Custody battles in the trans era

California has long been of interest to Americans beyond its borders because of its technical and cultural leadership. In other words, it has Silicon Valley and Hollywood. But the Golden State has also been the most influential of the states with regard to public policy and government. For a long time, it seemed that where California went, most other states would eventually go. The dynamic may be weaker now that America’s largest state has become such a left-wing monoculture. A recent bill working its way through the California legislature will provide an interesting test case.

The question before the state (and the rest of the country by extension) has to do with the difficult determination of which parent is deemed more suitable when taking custody of a child. It has always been difficult to make such determinations when parents both advance claims, but California is adding a new twist to the judicial calculus of child custody. The primary thrust of the state’s new bill, AB 957, is that a parent’s willingness to approve of a minor child’s gender preference will be a factor in favor of that parent gaining custody. If one parent approves of a child’s desire to change his or her gender while the other parent does not approve, the cheerleader parent will have a statutory advantage in the judge’s eyes.

The controversy raises the question of why we have parents. The way nature works is that human children are born into dependency and require various needs to be met to grow into maturity, but an issue such as the one at hand brings something bigger into view. What is the role of the parent with regard to how children make life choices and pursue them? Is it the job of the parent to be nothing more than an unconditional enabler of the interests and desires of the child, or is there something more involved?

We all understand that children depend upon their parents for a reason. Their facilities for judgment, aspiration, and control of appetite are all still immature. Recognizing that reality, parents exercise a benevolent kind of rule over their children (one inappropriate for adults dealing with each other) in which they draw boundaries and enforce them. The goal of this mild rule is to bring the child to the point of becoming a responsible adult and therefore living as a free person.

The question the California law brings into focus is which parent is the one who acts most like a parent should? Is the parent willing to assist their child in getting hormonal treatment and radical (essentially irreversible) surgery in service of a sex change the better parent? Or is the parent who counsels against such a course of action and resists it the one who acts more truly in the spirit of parenting?

Parents who resist “gender-affirming care” (an extraordinarily euphemistic term in light of its extremes) should not be penalized. They are, after all, taking the position that doctors have often extolled, which is “First, do no harm.” Not making chemical changes to a body and not surgically altering a body are excellent ways of avoiding harm. It should be more than obvious that the types of procedures done in the service of gender-affirming care carry tremendous risk of paralyzing regret down the road.

Perhaps more important still, the parent who resists such a course of action is doing what a parent is supposed to do, which is substituting their more mature judgement for the immature judgement of their child. It is by no means evident that the parent who prefers irreversible procedures is the better person to maintain custody of a child. Indeed, one could make a case that the parent who endorses gender-affirming care is exhibiting a degree of rashness.

The immaturity of children is something that has become more evident, rather than less, in a period when our society’s wealth and access to technology have skyrocketed. In higher education, many of us in the field have concluded that the 19-year-old of today may be equivalent to the 16-year-old of our past. We also need to account for the possibility of what is sometimes called “social contagion,” in which the young are excessively influenced by what they see on social media. No, the better course for parents is not to encourage our children along society’s vanguard. We should see the cautious parent, the one who is determined to carefully sift the truths of nature and young minds, as the one who is likely the better parent and should not be disfavored.