Andrea Long Chu's piece in NY Mag reviewing Judith Butler's new book Who's Afraid of Gender? is radical and ethically unhinged. There are so many philosophically troubling things said it's hard to choose, but this stood out to me:
"We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history."
According to the implications of this logic, a 12 year could be in florid psychosis demanding to chop off their testicles and "in principle" there's nothing wrong with this because the "right to change their sex" trumps the normal operation of clinical judgment and the Hippocratic Oath (which isn't even mentioned in the article as forming the foundation of medical ethics.)
Or a 13 year old girl could want to chop off her breasts and inject testosterone because she was sexually assaulted, permanently sterilizing herself and setting herself up for later detransition and regret, and Chu thinks there's nothing "in principle" wrong with this because everyone has a "right" to change their sex for whatever reason and etiology and psychiatric history is completely irrelevant to basic medical decision making, turning healthcare into a site of "liberation" and radical choice rather than restoration and maintenance of healthy function.
It doesn't matter if these children will regret it and suffer tremendously from the ramifications of these poor decisions, made when informed consent isn't even possible, because what's more important is "regret[ing] the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world."
This sort of logic is only sane to people who think of the body like an infinite malleable playground and care nothing about basic normative concepts like "healthy normal development."
Even more troubling, Chu writes "But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right."
This is insane. Puberty is a healthy and normal and biologically necessary developmental process that is critical to normal, healthy development, not just of the body, but of the brain. To call it a "drastic biological upheaval" that children have to "consent" to is like saying children need to consent to the beating of their heart or the functioning of their liver.
This is a fundamentally nihilistic and dire vision of the human body, and it's what happens when you strip teleology out of our conception of healthcare. In this trans right bizzarro world of logic, healthy child development is "queered" away as being "cis normative." Healthy development is no longer a default assumption of childhood but a "choice" children need to "consent" to (as if their minds are even capable of making a free and informed choice.)
It is a complete inversion of evolutionary logic, whereby the default position should be that Mother Nature is smarter than us, and we should only interfere in normal healthy development unless there is overwhelming and compelling justification.
But the idea that it's coin flip about whether puberty is a good idea or not is completely ridiculous and betrays the fundamental normative nihilism at the heart of modern trans rights activism. The idea of "consenting" to healthy normal developmental processes like puberty is absolutely backwards and twisted logic but is taken for granted by trans activists steeped in Butlerian gender theory.
I admire Chu for taking the logic of trans rights to its logical conclusion, but to me it is quite dystopian, not liberatory.
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