12 Jul 2021
A leading medical ethics journal faced fierce backlash online after publishing an article suggesting that parents lose their authority to manage their transgender children’s medical decisions.
In an article, titled “LGBT testimony and the limits of trust” published last month in the
Journal of Medical Ethics, Dr. Maura Priest, a philosophy professor and bioethicist at Arizona State University, wrote that parents should lose their “veto power” in most “transition-related paediatric care”:
If the medical community is to take LGBT testimony seriously (as they should) then it is no longer the job of physicians to do their own weighing of the costs and benefits of transition-related care. Assuming the patient is informed and competent, then only the patient can make this assessment, because only the patient has access to the true weight of transition-related benefits. Moreover, taking LGBT patient testimony seriously also means that parents should lose veto power over most transition-related paediatric care.