Growing Up “Properly”: Religious Freedom, Gender-Affirming Care Bans, and the Production of Future Citizens

This paper examines the state’s vested interest in producing children as “proper” future citizens by juxtaposing two seemingly disparate legal frameworks: the religious freedom protections afforded to Amish parents in Wisconsin v. Yoder(1972) and contemporary legislative prohibitions on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. By analyzing these cases through queer theoretical approaches to futurity, childhood, and citizenship, I demonstrate how debates ostensibly centered on “parental rights” reveal deeper state concerns with maintaining normative citizen formation and reproducing particular national imaginaries. The religious exemption granted in Yoder and the recent wave of anti-transgender healthcare legislation in states like Tennessee (2023) illustrate how the state selectively supports or overrides parental authority based on its assessment of whether the resulting children will conform to desired models of citizenship. 

In the early 1970s, Amish parents challenged Wisconsin’s compulsory attendance law requiring children to attend school until age 16, arguing that formal education beyond eighth grade violated their religious beliefs and way of life. Chief Justice Burger’s majority opinion emphasized that Amish children received practical vocational training that prepared them for productive adult roles within their community. The Court was particularly persuaded by evidence that Amish youth rarely became dependent on welfare or engaged in criminal activity, suggesting their alternative education adequately served the state’s interests in producing self-sufficient citizens. The Court highlighted how Amish children were “already teaching a work ethic” and “making good moral citizens” despite their deviation from standard educational requirements. When Amish parents sought exemption from compulsory education laws, the Supreme Court validated their parental authority specifically because their alternative educational approach was deemed to produce industrious, moral citizens who would not burden the state.

In contrast, when contemporary parents support their transgender children’s access to gender-affirming care, numerous state legislatures have intervened to override parental authority, despite this care being endorsed by major medical associations. Tennessee’s 2023 law, the “Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act”, exemplifies this trend by criminalizing healthcare providers who offer puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgical interventions to transgender minors while explicitly exempting similar treatments when provided to non-transgender children for other medical conditions. The law’s preamble explicitly frames these prohibitions in terms of the state’s interest in “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex” and preventing treatments that “might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Notably, the legislation contains no religious exemptions, even for families whose faith traditions affirm gender diversity, demonstrating how religious freedom claims are selectively recognized when they align with state objectives. This law, like similar legislation in other states, effectively positions the state as having superior judgment to both parents and medical professionals regarding the proper development of transgender youth into future citizens.

Drawing on queer theoretical interrogations of “the Child” as a political figure and childhood as a construct from scholars like Lee Edelman, Kathryn Bond Stockton, and Jack Halberstam, I analyze how both cases mobilize particular conceptions of children to advance state interests. In both cases, the state’s primary concern is not with the welfare of actual children or with the preservation of parent’s rights, but with the symbolic Child who represents the future of the nation – a future that is undoubtedly straight, cisgendered, and white. The Amish were permitted educational exception precisely because their alternative socialization was deemed compatible with producing functional citizens who would contribute economically and not disrupt social norms. Meanwhile, transgender healthcare bans reflect social anxieties that children who transition may grow into adults whose very existence challenges fundamental categories upon which current political arrangements depend.

Drawing on queer theoretical interrogations of “the Child” as a political figure, I analyze how both cases mobilize particular conceptions of childhood to advance state interests. Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism shows how the abstract Child serves as the ultimate justification for political decisions that maintain heteronormative social orders, where the innocent Child embodies futurity itself against which no political argument can stand. Kathryn Bond Stockton's concept of “growing sideways” rather than “up” offers a framework for understanding how transgender youth challenge teleological assumptions about development, as they grow in ways that exceed normative expectations and make this sideways growth visible in ways that provoke adult anxiety. Jack Halberstam’s exploration of queer temporality further reveals how transgender children’s lives disrupt conventional narratives of maturation by refusing developmentally appropriate gender expression, thereby challenging the progressive teleology of childhood underlying state policies.

In both Yoder and the anti-transgender legislation in Tennessee, the state’s primary concern is not with the welfare of actual children or with the preservation of parents’ rights, but with the symbolic Child who represents the future of the nation – a future that is undoubtedly straight, cisgendered, and white. The Amish were permitted educational exception precisely because their alternative socialization was deemed compatible with producing functional citizens who would contribute economically while maintaining fundamental gender norms and family structures, with the Court explicitly noting that Amish education prepared children for “specific roles in adult society” that preserved patriarchal arrangements. By contrast, transgender healthcare bans reflect profound social anxieties that children who transition may grow into adults whose very existence challenges fundamental categories upon which current political arrangements depend. This distinction explains why parental authority is upheld in one case and overridden in the other, revealing the state’s selective deployment of “parents' rights” discourse only when it serves to reproduce normative citizens.

The rhetoric justifying both Yoder and anti-transgender legislation reveals political commitments to particular configurations of family, development, and citizenship that are positioned as necessary for national continuity. The implications of this analysis extend beyond these specific cases to broader questions about how the state regulates childhood and parenthood in service of reproducing particular social orders. By recognizing parenthood as a site of political contestation rather than simply a private relationship, we can better understand why certain parental decisions are supported while others are criminalized. This perspective reveals that “parents' rights” discourse functions primarily as a mechanism for negotiating whose vision of proper citizenship will be instantiated in the next generation.