Hacker News Reader

Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> with significant benefit to kids

Straight kids from stable homes, perhaps. For LGBT kids, or kids in abusive homes, it's the end of a significant lifeline.

View on HN

It's interesting yet saddening to play out the consequences along the path you've outlined. LGBT kids, by definition a 2-4% minority, are unlikely to find other people like themselves. They remain closeted for longer, trying and failing to conform. Their struggle will be unfortunate, but also not measurable.

What will be measurable is the % of youth who identify as LGBT, which will be lower because more of them would be closeted. That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".

The root issue here is children not coming out to their parents. If we improve that metric, we can begin to improve all other metrics. Ie: the parent can help the child discover appropriate peer groups

That requires the parents to be accepting and engaged, which is a great long-term goal but will take much longer to achieve than the first-order effects of losing access to peer communities. (There are also feedback loops: a group being less visible means that people in the group are less likely to realize it isn’t something uniquely wrong with them, there are fewer other people who know fact from myth, and so on.)

I imagine we've seen massive increase in parental acceptance in our lifetime already.

The root issue is parents not being safe for kids to come out to. If you risk being chucked out on the street, or sent to a conversion camp, why the hell would you come out to a parent?

And that problem is so severe that it dwarfs all second order effects by a massive margin.

> That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".

That'd be dumb and funny if politicians wouldn't abuse people's fears to boost conspiracy theories for their agenda. For example, where I live some politicians associated the trans community with paedophilic behavior.

I don't understand their endgame really. Where these anti free choice (anti-freedom) stances come from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com