Medical decisions for children are always made by adults
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
Decisions about gender-affirming care for children are uniquely controversial because children cannot consent and parents cannot be trusted to decide. Unlike other medical decisions, this one should be subject to public opinion rather than medical judgement.
What I was pointing to there is something paediatricians live with every single day: we make medical decisions for children constantly, and we always have. A newborn has no say in how they are delivered. A toddler does not consent to their vaccinations. A child with a broken arm screaming "get off me" still gets the cast. We do not put those decisions to a public vote, and we do not treat the parents as suspects. We trust medically trained, scientifically literate doctors to work with families in the child's best interest, and where that is genuinely contested, we have courts for exactly that purpose. Gender-affirming care sits inside that same framework, not outside it. The question is never whether children deserve careful, expert medical care. The question is whether we let that care be shaped by medicine or by politics.
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