A new consignment of geriatric shoe manufacturers from the ACLU via Chase Strangio:
In the span of just a few years, transgender people have had their rights and lives radically reshaped by a litany of political attacks against our freedom, our dignity, and the health care many of us need to live.
Wait a second. Who have had what “radically reshaped”? I’d have thought the radical reshaping was being done by surgeons like Sidhbh Gallagher of “yeet the teets” fame.
As part of a coordinated national effort to erode legal protections for trans people and push us out of public life, a wave of bills targeting gender-affirming health care for transgender people have effectively banned it for nearly one-third of transgender youth in the United States. These laws uproot entire families and communities, alarm doctors and medical experts, and endanger the very young people they laws claim to protect.
Sounds alarming, but it relies on various assumptions about what “trans rights” are and what “trans dignity” is and what “trans health care” is.
There’s no such thing as “gender-affirming health care.” Gender in the sense of magic counter-factual sex has nothing to do with health care. Affirming a delusion is not health care. Making people’s fantasies about themselves a matter of law has nothing to do with rights. As for endangering very young people, what about the way Chase Strangio of the ACLU actively promotes the claim that very young people can be in the wrong bodies and need drastic life-altering medical intervention to affirm the wrongness of their current bodies.
In each of these challenges, we are committed to exhausting every option we have with the goal of protecting the ability of our community to access this care for as long as possible.
But it’s not care. It’s not care. It’s tinkering, and not the good kind.
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12 responses to “Radical reshaping”
And once you have succeeded in exhausting your options, will you shut up and go away?
Hey, Chase; what about this:
And many of those political attacks are from you and your “allies” who are so keen on getting men into women’s facilities, and erasing the word “woman” from vital health communications. Even the the fall of Roe v Wade was followed by a response that was seriously weakened and dissipated by the strenuous efforts of captured institutions (which were originally explicitly feminist and should know better) to use “inclusive” language that hid the true targets and victims of this legal disaster: women.
I don’t believe you. All this supposed “life saving” wouldn’t be needed if you weren’t ramping up the suicidal ideation in the first place. In the long run, watchful waiting and desistance are a hell of a lot safer. But you don’t want happy, confident gays and lesbians, you want anxious, pliable “trans kids.”
You’re a part of that effort, Chase. Own it.
Or maybe they’re putting restrictions on experimental precedures of doubtful worth being performed on children. That sounds like a worthwhile goal to me. What do you have against it, Chase?
If “gender identity” is the equivalent of the soul, how does reshaping the body do anything to it? What research has been done to determine how this immaterial essence and the material body interact? How is it distinct from “personality?” How does stunting normal bodily growth and development help it?
Children are not equipped to make these kinds of decisions for themselves. They are by definition immature. “Gender affirming care” would leave them immature in many ways, interfering with the one and only puberty they will ever have. They are not going to go through the puberty of the other sex, the sex they are not and can never be. They’re not changing lanes, they’re being led to a dead end. Yet you are eager to have these children do just that. Why? What’s wrong with watchful waiting? Are you afraid they’ll change their minds? What would be wrong with that, Chase? There’s a lot less risk of post-op infection, in fact no operations at all. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?A better outcome? Exactly whose interests are you defending here?
Back atcha.
It’s amazing just how much double-talk, hyperbole, and outright lying there is in this press release. If you removed it all there’d be little left but punctuation. But if you translate it into plain, honest laguage, it becomes a horror story. You’re selling a dangerous product, and you can’t afford potential customers (or the rest of society) to see past the euphemism and happy talk of a rainbow “community” to the complication-ridden, life-long medicalization and dependency that is the grim reality of “gender affirming care.”
You want to get as many children as you can booked onto your Trip to Nowhere while you can. Nice.
“geriatric shoe manufacturers”
that shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did:)
Oh well it’s a very UK-specific joke, especially for people who haven’t seen Yes Minister.
Given how many prisoners claim that such ‘healthcare” is not necessary for them to be held in the women’s estate, it’s hard to believe in the life-saving nature of such care.
I was once very definitively informed by a cobbler that cobblers REPAIR shoes, they don’t make them.
Huh. I didn’t know that. Clearly neither did the writers for Yes Minister.
Yep.
Shoes are made by cordwainers and repaired by cobblers.
All very confusing when the first time she made me dinner, my wonderful woman told me we were having cobbler for dessert! And then, it turns out, it wasn’t a cobbler, it was a crumble.
Damn you English language.
Rev, I’m shocked, that’s terribly English centric for an Australian! Any good descendant of the Scots knows a shoemaker is a Souter ;-).
I always thought of a cobbler (the food) as being topped by scone-like things, whereas a crumble is topped by an oat/flour/butter/sugar like crust that then crumbles when broken.
This also made me research the historic difference between a shoemaker and a cobbler. Cobblers were forbidden from working with new leather. The could only work with old leather, even for repairs, leading to the often bodged and substandard work that gives us phrases like cobbled together, load of old cobblers, etc.
Rob, I have denied my Scots ancestry, but I once knew a man by the name of Souter. Quite a nice bloke when he ran the East-West Ceduna Motel, a complete racist POS as Ceduna’s Mayor, and one of the great pushers of the cashless welfare card.
/threadjack
“The health care many of us need to live” could be interpreted in three different ways.
1.) “If I don’t get hormones and surgery, I’ll kill myself.”
2.) “If I don’t get hormones and surgery, I’ll find it impossible to go out in public and get a job, becoming a recluse depending on the support of others.”
3.) “If I don’t get hormones and surgery, my life might look okay on the outside but I’ll be a hollow shell of a person, struggling to get by from minute to minute.”
All of those are threats based on the certainty that being misgendered dehumanizes people.
Also 4) “If I don’t get hormones and surgery, I will pine away and die of grief and misery and oppression.” I think that’s probably the meaning the ideologues want us to get. “You HAVE to give us this or we will be so sad we will DIE.”
It doesn’t sound all that adult, does it…