I think part of the reason I'm not really viewing through the lens of abuse victim, is because (at least as far as my understanding of a time period I was not alive in goes) they most likely wouldn't have considered themselves victims, or children, and nor would most of society, so from my perspective it seems irrelevant to the conversation. People were expected to grow up quicker and take care of themselves then, they married and worked and had families younger and relationships with age gaps/power imbalances weren't looked at with anywhere near as much disapproval as today. And people had a harsher, more judgemental outlook on those who fell out of the bounds of acceptable society. Of course you may have a totally different perspective, but from my frame of reference for the past (my fairly conservative parents plus whatever news and media I've consumed) I would have thought that most people back then would have viewed a teenage prostitute as a bad egg, not a victim of abuse. Ergo, I see categorising them as the latter to be applying a modern lens to the past. Anyway, definitely not arguing that they weren't abused or exploited, but I just wasn't factoring that element in as much as you were for the reasons I just explained.
Thank you for the reply, I understand your point of view better now.
Definitely. But I think a big reason so many people are willing to accept it, rather than seeing it for what it is - a social contagion like EDs and cutting - is because it puts those pesky gender non-conforming children into a nice normal box. I don't think most people are consciously thinking "I hate my probably gay kid and want to turn them straight" but I think a decent chunk of them are subconsciously influenced by homophobia. A 'everyone's lives will be easier if my child fits in, so I must be doing the right thing' rationalization. And I think that if it weren't primarily children from marginalised groups being harmed by 'gender affirming care' there would have been more outrage and it wouldn't have gone as far as it has. Again, I don't think the average person is outright thinking "yay I'm glad a whole generation of gay, autistic and traumatised kids are being sterilised and mutilated". But I think society in general just cares less than it would if this was somehow happening to 'normal' children.
It makes me think of a line from The Normal Heart, when talking about public apathy towards the AIDS crisis - "The simple truth is, they just don't like us." And it's very true. Very few people hate any minority group enough to go out their way to do something bad to them. But most people also aren't going to go out of their way to stand up for them either. Gender ideology got a foothold because men weren't that concerned with women's issues, straight people weren't that concerned with gay issues and so forth, and now it's easier not to speak out against it so most people don't.
