The Alberta government has invoked the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to prevent court challenges to a trio of laws impacting transgender youth and adults.
The clause is part of a bill now before the house, and Premier Danielle Smith says the move is necessary to protect children’s health and well-being.
She says their health could be jeopardized if challenges to the laws are tied up in court for a long time.
The notwithstanding clause allows governments to override Charter rights if deemed necessary as a way to balance the authority of both politicians and the courts.
The clause relates to laws that put restrictions on student pronoun changes at school, on girls’ and women’s sports, and on medical therapies for young people looking to transition.
Two of those bills are facing court challenges on the grounds they are harmful and unconstitutional.
(I really dont think i should post this. I think im being polite enough, but I know all yall social justice warriors love to lecture people.)
Ya know. Ok, im cool enough on trans stuff. I let people live and everything. Mostly, dont bother me and ill pay you the some respects. Its the children thing… kids dont know shit. I dont think some kids should drive till 18. Some kids mature faster than other, but that also implies some lag behind. And these days… for some reason it feels like most kids are lagging right now, thats what I hear from teachers in grade school anyway. I see kids struggling. Like cant read a clock, or cant read/write in cursive. It seems like foreign language studies have decreased too. But I digress…
Lord… some of yall are gonna try to rip me open for this… im trying to be polite enough, but I hope to get my point across.
So, I watch plenty of internet video, like most. Ive watched some detransitioning videos with folks that changed their mind. These are the kids I feel real bad for, because they were asked to make a decision, but there is no way they soberly understood all the ramifications of those decisions. And that is exactly what they say. (I just watched one with a male that had full bottom surgery, but then detransitioned back) Its boils down to “informed consent” right? And im just gonna stop there… dont come down hard on me, if youre concerned about the mental/physical health of kids like me, we have common ground.
I too feel bad for the kids that are having to detransition.
But then what? What does that have to do with these laws?
You keep dancing around the issue instead of just saying it out loud: you think that, because some kids suffer with detransition, we should make it harder to get access to gender affirming care. Yes or no? If no, then cool. If yes, then you need to inform yourself on the already enormous hardship that is getting gender affirming care and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes it generates.
The vast majority of trans kids actually are trans.
Why is it more concerning that a small percentage of kids would be misdiagnosed and receive the wrong treatment, than for the majority to get established healthcare that themselves, both parents, doctors and therapists all agree on?
Why not continue to optimize medical guidelines to minimize misdiagnosis, instead of a ban for everyone who needs the medical care?
The life of someone misdiagnosed into transitioning, is effectively the same life that trans people live before treatment. It does less harm to allow transition since most trans are diagnosed correctly, and any that were wrong could still be legally allowed to transition back.
These bills are also banning puberty blockers which safely allows them to delay the decision for several years.
Anyone tired of hearing about trans people should know that going through the wrong puberty will make trans people a bigger part of your life. Not only does that make their lives permanently more difficult to have mixed gender features, but it forces them to live with unwanted gender nonconformity that will be „in your face“ throughout society.
Its a very tough call, because there is a window where you want to slow or halt puberty by your current hormones to transition, and unfortunately its the same time as developing the brain.
There are legit people who are just born and know there brain doesn’t match their assigned gender.
You will have those that may have a disphoria disorder, where the brain tricks them, like people who have alien hand syndrome. And so do you try to treat that via mental health, or do you give them relief by having a path to changing.
There will be just some kids who don’t know their belonging in the world, and feel the gender change is the answer. (We were all confused teens at some point.) These kids I feel really bad for because they may think the transition is going to solve how they feel inside, but it might not, or they might grow out of those feelings.
But back to the problem, if you ask them to wait and see if they grow out of it, you’ve lost valuable hormone time, and had them suffer unnecessarily if their outlook didn’t change.