Trans rights and anti-trans legislation in the USA
Since I’m always fuming about those trans “rights” which are just privileges being pushed by misogynists, I have to comment on the recent garbage.
Apparently, we’re doing this. Texas and Montana and Florida and who-knows-who-else-I-can’t-keep-up have been passing laws making it illegal to be trans, making it “legal” to take children away from parents for letting children switch gender, making it illegal for doctors to provide any cross-sex medical care to minors, and so on and so forth and so on.
(If you have a WashPost subscription, Philip Bump has a good article about the frequency of these laws in the various states. As for, as he says, it being “explicitly political, following an intentional effort to elevate transgender issues by right-wing activists,” yours truly pointed out that they’d be doing this years ago.)
These are human rights violations. Totally beyond the pale. A disgrace, a travesty, and a crime.
(Another parenthetical comment, which wouldn’t be necessary in a rational world. Feminists who advocate for women’s spaces are on the opposite side of trans issues from rightwingers. Feminists’ point is that you don’t need to cut biological bits to fit yourself into a socially determined cage. Feminists want to eliminate the cages. They advocate for women’s spaces to help women in our current misogynist world, not to limit them. Rightwingers, patriarchal caste system boosters, and general misogynists want to make the cages compulsory. The two are opposites. (Yes, I’m shouting.) Repubs are the opposite of feminists when they ballyhoo anti-trans legislation. Yes, both want to safeguard women’s spaces and stop minors from making decisions they could regret. For opposite reasons. The philosophy behind it becomes important when they can push their agenda through. Feminist implementation increases self-determination; misogynists just make stronger cages.)
There’s a right to control your own body, to control your own medical care, which is about as basic as it gets. Because children don’t have enough life experience to always know what they’re getting into, some caveats are essential for them which I’ll get to in a moment.
Nobody has the right to tell another human being what kind of sex to have or who to have it with or how to look while they’re having it, always providing all parties involved are pleased with the situation and are adults capable of understanding their choices.
In the case of children, nobody has the right to shut off their futures without knowing anything about them. The function of parents is to support and guide them into keeping their options open. Not closed.
So in the case of desperately unhappy children who want to be another sex, there has to be counseling. There has to be feminist counseling which can help them see how much of the desire is real and how much is the hope of escaping idiotic gender straitjackets imposed by sexists.
Kids being kids, I’d think it’s quite likely many of them would be happiest with being able to experiment. Wear whatever clothes they want, call themselves what they like, and see how things go. Medical treatments that close off their future sexual and reproductive lives seem like a really bad idea. But counselors see the one in a million exceptions, and there may well be some children for whom medical treatment is appropriate. That is a private decision for the child involved and those professionals helping them.
The point here is that it’s never a decision for politicians to make. They can require counseling for children before sex-changing medical treatment (and provide the funding for counseling). They cannot tell anyone which medical treatment to have or not to have.
And, unless the children have made it clear to social workers that they’re trying to escape, they certainly can’t take children away from their parents.
I guess one would really have to read the legislation itself to know what it is saying, as I do not trust liberal media such as WAPO on the subject of transgenderism. Making it illegal to be trans? In a way, they’ve already gotten their way as nobody *is* in fact trans, there being no such thing as being “born in the wrong body.” However, there *are* people who believe they are “trans” and who identify as such. What does a state which has made being trans illegal do in that case – round up trans identified people, charge them, jail them? It makes no sense.
As to making it illegal for doctors to provide any “cross-sex medical care” to minors, well, what is cross-sex medical care? As far as I know it consists of puberty blocking drugs such as Lupron, followed some years later by cross sex hormones (testosterone for females, estrogen for males). The bad health effects of Lupron in later years, especially for females, are legion (for males too, I think) and adding cross sex hormones to Lupron sterilizes the minor permanently. It SHOULD be illegal. Kids are way too young to make such permanent, life altering decisions. They simply do not have the life experience or brain development to do so and their parents should not be making such decisions for them either. It is for the kids to make their own decisions *after* they have become adults and can better understand what it is they are consenting to. It is probably going a little too far to take kids away from their parents if they agree to let their children change “gender” as these parents have probably been told their kids will kill themselves if not allowed to “trans.” (This is patently untrue, as the great majority of such kids will desist over time, and the others will just make their own decisions as adults.) It is, of course, entirely appropriate to let kids experiment by wearing whatever they want and doing whatever sports and activities they want, whether or not these accord with the stereotypes for the child’s sex. As a matter of fact it is not only appropriate, but DESIRABLE that parents give children this leeway to be themselves and not give the stupid, man-made sex stereotypes of “femininity” and “masculinity” any credence. But they should always be honest with their children about what sex they are and not “agree” that a boy is really a girl or vice versa.
Branjor on May 20th, 2023 at 12:07
The medical effects of the drugs are as you say, and my personal choices in those cases would be much like yours. The point I’m trying to stress is that it’s not up to _politicians_, or any third party, really, to make those choices for other people.
And, yes, kids do need to be protected from their own and others’ dumb choices. Obviously, that’s a giant topic. How best to do it is even more giant. What I’d want to see is a system that gives children as much ability to live life as they want while at the same time making sure they don’t fall into irrevocable paths that close off entire life trajectories. Such as being unable to have kids or enjoy sex. How, exactly, to do that is also mega-fraught. But it’s something (feminist) social workers and counselors have insight about. Not politicians, or voters, or somebody who wants help to be able to tell the boyz from the goilz.
quixote on May 20th, 2023 at 14:20
You say it’s not up to politicians to make these choices. There SHOULD be laws against doctors doing unnecessary, irreversible medical interventions on minors before they are even capable of consenting. It is just a form of medical child abuse. And who, other than politicians, makes laws? That is why they are called LEGISLATORS. Of course, the legislators making these laws in red states are also the ones banning abortion in those states and passing other repressive measures, such as voting restrictions and gerrymandering. They make laws against cross sex medical care for minors and against trans-identified males in girls’ sports for the wrong reasons. But however wrong their reasons and wrong some of their other actions, those laws and protections for women, girls and minors are the RIGHT thing to do. It is a case of broken clocks – they are right twice a day. I don’t see why you should disagree with them doing the right thing just because they are politicians any more than you should disagree that the sky is blue just because republicans said it. I don’t see anything “giant” or “mega fraught” in how to protect minors from their own and others’ dumb choices. You just do it. None of that stuff is to be done to minors until they are adults and can make the decisions themselves. Period.
Branjor on June 25th, 2023 at 17:45
(Branjor, your correction applied and the request ‘in storage.’ Hope I got it right! Can revert if I didn’t.)
You’re quite right that if Repubs do the right thing, that’s fine. I’m a bit more of an agnostic about kids’ states of mind than you are, so I’m imagining (possibly purely theoretical) cases where a kid’s mind really is made up and stays that way. If I was that kid, I’d want to at least be taken seriously by counselors or parents.
But possibly that situation never actually happens? And respect for one (imaginary?) kid means lots of others get lifechanging procedures they regret?
The safest route is obviously “no lifechanging procedures,” but biology doesn’t allow that option. The fundamental problem is trying to cure sexism by altering biology, which is never going to work anyway. In my world (the one I wish I lived in) gender as this giant hangup is just a footnote in history of the crazy way people used to live and the whole problem doesn’t arise. Oh well.
The other point about repubs doing the right thing is that they seem so adept at sneaking in misogynist shit that I can’t trust them as far as I could throw them. (Which, given my upper body strength, is not far.) I guess that attitude snuck into my sentence construction. But, yes, if they’re _really_ doing the right thing, it’s fine.
quixote on June 25th, 2023 at 18:29