Megan McArdle Wants Child Abuse to Be Simple
The conservative columnist attempts to chart a middle course on the question of transgender youth. Unfortunately, it’s not grounded in the reality of how families and children work.
by Evan Urquhart
There’s a lot to hate about an opinion column by Megan McArdle’s which appeared today in the Washington Post today. For one thing, it vastly underplays the quality of the evidence which has led to every major medical organization in the U. S. to support gender affirming treatments for youth with persistent, consistent gender dysphoria. It also tacitly buys into the idea that, if something did need to be adjusted in the medical treatment protocols for trans youth, this would be a big deal that demanded to be discussed endlessly in the mainstream press. It doesn’t recognize that such adjustments happen routinely in medicine, and nothing remotely like the current moral panic (which includes total bans on the disputed treatment) has ever ensued before. It even links to a laughably thin, poorly written blog post by journalist-turned-crank Jesse Singal, a man who was exposed for having argued on a private listserv that transgender people were subject to “groupthink” due to being trans, and could therefore never be objective enough to cover the science behind trans issues. (As a journalist who was already specializing in covering issues related to medical and scientific research at the time Singal was smearing trans journalists like me in private, I will never forget this.)
But for the most part McArdle’s column is very boring, and contains nothing new. It’s just one more example of a cisgender writer for a large mainstream organization, one with no background or base of knowledge on trans issues, assuming that there must be a solution halfway between the armed white supremacists shutting down drag shows and trans people politely saying we should generally lean towards the side of believing trans youth. McArdle then chooses whichever facts seem to support that middle-of-the-road position. She believes, apparently sincerely, that trans adults know less about a topic many of us have dedicated our lives to understanding than she, a cis person who had a column to write this week.
However, one of the moves McArdle makes feels useful to look at in more depth. Because, unlike most conservatives, McArdle deigns to spend a few sentences talking about child abuse, instead of completely brushing off the abuse of LGBTQ+ youth as something it’s beneath respectable middle class families to have to address.
screenshot from the Washington Post
This paragraph contains everything wrong, not just with the belief that it’s okay for schools to treat experimenting with a new pronoun as a major medical emergency, but with the mainstream understanding of the child welfare system itself. Because the one thing people in the mainstream don’t want to face about the child welfare system is that it doesn’t work.
From children housed indefinitely in hotel rooms because there are no beds, to poor families losing their children because poverty is routinely conflated with neglect (particularly when these families are Black), to children being abused in foster and adoptive homes, the foster care system is, to put it bluntly, a nightmare. It is only worth taking a child from their and subjecting them to the risks of this system if the child is in imminent danger should they remain. (That is, in fact, the standard for removal in many states.)
As a result, there are a lot of terrible families that are, nevertheless, better for children than a group home or foster care. This troubling fact is what McArdle breezes over when she says “that’s a good reason to have clear protocols for dealing with cases of child abuse.”
Let’s try a few hypotheticals, to illustrate the point:
A 10th grade trans boy from a traditional family comes out to a teacher at school. He asks the teacher not to tell his parents, and the teacher asks him if his parents are abusive. He says they’ve never hit him, but they’ve talked about “transgenders” and said that any Christian child who says they’re trans needed to be taken out of school and homeschooled. He loves his school and his friends and doesn’t want to be isolated at home. As it becomes clear that the teacher will have to tell his parents, he begs her not to, promising never to mention being trans again if only she’ll forget he ever mentioned it and not tell. The child is subsequently taken out of school by his parents to be homeschooled as a girl, and forbidden from ever seeing his friends again.
A teacher finds out that a 9th grader with long hair is going by a girls’ name among their friends. When the teacher asks the child if they’re trans, they admit they think they be, but beg the teacher not to tell their parents. The teacher, following he law, immediately informs the parents. The child and parents have a screaming fight where the parents use slurs for trans and gay people. The child runs away from home the same day, and is never seen at school again.
A child tells their parents they’re a trans boy, but the parents think they’re going through a phase and forbids them from transitioning. The child then confides in the school, who tell the parents, who again insist the boy is going through a phase. Unable to access social or medical transition, the child’s mental health deteriorates. This is taken as further evidence that the underlying problem is mental health, not gender dysphoria. A few years later, the child dies of suicide. Neither the parents nor the school nor any official statistic ever counts this as the death of a trans youth, or in any way blames the parent, or the school, for failing to affirm them. Everything is blamed on the child’s mental health issues, including the time when the child “thought” that they were trans.
These examples aren’t meant to be exhaustive—one could just as easily come up with imaginary scenarios where an excessively nervous trans child was helped after a school alerted their parents to their need to transition and the parents supported them completely, or imagine a scenario where a god-fearing parents helped a confused child back on the godly path. The point is that all of the situations above include a child who is harmed, and none would be solved by a school having “clear protocols” around child abuse.
It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand that there are a lot of bad parents who aren’t abusive. McArdle constantly harps on the idea that parents love their children, but some parents both love their children and abuse them, and some parents love the idea of their child and hate the child themself for not resembling the ideal. Very few parents would admit they do not love their child, but love isn’t always enough to keep a child safe from harm.
The continuum from loving, healthy families to abusive, dangerous families includes every possible point between those two extremes. Children with difficult, but non-abusive, home lives routinely benefit from having a measure of privacy and safety while they’re at school. Unfortunately, this basic understanding is too complicated for people like McArdle, who like to imagine they live in a world where everything to be black and white.
