Daily Archive

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew wants children under 16 kept off social media and AI chatbots.

Good.

Not because the policy is automatically workable. Kids are talented little smugglers, and the internet has more holes than any government net. But the premise is sound enough: children are not miniature adults. Their judgment is still forming. Their resilience is still forming. Their sense of self is still being built under pressure from machines designed to harvest attention, anxiety, loneliness, status hunger, and imitation.

Anyone who has spent time in a school already knows this. The phone does not stay in the phone. It follows children into classrooms, friendships, sleep, family life, and self-understanding, dragging the emotional weather of the internet behind it.

So Kinew is not wrong to worry about the infinite scroll.

But now comes the circle no one should be asked to square.

If children under 16 are too developmentally immature to responsibly use TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or AI chatbots, how are they mature enough to consent to medical interventions that can alter puberty, sexual development, fertility, and future bodily integrity?

That is not a cheap gotcha. It is the question.

The same adult world cannot say a 15-year-old is too vulnerable for algorithmic identity machines, then turn around and treat that same 15-year-old as a sovereign authority on an identity framework often first encountered, rehearsed, and socially reinforced online. The developmental premise cannot change just because the political subject changes.

This is where the phrase “gender-affirming care” does too much work.

It bundles together counselling, social transition, names, pronouns, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries, legal changes, and an institutional framework that treats affirmation as the default moral response. Once the label is accepted, scrutiny begins to sound cruel. Caution becomes “denial of care.” Questions become “hate.”

That is how a medical culture loses discipline.

None of this requires pretending that gender dysphoria is fake. It is not. Some young people are genuinely distressed, and they deserve compassion, seriousness, and protection from bullying or humiliation.

But compassion is not the same thing as medical acceleration.

The evidence base for pediatric gender medicine is not as settled as activists and professional bodies spent years pretending. The Cass Review in England found serious weaknesses in the evidence behind youth gender services and pushed the NHS toward a more cautious model. NHS England stopped routine prescribing of puberty blockers for minors in 2024, and the U.K. government later made restrictions on puberty blockers indefinite, citing expert advice about safety risks. (NHS England)

That was not an American culture-war panic. It was a major health system responding to an evidentiary rupture.

NHS England has also moved toward greater caution around masculinising and feminising hormones for minors, including a 2026 consultation on whether those treatments should remain a routine option for under-18s. (The Guardian)

Meanwhile, Manitoba’s own Gender Diversity and Affirming Action for Youth program says hormone blockers may be discussed for some youth early in puberty, while gender-affirming hormones may be discussed for youth who have completed puberty. Shared Health Manitoba has also described puberty blockers as delaying physical and sexual maturity for youth who have not yet entered or completed puberty. (Shared Health)

So the contradiction is not imaginary.

Kinew’s child-safety argument depends on one claim: children under 16 are developmentally vulnerable. They are susceptible to manipulation, emotional contagion, social pressure, adult incentives, and systems they do not fully understand.

Exactly.

Now apply that consistently.

Protect children from addictive apps. Protect them from algorithmic sexualization. Protect them from online mobs and chatbot intimacy. But also protect them from adults who treat adolescent distress as proof of an inner essence that must be medically affirmed before the child has finished becoming herself.

A sane society can hold two thoughts at once.

First, distressed children deserve care.

Second, because they are children, adults owe them caution.

Patience is not cruelty. Hesitation is not hatred. Preserving a child’s future options is not oppression.

Kinew has stumbled into the right premise. Children are not miniature adults. If that is true when the subject is social media, it does not magically become false when the subject changes to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, fertility, and future sexual development.

The standard cannot be: fragile when scrolling, sovereign when affirming.

That is not child protection. That is politics choosing which vulnerabilities count.

Kinew has been hoisted by his own petard. The only question is whether anyone in his political world is willing to notice.

References

Wab Kinew / Manitoba youth social media and AI chatbot ban coverage: (650 CKOM)

NHS England, Clinical policy: puberty suppressing hormones: (NHS England)

U.K. government, Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice: (GOV.UK)

U.K. government explainer, Puberty blockers: what you need to know: (healthmedia.blog.gov.uk)

NHS England / U.K. parliamentary briefing on hormone treatment policy for children and young people: (House of Commons Library)

Shared Health Manitoba, GDAAY program description: (Shared Health)

Shared Health Manitoba, Supporting Trans Youth to “Live Their Best Life”: (Shared Health)