Trans journalist Erin Reed called Douthat’s interview “hostile” and noted that El-Sayed previously stood up for trans rights when asked in August by Fox News’ Jesse Watters whether he supports “sex changes for minors.” El- Sayed replied, “The government shouldn’t tell you what kind of health care you should have, and if you’re a minor, that’s between you and your doctor and your parents.”
In September, a state university student asked about his position on gender-affirming care. El-Sayed answered, “I don’t think the government gets to have a say about what health care is provided in what circumstances and why.”
Reed also praised El-Sayed for remaining steadfastly committed to trans rights at a time when other Democratic politicians have adopted right-wing framing, saying they oppose government-funded surgeries for trans kids (something that almost never occurs) and “biological men in women’s sports” (an inaccurate and insulting reference to trans girls and women athletes who want to play on sports teams matching their gender identity).
“El-Sayed’s race will be one of the most important to watch on election night,” Reed wrote. “If he can win a highly contested seat despite the anti-transgender Republican money spent against him and the attacks from the right-leaning wing of his own party, it will be a clear case that embracing anti-trans views is not required to win swing states and swing districts across the United States.”
On his campaign website, under the heading “Healthcare Freedom for Women and LGBTQ+ Americans,” El-Sayed wrote, “Healthcare decisions should be made by a patient (and their parents if they are a minor) and their doctor–no one else. That includes reproductive and gender-affirming care…. I oppose any effort to criminalize certain medications and the use of lawfare or funding cuts to stop healthcare providers from providing full-spectrum healthcare that meet all the needs of their diverse communities.”
The lives of conservatives (including neoliberal journalists) are valueless. Completely valueless.
Any biological body can be used to make compost. Unrelated, I just felt like talking about organic farming.
“I don’t think the government gets to have a say about what health care is provided in what circumstances and why.”
Attaboy, this is EXACTLY the message. And, speaking from experience, it throws conservatives right on their asses.
He also had one of the most incredible comebacks I’ve ever seen to the “mutilating children” bullshit; “Are you circumcised?”
I saw him do this. Epic. The smug prick who asked him about it acted like he won some kind of gotcha but it was totally a self own. Amazing.
He’s a baller in interviews.
Also: I like how he uses his look.
I want to be clear: I don’t think every candidate should try and look like a macho tough guy. But I think everyone should find their look and lean into it. And his happens to be a flawless visual performance of traditional masculinity.
Which makes it so satisfying to watch when people try and put him off his game with fearmongering over evolving gender norms, and this absolute chad just dunks on them about what losers they look like when they insist on creating a lists of state-approved genitals.
I wish him so much success tomorrow, but regardless of the outcome he’s done amazing things in the campaign, and he’s going to be a force in American politics either way.
Reminds me of a fun moment from back when I was still on Facebook, a decade or longer ago:
During a political discussion about something else entirely, an American right wing nut job blurted out something about Scandinavia “being overrun by Muslims because of all Scandinavian men being low testosterone weaklings”.
Heinous bigotry, I know. But here’s the fun part: I, being a Danish guy born and raised in Denmark with very masculine features including an impressive full beard (who happens to be a far left pacifist internationalist) just said “both my nationality and profile picture of my own face are public” and that was enough to shut his vile white supremacist Islamophobic tirade down 😁
I remember how they used to air The World’s Strongest Man competition on ESPN 2 way back in the day, and all of the best competitors were Danish (and other Scandinavians).
Like every time.
Man, I remember that. Those dudes were massive. Look like they could bear hug trees and rip them out of the ground.
People (particularly, young men) have been so inundated with propaganda, that we need to have some visible people on the left who come off as traditionally masculine.
It’s stupid, but right now it’s necessary unfortunately.
Protecting human rights really is that easy. Anti trans folks always gotta twist themselves into pretzels for their ideology, making endless carveouts and caveats to justify their bigotry. It’s the same thing with abortion rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, or anything else reactionary thinking attacks.
“Aren’t you guys the ones always rallying around the ‘small government’ ideal? I’m just walking the walk while you keep talking the talk.”
Please win
If the polls are any indication he should win by double digits.
the last ten years is example enough as to why you cannot trust pre-election polls.
Eh I’ve been through a few of these in Michigan and I’d wager the margin is a tight 1% for either candidate
I don’t just expect Wayne county to show up big and Oakland county will probably not help much.
Would love to be wrong though!
Polls said it.\nWas a shoe in for hillary
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Fuck that bitch and the Ellison family. Everyone should boycott everything they own. Yes that includes Annapurna. Outer Wilds was funded by fascist money.
my daughter and i saw him in a small room at msu when he first began campaigning for governor. i was very impressed with him from the start. not just the fact that he had well thought out, wonky answers to difficult problems, but also because he really seemed to have a big heart. i’ve voted for him three times now. feeling good about his chances against oxy mike.
I’m getting worried that the fix might be in in Michigan. I don’t think they can cheat hard enough everywhere to avoid the wave, but they might just hate him enough to risk it in Michigan.
AIPAC money already turned his primary opponent. The right is terrified of a reasonable voice in the senate from an “other” demographic showing people that Muslims are actually good people who might even care about them more than the white power network that they’ve voted for for decades, which has never actually done anything to help them in their economic struggles.
Talarico elicits the same fear in Texas from a different angle.
AIPAC money already turned his primary opponent
I suspect she’s been turned for a long time.
Definitely. They’re like money sucking vampires.
(and their parents if they are a minor)
Some people would say he’s murdering trans kids with this little footnote
Who should decide then? You?
What is the procedure when a civilized justice system discovers parents have been sending their child to a “conversion camp” to try and turn them straight?
Denying a trans child their health care should require a response at least as severe as that.
(In an ideal world, which we are far from).
In an ideal world there’d be no “conversion camp” to begin with.
I concur - we’re far from an ideal world.
Yet steps towards a better world are necessary and appreciated.
For the time being I see need for guidance by parents and doctors when it comes to trans kids - even though not all parents and doctors behave ideally and with the best interest of the child in mind.
Having no guidance at all would likely be worse.Right, no one wants lgbt kids being abused by parents. That obviously includes you.
You’re worried about rare edge cases where parents lose custody because of over-zealous policy when the situation is not simple. You don’t want conflicted parents who mean well being overly punished for dragging their feet.
At the very least you’re worried about losing elections because of moderate voters fearing that scenario, right?
You’re being pragmatic. You’re coming from a place of measure, and study, and reason.
The person you’re responding to is more worried about the lgbt kids who are being abused, who are at risk of suicide, who run away and become homeless and resort to sex work and stealing to get by. They’re worried about bad faith parents who would rather see their own children suffer than live in a way they disapprove of.
The person you’re responding to is being empathetic. They’re coming from a place of hurt, and fear, and sadness.
They see the world from the trans child’s point of view.
You see it from a moderate voter’s.
How do we bridge that gap?
How do we get them to admit we can’t control everything and a line has infinite points between the ends, and how do we get you to feel the same urgency and despair as those trapped inside it who are suffering?
The trans kid?
Ideally? Yes!
Practically? Guidance required 🤷♂️
You wouldn’t solve the “some parents are dense assholes” problem by letting kids alone decide; you’d just create a different set of problems caused by asshole parents.I understand the point you are trying to make, but this is the compromise that we need to make, at least for now, to make progress.
If any politician goes full force with “transgender healthcare for minors, regardless of parental consent” they will lose. It sucks, but that’s how it is.
A lot more trans kids will die if Sayed loses vs. If he wins. I want him to win, not die on an absolutist hill.
We need to work towards laws about parental medical neglect. Focus on the laws that let parents deny lifesaving healthcare to their children on religious grounds first (a more direct form of child murder imho). Eventually we can move the needle on putting children ahead of their parents’ ideologies, but that isn’t a fight we are going to win today.
And the definition of “minor” in this case can be different than 18 or 21. Just like you can buy a firearm or drive a car but not drink alcohol at the same age.
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This is the most braindead take I have ever heard. What if someone owns a bathroom and decides that not only can trans people not use it, but they don’t want black people to use it, or jews, or muslims, or christians. People can just discriminate however they want because they own something? Also governments can absolutely own things you fucking dipshit, public property is clearly a thing, all over the world. I’m honestly hoping your a bot because I cannot imagine a living breathing human being that is this fucking stupid.
Sweet holy stonewall, that’s the dumbest nonsense I’ve seen on the fediverse.
Most English speakers don’t define “law”, “property”, “rights”, or “theft” the way faux libertarians and sovereign citizen scam victims do. Those that do use your minority definitions are generally ill-regarded by their social and economic peers, and suffer a reduced quality of life because of it.
Please go audit a freshman law survey at your local community college class. A general philosophy one might be good also.
Ad hominem. Try a conversation.
No, an ad hominem fallacy would be if I called the poster mentally or educationally deficient and then dismissed their argument because of it. Attacking the argument itself is entirely fair game. Especially if I supplied supporting information to buttress said attack.
Feel free to argue their position or against mine if you want, but sneering “whaa, fallacy!” is just an argument from fallacy and is as unhelpful as an actual ad hominem attack.
You sound libertarian.
Sort of. I would probably say the best current descriptor would be voluntarist. Anarchist also works. I disagree with the notion that communists are anarchists.
Almost certainly a libertarian.
Incidentally, here’s a nearly 30-year old internet essay related to this (please ignore the old-school ableism in the piece): Libertarianism Makes You Stupid
I REALLY wish anarcho-capitalists hadn’t stolen that word.
There’s nothing wrong with libertarianism by its original definition (being more in favor of liberty for the individual AND groups than the authority of the few to rule the many), but when you add the obsession with private (as opposed to personal) property and allowance for corporate authoritarianism as well as racial segregation, it becomes an ideology as childishly inconsistent as it is selfish and destructive.
I hear you. Something that I’ve been thinking about lately is how certain philosophies which sound good at first sometimes end up leading to strange or undesirable places, either because their original characteristics already pointed in that direction, because other groups co-opted the original idea for their own purposes, or both. I haven’t reached any conclusions, but it’s something that I wonder about occasionally.
oh i remember this one, first it was that your brain finished developing at 18, then 21, now its 25 and im seeing people consider banning all sorts of things until you hit 30. All based on pop psychology pseudoscience and a study that cut off at those specific ages and concluded that your brain never stops changing. Its funny how all pretense of having rigor and being careful with science stops once its something you can use to oppress minorities.
You know what’s also proven? HRT for trans minors is both easily reversible and proven to lower suicide rates. But from what I’ve seen from the people that spout these points you’d probably like it better if they killed themselves
I don’t want to ban anything until you’re any age, I want to know what seems to be the most rational age that best quantifies the sentiment that you must be able to provide consent to interact morally in this world with your personhood. If you cannot reason properly, you cannot produce consent.
If you can - by way of sufficient evidence - show that a 21 year old can produce the fundamental same level of rationality as a 25 year old, then I would agree that a solid age is 21.
But the problem here isn’t age, it’s consent.
The brain is only truly complete when you’re dead. Best to be safe and never let anyone make a decision.
I’d be ok with that rule, provided it only apply to those who’d complain the loudest: US “libertarians” and fascists.
Not really, since that’s obviously tyranny, but it could make for a fun week to do it temporarily 😁
1: the brain study didn’t conculde anything of the sort. It’s chart just showed constant growth and stopped where they ran out of available data. Human brains keep developing your entire life.
2: Both feminizing and masculizing trans HRT have changes that cannot be reversed without substantial surgery. Puberty blockers however are entirely reversible.
Can you consent to have your broken arm fixed before you’re 25?
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So now you’re adding more shit. “state it stuff but start in”.
So no treating congenital birth defects?
A birth defect is a defect, it’s in the name. That isn’t the same as someone having a mental feeling that they don’t feel like something they couldn’t hope to define the essence of (because it hasn’t one.)
With respect, the argument you want to make is impossible. If a 12 year old for example can consent to irreversible treatments for a feeling of “trans”, then they can consent to having battery acid poured into their eyes so they go blind because they feel like they were supposed to be born blind.
Jewel Shuping (US) was diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder where she experienced an overwhelming desire to exist with a severe physical disability so she had numbing eyedrops and drain cleaner in her eyes at age 21.
Now it’s not for me to decide that it should be illegal for Jewel to have done this. At 21 she was - at least legally - able to make this choice herself. I would argue that she clearly was not of sound mind though, so anyone who assisted her should have been convicted of a felony offense. But I digress.
I’m not here to tell anyone what they can or cannot do with themselves and their life. I am 100% in favor of anyone living the life they so choose, trans or anything else. My problem isn’t even necessarily one of my own personal opinions or feelings on the matter, but on logic and reason for logic and reason’s sake.
If you cannot consent, you should not be allowed to make decisions such as to go blind. Of course you could consent (especially with your parents/guardians) to REPAIRING eyesight, even if you were born blind, because that is a fundamentally unnatural state.
We don’t have to have a 300 page dissertation to go over what a “natural state” is. Being born blind is not the intended state of a human being. Arguments past the self-evident like that are generally deluded and attached to some level of nefarious intent.
Note that I can be completely accepting of how an adult wants to live their life but not OK with asserting that a child can consent. Both things can be true. A child also cannot consent to sex with an adult, full stop. Anyone who claims otherwise is an enemy to rational justice and morality and doesn’t need a conversation in argument.
We don’t discuss pedophiles who act upon their feelings, we imprison or kill them. No discussion is necessary there.
Now can some of these conversations hold some level of nuance? Well of course they can, but I stand with what I said. IF you’re talking about endorsing certain mannerisms, dress, or presentation, so be it. If you’re talking about consenting to cutting off body parts at 12? No, full stop. A 12 year old cannot consent to that and their parents cannot either, and anyone who does cut off body parts to a 12 year old for such things should be seen as nefarious and tried to the fullest extent of the law.
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You don’t know what trans rights are?
There are no such things. Rights aren’t real. The only rational morality is objective morality, which is predicated on a logical order of operations across time.
What is moral is just that in which is not immoral, and that in which is immoral are those actions of which we should not engage, and those actions of which we should not engage are predicated on a foundational premise that you cannot desire the violation of your own will, and that it is not objectively possible to quantify value.
Thus, if our wills collide, creating a conflict, the proper (moral) way of resolving said conflict is to note which of us held a will that was already initiated, and which would require some level of action of which would violate that preexisting will in order to make it manifest into the world.
Take for example, theft. Theft is, at its most fundamental level, an act of which violates the will of another as it pertains to their property. If you have $10 and I want that $10, I am the one who would need to initiate an action (theft) to have that $10 without your consent (your will), ergo, we side with you in our contest because I would need to become a thief in order to manifest my will unto the world.
This is actually the logic that produces the ideas of murder, rape, theft, assault, fraud, slavery, etc. This is why in our languages we do not say someone was murdered if it was purely accidental and there was no amount of negligence (in which case, the negligence was the will violation which then lead to the result.)
It doesn’t matter what you look like, what color your skin is, how your eyes, nose, or mouth appears, what clothing you wear, how you talk, walk, or what features on a human being you find attractive - none of that has anything to do with human will (personhood.)
EVERYTHING else is nonsensical authoritarianism which is predicated entirely on arbitration.
The PROBLEM is that government exists and asserts that it can somehow “own” things. Public property is a misnomer. You cannot threaten your neighbor with violence unless they give you $500 to buy a lawn mower and then try to argue that the lawn mower is public property and thus, it isn’t theft. Ask someone if that would be OK sometime and after they say no, realize that the neighbor IS the state in this instance. Slapping a badge on something or putting someone in a uniform does not change the reality of what is or is not immoral, or even sane.
The whole world is quite brainwashed by statism because we were all indoctrinated into it from birth. The vast majority of people’s minds explode the moment you start talking about statelessness because they cannot fathom the idea that - for example - HAD the government previously been in charge of all of the food the argument would be that without government we would all starve to death - except of course the governments of the world are not in charge of all the food and we - in the US at least - have such an overabundance of food that we throw away billions of tons annually and have an obesity epidemic in the nation. That’s HOW GOOD WE DO FOOD without the state.
The problem isn’t “trans rights”, and it never was. The problem is this: If someone who claims they are “trans” wants to use my bathroom - IE: The bathroom in MY house that I own - then I consent to that. Come use my bathroom.
If you want to use a bathroom in a public building, the problem isn’t whether or not a group of wolves should be allowed to vote alongside the sheep to decide what’s for dinner. The problem is that neither the wolves nor the sheep should be allowed to manifest their wills in a manner of which is immoral, full fucking stop.
You can’t say you come from a system you were fucking BORN INTO that dictates you can vote in the oppression of your fellow man and then say that the removal of that system is too scary to fathom. That’s insane, cowardly, and sinister.
So again, the problem isn’t which rights trans individuals do or do not have or might not have in the future. The ACTUAL problem is that there is a system in place that lets some people vote in others who can make laws that can control what you can or cannot do on threat of violence that isn’t simply protecting the innocent from murder, theft, rape, enslavement, assault, and fraud.
I don’t care WHAT the law said: If a law was put in place saying the government would take my innocent child to have them put to death, I would kill every single government official that they sent my way until they physically stopped me. The bloodshed would either be very limited, or they would be calling it the new red sea. What is “legal” or not is of no consequence to good people. All that matters is what is MORAL, and law and morality have NOTHING to do with one another.
Ok, then no vaccinations or blood transfusions for anyone under 25. Better start closing up all those public schools, too, since they’re funded with stolen money.
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