You may have heard about the radical new head of the Canadian Paediatric Society, but did you know how radicalized the CPS already was?
In Canada, the entire concept of Children’s Rights has been weaponized to hurt children. And the debate about medically transitioning minors has brought it to the forefront.
Can a 13 year old consent to sterilization? The Canadian Pediatric society says “Yes.” In fact, It’s their right!
This is especially outrageous on the current geopolitical stage considering every other major nation is clawing back these policies, specifically because they are not evidence based.
What does this reveal about deeper systemic changes in Canada that have made it dangerous to be a Canadian child?
This peer-reviewed paper critiquing the CPS’s position found something shocking. When it comes to gender based medical procedures, instead of being evidence-based, the CPS have shifted their position to one that is “rights-based.”
They don’t just claim that children can consent to permanent life-altering procedures like double mastectomies, they claim that children can essentially self-diagnose, and that when they ask for a procedure it is the physicians job to “center the adolescent’s expertise in their own life experience.”
In other words: practitioners shouldn’t determine if transition is appropriate. Their job is to fight the quiet, omnipresent bigotry by affirming.
In fact, in the face of the Cass Review, a systemic review of pediatric gender care in the UK, the Canadian Pediatric Society openly rejected the findings and doubled down on an affirmative model.
Now I know this is often framed as a left versus right issue. But is it?
The CPS is ignoring all data and testimony from detransitioners. The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) effectively sidelines the cohort of detransitioners and desisters in its policy framework, despite framing its approach around the “lived experience” and “expertise” of gender-diverse youth.
They claim that they are defending the child’s “right to self-determination.” But when detransitioners publicly declare that the medical pipeline CPS is reinforcing harmed them, they are screaming into a void the CPS proudly defends.
They claim that practitioners and policy need to be informed by the “lived experience” of the “mature minor.” But not if they’re a detransitioner, or gay and lesbian youth calling these policies homophobic for erasing them with early transition.
Their position implies gender identity is largely stable and linear for those presenting in adolescence, even though the activist organization claiming to be medical authority WPATH openly states it can change at any time.
There is a very good reason that the word detransitioner is nowhere to be found on the CPS website. The house of cards is set to collapse if they allow the detransitioners to enter the chat.
This is the weaponization of children’s rights, defending and protecting only the children that can be propped up as ideological proofs, disgarding the rest while claiming to be a champion of the oppressed.
This same mature minor doctrine is now being applied to the government sanctioned suicide service MAID, vaccination without parental consent, and is broadly used for minors to get abortion without family involvement.
But perhaps the scariest part is that the mature minor doctrine carries no age limit. It is merely up to a case-by-case scenario, giving practitioners the broad powers of judging whether or not a child comprehends permanent and long-term consequences.
But practitioners in Canada operate downstream of culture.
If the mature minor doctrine in Canada presumes no age limit and deals with these issues on a case by case basis, then doesn’t it give undue power to a practitioner who may be operating from culture instead of evidence? After all, this is the path being legitimized by the CPS with it’s rights based doctrine erasing the evidence based doctrine.
Let’s just say it: this rights based frameword is deceptively ideological, rather than evidence based. It pretends that there is a rights based moral high ground to retreat to, that simply doesn’t exist.
How can Canadians trust that practitioners are coming from an evidence base and not a woke interpretation of human rights, when it comes to their power to claim that a minor is mature?
Canada is a nation religiously following the guidance of WPATH, an organization that explicitly calls for the depathologization of gender incongruence, meaning medical gatekeeping is framed as bigoted, not protective.
How can the mature minor doctrine ever be considered safe in a nation this ideolgically skewed?
This debate is not about one’s personal politics. It’s about how much we balance our respect for the autonomy of our children with an honest understanding of how mature a minor can really be, given what we as adults all know for certain: that wisdom about life choices unavoidably comes from the struggle of lived experience over time.
It takes us decades to comprehend decision making of this scale and importance.
This is the very thing that children are lacking as minors: life experience.
CPS can scream about lived experience and mature minors all they want, but being young means you have lived less.
These are the very reasons parental guidance and protection are essential: the parent’s life experience both as individuals, and as the people who have the most intimate understanding of their child.
Afterall, if this were really about a progressive movement protecting oppressed children’s rights, why ignore detransitioners? Why ignore gay and lesbian youth crying out about erasure?
It is not left-wing progressivism that is successfully protecting minorities against “Trump’s anti-trans America” if these young voices are ignored. In fact Trump’s America is leading the way setting up dedicated clinics to care for detransitioners.
They are willing to sacrifice these minorities because what they are defending is not childrens rights, or trans rights but an endlessly progressive ideological lens.
Making gender affirmative care a “rights based issue” INSTEAD of an evidence-based, means the adults in the room don’t respect children enough to protect them from what they know they cannot comprehend.
This is now an apolitical movement, willing to sacrifice the health and happiness of children and minors based on the absurd claim that maturity is divorced from the wisdom inherent in the struggle of growing up.
