Samantha Brennan: A child's right to a gender-open future

If children’s rights protect their right to an open future, what does that entail for thinking about children and gender? Across North America, policies that affirm the gender of trans and gender nonbinary children are under attack. Part of the justification of these attacks rests on a particular account of parental rights, one in which parents, not the state, and certainly not children themselves, are deemed to have authority over a child’s gender. Most of the responses to these arguments either argue against the understanding of parental rights put forward or deny that the policies in question follow from parental rights. Instead, I want to look at the issue from the perspective of children’s rights, beginning by looking at a child’s right to an open future. What sorts of behaviours would a more gender-open approach to parenting recommend or require, from an ethical perspective? How should schools treat children if children have a right to a gender-open future?