ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a new conceptual model for enabling and listening to children’s voices in decision-making processes. It develops a child’s right to decisional privacy, which draws on the legal and normative framework of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and extends the work of respected children’s rights scholars. Decisional privacy gives individuals the ability to make decisions that contribute to defining their identity, without unjustifiable interference from other individuals or the state. The case study of judicial proceedings concerning medical treatment for children experiencing gender dysphoria is introduced to illustrate how the conceptual model of children’s right to decisional privacy may apply in practice. This chapter also articulates the central argument of this book: that recognising a substantive right to decisional privacy for children requires attendant procedural rights that facilitate children’s meaningful participation in decision-making about their best interests; and that, as courts have increasingly encroached upon decision-making in relation to children’s medical treatment, they have denied the decisional privacy rights of transgender and gender diverse children.
