Lurking Rhythmically: What Fresh Hell is This?

Sunday, January 28, 2024

What Fresh Hell is This?

I don't want to be told that my concerns about the Government making it illegal to be transgender are hyperbole ever again.

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Here is the full article, and here is the full audio recording.

If you think I'm overreacting by being concerned that elements of Big Government are actively scheming to prevent adults from exercising their body autonomy, then let me remind you of all the problems we still have today as a result of a similar moral panic which occurred over 100 years ago. Prohibition, aka "How dare adults have the ability to decide whether or not they can get drunk," gave us the following:

The creation and subsequent militarization of the ATF, aka "the Revenuers";
Organized crime, which was created to smuggle and distribute prohibited alcohol;
The War on Drugs, aka Prohibition 2.0, because when the Volstead Act was repealed organized crime pivoted to the next profitable thing;
Gang culture and violence, an outgrowth of both organized crime and the war on drugs;
the National Firearms Act of 1934, which was the result of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, and which was not only the first attempt at national Firearm Prohibition but also led to further infringements upon the Second Amendment like the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Hughes Amendment of 1986, and so forth.

So no, do not attempt to tell me that another government attempt to control grown-ass adults who aren't harming anyone (except, arguably, themselves) won't end up the same way.

I say "arguably" above because while I don't believe that transition harms anyone, even if it did, what business is it of yours? Grown-ass adults have the right to do unhealthy things to their bodies. It's why we allow them to smoke and to drink alcohol. So long as you aren't hurting another person through your actions, such as driving while impaired, what you do to your own body in the privacy if your home is your business and not mine and definitely not the Government's. If you believe otherwise, then understand that you are saying it's the right of the Government to declare what actions are unhealthy for you to take and forbid you from taking them, and by the same token that Government can compel you to take actions which they deem as healthy. Do you want compulsory Covid-19 jabs? Because that line of reasoning is how you get compulsory Covid-19 jabs. So if you want to get drunk, eat junk food, get high, get a tattoo, get cosmetic surgery... hell, if you want to amputate a limb... it's your right as an adult to choose to have that done. It's also your right (and duty) as an adult to deal with the consequences of that choice. That's what freedom is: the right to make choices, even bad ones. If you want to be protected from the results of your choices, then you don't want freedom, you want a parent.

Finally, I'm going to address the elephant in the room of "people who are mentally ill cannot give consent to gender transition": if an adult is so mentally ill that they cannot give consent to what happens to their bodies, then that adult cannot give any other kind of consent (financial, sexual, legal, etc.) and should be declared non compos mentis via due process and either assigned a legal guardian or institutionalized. Without this due process, depriving an adult of access to transition resources is the medical version of issuing an Extreme Risk Protection Order (aka a "Red Flag"). An ERPO is what is issued when someone thinks another person is a threat to themselves or others and alerts the authorities who, instead of getting that other person the help they need, just seize that person's firearms -- in other words, arresting the tools they use because they might do something wrong with them, while still leaving them free to harm themselves or others via different means. Put bluntly, that's either magical thinking or virtue signaling, because it doesn't at all address the problem which this law is purported to prevent.

Having said that, I would not be surprised in the slightest if the next tactic chosen in Transgender Prohibition is having us declared mentally unfit. If that happens, keep in mind that "not obeying the government" can be diagnosed as Oppositional Defiance Disorder, which means that after the Prohibitionists are done with declaring transgender people mentally ill, they can come after anyone who speaks out against the government. The Soviet Union weaponized psychology by declaring their dissidents mentally ill, and if you don't think that can happen here, then just watch during this election season as both sides trot out the predictable "studies" claiming that conservatives/liberals have a lower IQ and a higher incidence of pathology than their opponents.

To summarize:

Prohibition always makes things worse.
Always look for second and third-order effects.
Don't allow the government to exercise against others any powers which you wouldn't want your opponents to use against you, because your side won't always be in control.
Let grown-ass adults do what they like to themselves so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
Mind your own freaking business.

Addendum

Speaking of moral panics, I've lived through a lot of them. Here are the ones I know about, off the top of my head: