Transgender Rights
The left and the right have engaged in an unnecessary tit-for-tat escalation of rhetoric that has exploited gay/trans people and alienated moderate voters (especially parents).
I believe in smaller government with minimal intrusion/overreach and with an emphasis on personal liberties and responsibilities.
Discrimination is wrong, regardless of the person. People should live their lives as they wish if it doesn’t physically harm someone else. People who are qualified for their jobs should not have their livelihoods abridged due to their personal characteristics.
Government rules on bathroom use (either for or against transgender individuals) are superfluous and unnecessary. There have never been laws stating which bathrooms men and women should use, and I’m sure that prior decades have seen plenty of cross-dressing men with no vested interest in assaulting women who have accessed women’s restrooms without detection. Furthermore, prior decades have also probably seen unscrupulous men who have been undeterred by bathroom signs before they’ve assaulted women. Women have always had the right to sound the alarm if they feel uncomfortable, and their alarms should be heard and respected if they are not comfortable with a penis in their midst (roughly 90% of transgender women still have male genitalia1).
People who identify as transgender should be able to access single-use (e.g. unisex) restrooms. To reconcile trans rights with the dichotomy of biological sex, the federal government can provide grants to construct unisex single-use restrooms or else deconstruct multi-stall single-sex restrooms to single-use unisex restrooms. This move should not inconvenience small businesses, which already have single-use restrooms; larger facilities can receive federal government funding (e.g. schools) or else absorb the costs themselves (e.g. corporations).
The government should not be in the business of telling people what sports to play; if the individual corporations (e.g. NCAA, WNBA, NWSL, IOC) that control professional sports decide to introduce limits for participation, then any disagreements can be handled via the courts.
Government bans on drag shows are superfluous and unnecessary (parents can decide whether they want their children to attend).
Creating single-use unisex bathrooms obviates the need for more government regulations.
A word about clinical practice guidelines:
In medicine, we strive to base our actions on evidence from clinical trials in order to give patients a selection of the best treatment options that balance benefits and harms. I have published several clinical practice guidelines on lung cancer and blood clots, and I use this methodical approach not only in my medical practice, but also in my political decision-making. For every important issue, we must have a frank discussion on ALL benefits and ALL harms that any choice may carry.
Current clinical practice guidelines by European and American medical societies recommend against puberty-blocking agents in children, and they also recommend starting any potentially-irreversible medication at or after age 16, when most people have “sufficient mental capacity to give informed consent.”2
Therefore, I support federal laws that parallel evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (not simply expert opinion) that protect children from subjective, potentially-irreversible treatment plans initiated by independent physicians who do not practice within the multidisciplinary teams recommended by the current guidelines. The clinical practice guidelines are based on a multidisciplinary team approach pioneered in the Netherlands, and federal law can mirror this approach to allow the delicate process of gender dysphoria care to be under the purview of multidisciplinary teams licensed by individual state medical boards.
Clinical trials can (and should) be conducted to update clinical practice guidelines with new data, and parents and their children should be free to enroll in these clinical trials, which will ensure transparent, ethical treatment patterns with built-in protections for minors.
And a final word about parent involvement
**Most importantly, people need to realize that middle-of-the-road parents want to be involved with their children’s lives and educations, but most times these parents are clueless and embarrassed about broaching certain topics (like sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity). Teachers can be valuable resources to tag-team this conversation by starting the conversation with teens and then encouraging those teens to continue the conversation with their parents.
Shutting parents out rarely leads to good results. Passing more laws and regulations rarely leads to good results. Both sides just need to step back, scale down, and allow tempers to cool off before reassessing the situation.
Nolan IT, Kuhner CJ, Dy GW. Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender confirming surgery. Transl Androl Urol. 2019 Jun;8(3):184-190.
The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 102, Issue 11, 1 November 2017, Pages 3869–3903, https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2017-01658