elfs | "Democrats need to prove ..."

All right, let’s do this.

“Late-term abortion.”

Pete Buttigieg had the last word:

Nobody gets to the third trimester and then decides to get an abortion. Third-trimester abortions happen because they are medically necessary, undertaken by a woman who wanted to be a mother and now can’t.

Liberty is served when doctors and patients have the fullest range of options, without menacing sherrifs applying vaguely worded laws intended to terrify the doctor out of the best possible course.

If

njhochman wants more dead women because the law paralyzes doctors into withholding necessary care, he can speak out against abortion. I want to save lives. It’s that simple.

“Sexualized classrooms.”

I have no idea what The Right means by this. Sometimes they claim it means explicit sex education in elementary school, which I’ve just never seen in real life, and sometimes it means “telling kids gay people exist.”

I absolutely want a kindergarten kid who has two dads or two moms to know that his parents exist, that they’re not weird, that they are, in fact, expressing the highest human values by undertaking raising a child when they didn’t have to. I absolutely want a kindergarten kid who’s barraged constantly with straight people kissing in every Disney princess film, in every Toy Story, to know that if he wants to kiss a boy, or she wants to kiss a girl, that’s okay too.

The right has this idea that gay people “plant these ideas in kids heads.” The relentless, constant policing of queer impulses, the non-stop repetition of heterosexuality as the only answer, is cruel to kids who feel differently.

As for sex education, yes, I think there should be sex education in every grade. Other countries have had excellent results with this approach: less teen pregnancy, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and less child sexual abuse. It is a lack of education that enables child sex abuse and “grooming.” If you deprive kids of a vocabulary, if you shut them up with shame and threats, if you make it clear you don’t want to hear it… then you won’t.

Drag queens and gay teachers aren’t a threat to your kids. You know who’s really a threat to your kids? Youth pastors. Stepfathers. Boyfriends. Abusing authority to keep the kid silent.

If

njhochman wants more abused kids, preventing age-appropriate sex education should be high on his priority. I want to prevent sexual abuse of all kinds, so I advocate for sex education. It’s that simple.

“Gender transitions.”

I understand this one is hard. No one wants their kid to have a mental illness. But it happens. 1.5% of all pre-adolescent (about 1 in 65) kids suffer from biological depression. And 0.4% (1 in 250) suffer from gender dysphoria. But it does happen. And sometimes both the diagnosis and the treatment are difficult. Puberty blockers give those kids a chance to mature emotionally without locking them into the body they may not want as an adult.

Gender-affirming care has age-appropriate stages and interventions, but there is no real debate among scientists and academics: it saves lives. It turns depressed and suicidal kids into functioning adults:. And gender-affirming care isn’t new or experimental. The first organ transplant was in 1954, which is 25 years after the first sex reassignment surgery.

Without it, people experiencing gender dysphoria live lives of misery, deprivation, and suicide. And the medicine for this is gender-affirming hormones. No SSRI, no MAOI, no SNRI, no amount of “talk therapy” compares to gender-affirmation.

If

njhochman wants more dead queer kids, preventing gender transitions is the way to go. I want to save kids' lives, no matter if they’re straight, queer, or something else. It’s that simple.