From Ryan Anderson to Jesse Singal, all were guilty in Chu’s eyes of “compassion-mongering” and “gatekeeping,” disagreeing only on “how the gate is to be kept.” Maybe trans “affirmation” surgery would make some people happy, and maybe it wouldn’t, but for Chu, that wasn’t the point. The point was that “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want,” and “no amount of pain” could justify withholding it. 

First, they said nobody was transing kids. Then, they said it would be no big deal even if people were. You know what comes next, because you’ve seen this movie before: “Now it’s happening, and it’s a good thing.”

“I wrote about what justice looks like for trans kids,” tweets Pulitzer-winning “trans” journalist Andrea Long Chu about his new cover essay for New York magazine, in which he makes “the moral case for letting children change their bodies.” His thesis is shockingly simple: The freedom to change one’s body is a basic human right. Children are humans. Thus, they should have the freedom to change their bodies. (WORLD Opinions editor Albert Mohler covered this story when it broke earlier this week.)

Chu acknowledges that this is different from the common argument that “affirmative” treatments are necessary for “trans” kids’ health. While Chu does in fact believe that puberty blockers will benefit such children, his reasoning is not primarily medical. As his own subtitle states, it is “moral,” according to his twisted definition of “morality.” 

This essay should be read as the logical continuation of Chu’s 2018 essay about his own post-surgical regret, written for The New York Times (which, ironically, he now excoriates as insufficiently pro-trans).

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