Transformation

When my daughter was in high school she announced one day that she was getting a tattoo. I looked levelly at her over my coffee cup and told her that if she got a tattoo I would find out where she got it and dedicate the rest of my life, if necessary, to exposing the tattoo shop that did it and put it out of business for tattooing a minor. She was 16 years old. On her eighteenth birthday she got her tattoos. Ten years later, after beginning her professional adult life, she spent thousands of dollars removing them.

I know all the arguments in favor of permitting underage boys and girls to undergo pharmaceutical or surgical procedures to “become the gender they identify with.” Pushing these procedures to earlier and earlier ages buttresses this belief, effectively allowing boys who want to be girls and girls who want to be boys to undergo changes that will still be with them on their old-age deathbeds. These choices, in my view, are cornerstones of personal liberty and should be legal and accessible to anyone, without prejudice. As long as they’re adults.

Changing one’s gender is a more weighty decision than getting a tattoo, of course; you can get rid of tattoos if they lose their luster in adulthood. But the principle is the same. Teenagers suck up their contemporary culture like ravenous sponges. It’s their existential role to explore the world, challenge assumptions, to view that world with fresh, unjaded eyes. As a teenager I remember high-handedly telling my parents that the nuclear family was dead, that my generation was shedding their unenlightened generation’s notion in favor of egalitarian communal life.

Moving beyond children toiling in coal mines, lumber mills, and charnel houses, twentieth century laws shifted the protection of children from private charity to codified law. These laws protect children from all manner of abuse─most at the hands of us, their parents. Other western countries (with functioning national governments) apply these laws universally.

This being the United States, states set their own laws. In California, the age of consent for marriage, voting, military conscription, elective body alterations, and many other things, is 18. There are exceptions to laws with 21-year cut-offs, notably for tobacco and alcohol. (Remember Barry McGuire’s famous lyrics of the time, “Old enough to kill, but not for votin’,” from “Eve of Destruction?)

These laws recognize that children are too young and inexperienced, too unschooled in the ways of the world, to make impactful, life-changing decisions on their own. As parents, this can be difficult in the face of rampant, 24/7 social media, the perfect medium for developing teenage brains. Some teenagers are social media influencers, a subset raking in millions in the process. They look Like adults, sound like adults (albeit with limited language skills like grammar and noun/verb agreement).

But no matter how grown-up they look, how articulate they sound, they’re still basically kids at heart. One of our greatest challenges as parents in today’s America is the struggle to protect our kids from harm when they’re teenagers. They’ll be adults and out of your reach soon enough. This became a decade-long struggle for my best friend, whose teenaged son crashed cars, got DUIs, and generally ran hot and wild with his friends. The law recognized the transitory follies of youth and did not tar him with a record.

Today he’s a prosecutor with his own family.