Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
JFC. An extraordinary fourteen-year-old might be right at the edge of being capable of making this decision on her own, but I would look on that medically as a black swan. His failure to act would have been child abuse IMO. Wait for the prefrontal cortex to catch up.
There is almost no limit to the dumb things I might have done at age 14 had I been surrounded by a large group of enthusiastic (adult and teenage) cheerleaders. It’s a rather robust finding that we tend to become like the people in our social networks, a phenomenon termed Three Degrees of Influence, based on the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in 2007. We become like our friends and this shouldn’t seem at all like a surprise. Social contagion affects our choices of food, clothing, dialect, music, movies, sports, religion and many other things. It is one of the more astoundingly strange claims out there to hear that in light of social contagion affecting so many other things that a teenager ends up doing, that it (somehow) doesn’t affect the temptation to say that one was born in the wrong body and that one needs transgender hormones and surgery.
Surreal that a parent to a 13-year old does not have a say in this drastic irreversible treatment to his child …
https://twitter.com/christophelston/status/1383814437237256202
https://thepostmillennial.com/father-sentenced-to-6-months-for-violating-gag-order-about-childs-medical-gender-transition/
Chris Peterson, a concerned parent, created this video to discuss the case of “CD.”