysphoria is something it’s not. I remember seeing a comment on a recent episode of The Matt Walsh Show where one man says he used to put on his mom’s shoes because he thought it was funny, and that would be considered gender dysphoria today. However, gender dysphoria is not having long hair, watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, or even specifically acting feminine or wearing feminine clothing. Nobody is saying anyone who competes on RuPaul’s Drag Race is transgender because they dress up in women’s clothing, nor is anyone saying all Drag Queens, in general, are trans. Nobody is going to say Ed Wood was transgender because of Glen Or Glenda (although something was likely wrong with that man) nor is anyone saying Tim Curry is trans because he played Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Gender Dysphoria is a condition that is only diagnosed under one specific condition: The person in question hates their body to the point where they feel constant agonizing anxiety just by being inside of it. For a quick anecdote, I once had a male-to-female transgender individual tell me that, before she transitioned, she regularly prayed she would just wake up one day as a woman. That is having Gender Dysphoria, being a boy who likes My Little Pony is not.
A child taking puberty blockers is not the end of the world, it’s them being medicated for a mental illness, and nothing else.
