Can a kid barely old enough to know how to walk and talk decide that he or she is really “transgender” instead of the gender they were born as? Or is it child abuse for parents to let their children do something so life-altering so young? According to Disney’s ABC News, that’s perfectly possible, as the network just interviewed a “transgender” 3-year-old’s family in an article about Texas investigations into child abuse among the parents of young trans children.
In the article, ABC quoted the child’s mother, Susan, as saying, “When she was 3, one day, she told me, ‘I’m a girl person,’ and she said, ‘Can I be your daughter?’ – which made me cry.” Elsa, the child at issue, is now seven years old.
The family left Texas and moved to Washington state as the state launched child abuse investigations, and Susan claims that Elsa said, “‘But mommy, I can handle anything as long as we’re together.'” Continuing, Susan claimed to have said, “I feel the same way. I think we could handle anything when we’re together. But the reason that we have to go is that they could make it so we can’t be together anymore.”
Brian, the father, said when discussing their move that “It just kind of reveals how much damage all this causes to trans people, to their families, to people that support them, to people that haven’t even figured out who they are yet.”
Another parent, this one of a teenager, described a new Texas law prohibiting transgender surgeries and supplying hormone doses or puberty blockers to kids under 18 as “genocidal.” That parent was quoted by ABC as saying, “That did not feel like normal teenage stress, in Texas. Knowing that your governor and the top officials in your state literally don’t want you to exist – That’s a different kind of stress. It felt very genocidal there.”
Gov. Abbott said he was protecting children when he signed the Texas bill at issue and Texas state Sen. Hall said much the same thing, saying, “We are the Legislature — our job is to protect people. We protect children against lots of things. We don’t let them smoke. We don’t let them drink. We don’t let them buy lottery cards. … And so we are doing the right thing.”
The bill was attacked by a group of pro-trans activists. They released a statement saying, that lawmakers in Texas “are hellbent on joining the growing roster of states determined to jeopardize the health and lives of transgender youth, in direct opposition to the overwhelming body of scientific and medical evidence supporting this care as appropriate and necessary.” Continuing, they added, “We will defend the rights of transgender youth in court, just as we have done in other states engaging in this anti-science and discriminatory fear-mongering.”
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Ignored by the parents and the groups was why kids not old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes or case of beer should be allowed to make the much more life-altering decision of having their genitals surgically removed.