Secretary of Education Linda McMahon got to the heart of the moral panic over trans kids in a statement earlier this week, where she attacked California for protecting trans kids from getting forcibly outed to their parents: “Children do not belong to the State—they belong to families. We will use every available mechanism to hold California accountable for these practices and restore parental rights.” 

That is, the right sees children as property, and, to them, the only debate is whose property they are. The possibility that they’re actually human beings who belong to no one is simply unthinkable.

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Liberals, on the other hand, see children as human beings: Human beings who need extra help and care, who need boundaries and education, but they’re still people; people with their own identities, thoughts, and interests that their parents can’t control, who will eventually become adults who are not who their parents may have wanted them to be.

This attitude is what’s boiling underneath the right’s anxiety about trans kids, but they rarely come out and say it because many people who haven’t thought too much about this issue would reject the idea that parents can force their kids to become the kind of adults they want them to be.

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But it’s definitely the foundation of the anti-trans backlash. It’s what’s underneath those urban legends conservatives tell each other about teachers turning their kids transgender: someone is going to force my kid to be like them; they couldn’t possibly be their own person.

It’s why right-wingers like to believe that things like social media, television, or “social contagion” turn kids trans; their kid isn’t really trans, so it’s not really so bad if they withhold love and support or even kick their kid out for being trans because they’re just protecting their kid from an outside force.

It’s why they stop talking to their trans or queer kids when they come out or kick them out of their homes. They’re supposed to be what their parents want them to be, and it’s so deeply ingrained that they sometimes can’t even understand how their kids could be their own people.

It’s also why they can say with a straight face that they still love their LGBTQ+ kids even after they kick them out, and they get mad at anyone who calls them a bad parent. They confuse loving themselves — or at least their idea of their child — with actually loving their child.

It’s implied every time conservatives bring up “parents’ rights” without ever mentioning children’s rights. To them, kids have no rights that are distinct from their parents’. They don’t have the right to an education that prepares them to be independent adults or the right to any private space — physical or even mental — to learn who they are. They are empty vessels to be moulded into and filled with whatever their parents want them to be. They’re like domesticated animals who need to be trained to perform a certain way.

This is why so much of the anti-LGBTQ+ movement focuses on schools. If a kid isn’t at home, there’s a good chance they’re at school, and teachers, librarians, and coaches are the other adults in a kid’s life who can act as role models. Church is another place where kids interact with adults who aren’t in their families, but parents can pick a church from an array of choices. Most parents don’t have that luxury when it comes to school, and some of them really don’t like that fact.

So it’s no surprise that McMahon, the administration official charged with education, is the one saying the quiet parts loud here. Trans kids playing sports with their friends, students learning about LGBTQ+ people so that they’re more tolerant, teens having access to books with LGBTQ+ characters, all these education issues are seen as assaults on conservative parents’ rights because they can’t keep their kids from learning about fairness and civility to people who are different from them.

And conservative parents aren’t just offended that their kids are being exposed to the fact that LGBTQ+ people exist; they’re offended that their property rights are being violated.

Conservative parents don’t see it that way, of course. To them, it’s just natural that a child will be a replica of their parents, and any aberration from that is the result of outside influence. They spent yesterday arguing on social media that the guy who attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was actually on the left because his kids look queer and leftish — they literally believe that political views are hereditary.

Spelled out like this, it sounds pretty bad. Most people wouldn’t agree that kids don’t have any rights to be the people that they are, and even conservatives realize that saying this explicitly would make their position seem unsympathetic.

So they develop narratives to justify their control over their kids, positioning parents as always being right and as the only people who can protect their children from one bogeyman or another who wants to lead them astray. They spread rumors about teachers transing kids behind their parents’ backs, when, in reality, the issue is that a trans or nonbinary kid is exploring their identity at school — the place where their parents have less surveillance over them — and they’re not ready to talk to their parents while they’re still figuring it out.

That is, conservatives have to think that trans identity comes from teachers so that they don’t have to live with the idea that their own kid is not who they want them to be. Then they say teachers are telling kids to keep quiet about this, when in reality it’s students who don’t want teachers to tell their unsupportive parents about them.

This extends outside of LGBTQ+ issues, too. If kids are property, then parents have a right to deny them vaccines, while the child has no right to evidence-based health care. If kids are property, then parents have a right to turn a profit on them, which child labor laws infringe on, while the child doesn’t have a right to be protected from the exploitation of the labor market. If kids are property, parents should be allowed to force them to carry babies, while kids don’t have the right to control their own bodies.

It’s a battle of narratives, and the “blue-haired liberal teacher is forcing kids to be trans” is a narrative that works for the conservative worldview. It allows them to exert control over their kids because they’re not forcing their kids to be someone they’re not; they’re just protecting them from a scary outside force that wants to harm kids for no reason. Their egos won’t let them face the reality that their kid is just queer or trans, and they’re the ones who are trying to force the kid to be something they’re not.

In the end, they make up these stories because they’re too ashamed to face the reality of their own actions and beliefs: they’re making their own kids sadder, more afraid, and more alone.

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