Under the influence
It seems they have a website.
“…convicted torturer SJ/Alan Baker. I have raised a PREVENT and a safeguarding concern with Met Police and Westminster City Council”
I suppose Baker designed the website, too, because that’s how dumb it is.
The rights and freedoms of trans+ children and young people have been deliberately and systematically eroded. We have been made into political tools for failing British politics in order to create moral panic, split the left, and distract from real problems.
Eroded? Eroded from what? What are these rights and freedoms of “trans children” that have been “eroded”? Do they extend back into the past as far as we can see?
Of course not. Nobody was talking about “trans children” until recently, so nobody was talking about any such “rights and freedoms.” Newsflash: children don’t have the kinds of freedoms adults have, because it’s not safe for them to have such freedoms. There are no special rights for “trans children.” What Baker no doubt means is the “right” to be talked into idennnifying as trans and proceeding to ruin your life. He’s talking about recruitment, not rights.
Healthcare
We deserve equal access to gender-affirming healthcare. To delay care to a trans person is to deny it. We don’t have time to wait. Secondly, we should be able to give informed consent to our own treatment – just as any cisgender young person already can.
Well that depends on how you define “young person,” but seeing as how the website is for “trans kids” with no minimum age mentioned, Baker clearly means from infancy on. I’m pretty sure toddlers can’t give informed consent to anything, let alone medical treatment. Baker is an idiot.
We deserve to be treated with respect in all areas of life. We are human beings, and should be protected from misgendering and deadnaming at all times.
Massive non sequitur. Might as well say we are human beings, and should be protected from leaf mold and dry rot at all times.
And finally
We deserve to be heard in all matters which affect our lives. We should not be used as political pawns, and must not be made a spectacle for the benefit of politics or the press.
That is hilarious. Baker is using them as political pawns and making them a spectacle for the benefit of politics and press, and ventriloquizes them as saying he should not be doing that.
There is of course a page telling you to check their fundraising page.
“We deserve equal access to gender-affirming healthcare.”
By “gender-affirming healthcare” they mean puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and cosmetic surgeries. By “equal access” they mean the same access to these treatments that are afforded to people who (also) don’t need them and don’t ask for them, which would logically be no access. They don’t want “equal access”, they want treatment on demand.
“Secondly, we should be able to give informed consent to our own treatment – just as any cisgender young person already can.”
That’s generally not the case, as I understand it. Minors can consent to a subset of medical treatments, but not to cosmetic surgery, and not to sterilization.
They have all the time in the world…well, in their life, anyway. They want to put it up there with heart attack treatment, appendectomy, and other things that cannot wait.
You know what else cannot wait? (Of course you do…and I bet Baker does to…). Abortion. But that’s about women, and women only matter if they are men.
Get in line behind women, bub.
Activists want to push these children onto the trans track before they desist, as most disphoric children do.
Baker doesn’t seem to have much background available. Convicted when, where etc.?
Yeah, but no. It’s more complicated than that.
First of all, define “young person”. Since we’re talking about puberty-blockers, then that’s going to be someone who is at most in their early teens. So can – let’s say – a 12-year-old consent to treatment? Sometimes. it depends on the treatment, and on the child.
Importantly, though, consent doesn’t mean demand. Too many people think that it does. Consent is a negative thing: it’s about my being able to tell you what you not do to me, not about my being able to tell you what you should. Or, perhaps, we could say that the default is that treatment should not be given, but consent lifts the barrier.
In effect, it means that the doctor comes up with a suggestion that is expected to serve the child’s (or any other patient’s) best interests, and the child (or adult patient) agrees to it. Sometimes, there’ll be more than one option, because treatment modalities have up- and downsides. Sometimes there’ll be more than one option, because what counts as “best interests” is open to debate: medical, social, in keeping with the patient’s account of the kind of life they want to lead, and so on. To give a hackneyed example, the JW might sincerely believe that it is in her best interests not to have the blood transfusion, and given a sufficiently strong commitment about the kind of life she’d find tolerable, then that’s all fine and groovy.
That, in essence, is what Gillick v West Norfolk was all about. And I think that some people get misled by that because, superficially, it lends itself to the fallacy that consent is the same as request or demand. But presumably the doctor in that case thought that prescribing the pill was in the girl’s best interests; had he not thought that, he ought not to have been offering it. In a way, it was fortuitous that she asked for it; but her having asked for it wasn’t really the driving force behind its prescription being permissible.
And so: can these kids give consent? Possibly some can, though since PBs are most use to the very young, the more useful they are, the less likely it is that consent would be possible. But all that rides on there being a medical consensus that they should be offered to begin with. Keira Bell had argued that as a matter of fact, she could not give consent to gender-treatment because not enough was known about them. As we know, she lost. But post-Cass, I’m not sure that a parallel case would be lost, because we now know that there’s not really evidence that it serves anyone’s interests. Therefore they shouldn’t be offered. Therefore consent is neither here nor there.
Thank you, that is very clarifying.
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The consent/ demand thing is a bugbear of mine. You get a similar misuse of appeals to autonomy, such that “my autonomy” mutates to mean “things you must do”.
@john the drunkard, look him up. Wikipedia has a sympathetic entry about him.