CNN reported on the suicide death of "transgender" teen Josh "Leelah" Alcon.
They linked his suicide to his parent's religion. (See screenshot below.)
This leads me to a question.
Are we getting to a point where Christian parents could have their children taken away from them due to belief in a religion that supposedly drives parents to "abuse" their children by not accepting the "validity" of the "transgender" issue?
Will being a Christian parent be considered as dangerous as other destructive things like drinking or drug problems?
More stories like this will continue to link highly emotional situations like suicide to Christianity. Will this push people to demand removal of children from Christian parents?
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The transgender life: What to know, say and understand - CNN.com
It will depend on the ferocity with which parents approach children whose lifestyle choices contradict their preferences. I prefer this to be looked at as a social and moral issue rather than a legal one, but there is certainly room for legal intervention if the rights of the child are being infringed by the parents. If the child is acting within its legal rights (which Josh was, at the age of sixteen) to choose his lifestyle so long as it did not infringe on another's rights, but the parents, for instance, kicked him out, they would be breaching their legal obligation to sustain the child until adulthood, and thus a court-case could be made.
The UN Convention on the Legal Rights of Children states that the government must respect a parent's right to raise a child as they please so long as the parents, in doing so, are respecting the legal rights of the child. Some of the further legal rights of a child are; the right to self-autonomy of thought, religion or no religion, and personal identity so long as it is not infringing on anyone else's rights; the right to a provided standard of living necessary for personal, religious, spiritual, moral and social development; and the right to protection from abuse, violence, exploitation, neglect and maltreatment.
It could be argued legally that by forbidding the boy to feel or think of his desire to be female that the parents are impeding his right to autonomy of thought and personal identity -- that they are effectively forbidding him to be what he identifies with even though his identification with being female does not in and of itself infringe upon any of the parents' legal rights. It would be fair, for instance, for the parents to deny the boy access to gender reassignment treatment until his legal age of consent, but it would not be fair for the parents to demand the boy stop identifying as female.
It also seems the mother misunderstood the boy's position when she said that the bible 'forbade his sexuality'. It is not an issue of sexuality, but an issue of gender. However, I can see how she misunderstood.
If we look at this another way, though, if he were homosexual. Again, it would be fair for the parent to deny the child bringing boyfriends to the house, but it would not be fair for the parent to demand the child stop being gay, as the child is perfectly within his legal rights to be so. His being attracted to men does not infringe on the rights of parents, because no parent has a right to force a child to be a certain sexuality or not be a certain sexuality, nor to have a child ''turn out just like we wanted him to''.