Your family does not exist in a vacuum, and you do not have sole rights over what happens to your child, or what they think about themself or the world:
- We have child protective services for a reason; if you fuck up in some severe way, the child will no longer be yours, that's how it should be.
- We require vaccinations because your child isn't the only child in the fucking world, there are other children and their health to be concerned about.
- We have public school curricula because children need to know certain things about the world to be functioning members of society. You cannot be a fully functioning member of society if you don't recognise everyone inside it.
- Your child's thoughts and feelings are not your own and hiding something from them will not stop them from being queer, no matter how much you wish it would.
Basically, your child is not a little you, they are a semi-independent person with an interior life of their own, they have their own rights independent of your feelings, and they exist in a vast and interconnected world full of other people - even different people.
As someone who has had extremely bad (now fully estranged) parents and know far too many people who have dealt with parental abuse, I bristle at the notion that parents have gifts of knowledge that non-parents lack, and that parents are uniquely suited to understand what's good for their children - they are not. At best they have one experiential part of a fabric of experiences and research about what child development is.
Parents are no better than anyone else - they are fallible humans who can have stupid fucking ideas, can be abusive and can be bigoted. I feel like not enough people get this idea - having a child gives you more responsibility for your actions and what you say, it does not absolve you of them. If you say stupid and irresponsible things, you're not a brave parent, you're an asshole who happens to have custody of a child.
I'm not worried about the people who have these feelings to the extent that they're trying to suppress queer visibility, they are firmly in the minority (at least in the UK). But I think the generic idea that parents are special beyond their basic experiences is fairly widespread, and I can count too many idiotic movements that use that resulting sense of entitlement and superiority and use their own children as human shields in proxy wars against progress over the decades.
I've talked about this before, but I think fundamentally the idea of what it means to be a parent needs to be made both un-special and also pretty fucking serious. You're not upgrading your relationship, you're not fulfilling a social script, you're not achieving immortality through an impressionable developing mind. You're just a someone who is also responsible for another someone.
Fun fact: In the US at least, child protection laws flow from anti-animal abuse laws. For a very long time, children were seen as private property of the parents, and the State should not get involved.
Conservatives want to get back to that society.
