Sarah Cornett
Oakland, Calif.
To the Editor:
Our 16-year-old son is scheduled for high surgical procedure this December. He has been fastidiously researching and dreaming about this surgical procedure for the final 4 years. I’m his mom. I grew his physique in mine. So I’ve struggled with the concept of his bodily transition.
However as his mother or father, I additionally know my youngster. I do know that that is who he was meant to be, who he at all times was. His pleasure, his confidence, his ecstatic love of his life since transitioning makes us sure that this is only one extra step in his turning into his true self. And that he’s prepared, now.
We, his mother and father, and his trusted, devoted physicians are those that are certified to make this judgment, not the state.
Sandy Russell Jones
Highland Park, N.J.
To the Editor:
The topic of trans folks in search of surgical and drugs intervention is one that’s fraught after we acknowledge that the themes signing up aren’t consenting adults. Surgeons are performing everlasting modifications to youngsters’s our bodies. These remedies are primarily based on selections made by brains incapable of understanding long-term penalties. That reality is what makes the present stance of the medical group so alarming.
If gender identification is fluid and dynamic, then the push to make the bodily physique chase a dynamic place of the thoughts in any given time interval is at finest a idiot’s errand and at worst an act of genital and corporeal mutilation. I don’t use these phrases evenly; I take advantage of them primarily as a result of we’re speaking about youngsters, not consenting adults.
Please look to other countries which have researched this topic and have elected to delay such remedies till the sufferers are extra mature and identification is extra established.
Kathryn A. Geen
Mechanicsville, Va.
To the Editor:
It’s placing how intently the arguments to limit medical or surgical remedy of transgender adolescents resemble the techniques used to suppress abortion. Dispute the necessity for the medical process. Query the power of the affected person to make an knowledgeable resolution. Stress the “irreversibility” of the process. Cloak paternalism within the heat tones of affordable concern. And if all else fails, inform the story of the “scarred survivor,” the affected person who voluntarily selected the process, solely to expertise deep and near-suicidal remorse years afterward.
