There was an uproar online this week after a man who calls himself "Zinnia Jones" and demands that everyone consider him a female wrote a few tweets regarding minors taking drugs to make themselves somewhat ape the opposite sex.

Jones wrote:

If children can't consent to puberty blockers which pause any permanent changes even with the relevant professional evaluation, how can they consent to the permanent and irreversible changes that come with their own puberty with no professional evaluation whatsoever? An inability to offer informed consent or understand the long-term consequences is actually an argument for putting every single cis and trans person on puberty blockers until they acquire that ability. This is literally a position that permanent changes are fine as long as you're not trans[.]

If children can't consent to puberty blockers which pause any permanent changes even with the relevant professional evaluation, how can they consent to the permanent and irreversible changes that come with their own puberty with no professional evaluation whatsoever?

— Zinnia, adult demon female (@ZJemptv) December 2, 2020

An inability to offer informed consent or understand the long-term consequences is actually an argument for putting every single cis and trans person on puberty blockers until they acquire that ability.

— Zinnia, adult demon female (@ZJemptv) December 2, 2020

This is literally a position that permanent changes are fine as long as you're not trans

— Zinnia, adult demon female (@ZJemptv) December 2, 2020

Conservative media outlets erupted.  Headlines popped up like "Transgender activist says all children should be put on puberty blockers until they can decide their gender" (TheBlaze), "Transgender activist calls for all children to be put on puberty blockers until they can determine identity" (Washington Examiner), and "'Trans Activist' Says Children Need Mandatory Hormone Blockers, Kids Can't 'Consent' to Puberty" (Daily Handle).

TheBlaze provides a good example of the bad reporting that followed.  Phil Shiver wrote:

Lauren McNamara, known by followers as "Zinnia Jones," argued earlier this month that children should be legally able to consent to the administration of puberty blockers since they already de facto consent to the "permanent and irreversible changes" that come naturally through puberty. ...

[Jones] argued in her [sic!] tweet thread that puberty became "optional" when technology was developed to "enable deliberate choice between natal puberty and puberty induced by cross-sex hormones.

There are a couple of problems here.

First of all, that TheBlaze would use female pronouns to describe this man is disgraceful.  "Zinnia Jones" was not just "born male."  He still is male and always will be.  He cannot be anything else.  To call a man "she" and "her" is to be complicit in transgender insanity.  It's twice as damaging when conservatives, who purport to hold the moral high ground, join liberal sexual deviants in pushing the linguistic envelope.

Second and more important is that Shiver got Jones's argument wrong.  Jones did not say all children should be put on puberty-blockers.  Rather, he's attacking conservatives' logic: if conservatives maintain that minors are incapable of consenting to body-changing processes, then all children should be preserved from puberty, itself a body-changing process, until they're mature enough according to the law (or conservatives' fancy) to consent to it.

(The Washington Examiner, which also disgracefully refers to Jones as "she," appears to have come to the same conclusion, having changed its headline.)

While transgenderism is insane, and Jones is insane for promoting it, as a matter of fact, he's deftly backed conservatives into a corner here.  Matt Walsh, who got Jones's position right at The Daily Wire, shows why, perhaps in spite of himself, with a reductio ad absurdum:

If puberty violates consent, then my bones violated my consent by making me six feet tall. Certainly my metabolism has committed an unspeakable crime against me by slowing down, without asking first, and ensuring that I can no longer eat at Cinnabon without the evidence showing up around my midsection. In fact, even as I write these words, my heart is pumping blood without asking permission and my liver has taken it upon itself to filter blood, regardless of my personal preferences. ...

Our consent cannot be violated by nature, because nature is outside the realm of consent. Looters who destroy your store have committed a crime against you. A hurricane that destroys your store has not.  You are not oppressed or victimized by a natural process occurring in or to your body.

Walsh's rejoinder is better than he's willing to give himself credit for, possibly because the implications are pretty dire for the modern Western way of life.  He ridicules the idea of stopping his own liver's filtration process as if that were an absurd proposition, but in fact, that's where we are.

This is the most important takeaway from the Zinnia Jones debacle.  To wit, conservatives are trying to oppose Jones in a culture that 

(a) has made a deity out of "consent."  See the chaotic nonsense on campuses about "affirmative consent" to sex, with its accompanying Star Chamber proceedings against men who insufficiently procure such consent; the extreme expansion of the definition of rape to include sex acts once consented to but subsequently regretted; and Planned Parenthood's obsession with insisting that any sex act is acceptable provided the participants "say 'yes' and seem happy."  It's not just liberals who do this.  Conservatives do it, too, or else there wouldn't be the exclusive focus on minors not being permitted to mutilate themselves.  (See also libertarian arguments for legalizing society-destroying drugs.)

and

(b) has been marinating in legal abortion for a half-century.  We've all been brainwashed to believe that women can withhold or revoke their consent to birth their already conceived children.  As there are few processes more natural than pregnancy, it stands to reason that a society with a pro-abortion mentality will descend into believing that people can grant or withhold their consent to other natural processes, such as puberty.

We see this self-destroying outlook elsewhere, too, outside mothers murdering their pre-born babies.  It's now mainstream in the West to believe that people can consent to have themselves murdered, usually by doctors.  It's extremely mainstream, even uncontroversial, to champion people's right to consent to sterilize themselves by cutting sex organs.  Likewise to corrupt the sex act so as to render it fruitless, even to the point of women sedulously poisoning themselves to trick their own bodies into believing they're constantly pregnant.  (That's the original "consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy" argument.  The vast majority of conservatives support it.)  The right to consent to blow up children's families is sacrosanct among liberals and conservatives both — although this one gets tricky when one spouse doesn't consent to the divorce, in which case family blow-up takes precedence.  And don't get me started on the right to consent to send your kids to government schools, where taxpayer-funded teachers will instruct them in how to become future Zinnia Joneses.

To sum it up, it's easy for conservatives to get the reporting on Jones's tweets so wrong because they are working from a liberal frame of mind — namely, that because adults can "consent," they can do whatever they want in matters of sex.  This is true — they certainly can — but it misses that (a) children also can (i.e., have the physical capability to) do whatever they want, and (b) adults shouldn't do whatever they want, regardless of what they might be ready to consent to.

In other words, Jones was set to win this argument because liberals and conservatives have been cooperating the past half-century or so to lay all the groundwork for him.  Both sides of this debate agree that people can "revoke their consent" and thwart natural processes — divorce, contraception, abortion — with only some minor bickering about fringe particulars like "viability" or "rape and incest."  Both sides also agree that genital mutilation is acceptable after some magical age line.  The only dispute is whether it's acceptable before that line, too.  As long as that's the debate we're having and those the premises, transgender insanity will continue apace.

Image: Zinnia Jones via YouTube.