I agree hormone therapy is the wrong medication here; it actually gets me pretty upset they'd do this to an eleven year old. I don't quite agree there's nothing to correct because there is a vast disparity between mental identity and physical identity. By no means do I think Jazz needs to be pushed toward masculinity, but I definitely believe mental conditioning is required for Jazz to better cope with her situation. Toward accepting herself as being quite different and understanding the world will look at her differently -- and being able to be okay with that. I absolutely do not believe hormone therapy will help with that. I don't think baldly revealing her status to other eleven year olds is very helpful either.
But, and this is the devil's advocate for me, again I have to give parents the benefit of the doubt because they're in the trenches. Maybe they know more and maybe they know without a shadow of a doubt this is the right course of action.
Personally I think using medical interventions so that a person can manipulate their gender to fit what they think is right in their head is no better than a deeply closeted gay born again christian taking viagra so he can have sex with women.
I'm all for gay rights and I think people should be able to do what they want to with their lives as long as they aren't hurting anyone but I strongly disagree with treating "transgender" persons with surgery and hormone therapy as any sort of medically covered procedure. If you want to do that sort of thing to yourself it should be 100% out of pocket like any other non health related elective procedure and it should never be done on children.
If you identify yourself as transgender and you feel that you need medical intervention you are openly saying that there is something deeply wrong with yourself. You are not proud of your identity, in reality you are doing everything possible to mangle your true physical body away from its true nature. I think a TS person seeking medical intervention is exhibiting a degree of self loathing on par with a gay person seeking medical intervention to become straight.
In fact in Iran where homosexuality is strongly frowned upon, male to female sex changes are actually very popular and are seen as a method by which a gay man can become socially acceptable in a society that does not tolerate open homosexuality.
To be fair though I think it should be illegal to perform any significant surgery on a minor for non medical reasons.
If a child is involved in an accident and is horribly burned, by all means do plastic surgery.
But a minor getting a non medically neccesary face lift / boob job / liposuction just to alter their looks should be illegal. Now if a 15 gets breast cancer and has a partial mastectomy, yeah she should be able to get breast implants. But a 15 year old who's just unhappy with being a B cup should not be able to regardless of her parent's opinion.
As for the parents knowing best, you forget that a great many people are stupid and have no idea what they're doing in life. They generally beleive they've made the best choices based on the information that was available to them at the time but history is littered with cases of people doing horrible horrible things that seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
