cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47362341
Henry Cuellar, Donald Davis, Cleo Fields, Laura Gillen, Vicente Gonzalez, Marcy Kaptur, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Eugene Vindman
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47362341
Henry Cuellar, Donald Davis, Cleo Fields, Laura Gillen, Vicente Gonzalez, Marcy Kaptur, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Eugene Vindman
The United States is a country that believes children are their parents’ property instead of people themselves.
Children have rights.
And your own gender identity is one of the most inherent rights that people have.
I’m saying this as a cisgender man. The idea that your school would literally put you in danger by outing you to your parents is absurd.
The absurd cruelty is the point. This legislation was not written to solve any problem or to address any issue of policy failure, but instead to torture children. I am glad we have someone like you on our side, but we need more people who understand that attacks on our trans brothers, sisters, and thimbers is an attack on everyone everywhere. For now it is mandatory that you conform to your AGAB, but from here we open up a can of worms that includes things like codifying gender roles to match a certain worldview. From here it is possible to say things like “It is a masculine trait to grill. Any man who does not grill is gender non-conforming and must be forced to grill” and “Women are property of their husbands. Any woman who disobeys her husband will be shot”
The right wing of this country has never been in objection to Sharia law for the reasons they say. They are in objection because they want their religion to set the rules, not a slightly different Abrahamic offshoot founded in a slightly different desert.
The fundamental problem with a theory of “rights” is that it assumes a government will self-police.
Ultimately, any social cohort without access to some amount of wealth, legal standing, and support from their peers has no rights in a practical sense.
Children are vulnerable on all three fronts.
Government doesn’t grant rights.
It only acknowledges them or chooses not to.
Rights are things that it is right for a person to have and is not right for a person to be denied.
Governments grant privileges. Governments do not grant rights.
Show me a legal stricture that isn’t written, enforced, or adjudicated by a government body.
That’s an oroborus of a definition.
It doesn’t clarify how rights are created, enforced, or adjudicated.
Governments are people, my friend.
And rights are legal guidelines administered by people.
That doesn’t mean anything.
Rights are not created, enforced, or adjudicated.
They are acknowledged, protected, obvserved, or denied.
Governments grant privileges, not rights. In the same way that governments follow the laws of science and don’t have the ability to change them.
Rights are inherent. They are not granted. As much as governments, or you, or anyone else, beg for them to be granted. Rights are fundamental to existence.