Nomadic ethics versus adultism: Towards equitable healthcare futures.

Parents and their trans and gender expansive children over several years have had to navigate prejudice and misinformation about healthcare interventions available. In the UK, which I use as a case study in this chapter, gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues interventions (GnRHa) for trans children has been vilified as an experiment by trans exclusionary people (TEP). TEP suggest that GnRHa stops trans children from developing ‘normally,’ into cis gender straight, gay and lesbian people and also sterilizes them. This, they say, is underpinned by a conspiratorial trans lobby pushing an ideological message that removes women’s and girl’s rights. These challenges have apparently been accepted by the UK government’s equalities minister in 2020, and in a December 2020 impacted a court ruling where the judges said that it was highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or less would be competent to give consent to the administration of GnRHa, and that it was doubtful that 14 or 15 year old children too could understand the long-term risks and consequences of these healthcare interventions and if desired by the child they must acquire legal consent. In the UK, this shift in sentiment attempted to establish a legal framework that does not reflect all children’s equitable competency to consent. The ruling casts trans children and their parents within an oppressive adult-centric medicolegal structure that is not applied equitably to cis children who may also take this intervention for other conditions; however, it does force precedents for them. This chapter explores adultist notions of competency to consent by juxtaposing trans and cis people’s requests for GnRHa. Firstly, I argue that that trans exclusionary people’s arguments and the legal ruling reifies a representation of adult binary sex-differences, which reinforces what I call a gender normative adultism. I demonstrate that the logical outcome of these gender critical contestations and the legal ruling form a gender normative adultism that will negatively impact all children’s healthcare desires. Considering this through the lens of neo materialist nomadic ethics (Braidotti, 2006), I will argue for a medical-patient ethics based on varying nomadic human drives that challenges gender normative adultism.