This Snopes article is misleading and makes me mad as well. I don't see how it debunks or casts doubt on the core claims at all. In fact, it affirms them by confirming that changes were made to the law in Oregon and that the effect of those changes is to legally permit elective double mastectomies on 15-year-old girls. Oh, but wait, Snopes is here to tell us, "Don't worry, because what kind of doctor would actually perform that kind of procedure on a young girl? Surely doctors will be reasonable." Those are the noises of someone who has no idea wtf they're talking about on issues stemming from gender ideology or is being deceitful while knowing better. We have already learned that good faith is not a standard we can rely on when it comes to those who profit from gender ideology.

I say this as a lawyer (not your lawyer) all the time but I hate how reporting on legal situations and changes is handled by the media when it's directed at the general public. It often preys upon widespread public ignorance about our legal system and the way changes are made to the law in the first place in order to manipulate public perception. In the U.S. we have a common law system involving an interplay of statutes passed by legislative bodies, agency regulations, agency opinions, guidance published by agencies, case law developed through judicial opinion, executive orders, procedural rules, etc. with layers of federal, state, and local laws. That's why when someone asks "Can I legally do X?" it's not a simple inquiry of "Let me pull up the law for a sec and let you know." The legal parameters for almost anything rely on a constellation of legal authorities as specified above that first require you to identify the universe of legal provisions at issue. You can’t answer a legal question with any reasonable degree of certainty without doing so.

Snopes's point seems to be that because the pre-existing age of medical consent in Oregon is in 15 and that that is the age of consent that applies to the new law in question, that it’s a nothingburger. The reporting that I read before, which was not from Fox News, made this clear. As if the think thanks and special interest organizations who drafted and lobbied for these specific legal changes didn't have a team of lawyers behind them analyzing the existing legal framework and implications of proposed changes. There is no way they didn't at any point identify and consider the age of the people to whom their proposed changes would apply. That means they knew it would allow 15-year-olds to get double mastectomies/sex change surgery without parental consent. That means they deliberately didn’t add a higher age of consent into this new law because they knew that the gap-filling age of consent for medical procedures would apply as a default. And if they had any issue with this result they would have pushed for an update to the law. So yea, here the legislators and lobbyists knew exactly what they were doing, and it’s shady af.

By the way, I’ve never looked into who publishes Snopes articles, but this is Kim LaCapria, the content manager for Snopes and author of this particular article. And if there’s any doubt about what her bias is here, she puts her pronouns in her Twitter profile, and if you Google her, you can also find her giving a lot of commentary in various publications about anti-trans hoaxes. There’s also a lot of weird information about her out there. I can’t look at Snopes the same way again.