I looked to see if there was a thread on this documentary, uploaded to YouTube about three days ago, but couldn't see one — has anyone else watched it? It's about parents of children who've transitioned (socially and, I think, perhaps medically in a couple of cases) in US states which have new laws banning some types of child transitioning practices, and discussing whether to move to states with different laws.
Something I found quite striking when I watched it was how frightened the children seemed to be, and how they articulated those fears in words that sounded like sentences they'd heard from the adults around them. As well as not being shielded from the possibility that their parents and therapists might be punished for helping them (and while I believe that some of the treatments given to these children are wrong, if I did think they were the right thing for a young child, I would try to avoid impressing upon the child that I felt I was taking a massive legal risk by giving them these treatments), some of them seemed to have been given the idea that people wanted kids like them dead, and not just by suicide.
While I understand that some of the motivations behind the state laws in parts of the US may not be the same as the motivations of UK feminists when we discuss child transition, I doubt that many of even the very staunchest of Christian nationalist republicans actually want these kids dead.
The dramatic fear in some of the families was explicitly linked in the documentary to family histories of persecution, including Jewish Holocaust survivors and undocumented migrant families. I get that it doesn't seem fair that one moment, you're happily taking your socially-transitioned kid to the affirming gender therapist and planning puberty blockers and hormones and surgery, because everyone's told you that's the best thing to do, and the next moment you're being told that what you're planning to do is pretty much considered child abuse now. Even worse if you've already started the physical treatments. But it came across to me like they were almost egging the kids on to feel like there was about to be a pogrom any minute now.
Perhaps that was just the editing, I dunno. I can understand that the universal mandated reporter laws would be frightening, with those family memories.
Seeing a kid crying because mum had decided overnight that the whole family had to flee the state with whatever they could carry, so the kid had had to leave their chickens behind which they'd promised would have a safe home with them, though… it makes me wonder how these families escalate to the point where causing this level of terror in the whole family seems reasonable.
The law isn't great, if you're a family in that situation who's already started down that path, but there must be alternatives to letting your kid think that mum and dad could be arrested any moment, and that lots of people want kids like them to die so the family has to flee.
They also mentioned the expense and the difficulty of affording the cost of living in the wealthier "sanctuary states" on top of the cost and upheaval of moving. I wonder how these kids will feel as adults, knowing that the reason they and their siblings were taken away from all their friends and extended family, and their family had to struggle for money, was essentially so that they could transition a few years earlier. Or how the siblings will feel about the years of living in terror and fleeing halfway across the country, in years to come.
I feel for these families; lots of them seemed like nice enough, decent people. If anyone else has watched this I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts.