Tracy,

Well, then it definitely sounds like electoral mission creep to me. “Well, we got in here to do A, but that failed, so let’s stay in here and do B instead.” Again, perhaps it’s time to cut your losses and find a better strategy, rather than just keeping in electoral politics because that’s where you started out?

Anthony,

I’m glad that Ron Paul and his boosters have gotten people excited about libertarian ideas. I wish that there had been more thought (especially by the boosters, since I take it that Ron Paul was busy doing other things) put into what to do with all these excited, activated people after the close of the campaign. I don’t think there has been much thought about that, and to the extent that there hasn’t been, that means that a lot of time and energy and tens of millions of dollars are going to go straight down the toilet, as the Paulitarians either burn out and wander away, what with the end of their groups’ raison d’etre, or else pitch themselves into the next “educational” failing electoral campaign, either as marginalized Republicans or as members of the LP. A project like “transforming the Republican Party” is more or less guaranteed to be a tar-baby for this putative “Revolution.”

I predict that, unless something quite unusual happens over the next couple of months, in the direction of redirecting former Paulitarians toward some other concrete project outside of electoral politics, then, four years from today, Ron Paul’s campaign will have made no more difference to the political consensus than Howard Dean’s in 2004, or Pat Buchanan’s in 1992.

Matt Polzkill:

Of course Spooner greatly respected the Constitution, that’s why he devoted a large chunk of his life to studying it & writing about it (his treatise on how chattel slavery is unconstitutional is genius). His MAIN problem with it is that no one follows it.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority:

Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

That’s some kind of respect he’s got there.

Matt Polzkill:

He correctly explains that paper can’t magically create a just society & that the people calling themselves “the government” are in fact the greatest criminals because they ignore or subvert it.

That is certainly not Spooner’s explanation of why the people calling themselves “the government” are the greatest criminals.

His explanation of why they are the greatest criminals is that they impose binding political obligations on free and independent people without the latter’s genuine individual consent.

Matt Polzkill:

Yeah, and Jefferson had slaves and…my god, what a way to go about things!

Yeah, that was pretty shitty of Jefferson. He was also a hypocrite, a rapist, and President of the United States, all of which I think were pretty shitty of him. What’s your point?

Matt Polzkill:

I’m sure liberty will just drop in your laps someday, or maybe Jesus Christ will come down. Have a nice wait, if things improve, the rest of us will know who NOT to thank.

You seem to be presuming that trying to get somebody elected President of the United States is the only way to get “things [to] improve”. But it’s not the only way. It’s not the best way, either, or even a particularly plausible way. Or, at least, if you think that it is, that’s certainly not a self-evident truth that you can just presuppose. It’s a tendentious claim that you’ll have to justify with some kind of argument.

The Ron Paul Revolution of transforming the Republican Party won’t end with Dr Paul.

Is that the “Revolution’s” goal now?

I thought the goal was to elect Ron Paul President of the United States, or at least get him the Republican nomination for President. But I guess if at first you don’t succeed, you can always move the goalposts.

This sounds like electioneering mission creep to me. In order to do A (get libertarian, anti-war policies) you decided to do B (get Ron Paul elected). To do B you’d have to do C and D (raise money and convince Republican primary/caucus voters). To do D you found out you’d have to do E (either recruit and register new Republicans or convince enough influentials within the Republican party and the media to get your message to the existing Republicans). But now you’ve found out that to do E effectively you have to do F (“transform the Republican Party” (!)). To do F, you’re planning to do G (run a bunch of Pauliticians in other, lower-level Republican primary races). But to do G, you’ve got to go back to C and D. And around and around we go.

Maybe it’s just time to cut your losses and look for other ways to do A without getting sucked even further into the quagmire of electoral politics.

I’m not sure that Ron Paul supporters ever believed Paul was the Messiah.

Maybe not. But at least one does think he’s “The Greatest American ever” Another thinks that he’s a light that shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended him not.

piny,

I didn’t mean to suggest that adolescents never consider or make a physical transition, or to attribute to Michelle the claim that there ought to be therapeutic intervention to “correct” GID in young kids because a failure to do so would lead to them ending up gay. I didn’t infer from her mention of the “outcome” statistics that that’s what she believes. If I did inadvertently suggest that, I apologize for being unclear.

The point I was trying to make about age is that, as I understand it, an issue that’s unlikely to come up at the age of 7 or 8 in a case like this one. A few years later, closer to adolescence, sure, but at that point we’re moving rapidly away from the diagnostic territory of “GID in Children” anyway, and towards “GID in Adolescents and Adults.” My understanding may be mistaken; if so I retract that claim, but I’d still make the more specific claim that it doesn’t have much to do with what this particular kid and her mother say they’re concerned about at this particular moment, or with the details of how the school is dealing with them. And I’d also fall back on the other argument against the basic problem with the way that the medical establishment holds medical aids to transition hostage to medicalized labels and “disorder” diagnoses.

The stuff about “outcome” statistics wasn’t meant to suggest that Michelle personally believed that there was something wrong with adolescents being gay. Rather that if one believes that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, nothing wrong with not being gay, nothing wrong with being trans, and nothing wrong with not being trans (which for all I know is what Michelle believes; otherwise I would have been arguing about that rather than just asserting it), then that correspondingly undermines the claim that there’s anything that ought to be called “disordered” or of “clinical interest” here, and to that extent it’s unclear why you’d need a diagnostic category for it, let alone a diagnostic category that’s used to justify psychotherapeutic intervention (at least not for children who don’t actively seek it out for themselves, rather than being shoved into it by anxious adults), let alone a diagnostic category that’s counted as a mental “disability” for legal purposes.

If I had to guess at Michelle’s motives I’d be very unlikely to guess that it had to do with personal attitudes of homophobia or transphobia, and much more likely to guess that they have to do with the tendency in our culture to elevate professionalized psychiatry and medicine as the primary or only way to understand the things that are most important to our lives, and the “mission creep” for medicalized labels that this inevitably leads to, no matter how ill-founded or inappopriate that model may be in a given area. But that’s just speculation, and I’ll happily take it all back if I’m wrong.

And this is a great example of why I think we’re diverging even as we state many similar principles. If concentrated power is the enemy, not the abrogation of rights, then there’s a lot that happens at the local, familial, and small group level that falls outside of the strict boundaries of libertarian concerns. So it’s natural that a “thick” libertarian would not approve of that kind of libertarianism.

I need to read the essay on thick and thin libertarianism again to make sure that I’m using those terms correctly; feel free to correct me or clarify muddy thinking.

Well, thin libertarianism is the position that “libertarian concerns” should be narrowly construed, as being exhausted by whatever your favorite specification of the non-aggression principle is (abrogation of individual rights, violations of equal liberty, initiation of force, whatever). Thick libertarianism is the position that “libertarian concerns” should be construed more broadly, as including a definite stance for or against at least some attitudes, practices, traditions, practices, projects, institutions, etc. that are logically consistent with, but not entailed by, the non-aggression principle. (All the forms I’ve discussed in my writing on the topic, at least, are forms of “thickness” in which the cause for concern is that the commitments that go beyond the logical entailments of a commitment to non-aggression are still linked to a commitment to non-aggression in some other, weaker, but still interesting sense — e.g. causally linked, or in application to specific cases, or in virtue of being two different conclusions of a common set of prior premises.)

Strictly speaking, if a “thin” libertarian is being consistent about the non-aggression principle, then she will still concern herself with things that happen outside the scope of the State insofar as they involve the direct use of violence — so, for example, her version of “libertarian concerns” would still properly include non-State forms of systemic coercion like race slavery or violence against women. A “thick” libertarian would agree, but take it one step further to include things other than the express acts of violence, which she takes to be importantly connected with the express acts of violence (e.g. white supremacist prejudices, patriarchal rape culture, etc.).

I don’t think the distinction lines up neatly with the question of whether the libertarian or anarchist in question focuses narrowly on anti-statism or generalizes to cases other than the State. (Cf. 1. Some “thin” libertarians do tend to write as if the State were the only significant form of systemic coercion, and “thick” libertarians may be more likely to recognize the existence of other forms of systemic coercion, but in principle a “thin” libertarian might very well recognize other forms, while a “thick” libertarian might in principle regard statism as the only significant form of systemic coercion around, and devote her time spent on “thick” concerns entirely to the stuff that she takes to be causally or conceptually supporting statism.)

So thick libertarians will probably tend to be much more interested in things like a critique of institutionalizing or otherwise concentrating social power, even without that critique cashing out at some point in references to rights-violations. Thin libertarians will tend to argue that those concerns are either uninteresting, or, if interesting, still outside the scope of libertarianism per se.

I’m not sure how far this clarifies the point that you were interested in clarifying.

… I think numbers *do* constitute authority …

Authority for what?

Do you mean to suggest that, for example, that superior numbers gave Anytus’s party the rightful authority to kill Socrates, or the Roman occupiers the rightful authority to crucify Jesus?

If so, why? If not, then what do their superior numbers give them the rightful authority to do?

Rosehiptea,

As Holly mentions, the major distinction in types of treatment has to do with whether the diagnosis is made in childhood or later in life. Shrinks are generally respectful enough of their adults patients’ wishes and strongly held convictions, at least on this specific point, not to simple-mindedly force them into efforts to “correct” their transgenderism. Not so for children, where all kinds of nasty behavioral therapy are commonly employed to “cure” them.

Michelle,

I think that when the common features of “diagnostic category” are explicitly described “symptoms,” while the thing itself is explicitly labeled a “disorder” and it is classified as an Axis I Clinical Disorder, it’s a bit odd to suggest that the purpose of the diagnostic category is primarily descriptive, rather than prescriptive. When professional medical practitioners describe a set of behaviors and attitudes in terms that are directly and deliberately taken from the medical study of disease, and describes them as causes for “clinical attention,” it is pretty strongly suggested that there’s something wrong with people who have that “disorder.”

As for the professional ethics in sex-reassignment surgery, it has basically nothing to do with the use of Gender Identity Disorder as a “diagnostic category” in eight year old children, which was the context of the discussion. However, I think that if the sole raison d’etre for this diagnostic category is in order to pander to the prejudices of doctors who can only be persuaded to acknowledge their trans patients’ considered judgment when said patients can get another doctor to sign off on it in the form of an Official Diagnosis certifying that they’re “disordered,” that’s a pretty slender reed to lean on. I’d hope that maybe we can start talking about changes that are important for our lives without first having to get a medical label slapped on it.

As for the study of “outcomes” in children labeled as having GID, cf. Speck’s reply. (Incidentally, last I checked, the DSM-IV TR says that 3/4 of anatomical boys diagnosed with GID end up living as homosexual or bisexual males in their late adolescence; the corresponding figure for anatomical girls diagnosed with GID are said to be unknown.)

But, moreover, I don’t see what the point of bringing this up is in the first place. If 3/4 of GID-diagnosed kids turn out to be gay, then so what? There’s nothing wrong with being gay and there’s nothing wrong with not being gay. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live as a girl (or boy) when you’re 8 and then deciding you want to live as a gay man (or lesbian) when you’re 16. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live as a girl (or boy) when you’re 8 and then deciding that you want to continue living as a woman (or man) when you’re 16. There’s nothing wrong with changing the gender you want to live as every four months, if you feel like it. If only a few kids diagnosed GID end up seeking sex-reassignment surgery as adults, what of clinical interest follows from that? It’s certainly not any kind of argument for therapeutic intervention with the kids with strong, persistent cross-gender identification (either potential outcome–remaining trans or not remaining trans–is fine, so what’s the big deal?). Nor is it an argument for trying to get the government to treat 8 year old kids with strong, persistent cross-gender identification as if they had a mental “disability.”

ThickRedGlasses,

“The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” . . . People with Gender Identity Disorder are going to be significantly distressed by being in the wrong body, even if the social stigma goes away.

A significant part of my point is that the criteria having to do with “impairment in social [or] occupational … functioning” are basically bogus. They’re a way of shifting the responsibility for other people’s discrimination and bullying onto the victims of the discrimination and bullying. In reality, insofar as there’s a “disorder” here, it’s because other people have a problem, not because kids labeled as having GID have a problem.

As far as “clinically significant distress” goes, as far as I know, there’s been no positive evidence presented to the effect that the little girl in question feels that way, and I see little reason to assume that she does. Not everybody who wants to live as a member of a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth is especially concerned about the anatomical details of their body, especially not when they are still years away from puberty.

If, on the other hand, she does feel that way, then in any case that’s a separate issue from the accommodations that the school should or shouldn’t make for her. They don’t have much control over her personal feelings about her genitals. The issue at hand is how they will or won’t deal with the questions about her immediate social environment–whether or not teachers and classmates call her by her chosen name, allow her to to come to school dressed as a girl, do or don’t harass her, etc.

From a clinical standpoint, I’d question the utility of creating a gender-specific diagnostic category if the only purpose is to group together people who are (1) trans and (2) depressed or anxious or dysphoric about their bodies. There’s nothing wrong with (1) per se, and there’s already a ton of different diagnostic categories to cover (2), so why come up with a new one just to single out the fact that one subgroup of people who develop (2) are also (1)?

Jeremy,

I’d like to suggest that the chief reason libertarians and anarchists spend more time assailing government than they spend assailing “mere” crime isn’t so much that the former is institutionalized while the latter isn’t. There are plenty of examples of “mere” crime that’s institutionalized — the Mafia, for starters — that libertarians and anarchists also don’t spend much time fulminating.

What I think is more likely is that libertarians and anarchists spend a lot of time and rhetorical energy on government because over and over again we see that the violence of the State apparatus, no matter how intense and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless its victims, is ideologically mystified, morally excused, and either widely treated as legitimate or else simply rendered invisible, whereas most “mere” crime is not. It doesn’t take a lot of rhetorical energy to convince most people that the Mafia is a band of thugs; most everybody knows that being a band of thugs is their business. Most people don’t know, or don’t consistently realize, that being a band of thugs is the government’s business. Hence the effort to demystify, delegitimize, and get people to come down and look at the actions of governors and their hirelings the way they would look at similar conduct by someone without a badge or a pompous title on letterhead.

Note that when libertarians have been especially concerned with exposing and condemning some form of systemic violence carried out mostly outside of the formal State apparatus — for example the “private” violence of race slavery, or violence against women, or adult domination of children — it is more or less always a parallel system of violence which is, like the State, mystified as being something other than violence, culturally excused, and either explicitly socially accepted or else kept silent and made invisible. Even when (as in the case of, for example, violence against women) there may be various kinds of institutional support or institutional denialism for the violence, but the paradigmatic locus of the violence is in informal actions by one ordinary person against another, carried out in private settings.

I should note that the mystification of State violence also seems to play an important role in arguments that try to undermine the ideal of a consensual society by appealing to the ignorance, folly, or vice of mortal creatures. Of course we are all prone to ignorance, folly, or vice in this vale of tears. But that is precisely the reason to oppose all forms of coercive power. Every government is run by those same imperfect, sinful people that it supposedly exists to straighten out, and certainly the would-be bellowing blowhard lords of the world are no more immune to pride, cruelty, or sharp dealing than ordinary business-people, workers, etc. Quite the opposite. If it’s utopian to imagine perfecting human nature, then certainly you have every reason to centrally concern yourself with institutions, practices, projects, traditions, etc. which take all the ignorance, folly, and vice of those who come out on top of the power-struggle, and then magnify it, concentrate it, regularize it, and insulate it from both criticism and resistance.

That libertarians are simply more consistent in their advocacy of non-agression is no mind-boggingly unique contribution to political discourse; it’s actually just a preference

I don’t know what you mean by this. Clearly one can have a preference for consistency — I’d hope everyone does — but is the phrase “just a preference” supposed to indicate that preferring consistent application of moral principles over inconsistent application of moral principles isn’t backed by some prior logical and/or moral obligation? That it’s just a matter of taste, like preferring milk over lemon in your tea? If so, why do you believe that? If not, then what work is the word “just” doing here?

And I agree with you that, as distasteful as it may be to us, government is comprised of genuine traditions, norms, and social identity.

Again, I’m confused by what you mean here. Are there libertarians or anarchists who deny that government is comprised of genuine traditions, norms, and social identity? (What then do they believe it is comprised of? Idiosyncratic rather than traditional practice?)

The point of anarchistic critique is not that government somehow exists separately from traditions, norms, and social identity, but rather that some traditions, norms, and ways of understanding your social identity are foolish, vicious, or otherwise objectionable, and in particular that the the statist elements of those traditions, norms, and social identity are in need of critique, reform, or revolutionary transformation.

One realization I’ve come to is that I don’t have a problem with force being exerted by society, so long as it is society, and not a particular class of society, executing the force.

And again, I’m confused by what you mean. Force is never exerted “by society.” It is exerted by individual people who live in a society, and, when it’s coordinated, it is always coordinated by an organized faction within that society (whether spontaneously or deliberately ordered), not by the “society” as a whole. This is no less true of “citizen militias” than it is true of professionalized police or government armies. (Barring universal conscription, there will always be a fair number of people who decline to participate. And there will always be a fair number of people — young children, frail people, paralyzed people, etc. — who are incapable of participating. Aside from any limitations through cultural or institutional prejudice, the nature of the practice necessarily limits participation.)

As far as I can see, the only important question here is, not who is or is not exercising the force, but rather how it is being exercised: whether it is being exerted prudently or destructively, and, when it is exerted, whether it is being exerted to vindicate just claims or to violate and suppress just claims. Insofar as there’s a question of “who” involved, it’s only a question of which factions, and which forms of organization, are the most likely to abstain from destructive or aggressive uses of force, and most likely to pursue wise and righteous uses of force. I think the superiority of citizen militias here over unaccountable paramilitary cops or imperial standing armies is obvious, but the reasons for that superiority have little if anything to do with some mythic direction of force by the General Will. It just has to do with what we, each of us individually, in our ordinary lives, are prone to do under different circumstances, when we are dependent on others for our safety, or when we have unaccountable power over others, or when we are able to defend ourselves, or when we are working cooperatively with our neighbors, etc. etc. etc.

John,

The most unfortunate thing about “anarchism” may be the name, which may lead one to believe anarchists are against all gov’t, when really (as I understand it) they are perfectly willing to cooperate with their neighbors for the common good, a good that must inevitably, at times, impinge upon their personal good.

But, John, the reason that anarchists call themselves anarchists is that they are against all government–as they understand government. If you want to introduce your own definition of the word “government,” which includes absolutely any arrangement for cooperation between individual people, no matter how informal, consensual, non-territorial, non-monopolistic, and accountable to external constraints of justice, then you’re free to use the word “government” that way, but your definition of the term (which I think is much further from the common use of the term than anarchists’ definition) would seem to be of little help either in understanding why anarchists call themselves what they call themselves, or in advising them on what they ought to call themselves to maximize clarity.

What they are not willing to do, and what no man [sic] should be willing to do, is to deprive the many in favor of the few,

I don’t see what numbers have to do with it. Of course it’s terrible when the many are forcibly deprived in favor of the few, and this is what almost always happens under the auspices of government (even so-called majoritarian government), where the governing class is always an elite minority parasitic upon the productive labor of the governed. But is it any less terrible when the minority, or an individual person, are forcibly deprived in favor of the majority, which has certainly also happened over and over again in history? (Cf. Socrates, Jesus, the Christian martyrs, Catholics in Reformation England, Protestants in Counter-Reformation Spain and France, Jews and Muslims and Romani all across Europe…) The only reason I can see why “the many” would, as a group, be entitled to demand that they will not be beaten or robbed or swindled by an elite few is because each of them, naked and alone with nothing other than her humanity, is just as entitled to demand that she will be beaten or robbed or swindled by anybody else, whether they are few or many. That’s rights, as I see it, and everybody’s got them whether or not they have a large enough posse.

Have I been inducted into the Beltwaytarian Illuminati without having heard about it? If so, I eagerly await my imminent influx of cocktail party invites and Kochtopus cash.

ThorsMitersaw,

The declarations of states are not reflective of their citizens …

No, but they are reflective of the opinions of the state governments at the time that those state governments determined to secede.

Of course, many if not most people in many southern states at the time felt differently. For starters, many if not most people in many southern states at the time were black slaves.

The white southerners who fought as common soldiers often had very different views of the import and justification for the war than those held by their governments. But of course it was their governments, and not they, who made the political and military decisions that we’re discussing here.

Charles H.,

I agree with you that any honest review of what the secessionists said (especially what they said at the time of the secession debate, rather than when they wrote their memoirs in the 1870s) would very quickly reveal that the perpetuation and expansion of race slavery was absolutely central to the Confederate cause. However, it would be an ignoratio elenchi to follow that evidence with the conclusion that ending or limiting race slavery must have been absolutely essential to the Union cause.

When people claim that the Southern states had the “right” to secede, what they mean is that a minority– adult white male landowners– had the right to decide for everyone else what form of government they would live under, and whether their basic human rights would be recognized.

I’m sure that when many people claim that, that is indeed what they mean, but I don’t think it’s at all fair to impute that meaning to most of the writers at LewRockwell.com or the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Whatever faults they may have (and some of them have a lot), most of the people in question are anarchists, who believe that no government whatever, state, federal, or other, has any legitimate right to compel anyone’s allegiance. Their point about the right of secession is that adult white male Southern landowners had a right to determine for themselves (and themselves alone) what form of government, if any, they should live under, a right which any principled and honest believer in the principle of government by consent would have to concede they do have. The obvious and hideous atrocity of southern race slavery hardly justifies military invasion and bayonet-point Unionism; what it justifies is the (Garrisonian) strategy of embracing peaceful disunion, and then supporting southern slaves in their efforts to secede from the from the illegitimate government created by their quasi-secessionist slave-drivers.

If you’re not already familiar with it, I’d like to recommend J.R. Hummel’s excellent book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, which ably defends the Garrisonian-disunionist position and presents a much more accurate and sophisticated libertarian analysis of the war than the stuff churned out by, for example, Tom DiLorenzo or Tom Woods.

PhysicistDave,

I think the issues at hand are a bit more complex than cultural affinities. When I see Yankees like Tom DiLorenzo running around affecting a fondness for the ol’ Moonlight-and-Magnolias, I just find it ridiculous. But when I see them actively distorting history for polemical purposes, in order to whitewash rabid slave-driving statists like John C. Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis (cf. for example 1, 2, 2, 3, etc., not to mention DiLorenzo’s periodic attempts to portray Lysander Spooner, the author of the Plan for the Abolition of Slavery and a conspirator in an abortive attempt to rescue John Brown from the gallows, as an advocate for “peaceful” gradualist emancipation, I think there is something deeper and nastier at work that needs to be exposed and confronted.

Of course, those people who, in the name of “moderation” or “compromise” or politesse, attempt to water down or dissemble about libertarian principles on hard cases, or who try to marginalize radical libertarians for simply for making uncomfortably libertarian points — a group that intersects with, but certainly does not exhaust and certainly is not limited to — the staff at Cato and Reason deserves nothing but contempt for that kind of hand-wringing opportunism. But I don’t think it’s true that that’s the only reason that the Paulitarians and the VMI/LRC crew draw the kind of flak that they draw from within libertarian circles, or even from the Cato and Reason crowds specifically.

GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, in which an Ohio county sheriff declares that when a woman is thrown in jail on a bogus “disorderly conduct” charge, having a gang of cops, including two male officers, pin her down and strip search her over her screams of protest, and then leave her naked in a freezing-cold cell for six hours, counts as “us[ing] reasonable force to … protect prisoners in their custody.”

<a href=”http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/02/10/the_conservative/>GT 2008-02-10: The Conservative Mind (second Sin Fronteras edition), in which we’re reminded that they’re not against immigrants; they’re just against illegal immigrants!

GT 2008-02-13: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in which your humble blogger appears in print.

Holly:

Thank you for posting this. I love how the genital correctness blowhard brigade keeps falling back on the idea that anyone who doesn’t go out of their way to make life unpleasant for this kid (e.g. by refusing to call her by her chosen name, or by harassing or punishing her for wearing the “wrong” set of clothes to school) must, therefore be “bending over backwards” to suit her delicate sensibilities. Rather than, you know, just not going out of their way to be obnoxious to an eight-year-old kid in the name of heteropatriarchal social engineering.

ThickRedGlasses:

Wouldn’t this child be considered disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Gender Identity Disorder is considered considered a mental disorder, so shouldn’t this girl be covered by ADA?

I think we’d be better off not going there.

So-called “Gender Identity Disorder” is a basically political, not medical diagnosis. It’s been used repeatedly as an excuse for quack psychiatrists and anxious or controlling parents to inflict all kinds of torture, mislabeled “therapy,” in the name of “curing” their trans kids, or even mildly gender-deviant kids, of their “disorder”. In fact there is absolutely nothing wrong or crazy or disordered about a kid born anatomically male who wants to live as a girl (or vice versa), and I think it would be a serious mistake to reinforce and institutionalize the notion that there is, whatever short-term advantages you might hope to gain from it.

A few decades ago, Homosexuality was considered a mental illness and included as a category in the DSM. But if that diagnosis were still on the books, I think it would be counterproductive, to say the least, for gay liberationists to try and use it to get accommodations under the ADA.