Me:

Children can and do administer over-the-counter and prescription drugs to themselves in homes, libraries, stores, museums, parks, and just about every single other institution that they encounter in their daily lives, with the sole exception of schools.

PG:

Homes have parents.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I was 13 years old, I was at home when my parents were not. Sometime I even took an Advil when they weren’t around, and without having checked with them first.

Children in libraries, stores, museums and parks generally are attended by parents.

I think you’re underestimating the amount of time 13 year olds spend outside of immediate parental supervision. But even if you weren’t, I don’t know what I’d be expected to infer from what you say here. If, when parents are around, 13 year olds aren’t generally subjected to zero-tolerance policies where they absolutely cannot consume prescription or even mild OTC drugs except through the mediation and supervision of their parents, then that would seem to indicate that the school’s policies are out of touch with what responsible 13 year olds are able to do, and in fact do, outside of the school. Which was my point.

Moreover, librarians, storekeepers, docents and rangers never have been deemed to stand in loco parentis. Schools have been, which is why you see this exception.

I’m aware of the legal reasons that government schools have felt compelled to adopt this kind of policy. But I think that’s an explanation of the policy, not a justification of it, and it is absolutely not a justification of using invasive and sexually humiliating methods to ensure that it is rigidly enforced.

As for standing in loco parentis, I think it’s a funny sort of justification for imposing policies that are far more invasive and busybodying than the practices of actually-existing parents. Of course, I know the legal reasons why this is so (specifically, the threat of a lawsuit), but that’s a good reason for dealing with the out-of-whack legal situation, not a good reason for anti-ibuprofen policies.

RonF:

The school has an interest in ensuring that drugs (whether OTC, prescription or illegal) are not distributed among the students outside of the control of the faculty and administration.

No it doesn’t.

No school in the United States spent a minute of its time worrying about anything of the sort until about 15 or 20 years ago, and there’s no real reason why they should, any more than they worry about whether or not students are distributing snack-packs or mechanical pencil refills outside of the control of the faculty and administration. Children can and do administer over-the-counter and prescription drugs to themselves in homes, libraries, stores, museums, parks, and just about every single other institution that they encounter in their daily lives, with the sole exception of schools. The current fixation of schools on trying to tend to every conceivable need that students might have and control every conceivable action that students might take, while on school grounds, is foolish and destructive.

It’s quite reasonable to presume that a kid might stash illicit drugs in their underwear if they don’t want to get caught holding them.

There needs to be some way of searching a kid to see if they’ve done that.

No, there absolutely does not.

If I were to grant, solely for the sake of argument, that schools ought to be concerning themselves with whether or not kids are carrying around Motrin outside of the control of the school nurse, then it would certainly not follow from that that the school has to be able to use strip searches in order to detect violations of the policies they set. Just because something is Against The Rules doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to do anything and everything in order to find out whether or not people are doing it.

Sometimes the only way to catch someone at breaking The Rules is to use procedures that would be too costly, that would interfere too much with other more important goals that the school is trying to accomplish, or that would unacceptably violate the student’s liberty, privacy, or dignity. If so, then what you have to do is just come to terms with the fact that you can’t always enforce all of your school policies all the times, and sometimes clever kids are going to manage to get away with something that the rules say they shouldn’t do — and, well, Christ, what else is new?

Jill:

which would mean that a lot of kids in more conservative or rural areas would get really crappy sex ed, or none at all. And likely crappy science and literature classes, too. Which is why I think libertarian principles applied to education are problematic.

Well, then. Thank goodness government schooling has done such a great job making sure that kids in more conservative areas don’t end up with really crappy sex ed, or none at all.

Oh, wait.

GT 2008-06-11: Beating up your teenage daughter isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law. In which parents of several teenaged defendants sue for a restraining order against Justice of the Peace Gustavo “Gus” Garza, of Los Fresnos, Texas, and if possible his removal from the bench. After a 14 year old young woman was hauled into his court over skipping school, he ordered her stepfather to spank her with a heavy wooden paddle, in front of strangers in open court. Garza claims he didn’t “order” a spanking per se, and calls this a “punishment option,” because the threatened “alternative” was a $500 fine and a criminal record for the daughter if the stepfather refused to spank her. After the court-ordered spanking, Garza told the stepfather that he hadn’t hit her hard enough.

Several other parents have now come forward, including the parents of a 14-year-old boy with a muscular development disability who Garza ordered beaten as punishment for swearing at a bus driver, and have joined the lawsuit.

A young woman is shot to death and her car is gutted and set on fire in a campus parking lot. This is not considered reason enough to conclude there’s enough of an “immediate threat” to the campus community to active AU Alert.

Students find out the next day and start to talk about what happened amongst themselves. These rumors, which may affect the University’s P.R. with parents and alumni, are considered reason enough to conclude that there’s an immediate threat to the campus community to activate AU Alert.

And that right there tells you all that you need to know about the Auburn University senior administration’s attitude towards campus safety and violence against women in the Auburn “campus community.”

-AU graduate, class of ’03

Kevin,

Broadly speaking, I agree with your and Henley’s point about strategic priorities. It’s an odd form of libertarianism, and a damned foolish one, that operates by trying to pitch itself to the classes that control all the levers of power in both the market and the State, and to play off their fears and class resentment against those who have virtually no power, no access to legislators, are disproportionately likely not to even be able to vote, and who are trodden upon by the State at virtually every turn. It makes just about as much sense as trying to launch a feminist movement whose first campaign would be to organize a bunch of men against their “crazy ex-girlfriends.”

But I do want to sound a note of caution. Aren’t there a lot of so-called social programs out there which the government fraudulently passes off as crutches, when in fact they are crowbars? Since you mentioned it, consider the minimum wage–the primary effect of which is simply to force willing workers out of work. If it benefits any workers, then it benefits the better-off workers at the expense of marginal workers who can less afford to lose the job. Or, to take another example, consider every gradualist’s favorite program — the government schools — which in fact function as highly regimented, thoroughly stifling, and unbearably unpleasant detention-indoctrination-humiliation camps for the vast majority of children and adolescents for whose benefit these edu-prisons are supposedly being maintained.

Or for that matter, consider phony “pro-labor” legislation like the Wagner Act, the primary function of which is actually to capture unions with government patronage and bring them under greater government regulation.

Aren’t there a lot of so-called “crutches,” usually defended by corporate liberals and excoriated by conservatives, which really ought to be pressured and resisted and limited and abolished as quickly as possible, precisely because, bogus liberal and conservative arguments notwithstanding, they actually work to shackle the poor or otherwise powerless “for their own good”?

piny,

I didn’t mean to suggest that adolescents never consider or make a physical transition, or to attribute to Michelle the claim that there ought to be therapeutic intervention to “correct” GID in young kids because a failure to do so would lead to them ending up gay. I didn’t infer from her mention of the “outcome” statistics that that’s what she believes. If I did inadvertently suggest that, I apologize for being unclear.

The point I was trying to make about age is that, as I understand it, an issue that’s unlikely to come up at the age of 7 or 8 in a case like this one. A few years later, closer to adolescence, sure, but at that point we’re moving rapidly away from the diagnostic territory of “GID in Children” anyway, and towards “GID in Adolescents and Adults.” My understanding may be mistaken; if so I retract that claim, but I’d still make the more specific claim that it doesn’t have much to do with what this particular kid and her mother say they’re concerned about at this particular moment, or with the details of how the school is dealing with them. And I’d also fall back on the other argument against the basic problem with the way that the medical establishment holds medical aids to transition hostage to medicalized labels and “disorder” diagnoses.

The stuff about “outcome” statistics wasn’t meant to suggest that Michelle personally believed that there was something wrong with adolescents being gay. Rather that if one believes that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, nothing wrong with not being gay, nothing wrong with being trans, and nothing wrong with not being trans (which for all I know is what Michelle believes; otherwise I would have been arguing about that rather than just asserting it), then that correspondingly undermines the claim that there’s anything that ought to be called “disordered” or of “clinical interest” here, and to that extent it’s unclear why you’d need a diagnostic category for it, let alone a diagnostic category that’s used to justify psychotherapeutic intervention (at least not for children who don’t actively seek it out for themselves, rather than being shoved into it by anxious adults), let alone a diagnostic category that’s counted as a mental “disability” for legal purposes.

If I had to guess at Michelle’s motives I’d be very unlikely to guess that it had to do with personal attitudes of homophobia or transphobia, and much more likely to guess that they have to do with the tendency in our culture to elevate professionalized psychiatry and medicine as the primary or only way to understand the things that are most important to our lives, and the “mission creep” for medicalized labels that this inevitably leads to, no matter how ill-founded or inappopriate that model may be in a given area. But that’s just speculation, and I’ll happily take it all back if I’m wrong.

Rosehiptea,

As Holly mentions, the major distinction in types of treatment has to do with whether the diagnosis is made in childhood or later in life. Shrinks are generally respectful enough of their adults patients’ wishes and strongly held convictions, at least on this specific point, not to simple-mindedly force them into efforts to “correct” their transgenderism. Not so for children, where all kinds of nasty behavioral therapy are commonly employed to “cure” them.

Michelle,

I think that when the common features of “diagnostic category” are explicitly described “symptoms,” while the thing itself is explicitly labeled a “disorder” and it is classified as an Axis I Clinical Disorder, it’s a bit odd to suggest that the purpose of the diagnostic category is primarily descriptive, rather than prescriptive. When professional medical practitioners describe a set of behaviors and attitudes in terms that are directly and deliberately taken from the medical study of disease, and describes them as causes for “clinical attention,” it is pretty strongly suggested that there’s something wrong with people who have that “disorder.”

As for the professional ethics in sex-reassignment surgery, it has basically nothing to do with the use of Gender Identity Disorder as a “diagnostic category” in eight year old children, which was the context of the discussion. However, I think that if the sole raison d’etre for this diagnostic category is in order to pander to the prejudices of doctors who can only be persuaded to acknowledge their trans patients’ considered judgment when said patients can get another doctor to sign off on it in the form of an Official Diagnosis certifying that they’re “disordered,” that’s a pretty slender reed to lean on. I’d hope that maybe we can start talking about changes that are important for our lives without first having to get a medical label slapped on it.

As for the study of “outcomes” in children labeled as having GID, cf. Speck’s reply. (Incidentally, last I checked, the DSM-IV TR says that 3/4 of anatomical boys diagnosed with GID end up living as homosexual or bisexual males in their late adolescence; the corresponding figure for anatomical girls diagnosed with GID are said to be unknown.)

But, moreover, I don’t see what the point of bringing this up is in the first place. If 3/4 of GID-diagnosed kids turn out to be gay, then so what? There’s nothing wrong with being gay and there’s nothing wrong with not being gay. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live as a girl (or boy) when you’re 8 and then deciding you want to live as a gay man (or lesbian) when you’re 16. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live as a girl (or boy) when you’re 8 and then deciding that you want to continue living as a woman (or man) when you’re 16. There’s nothing wrong with changing the gender you want to live as every four months, if you feel like it. If only a few kids diagnosed GID end up seeking sex-reassignment surgery as adults, what of clinical interest follows from that? It’s certainly not any kind of argument for therapeutic intervention with the kids with strong, persistent cross-gender identification (either potential outcome–remaining trans or not remaining trans–is fine, so what’s the big deal?). Nor is it an argument for trying to get the government to treat 8 year old kids with strong, persistent cross-gender identification as if they had a mental “disability.”

ThickRedGlasses,

“The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” . . . People with Gender Identity Disorder are going to be significantly distressed by being in the wrong body, even if the social stigma goes away.

A significant part of my point is that the criteria having to do with “impairment in social [or] occupational … functioning” are basically bogus. They’re a way of shifting the responsibility for other people’s discrimination and bullying onto the victims of the discrimination and bullying. In reality, insofar as there’s a “disorder” here, it’s because other people have a problem, not because kids labeled as having GID have a problem.

As far as “clinically significant distress” goes, as far as I know, there’s been no positive evidence presented to the effect that the little girl in question feels that way, and I see little reason to assume that she does. Not everybody who wants to live as a member of a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth is especially concerned about the anatomical details of their body, especially not when they are still years away from puberty.

If, on the other hand, she does feel that way, then in any case that’s a separate issue from the accommodations that the school should or shouldn’t make for her. They don’t have much control over her personal feelings about her genitals. The issue at hand is how they will or won’t deal with the questions about her immediate social environment–whether or not teachers and classmates call her by her chosen name, allow her to to come to school dressed as a girl, do or don’t harass her, etc.

From a clinical standpoint, I’d question the utility of creating a gender-specific diagnostic category if the only purpose is to group together people who are (1) trans and (2) depressed or anxious or dysphoric about their bodies. There’s nothing wrong with (1) per se, and there’s already a ton of different diagnostic categories to cover (2), so why come up with a new one just to single out the fact that one subgroup of people who develop (2) are also (1)?

Holly:

Thank you for posting this. I love how the genital correctness blowhard brigade keeps falling back on the idea that anyone who doesn’t go out of their way to make life unpleasant for this kid (e.g. by refusing to call her by her chosen name, or by harassing or punishing her for wearing the “wrong” set of clothes to school) must, therefore be “bending over backwards” to suit her delicate sensibilities. Rather than, you know, just not going out of their way to be obnoxious to an eight-year-old kid in the name of heteropatriarchal social engineering.

ThickRedGlasses:

Wouldn’t this child be considered disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Gender Identity Disorder is considered considered a mental disorder, so shouldn’t this girl be covered by ADA?

I think we’d be better off not going there.

So-called “Gender Identity Disorder” is a basically political, not medical diagnosis. It’s been used repeatedly as an excuse for quack psychiatrists and anxious or controlling parents to inflict all kinds of torture, mislabeled “therapy,” in the name of “curing” their trans kids, or even mildly gender-deviant kids, of their “disorder”. In fact there is absolutely nothing wrong or crazy or disordered about a kid born anatomically male who wants to live as a girl (or vice versa), and I think it would be a serious mistake to reinforce and institutionalize the notion that there is, whatever short-term advantages you might hope to gain from it.

A few decades ago, Homosexuality was considered a mental illness and included as a category in the DSM. But if that diagnosis were still on the books, I think it would be counterproductive, to say the least, for gay liberationists to try and use it to get accommodations under the ADA.

Anthony,

Suppose that Prez Ron Paul decided — as Harry Browne, for example, promised to do when he ran on the LP ticket — to issue blanket presidential pardons to all nonviolent drug offenders in the United States, including both those in federal and those in state custody. In one sense, this action wouldn’t increase the net extraction of taxes against anybody (it would dramatically reduce spending by both state and federal government). But then, neither would the action of declaring all local government schools abolished. In some other sense, both actions would make use of some non-zero amount of tax money — to pay for the paper and the pens and the administrative costs of notifying the prison and so on — but that money would have been extracted whether it was used to pay for one thing or for the other thing, and neither nullifying drug laws through blanket pardons nor declaring local government schools abolished would directly increase the amount of taxes extracted in the future, either. (In fact, both actions would stand some small chance of indirectly decreasing the level of taxation.)

That said, would you make a similar argument to the effect that if even one taxpayer objected to releasing nonviolent drug offenders from state prisons, the nullification-through-blanket pardon would (1) have an identifiable victim, and (2) victimize that victim in such a way as to be fairly characterized as “an astonishing act of centralized tyranny”? If so, why? If not, what’s the difference between the one case and the other?