Yet again I wonder…how do adults let themselves get to this point?
But there is no such “right.” That has never been a right. For blindingly obvious reasons. Everybody could have claimed to be the local landowner, and then what? Everybody could have claimed to be the king, the pope, the admiral, the owner of the bank, your sister, your daughter, your mother, a daffodil, a planet – the list is infinite. There is no “right” to “be the thing they say they are.” We don’t have the right to be David Andress even if we say we are.
This is obvious obvious obvious. Everybody knows it’s obvious. Yet somehow adults go on saying it. Why? How?
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8 responses to “The right to be the thing they say they are”
It used to be men claimed to be Napoleon, and they locked them up. Now they claim to be women, and they cheer.
They never, ever, address the actual argument; they always erect that transparently false straw man.
Not believing that someone isn’t who they claim to be is not even remotely related to not wanting them to exist; but, to a narcissist with a fragile sense of self, that might be how it feels. They are entirely reliant on other people fitting in with whatever fantasy they’re currently projecting, and they get disproportionately angry at anyone who doesn’t play their part.
Another person whose intellect and ideas I used to respect.
Same. We used to be quite friendly.
(The author of) Jesus and Mo had something to say about this reasoning just this week.
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/wear/
“What KS and her supporters claim is that trans people can of course have rights, but they can’t have the right to be the thing they say they are.”
There’s this weird idea that if you support X but believe there are, or should be limits on X (or its expression) then you are fundamentally dishonest. As if a spectrum isn’t really a spectrum but just one damn colour and any one who says otherwise is just out of touch with some higher truth (which in reality is just the despised binary thinking obfuscated into a religion of stupidity.)
In the words of a great philosopher “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”.
“But that is saying they can’t exist, as what they are. Because you refuse to believe what they are is real.”
That’s the fairies in Peter Pan.
Notice we’re the ones who are merely saying, while they ARE what they are.