I have to apologize for this burst of posts with the launch of this sub, they’re unordered. But as this place is mostly a dumping ground of observations, I feel that should be the aesthetic of this place. For tonight’s TED talk I want to share with you my thoughts of the final phase of transactivism, a poison pill that will set the LGBT movement so far backwards, it will actually scare people who have left gay and trans activism. This sucker has the potential to cause extensive ruinous damage to the entire LGBT community, not just politically.
I have to admit that I do have chills of fear in my spine as I write this. This has the potential energy of a planet-destroying asteroid. A very real, very toxic, and very chaotic anti-LGBT backlash could see the revival of the 1980s Moral Majority and even direct attacks on landmark Gay Rights court cases. No amount of social media shaming will overcome this response, no amount of doxxing, and no threats of employer writeups to HR. Transactivists will be the last people of all to see what’s coming.
It’s over this idea of deparenting.
Deparenting is the stripping-away of parental rights to clear a child an unobstructed path through the gender clinic system. Transactivists prefer to use the term “gender-affirming care” to make it sound less like a factory, but it’s a factory. Deparenting was discussed briefly at WPATH, but the idea circulates constantly on transactivist boards. Turn on your speakers for this one.
Loss of custody because one parent in a divorce is resistant to transitioning their child has already featured in a number of high-profile divorce cases in Texas and Washington, including rulings completely barring the gender-skeptical parent from having any contact whatsoever over their child.
For the government to get directly involved in any case, a divorce has to be present, and it has to be unamicable. When a custody fight ensues and one of the children is gender non-conforming, using that fact as a wedge could push a judge into this trap, since all the expert advice a judge will ever see will instruct her that the gender-skeptical parent is doing harm to the child.
But what if this grotesque weapon could be aimed at all gender-skeptical parents, everywhere?
That’s what Ran Massey is suggesting here, making sure to note that state child-welfare caseworkers that he has spoken to in red states (why was there even the need to bring up politics here?) are ready to deploy this weapon wherever they deem fit to use it.
This is the Nuclear Option and it leaves transactivism naked and exposed. But it’s worse. This could open a very scary door for everyone both gay and transpeople everywhere.
The Setup
State child welfare agencies were heavily juiced-up during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as economic destruction also destroyed many nuclear families through the hardest-hit areas of the Midwest. Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas all rebooted their child welfare systems in the 1930s-1940s and with the help of updated welfare and poor laws, built programs heavily-dependent on removal.
Many caseworkers, mostly women, applied to run these offices with only their Protestant upbringings and secretarial skills to bear. Foster care rolls dried up and orphanages began to burst as family after family had “the visit”, a Ford sedan pulling up to the house to whisk the children away.
If deparenting takes off in more liberal states, and it seems likely, we could see a 21st century version of aggressive separation, intermediated by the statutory required work plan which a gender-skeptical household is certain not to follow.
Instead, picture an America with parents on the Interstates fleeing their homes to escape the reach of child welfare agencies and escalations to Federal court to order parents to return and surrender custody, with some parents finding themselves in contempt of court and even jail time for resisting the demand that their child go into the gender clinic.
The Downfall
Depending how hard transactivists and the medical community press for children who express any signs of gender non-conformity to submit themselves for examination, or as the case with child-welfare agencies who can react and inject themselves into a family’s affairs simply on anonymous complaints of suspicion, the reaction to this will be just as extreme.
We had a small taste of this in the 2021 Virginia election cycle when Democrats were swept out of their majorities over parents statewide expressing anger over how their children were being treated by that state’s education system.
With deparenting, the fear in parents everywhere across the country and the feeling that they are just spectators to their children with worthless rights will be palpable and reach the most politically-inactive families, particularly those of the working middle class. This will also touch the most protective instincts that parents have over their own children. In short, millions of people will activate, and every politician everywhere will capitalize on it.
The Justification
You don’t believe deparenting can happen? Cases in Philadelphia provide the legal framework here. Courts have ruled consistently that religious rights sometimes cannot be used in the justification for medical neglect in children, even if a state has a Swiss-cheese legal code that exempts all sorts of medical and life-safety requirements for religious purposes, as Pennsylvania has with its longtime relationship with the Mennonites.
Specifically: Philadelphia and Boston have prosecuted and sustained convictions against parents practicing Christian Science, a religious sect that totally rejects medical science. Certain Christian Scientist adherents believe in this so viciously that they will not use medical services even in a life emergency; the appropriate medicine for cancer or a heart attack is prayer.
Some states can create a deparenting regime by slipping in benign statutory updates to their health codes. Washington state already has a working framework that only needs an executive administrator to interpret their state health codes to include gender-skepticism as “medical neglect.” And since state welfare agencies and providers everywhere take all their advice from WPATH on what is best and needed for transpeople, their advice for trans teenagers and trans toddlers should also find its way into statutory interpretation.
The Aftermath
Once the sword of deparenting is forged it can ever be put back in its stone. My biggest fear in the back of my mind is the scale of the response that is sure to come once the first batch of unsuspecting parents that are waiting to see if their child will desist on their own find themselves placed on compliance plans with the state breathing down their neck to remove their children.
This is sure to revive the social conservative evangelical population, and who really knows if their reply to this threat will be tailored to match, or if they will come to the barfight with fists slinging everywhere.
LGBT acceptance has only been going down among the youngest generation overexposed to political LGBT discourse, one can only imagine that acceptance deficit widening rapidly when transactivists, plastic surgeons and gender clinic staff come out in the open and cast their aspersions on the bulk of the families of this country.
We only got rapid gay acceptance in the US because Westboro Baptist Church was dumb enough to run nasty protests at funerals and memorial services for fallen war soldiers. Something just as stupid could blast a hole in that achievement.
Transactivists threatening parents with loss of custody is one of these things.