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 thought I might be somebody!
They tell me I was wrong.
For no one was harmed in the race we ran;
I was no one all along.
Mary Leng

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. (William Gibson, whenever he said it.)

In most of the OECD, most disasters haven’t hit most people hard yet. Covid maybe came the closest. In some of the US some women are brought to death’s door because life is sacred. Not their life, obviously. There are wildfires. Floods. People die. But mostly the disasters just loom. They happen to other people. Even so, cartoons are the least of our worries, right? So I’m not sure why this one tipped me over the edge. But it did.

Yes, it’s beyond the pale for the Republicans to censor books, to tell people what kind of sex to have or how to talk about it, to subject women to forced pregnancies, or to tell unhappy children they can’t get help for their conditions (yes, I do mean kids who feel trans and I do mean help).

But while we’re virtuously against racists and Nazis and homophobes and transphobes, there’s a giant elephant in the room. Totally unseen.

Does anyone honestly think that the reason men played women’s parts in drag in Shakespeare’s day is that theatres were being bravely transgressive? That the public was eager to stick it to The Man by gender-bending? That they were less hung up on sexist stereotypes than dumb Republicans?

Men played the women’s parts because women couldn’t. Women were men’s possessions, kept boxed in at home, not out in public. They certainly weren’t to prance around on a stage. They could expect violence and worse if they tried to run around loose.

They still can.

If you’re one of the people making that worse, you know what? It doesn’t matter what your reasons are. It doesn’t matter whether you think women are subhuman, like an incel. Or whether it’s because you’re so progressive you’re only concerned about trans people. Either way, women count for nothing to you. It’s the same old misogyny dressed in makeup and spangles.