Transgender youth and attraction to minors

Transgender rights, including the medical treatment of transgender youth, is one of the most contentious cultural topics in 2020s mainstream media, invoking the topic of youth agency and potentially problematizing outdated concepts such as purity discourse, negative utilitarianism and safeguarding.

The topic of trans youth (in particular, gender-affirming healthcare, a theme of relevance to the culture war between conservatives/gender critical feminists and modern social justice orthodoxy) has been frequently linked with attraction to minors and the MAP Movement in the 2020s. This linkage takes two forms, theoretical (as described below), and associative - where the trans-ness or trans-inclusivity of MAPs or vice versa is weaponized by conservatives in political discourse. The controversy surrounding Jacob Breslow is one striking example of this weaponization, as are the editorials of gender-critical news outlets such as Reduxx, which focus on trans people whose lifestyles involve intersecting queer/invalidated expressions of desire, and thus may "sexually offend".

Some youth-liberationists, neutral and pro-c MAPs have advocated that the ongoing medicalization of transgender youth must be encouraged (or at least not resisted), as it will inevitably lead to the abandonment of negative utilitarianism, and adoption of evidence-based approaches with respect to the sexual agency of minors in general. Thus, the topic of transgender youth is said to form an important part of the MAP Movement's adjacency-enabled rise to public contention.

Linkages

As mentioned, earlier, there have been some attempts to link the affirmation of transgender-identified youth with minor attraction - sometimes embraced and sometimes rejected by MAPs, and generally rejected by LGBTQ+ people, except for a conservative/gender-critical subset.

Theoretical

The GB News TV columnist Mark Steyn described the theoretical linkage between transgender youth and the pro-c MAP Movement on his show, 6 Oct, 2022:

STEYN (with ironic sarcasm): I should add, of course, that pedophilia has absolutely nothing to do with advocating the mutilation of children's bodies by chopping off girls' breasts... and rendering them sterile. They're two quite different things:

• One abuses children who can not give informed consent to sex, and -
• The other abuses children who can not give informed consent to bodily experimentation.

They're two quite different things(!)

Steyn correctly identifies that social justice movements (if they are to have any integrity) can not hold two conflicting positions on the ability of minors to give consent in matters of bodily autonomy. Thus, he suspects, any re-appraisal of youth choice concerning gender-affirming surgeries will not only lead to re-appraisal of youth choice in the wider sexual arena, but will be supported by those (pedophiles, in his words) who can see, and take advantage of the fact that the topics are analogous.

Associative

The associative method we identified in relation to the gender-critical media is often used alongside the theoretical/political rationale explained above, and can be seen in the "groomer" panic of the early 2020s. Mainstream media outlets tend to veer towards this more simplistic method, although opinion journalists such as Tucker Carlson have attempted to explain the theory behind a "plan" to undermine the institution of American childhood by attacking language and concepts such as gender.