Utah lawmakers are pushing a ban on gender reassignment surgery for minors in the upcoming legislative session.
Utah Republican state Sen. Mike Kennedy, who is sponsoring the bill outlawing the practice, argues that it’s wrong to allow children to make irreversible decisions they could regret for the rest of their lives.
Kennedy’s bill wants to ensure that people are more physically and mentally mature before they make life-altering decisions about their bodies. It seems like a moderate, commonsense proposal, but liberals will hate it.
That’s fine. However, lawmakers should also find ways to expand and promote alternative treatments for those with mental health issues such as gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia and the other problems associated with those disorders.
Lawmakers and society need to foster a culture that acknowledges biological reality. Differences exist between the two genders, and it’s OK to admit it. Men are men, and women are women. No amount of hormones or surgeries can change a man into a woman or a woman into a man.
Not to mention, forcing society to accept a false premise such as transgenderism fractures social cohesion. Some people are uncomfortable sharing women’s only spaces with men or men’s only spaces with women. Yet, liberal lawmakers don’t care about these people’s feelings — even though they comprise a larger portion of the population than those who identify as transgender.
However, that doesn’t make transgender people themselves bad. Some of these people have mental health problems such as gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia that cause them to be uncomfortable in their skin, and they feel as if they have to change who they are to be happy.
Therefore, lawmakers should try to answer these questions: What are the alternatives? What can they do to prevent people from developing these problems, and what can society do to help people struggling with mental health problems? And how can they do this without causing irreparable harm to children and making others uncomfortable?
Getting gender ideology out of schools could help. The public education system shouldn’t promote ideas that confuse children and make them feel trapped in the wrong body. Some children, especially young girls, feel awkward and uncomfortable about their bodies already, so the education system should not add further confusion.
Additionally, lawmakers should try to tackle the individual issues that gender dysphoria causes. Gender dysphoria can result in intense feelings of depression and anxiety for people who suffer from it, according to the National Health Service.
Both are serious problems. However, there are other ways to treat and mitigate such issues.
Conservatives are well-equipped to combat issues that negatively affect children’s mental health, such as tobacco and marijuana use, underage drinking, teen social media use, and the broken foster care system. However, they can also work at the state and local levels to offer resources for mental health treatment and for those who want to detransition.
So while lawmakers deserve credit for wanting to take on this woke gender ideology, they will need to try to find ways to mitigate gender dysphoria if they want to succeed. If not, then some may, unfortunately, view the supposed solutions liberals are offering to these problems as the only solutions.
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Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
