I was peacefully sipping my second cup of coffee and cycling through the morning’s newspapers back in the day when my 16-year-old daughter strode into the kitchen and plopped herself down across from me at the kitchen table.
Daughter: “I’ve decided to get a tattoo.”
Me: (putting down the paper and looking at her full on) “No you aren’t.”
Daughter: (defiantly crossing her arms) “It’s my body and I can do what I want with it.”
Me: “If you are so determined to get tatted up, you can do so when you’re 18, not one day before.”
Daughter: (raging and shooting me death rays) “All my friends are getting tattoos.”
Me: “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off, too?” (Thanks for that one, Dad!)
Daughter: “You can’t stop me, I can get a tattoo if I want to!”
Me: (futilely attempting to inject reason into the emotional headwind) “Actually, you can’t. You’re 16 and can’t buy beer or cigarettes, either. The law fortunately recognizes that minors are too immature to be trusted with such impactful decisions.” (As of this writing 38 states allow tattoos for minors – but only with parental consent.) “Furthermore, if you do get one,” I continued, “I will find out where you got it and I will not rest until the shop is sanctioned for illegally tattooing minors.”
Daughter: Flounced off, though unfortunately she still got a tattoo on her 18th birthday. Her early 30s then featured several expensive sessions to get untatted. Tattoos, like credit cards and bad marriages, are easy to get into and hard to get out of.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for teenagers. Their hormone-infused passions and free-ranging opinions are, after all, the natural minefields we all must navigate along the bumpy road to adulthood. I recall several cringe-worthy teen declarations of my own, like telling my parents in the late ‘60s that the nuclear family was dead and we’d all soon be living communally, preferably out in bucolic Mother Nature somewhere.
Finding our place in the world is one of our most important journeys as humans. Our sexual identities are a natural part of that equation, of course, and today’s mediascape—no stranger to capitalizing on social trends—drones on and on about it. This has created a sort of sex smorgasbord: who’s doing what with whom and with what equipment, and should this basic physiological drive be satisfied by man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, black/white, or other/other couplings?
We know instinctively to whom we are sexually attracted, mostly at young ages. Over the years, gay friends have shared with me their personal tales of reckoning. One told me that, picking up his high school date one evening, he realized suddenly and irrevocably that he was way more attracted to his date’s handsome brother, who was reclining fetchingly and shirtless on the living room couch. Since my friend lived in rural Georgia and could have been killed for being gay back then, he and a gay friend devised a clandestine double-dating scheme where they picked up their proper southern belles and chastely returned them to their equally proper homes before beginning their real dates - with each other. My friend knew he was gay and remained out of the closet for his entire working life in San Francisco.
This early recognition of sexual preference has unsurprisingly created a movement to allow minors (aged 13 to 17) to take the necessary physical steps to actually change their genders, up to and through surgery. This notion of changing one’s god-given gender has prompted more than 20 god-fearing states (so far) to quickly ban these procedures. Sanctions vary, but the most draconian could pull the medical licenses of doctors prescribing gender-changing meds or even cite individuals who knowingly help minors receive this care. Other states are actively considering some form of ban on these procedures.
The American obsession with all things sexual, amplified through unfettered social media, has given gender reassignment an outsized place in today’s media firmament, clearing space for pundits of all stripes, both religious and civil. UCLA’s Williams Institute School of Law recently estimated that some 300,000 American youths aged 13-17 identify as transgender, or about .09% of the total current population of nearly 337,000,000 (as reported by the 2021 U.S. Census). Compare that with the 24,000,000 American children living in poverty, who collectively make up more than 7% of the total U.S. population. Yet reporting on poverty is complicated, difficult, and typically reduced to dry, one-graph summaries of scheduled government reports. Coverage of gender reassignment issues, on the other hand, with all its provocative high emotion and drama, frequently makes the front page.
All individual rights matter, including this one, but imagine for a moment what the country could be like if those 20 state legislatures that worked so feverishly to ban gender reassignment surgery had instead directed all this energy to ending youth poverty? What would it take to arouse the same passion? That’s a question for all of us.
To arouse the same passion would probably require the same hormones, at the least. Sexual innuendo is used to sell everything. As pointed out, poverty is difficult and complicated, and without similar drivers. So here we are.