Are Parental Rights Being Violated?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is gender-affirming care for children and its constitutionality. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last week on the topic “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.” The hearing exposed how children are being abused by adults who seek to coerce them to make decisions that are life-altering and medically questionable.

Sarah Parshall Perry published an article in The Daily Signal about the hearing, which she thought began unusually. In a podcast, “Dr. Blair Peters, a self-described ‘queer surgeon’ at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, explained that in the field of ‘gender medicine,’ they are ‘just kind of learning and figuring out what works.” He continued by saying, “We know almost nothing about these outcomes.” 

Ranking Democratic member Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-Pa.) blamed Republicans of trying to “motivate right-wing voters” and impose “ultra-conservative and religious views” on other Americans. Perry reminded her readers that “no parent has a constitutional right to injure their own children.”

She seems to have also forgotten that the federal government and every state and territory have child welfare laws on the books that recognize the appropriateness of government intervention when minor children are being subjected to physical, and in some cases, emotional harm by their custodial parents or guardians.

In fact, a federal appellate court that then included the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held in 2007 that medical care of any kind is not a constitutional right….

In fact, a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit, when the court was considering such a state ban out of Tennessee, … held that the state law did not violate either parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children or constitutional protections that require all individuals to be treated equally regardless of sex. Some have posited that this case may now be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Next up, the 11^th Circuit will hear a constitutional challenge to Florida’s gender-affirming medicine ban for minors. In a previous case, Adams v. St. Johns County School Board, that court determined that a school’s sex-segregated bathroom policy was not a violation of the Constitution because (just as the Tennessee ban does) it treated all students equally, regardless of sex.

Finding that the law that restricted “transgender” students’ access to bathrooms that corresponded to their biological sex to be constitutional, it may well reach the same conclusion as the 6^th Circuit when considering a law on transgender minors’ access to invasive medical treatments.

Witnesses at the hearing included Paula Scanlan, a former University of Pennsylvania swimmer, who was “forced to change and shower alongside a 6’4” male swimmer with male genitalia 18 times per week.” The female swimmers were offered psychological “reeducation services” to help them deal with the situation.

Another witness was Chloe Cole, “a young woman who once believed herself to be a boy but has since ‘detransitioned.’ At the age of 15, Cole had a double mastectomy and other “medical interventions” to “treat” her gender dysphoria. She claims to be a victim of the “biggest medical scandal in America” and that her parents were coerced into signing a consent form with the question, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living [transgender] son?”

Additional violations of parents’ rights are also occurring in school districts that are hiding from parents the social gender transitions of their children and the use of their children’s “preferred pronouns.”

What’s clear from Thursday’s hearing is that the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is indeed being violated. But those violations are not occurring when states protect minors from getting experimental “gender-affirming” treatments. The violations are transpiring in blue states that are cutting parents out of the equation altogether.