It was unsurprising when a friend, a teacher, told me that one of her students expressed a desire to be called by a name other than the one given by her parents. She told her principal, and inquired whether she should inform the child’s mother. Her principal instructed her that it was district policy not to do so, that the teacher was to acquiesce to the child’s preference and keep it from the parents.

In one story, parents are wonderful nurturing people. In another story, parents aren’t. The school wasn’t taking any chances of being on the wrong side of transphobia. Maybe the child is gender-dysphoric. Maybe not. But if they snitch to the parents, and the parents lack sufficient prescience to be supportive of a second grader who wants to be called Billy instead of Suzie, all hell could break loose. They don’t need that sort of backlash, and so the choice of keeping the parents in the dark prevailed.

Bioethicists have seized upon this mindset by invoking the power of the State not just to conceal information from parents, but to seize the child to be raised and medicated in the “right” way.

More and more children feel that they are really males trapped in a female body or females trapped in a male body. In many quarters this sensation is no longer regarded as a form of mental illness, but as a legitimate dimension of sexuality.

Is it “more and more,” or have a certain cohort seized upon ordinary childhood development and given it exaggerated significance? At one time, my son informed us that he wanted to be called “Luke.” At another, he told us he wanted to be a ballerina. Each passed on its own. But what if the name was Sally and we told him “no”?

Transgender advocates have a solution for these children’s psychological distress. The first stage is to affirm their chosen gender by allowing them to dress and groom themselves members of the opposite sex. The second is to administer puberty blockers, powerful drugs which suppress natural body changes. Later on, there are other drugs which will allow boys to develop breasts and girls to have facial hair  — and so on.

But what if parents oppose these treatments – as they often do? Who should decide what is in the best interests of their son or daughter?

According to many bioethicists, it should be the government. Big Brother knows best.

The concern is that denial of puberty blockers is abuse to a child with gender dysphoria, and when a parent abuses his child, the State must step in, seize control and save the child from the parent.

To cut to the chase, Dr Priest and many of her bioethics colleagues believe that refusing to let your ten-year-old son or daughter access these life-transforming drugs is child abuse. She contends that:

… the law should clearly state that transgender youth (after having met appropriate diagnostic criteria) have a legal right to PBT regardless of parental approval. In addition to these legal parameters, the state should play a role in publicizing information about gender dysphoria and treatment via public schools, government-sponsored websites, and public service announcements.

Priest is convinced that the harms of withholding puberty-blockers are too great to allow parents to stop their children from trying to change gender. Gender-dysphoric children who are not supported by their parents could commit suicide, suffer stigma and discrimination, become homeless, self-medicate in a dangerous way, and so on.

The litany of bad things that could happen to a gender-dysphoric child isn’t false, as much as it’s probability is infinitesimal compared to the potential of this going horribly awry. Consider how bad Child Protective Services is at distinguishing children who need to be taken from their parents for child abuse as compared to the damage they inflict on children from their knee-jerk reactions and pervasive mistakes. Suddenly, we should trust the State to know what’s best for our children?

From the view of woke bioethicists, however, this isn’t a matter of lifestyle differences, but a medical emergency.

Just as it is the state’s duty to step in when naturalist parents are refusing insulin to their diabetic son or antibiotics to their daughter sick with meningitis, so is it the state’s duty to step in when the parents of gender-dysphoric children are avoiding medically recommended treatment.

Wrapping this up in a gender-conflicted bow may be fashionable, but this isn’t about trends by medical necessity. If a ten-year-old satisfies a psychologist that she wants to be he, is denial of drugs that will permanently alter her life the same as cancer? But then, if the State says so, certainly it knows better than parents who, in this story, are awful transphobic haters denying their gender-dysphoric child their rightful future and condemning them to homelessness, if not suicide.

The idea that gender dysphoria and needing a blood transfusion are both medical emergencies is obviously catching on amongst paediatricians, psychologists and bioethicists. But has this been proven? Transgender science is a controversial area and establishing watertight proof of these harms is difficult. Priest claims that the need for PBT is “based on the best available science and expert professional consensus”.

There are, however, physicians who disagree with this view, and they are, naturally, demonized for it.

On the smoke-filled transgender battleground, these three doctors are regarded as “conservatives” and even “transphobic” because of their suspicions of the whole transgender narrative.

There are more moderate believers who question whether this is really a “medical emergency” of the magnitude compelling the State to seize children from their parents so they can be medically saved.

But the three other comments come from experts who simply think that the need for puberty-blockers is not necessarily a medical emergency and that Dr Priest has overlooked the serious health risks involved.

One such risk is that any child given puberty blockers because, at ten years of age, the State decides they should, will be incapable of procreating. What will the narrative be at 30 years old when they ask their parents how they could have let the State, some nutty woke psychologist, do that to them?

At this moment in time, when any question of transgender children demands the outrage of the mob, what chance do these children have to battle the might of the State saving them from their parents? Maybe they are gender-dysphoric. And if the State says they are, who is a parent to doubt it?