“How does it feel to be a problem?” This is the question that the eminent sociologist and socialist W.E.B. Du Bois posed to his fellow African Americans in his 1903 masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk. Today, the same question could be posed just as easily to transgender young people, who find that their very existence has become a lightning rod for all sorts of cultural and political conflicts taking place in the United States and elsewhere. While the experiences of African Americans in the early 20th century can’t be mapped neatly onto those of transgender youth today, the question itself speaks to a shared reality. Both groups have been stigmatized, pathologized, singled out, and “othered.” They’ve been treated by politicians, media figures, and for transgender youth particularly, by many in their own communities as first and foremost “a problem.” And unfortunately, far too many who see themselves as progressive LGBTQ “allies” have been far too fearful of further offending the perpetually offended “parents’ rights” crowd to prove themselves proactive advocates for these vulnerable and oppressed young people.

At the local, state, and federal levels of the American government, debates are raging about what rights, if any, transgender youth should have in their daily lives. Should they be allowed to use public facilities that align with their gender identity? Should K-12 teachers be forced to “out” closeted transgender students to their parents? How should transgender issues be handled in the context of organized youth athletic competitions? Should books with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) themes be banned from school and public libraries? Should minors be banned from attending drag shows? Should K-12 educators lose their jobs for referring to transgender students by their chosen names and pronouns? Should even acknowledging the existence of transgender people in K-12 schools be illegal? On and on it goes.

Throughout these debates, Republican politicians rile up their socially conservative base by painting transgender youth as confused, impressionable individuals who have been “groomed” or “brainwashed” by a bizarre leftist ideology that they must be rescued from. And yet, simultaneously, they also portray young trans people as dangerous predatory figures who pose an existential threat to the American family, and to the physical safety and virtue of young women in locker rooms and public bathrooms across the nation. The former set of discourses are more likely to be directed at transmasculine youth, while the latter set of tropes are more often associated with transfeminine youth. As the writer and philosopher Umberto Eco noted in his discussion of how fascist governments frame their perceived enemies, “the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

While it seems that no accommodation to the needs and desires of transgender young people is too meager for anti-transgender social conservatives or so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) to take vocal exception to, those on the right who oppose transgender rights have made blocking young people’s access to gender-affirming healthcare one of the centerpieces of their agenda. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the government to take action to end gender-affirming healthcare for individuals under nineteen years of age, leading hospitals to cancel appointments and leaving patients in the lurch. Some state governments have begun taking steps to fight back, with New York Attorney General Letitia James, in one prominent example, informing hospitals that they would be violating state law if they ceased offering gender-affirming healthcare to youth in response to President Trump’s executive order. More recently, 15 states and the District of Columbia have sued to block the policy. These efforts are laudable and ought to be commended. 

But even while some Democratic officeholders at the state and local levels have pushed back on the Republican anti-trans youth agenda, even more devastating news for transgender young people and their supporters came in June, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for those under the age of eighteen is constitutional. According to the LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), this ruling will “effectively restrict access to gender-affirming care for thousands of transgender youth in twenty-seven states.” It seems that no sooner had transgender young people started to become broadly visible in American public life, than politicians, media figures, and right-wing activists have sought to punish them for that very visibility by successfully working to restrict their rights in new and unprecedented ways.

But while the widespread public conversation on transgender youth issues may be new, transgender youth themselves are not. An important aspect of anti-trans youth arguments that have proliferated recently on the right (and even among some anti-transgender feminists on the left) is that the increasing numbers of young people identifying as transgender and seeking gender-affirming medical care represent a sort of “social contagion” created by a faddish form of adolescent peer pressure. Much of this discourse can be traced back to the work of Lisa Littman, a scholar who started publishing about the supposed phenomenon of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” in 2017 despite having no prior background in researching transgender issues. Importantly, Littman’s study did not involve interviewing transgender youth or adults themselves, instead relying solely on the impressions of a group of parents. Nonetheless, there has been a great deal of uptake of this discourse from those who seek to curtail the right of transgender youth to make decisions about their own bodies, identities, and lives.

Jules Gill-Peterson’s 2018 book Histories of the Transgender Child—published by the University of Minnesota Press—provides an important corrective context for some of these claims. Gill-Peterson’s chronicle begins in the late 19th century and ends in the 1970s, encompassing an historical period in which many anti-transgender voices would claim that transgender children did not yet exist. Nonetheless, exist they did, and Gill-Peterson proves definitively that their desires, their struggles for autonomy, and their oppression at the hands of paternalistic adults are not new. Some of the most powerful moments in Gill-Peterson’s work—which is largely based on archival research done at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and other archives—occur when the transgender youth of past eras reach out to us through the archive and speak to us in their own words about their experiences. Then, as now, they relate feeling deeply alienated from their bodies even as the adults around them sought to deny them access to the very medical interventions which could have empowered them.

Particularly striking in this context are the letters sent by Vicki, a transgender teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s who was assigned male at birth. In her letters, she desperately and unsuccessfully reaches out to clinicians across the United States throughout her teen years to see if there is anything they can do to help her bring her growing, changing body into alignment with her female identity. While the medical professionals repeatedly implore her to wait until she is older to seek out these treatments, Vicki’s body is changing in irrevocable ways that she finds painful and humiliating, and that contribute to her social ostracization at school and in her community. While these paternalistic medical professionals repeatedly stress to Vicki that she must wait until she is legally an adult to embark upon these interventions, her body has a timeline of its own. The changes of puberty do not begin occurring at legal adulthood, and these changes are themselves not fully revocable. 

Vicki’s letters bring to light the mismatch between infantilizing (and historically, relatively recent) notions of adolescents which position them as analogous to literal babies, incapable of making their own decisions, and the physical reality in which their bodies are undergoing lasting changes which denote the young adults that they in fact are. And crucially, these letters speak to the real psychological toll exerted upon a young lady forced to go through a male puberty that causes her to feel alienated from her own body, leading in turn to alienation from her entire community. At one point Vicki writes, “I think about running away, but I can’t. I’ve tried killing myself but nothing happens—at the very worse I just get sick.” In her letters, Vicki wonders aloud how she’s managed to live through the preceding year.

Finally, these letters speak to the risks that such young people are willing to take in the absence of more appropriate medical interventions being available to them. At one point, Vicki discusses sending for estrogen cream through the mail and eating it in order to provide herself with a form of do-it-yourself (DIY) gender-affirming care. The clinician she writes to discourages this, but he does not provide her with safer options. Proponents of keeping abortion legal often point out that even where abortion is legally banned, people still undertake the practice of attempting to end unwanted pregnancies. They simply do so in more dangerous ways, employing wire hangers in seedy back-alley clinics instead of terminating their pregnancies in ways that are more likely to preserve their lives, health, and safety. Similarly, advocates for legalizing drugs often speak to the fact that the war on drugs hasn’t stopped people from using drugs; it has simply made doing so more dangerous in a variety of ways. 

Throughout Histories of the Transgender Child, we encounter numerous youth who engage in various forms of DIY gender-affirming care. Some steal hormonal medications intended for other people; others send away through the mail for estrogen cream that they intend to consume orally, like Vicki did. It seems, as with abortion and drug use, it is impossible to legislate away the practice of gender-affirming care for youth or adults. It is possible, however, to create contexts in which it is safer or more dangerous, provided in a supportive context as opposed to taking place in a hostile, unwelcoming climate, and openly accepted as a part of life for some people as opposed to driven underground and placed within a web of secrecy, deceit, and subterfuge.              

In the 1970s, while Vicki was living through her own private version of transgender teenage Hell, youth liberationist thinkers like Richard Farson, Shulamith Firestone, John Holt, and Howard Cohen laid the groundwork for thinking about childhood itself as a cultural and political construct that functions, in Farson’s words, to render young people “incapacitated, oppressed, and abused” in a society in which they have few rights that any adult is truly obligated to respect (particularly when those adults are their parents or teachers). In more recent decades, scholars such as Priscilla Alderson, Samantha Godwin, Jules Gill-Peterson, Steven Angelides, and Judith Levine have picked up important threads in this work and continued to argue in favor of more rights, liberty, and autonomy for young people. As with arguments in favor of extending greater rights to any oppressed group of individuals, bodily autonomy is absolutely key here. And the right to access gender-affirming healthcare is about as clear-cut as bodily autonomy issues get.      

But today, there is a curious contradiction at the heart of the way that both Democratic policymakers and mainstream LGBTQ organizations have approached this issue. One the one hand, these politicians and advocates proclaim that gender-affirming care for youth is necessary and safe, that young people denied access to this care are at risk for a multitude of psychosocial harms including depression, anxiety, and even suicide, and that accessing gender-affirming care is a basic human right. Simultaneously, however, these same political figures and activists couch their arguments in the language of parents’ rights. They discuss the importance of allowing families and parents the freedom to make decisions on behalf of their minor transgender children instead of clarifying the right to bodily autonomy of transgender youth themselves as fundamental and non-negotiable. For an example of this sort of fundamentally incoherent rhetoric, here's a quote from the homepage of the HRC: 

Bans on access to gender-affirming health care for youth can have devastating consequences. These laws interfere with the ability of transgender youth, their families, and their providers, to make the health care decisions that are right for them, and access the medical care they need. No parent should ever be put in the position where they and their doctor agree on one course of action, supported by the overwhelming majority of medical experts, but the government forbids it. But that’s exactly what these health care bans do.

On the one hand, we read that denying young people access to gender-affirming care is “devastating.” However, the rest of the response says almost nothing about the devastation young people themselves may suffer as a result of being denied this care. Instead, the language situates parents and doctors as the people that matter in this discussion. To read HRC’s response in this passage and take it at face value, you might think that the primary harm of denying transgender youth access to gender-affirming care is to upset their parents, which is to say the least a weird take. 

On the website for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights (NCLR), the first link that I could find dealing with gender-affirming healthcare for youth is titled “Kentucky Parents Ask Supreme Court For Relief.” The page ultimately links to a case filed with the Supreme Court of Kentucky which argues against the state’s ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors by claiming, remarkably, that “This extraordinary law puts young people at well-documented risks of depression, anxiety, and in some cases, suicidality. It usurps’ parents’ traditional authority over important decisions regarding their children’s health.” The phrase “traditional authority” is in this context both striking and bizarre. Why would an organization whose primary mission is to promote the human rights of LGBTQ people have any use for the “traditional authority” of the patriarchal family? If denying transgender young people gender-affirming healthcare puts them at “well-documented risks of depression, anxiety, and in some cases, suicidality” why isn’t ensuring that these young people receive this care—whether or not their parents approve—the main priority?

Democratic Party politicians have tended to repeat these sorts of talking points too. Attempting to defend the already abysmal status quo from recent Republican onslaughts, Congressman Jerry Nadler stated, “Let me be crystal clear. Government should not stick its nose into a parent’s decision to seek gender-affirming care for their children.” This statement is very typical of the language that Democratic elected officials and candidates for office have adopted to talk about this issue. And, while this is almost certainly not the congressman’s intent, the wording implies that a parent who unilaterally decides that their child needs this sort of treatment has a right to make this choice, even if the young person themselves does not consent to it. Likewise, it also seems to imply that a parent who chooses to deny their child treatment against their will has the right to do so.

This argument is inherently contradictory and intellectually dishonest. On the one hand, we are told that denying transgender youth access to gender-affirming care is deeply harmful because it undermines these young people’s quality of life and in some cases even their will to live. On the other hand, what’s emphasized is that parents are the ones making the decisions. If transgender healthcare is necessary for those young people who seek it out to flourish and live happy, healthy lives, then why is this something that parents should unilaterally be allowed to deny their minor children access to? (After all, even minors seeking an abortion without parental consent in states where it’s required usually have the option—at least on paper—to go before a judge to plead their case.) Is gender-affirming healthcare only a positive good for those young people whose parents just happen to support their choice? What happens to those deeply unhappy youth without supportive parents, who are currently experiencing the onslaught of irreversible physical changes associated with puberty and who find that every day their body changes in ways which make them more and more miserable in their own skin? 

By appropriating the language of parents’ rights to argue in favor of allowing young people to access gender-affirming medical care (but only if their parents want them to!), mainstream Democratic politicians and advocates have essentially gone on the defense. Meanwhile, the right is very much going on the offense on this issue. And in the process, they find themselves promoting a set of talking points that are completely logically and ethically incoherent as well as deeply intellectually dishonest. 

Those on the right sense that there is something amiss with this progressive position, and many take the contrary position—which at least has the virtue of consistency—that gender transition is unequivocally harmful, and that young people should not be allowed to seek gender-affirming medical care under any circumstances, whether their parents would support them doing so or not. On this account, parents shouldn’t have the right to consent to gender-affirming care on their children’s behalf because it is detrimental to these young people’s well-being, regardless of what any individual parent happens to believe about the matter. 

While the right tends to weaponize the language of parents’ rights far more than does the left at present, the current progressive talking points on this issue seem to perpetuate the notion of minors as parental property even more than the current Republican anti-gender-affirming care across the board position does. For mainstream progressives, the party line at present seems to be that gender-affirming care for minors is a vitally important human right that no one should be able to abridge except for their parents. In that event, young people being forced to experience the body horror nightmare of a puberty that doesn’t accord with their sense of gender identity are simply out of luck and there’s nothing that can be done for them.

The good news is that the mainstream positions being offered on this front are not our only options. It is possible for Democrats, progressive activists, and anyone else who cares about transgender and youth rights to speak and act on these issues in a way that is ethically, logically, and intellectually sound and consistent. Instead of capitulating to reactionary narratives about parents’ rights, we need to start talking about the rights of young people themselves and underscoring their needs for bodily autonomy, dignity, liberty, justice, equality, and self-determination in our discussions of any issue that impacts young people.

One troubling feature of the current talking points that many mainstream transgender youth advocates spout—in which gender-affirming care is great for those youth whose parents support it, but still off-limits for those whose parents oppose it—is that it represents a position that probably no one making it really believes or could truly defend confidently if pressed to do so. The LGBTQ movement is filled with people who know the sting of familial rejection, oppression, and prejudice. Even those of us fortunate enough to come from families that have always been supportive of our identities as queer or transgender people know a lot of people who are estranged from their parents or others who helped to raise them, because those people could never bring themselves to fully accept their child’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity. We all know people who were kicked out onto the streets by their parents at a young age when their parents discovered that they were LGBTQ. Some of us have been in that situation ourselves. We all know (or have been) people whose relatives refused to come to their (our) weddings or who were sent off to anti-gay conversion camps early in their (our) lives. We know intimately that Father and Mother don’t always know best. This deeply rooted appreciation for the ways in which hierarchical, ageist, and patriarchal nuclear family dynamics can be a wellspring of oppression and domination is part of our collective wisdom and history as LGBTQ people. 

In a beautiful 2018 article for the Boston Review by Michael Bronski entitled “When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children,” which I try to share on social media every year during Pride Month, Bronski documents the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation activists of the 1970s emphasized a radical anti-paternalist vision of youth liberation in their work. LGBTQ people and those with deep ties to our community recognize that there are many parents out there who are not equipped to make wise, beneficent decisions on behalf of their LGBTQ children. We know, even if our politicians don’t acknowledge this, that it is deeply wrong and unjust that transgender youth seeking gender-affirming healthcare while lacking parental support currently have no real avenues of redress or appeal in reference to their plight.

There are practical steps that advocates and policymakers could take to make their approach one which truly prioritizes the dignity, autonomy, and self-determination of transgender youth. Shifting the discourse is the first step. Instead of invoking parents’ rights arguments in favor of gender-affirming healthcare for (some) transgender youth, advocates need to drive home a clear and simple message: gender-affirming care is safe, effective, life-affirming, facilitates appropriate psychological, social, physical, and sexual development, and allows those individuals who need it to live their best lives. Therefore, no one’s access to this necessary care should be held hostage by parents or guardians who, whether from ignorance or outright bigotry, want to deny it. 

Examples of such parents are easy to find. There’s Elon Musk, who is such a deadbeat father that he claims he didn’t even realize his daughter Vivian was in the middle of a gender transition until he received a form he was asked to sign. Or there’s Montana State Representative Kerri Seekins-Crowe, who, on the floor of the Montana statehouse, compared granting a child access to gender-affirming care to indulging one who expressed suicidal ideation. Medical professionals, including those in the mental health field, who are attuned to issues of safety, informed consent, and the maturity and decision-making capacities of those seeking medical care are already involved with gatekeeping gender-affirming medical care. A parent who is misinformed, prejudiced, out of the loop in regard to their child’s life, or just plain malicious has nothing to bring to the table here, and we need to stop pretending that they do.

It would be disingenuous to insist that there is no real risk of regret involved for those undertaking any sort of medical procedure or treatment, although one advantage of puberty blockers in particular is that they put pubertal changes on pause, providing some young people with more time to figure out whether they want to pursue further medical interventions going forward or not. But it’s at least equally disingenuous to insist that something as personal and subjective as an individual’s gender identity and relationship to their own body is a topic that anyone besides them—including their parents—has any special epistemic authority about which the individual themselves lacks. Individuals, of all ages, may not always make decisions about their lives that they look back upon with total satisfaction. But that doesn’t mean that others are in any better position to make intimate decisions on their behalf. Individuals are rarely perfect judges of their own best interests, but every individual is the only person who truly knows what it’s like to be them. Spending more years on the planet may give a person more experience with how to live their own life and what’s best for them; this doesn’t translate into any special insight into what it’s like to walk through the world as another person and where that individual’s best interests lie.  

Once they’ve started talking about these issues in this new way, progressive lawmakers and advocates should follow this rhetoric up with action. There are already policies in place at the state and federal levels that allow young people to consent to certain types of medical care without the permission of a parent or guardian. For example, the federal government mandates that minors be allowed to independently and confidentially access contraception and sexually transmitted disease (STD) care at all federally funded Title X clinics in the nation as well as through Medicaid. Most states have laws that allow minors to seek out treatment for substance abuse issues without parental consent. In a country like the U.S. with such a unique patchwork of diverse local, state, and federal laws, there are multiple other instances of similar policies across the nation. While it seems almost impossible that progress will be made on these issues on the federal level during the Trump administration, there are steps that can be taken on the state and local levels to begin allowing youth to access gender-affirming healthcare services confidentially without parental consent. Lobbying for such policies should become a major priority for all LGBTQ advocacy groups.

Another area in which state and local leaders can be more proactive is in taking steps to assure that youth in foster care who identify as transgender are always placed with families that are willing and able to support their identities. In 2023, California voters showed widespread support for a bill that would mandate that courts consider a parent’s affirmation of a transgender young person’s gender identity in any custody dispute. That bill made it all the way through both houses of the state legislature with overwhelming support before, appallingly, being vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, who likes to cast himself as a brave champion for LGBTQ liberation—when he’s not spouting anti-transgender talking points to right-wing podcasters, that is. 

Newsom shouldn’t be able to get away with framing himself as a hero for the LGBTQ community (as he will inevitably try to do if he runs for president in 2028) if his support doesn’t extend to those transgender youth caught up in custody disputes. They are among the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ community and are far more in need of empowerment and affirmation than the wealthy and politically connected lesbian and gay adults that constitute part of Newsom’s donor class. Legislators in other states can build on this work, however, by introducing legislation modeled after the bill Governor Newsom vetoed in California. Meanwhile activists, legislators, and citizens in California can turn up the heat on Newsom regarding his veto, and keep introducing similar legislation. The message coming from the LGBTQ community right now must be united and unequivocal: Transgender youth have become the primary targets of deeply bigoted right-wing attacks. You cannot claim to stand with us if you aren’t willing to stand with them.           

Of course, some people who support transgender rights are afraid of taking these steps in the current political climate. “What if they call us groomers?” “What if they say we’re destroying the American family?” “But they’ll say we’re perverts and weirdos!” But, of course, they are already saying those things and many more truly bizarre and untrue things besides. At least twenty Republican politicians have claimed that public schools are making accommodations for students to use litter boxes because they identify as cats. Joe Rogan even claimed during an interview with Tulsi Gabbard on his podcast that his friend’s wife worked at a school which had installed one of these litter boxes for a student who identified as a non-human animal. During rallies over the course of his most recent campaign for the presidency, President Trump frequently told crowds that youth were undergoing transgender-related medical care during the school day, telling his supporters that students were returning home at the end of the day after having had surgical procedures performed while they were away at school. 

Chances are, many anti-transgender Republicans already believe that masses of minors are receiving gender-affirming care without parental consent at government-funded medical clinics. Taking a milquetoast approach to the issue, parroting the right’s language on parental rights, and trying not to “go too far” lest we risk offending traditional conservative sensibilities on this question has not prevented Republicans from claiming that the “transgender agenda” is out of control while working overtime to decimate transgender rights, especially for young people. Reactionary bigots will spread lies no matter what proponents of LGBTQ rights do or do not do. Those on the left need to show that they are just as committed to expanding the rights of transgender youth as those on the right today are to rolling them back. 

Now more than ever, transgender youth need to know that we trust them, that we respect them, that we have their backs, and that we will fight for their rights, even when those who are the biggest threats to those rights are members of their own families and communities. We cannot simultaneously claim that gender-affirming healthcare is necessary, life-saving medical treatment and at the same time claim that youth should be denied this necessary, life-saving medical treatment—especially when this denial has the potential to impose negative externalities on them for the rest of their lives—because they happen to have a parent or legal guardian who doesn’t appreciate the reality and urgency of their situation. The plight of transgender youth with unsupportive families is just one part of a much larger picture. Really, all minors are oppressed and discriminated against by a variety of laws, institutions, practices, policies, and attitudes that render them what the legal scholar and philosopher Samantha Godwin refers to as parental “quasi-property.” 

As Paris Hilton has recently discussed in her interviews and activism, some young people are literally kidnapped in the middle of the night at the behest of their parents and sent to so-called “troubled teen” facilities with little to no official oversight, and because they are minors, this is perfectly legal. At these facilities, young people are often abused and even tortured physically and psychologically. Many people who have survived time in such places have also spoken out about experiences of sexual abuse inflicted by the staff. While many of these institutions refer to themselves as “schools,” the academic instruction on offer in such places is typically abysmal. These young people are not placed in these facilities because they have committed any crimes or been flagged by a judge, police officer, doctor, social worker, therapist, or anyone else in any official capacity with needing this type of “treatment.” It’s simply the unilateral choice of their parents, some of whom are hoping these facilities can help to rid their child of an LGBTQ identity. And because young people are not accorded full legal personhood or full human rights, they have no choice in the matter. Yet, the parents’ rights movement somehow thinks this level of control still isn’t enough.

While all LGBTQ issues are especially emotionally charged right now, the right’s obsessive preoccupation with transgender youth gives the left an opening to challenge these noxious parental rights discourses head-on in a bold and uncompromising way. By doing so, it can set a precedent for other areas of policy that impact youth as well—education, reproductive rights, censorship, and healthcare issues more broadly being just the tip of the iceberg here.

In order to show solidarity with transgender youth in the face of this most recent onslaught of rightwing bigotry, many people have taken to wearing T-shirts, buttons, stickers, and other merchandise emblazoned with the slogan “Protect Trans Kids.” A young transgender person I recently spoke with commented that they never liked that slogan much, and I admitted that I had always felt the same way. “Protect Trans Kids” reeks of paternalism. While a need for protection need not automatically signify that the object of protection is incompetent, rallying around the language of “protection” in a context in which issues of self-determination for a group of inappropriately infantilized individuals is primarily the issue ultimately sends a potentially confusing mixed message. 

After all, in their own way, “protecting trans kids” is what people like J.K. Rowling ultimately say that they are doing—protecting impressionable, naïve young people who don’t know what’s good for them from an ideology that they view as predatory and dangerous. In their minds, if they just manage to “protect trans kids” enough, they will make it to adulthood without having accessed any sort of support for their identity—medical, social, or otherwise—and then “grow out of it,” realizing that they were never really trans to begin with and had been mistaken all along. Of course, as any transgender adult can tell you, that’s not how it works. But this is the worldview that these individuals cling to, bolstered by stories in the news every so often about someone detransitioning and then demanding that the government or medical providers respond by preventing people with better decision-making abilities than theirs from charting their own course. Even the use of the word “kids” in this context comes off as dismissive and infantilizing. Many trans young people have probably concluded at this point that they have been overprotected and, in the process, have been stripped of their autonomy, dignity, and capacity for self-determination.

Instead of vowing to “Protect Trans Kids”—casting ourselves as the grown-up saviors of hapless young people who must look to us for benevolence and patronage—we ought to instead commit to “Support and Empower Trans Youth.” Anti-trans, anti-youth reactionaries want to prevent transgender young people from making decisions about their own bodies, identities, and lives and from acting effectively on their own behalf. We will show we are fundamentally different from these reactionary forces by doing what they refuse to do, and that all too many ostensibly pro-trans youth voices have also refused to do completely up until this point—center the needs, rights, and liberation of transgender youth in discussions and policymaking about them and stop showing deference to the harmful, odious, morally bankrupt ideology of parental rights.