It’s Not an Attack on Parental Rights to Note That Minors Can’t Do Some Things Even with Parental Permission

At last night’s Republican debate, Chris Christie offered an impassioned defense of allowing parents to choose to have their children subjected to transgender surgeries. Here’s the exchange with moderator Megyn Kelly:

KELLY: Governor Christie, you do not favor a ban on trans medical treatments for minors, saying it’s a parental-rights issue. The surgeries done on minors involve cutting off body parts at a time when these kids cannot even legally smoke a cigarette. Kids who go from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones are at a much greater likelihood of winding up sterile. How is it that you think a parent should be able to okay these surgeries, never mind the sterilization of a child, and aren’t you way too out of step on this issue to be the Republican nominee?

CHRISTIE: No, I’m not, because Republicans believe in less government, not more, in less involvement with government, not more government involvement in people’s lives. You know what, Megyn? I trust parents, and we are out there saying that we should empower parents in education, we should empower parents to make more decisions about where their kids go to school. I agree. We should empower parents to be teaching the values that they believe in in their homes without the government telling them what those values should be. Yet we want to take other parental rights away. I’m sorry. As a father of four, I believe there is no one who loves my children more than me. There’s no one who loves my children more than my wife. There’s no one who cares more about their success and health in life than we do. Not some government bureaucrat, not some . . .

You look at these jokers down in Congress, it takes them three weeks to pick a speaker, and up until two days ago, they couldn’t promote somebody in the military in the United States Senate who earned their new rank, and we’re going to put my children’s health and my decisions in their hands for them to make those decisions, for Joe Biden to make those decisions for me and for my wife? Let me just say this. This is not something I favor. I think it’s a very, very dangerous thing to do, but that’s my opinion as a parent, Megan, and I get to make the decisions about my children, not anybody else. Every parent out there who’s watching tonight, you start to turn over just a little bit of this authority, the authority they’re going to take from you next, you’re not going to like. I’ll stand up for parents each and every time. . . .

I stood up every single time for parents to be able to make the decisions for their minor children. Every single time parents should make those decisions. By the way, you know what? Every once in a while parents are going to make decisions that we disagree with, but the minute you start to take those rights away from parents, you don’t know that’s slippery slope, what rights are going to be taken away next and what’s going to be imposed on you.

Ron DeSantis offered the snappiest response: “As a parent, you do not have the right to abuse your kids. This is cutting off their genitals. This is mutilating. These minors, these are irreversible procedures, and this is something that other countries in Europe like Sweden, once they started doing it, they saw it did incalculable damage. They’ve shut it down.” Vivek Ramaswamy added: “I think the North Star here is transgenderism is a mental-health disorder. We don’t let you smoke a cigarette by the age of 18. We don’t let you have an addictive drink of alcohol by the age of 21.”

Christie’s position is a serious and thoughtful one, at least if it’s applied consistently — which it often is not, not by Christie and certainly not by liberals or progressives who try to troll social conservatives by making this argument. Because it can be a serious argument, however, it is worth unpacking a bit.

Start with four general principles. First, where only adults are concerned, we should be very hesitant to interfere with people’s choices about their health and their bodies, so long as nobody else is being harmed. It’s not the government’s job, as a rule, to prevent people from doing things that harm themselves. Second, where minors are concerned — be they children or teenagers — we typically presume that they can’t legally do some things, and can’t legally consent to others — only their parents or legal guardians can make certain decisions for them. Third, the rights and authority of parents to control the upbringing of their children is crucial to why people have families and how children are best raised, and governments should be extremely hesitant to interpose itself in decisions best made by parents, especially about hotly contested value judgments. Fourth, because conservatives seek to apply our principles in the world of reality rather than the world of ideas, the previous three principles are not absolutes; they are guidelines and presumptions.

If we apply those principles, there are two situations that should be fairly easy. On the one hand, if adults wish to experiment with transgender surgeries and hormone treatments on their own bodies with their own money, the government should be inclined to stay out of that, just as it mostly stays out of all sorts of elective cosmetic surgeries, tattoos, piercings, and other bodily refinements, or in the same way that the government lets adults participate voluntarily in trials of experimental drugs. There are situations where state medical authorities ought to crack down on dangerous quackery, and fair debates over the extent to which these surgeries enter that territory, but the presumption should always be that people can make their own choices, even if those choices are likely to harm them.

The even easier one is the appalling situation tolerated and even actively encouraged and bankrolled by progressive states such as California and Minnesota: minors undergoing life-changing, irreversible surgeries and hormone treatments without the consent or sometimes even the knowledge of their parents. This is child abuse, plain and simple. It is the government perpetuating the fiction that children and teens can legally consent to major, life-altering medical decisions, and piling atop that the decision to let unrelated adults (doctors, teachers) substitute their judgment for the judgment of the parents. (One may ask how many doctors perform these surgeries unpaid.)

When the minor’s parents or legal guardians consent, it is a marginally harder question, because the interest of the parent shifts from one side of the balance to the other. But it is simply not the case that anybody in our society really takes seriously the notion that parents can and should be able to consent on behalf of their children and teenagers to everything that adults do. Not only are there a lot of things you can’t consent to until you’re an adult; there are a lot of things you just can’t do until you’re an adult, and nobody else can consent to those things for you. Consider a number of examples, many of which reflect laws in Christie’s own state of New Jersey (and I won’t even discuss abortion, given that many of the people who want to eliminate age and parental consent in this area usually favor doing so for abortions as well):

• Having sex and getting married. Every state has an age-of-consent law barring teens under age 16 (sometimes 17 or 18) from having sex. Yes, even the really blue states. Some states long had laws that allowed very young teens to marry with parental consent, but New Hampshire in 2019 eliminated what I believe was the last of those, raising the minimum age for marriage from 13 for girls and 14 for boys (with parental consent) to 16. The potential for abuse when an adult is allowed to consent on behalf of a teenager to have sex ought to be obvious.
• Tattoos and body piercings. New Jersey law prohibits “the performance of a body art or ear-piercing procedure upon a minor without the presence, written consent, and proper identification of a parent or legal guardian, unless the minor provides a court order declaring the minor to be an emancipated minor; …The performance of genital piercing upon a minor, regardless of parental consent.” Under New York law, it is a class B misdemeanor of “Unlawfully Dealing with a Child in the Second Degree” when anyone “marks the body of a child less than eighteen years old with indelible ink or pigments by means of tattooing,” and this law applies “regardless of parental consent.”
• Drinking. The nationwide drinking age is 21 (Ramaswamy even argued for following the still-controversial Reagan administration initiative to leverage state highway funds to force states to raise the drinking age). While it is generally the case that parents can get away with giving teenagers booze in their own homes, it typically is still not legal to do so.
• Owning a gun. Many states prohibit buying a handgun until age 21 (federal law prohibits such sales by licensed firearm dealers) or a rifle or other long gun until age 18. True, if you could get them to be honest, progressives would distinguish guns from transgender surgery or abortions on the basis that they want to restrict as many people as possible from having guns, but at least the theory of an age restriction is that younger people lack the maturity and impulse control to carry a gun. But we’re just fine with them making a lifelong decision to sterilize themselves and permanently alter their bodies and identity?
• Smoking. It’s illegal to buy cigarettes until you’re 21, the theory being that getting addicted to smoking is a potentially irrevocable health decision. So, irrevocable health decisions are . . . not something teens can make?
• Gambling. Most types of gambling, be they lotteries or casino gaming, have a minimum age between 18 and 21. Under the law of New Jersey, in force during Christie’s tenure, “If a parent or a person who has custody or control of a person under the age of 21 allows an underage individual to gamble, that person can be charged with a disorderly persons offense.” So much for the absolute nature of parental rights.
• Strip clubs and sex shows. “Adult entertainment businesses” typically operate under rules that require “ensuring that all performers and patrons meet the legal age requirements” and “must use strict age verification measures to prevent minors from accessing adult content. Record-keeping is essential to show compliance with these regulations in case of legal inquiries.”
• Driving. There are a variety of ages between 15 and 18 for learner’s permits and driver’s licenses in different jurisdictions. Most teens have the size and motor coordination to drive before they are legally permitted to do so. Again, the grounds for the minimums are about a social judgment of their maturity in making decisions.
• Voting. Notably, even in jurisdictions that have pressed to expand the vote below age 18, nobody argues that parents should be able to make the voting decision for their kids.
• Joining the military. You can’t join until you are 17, and join without parental consent at 18. Sixteen-year-olds are physically capable of many of a soldier’s tasks; they are barred from serving for reasons other than simply that the military could make no use of them.
• Working. States have varying child-labor laws, but generally, you need to be 14 to work and are restricted in working hours and conditions for a year or two after that. Federal law bars teens under 18 from some hazardous occupations. That’s partly a social judgment about keeping kids in school, but it also reflects both the idea that kids can’t consent to choose working over school, and also that they are susceptible to being abused by self-interested adults.

I could go on. We have minimum ages of 18 for vasectomies and vaping, and dozens of states that absolutely bar parents from female genital mutilation for religious or cultural reasons, or that prohibit “gay conversion therapy” even consensually.

We have so many laws of this nature — even if they are something of an inconsistent patchwork quilt of rules — because we understand that some decisions can only be made by adults for themselves, and not for anybody else. There’s nothing inconsistent in believing in general in both parental rights and human bodily autonomy, and believing in particular that life-changing, irreversible, and still-experimental sex-change treatments (many of which are outright banned by the medical establishment in other advanced countries) fall into the category of those decisions where children and teens cannot make the decision for themselves until they reach legal adulthood, and either can their parents or other adults consent on their behalf. Listen to Caroline Downey’s new podcast, The Detransitioners, if you need further examples of why these are such momentous and unfixable life decisions.