Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 1 of 8

The End Of Cash & The Rise Of The Non-Person

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On July 8, 2025

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Image by TW Collins

Back in 2017 I wrote “The End of Cash”:

Understand, however, that getting rid of cash is part of this. Understand that blockchains, “coins” do not have to ultimately be a technology of freedom, but can easily be a totalitarian technology. Understand that virtually no one in a position of power is your friend on this: They want to know, they want to control, they want to be able to decide how you spend your money and your time, and they want to have an electronic dossier on you which is complete, and which will be usable to destroy you, because no one has never done or said something which cannot be made to look not just bad, but terrible and illegal, especially if you can pick, say, ten quotes or actions out of a lifetime.

In the 80s and 90s it was possible to live the cash economy, or the near cash economy (some checks, but no bank account.) Around 1990 I worked as a dispatcher for a printing company. There was an independent food stall nearby, the sort of place that was all “skilled short order cook” food. I bought most of my lunches there, and the owner ran a tab. When I was paid, by cheque, I endorsed them to him, he took 2%, and paid me cash, minus any tab I’d run up. I paid my landlord in cash, and I bought my food in cash.

At other points I was entirely casual labour: I painted, did light construction work for homeowners, various landscaping jobs, and helped people move. In most cases they paid me cash, if they paid me with a check and I didn’t want to wait the 28 days the banks often insisted on for “clearance” I’d endorse the check, lose 2% and count it not entirely unreasonable.

It’s very hard to do that now. Most people don’t pay with cash, or even checks, and everything goes thru a bank or payment processor and they are very picky about who they allow as customers. Legal activities (say selling nootropics, or porn) are often frozen out, and, indeed, banks have closed down clients accounts without even saying why. Indeed this was done to someone as prominent as Britain’s Nigel Farage, though he had enough fame and political clout to handle it. Perhaps you remember when PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all decided to stop letting people donate to Wikileaks.

Here’s a new case, in Germany, from the EU:

Here is a man, Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist (of Turkish origins, but not a dual citizen) whom the EU authorities have found a novel, immensely cruel, way of punishing for his coverage of, and views on, Palestine.

The German authorities learned a lesson from my case. Not wishing to be answerable in court for any ban on pro-Palestinian voices (similar to the court case I am dragging them through currently), they found another way: A direct sanction by the EU utilising some hitherto unused directive, one introduced at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that allows Brussels to sanction any citizen of the EU it deems to be working for Russian interests. Clinging to the argument that Hüseyin’s website/podcast used to be shown also on Ruptly (among other platforms), they are using this directive aimed at an ‘anti-Russian asset’ to destroy a journalist who dared oppose the Palestinian genocide.

In practice, this means that Hüseyin’s bank account is frozen; that if you or I were to give him cash to buy groceries or make rent then we would be considered his accomplices and subject to similar sanctions; it also means that if he were a civil servant, he would be fired; if he were a student he would be expelled from his university; if he received a pension it would be suspended; if he received any social benefit it would be frozen. It also, astonishingly, means that he cannot leave Germany!

Last, but definitely not least, it means that Hüseyin cannot sue his government for turning him into a non-person but only challenge the European Commission in Brussels – where he is not even allowed to go!

Beautiful stuff, even cash is forbidden, BUT, of course, cash is hard to trace. Thing is, these days, most payments are electronic.

Back when the Trucker Protest happened in Ottawa Canada I opposed freezing their accounts, even though I thought they were a bunch of fools and opposed their agenda. Why? Because it is punishment without a trial or facing a jury. It’s devastating. And I understood that if it could be done to people I disagree with, it could be done to people I do agree with.

So Germany has made it so Huseyin will wind up homeless and possibly even starve to death simply by making him an economic non-person.

This is made much easier by the fact that there’s barely a cash economy any more

These sorts of administrative penalties are becoming more common. Palestine Action, for example, was designated a terrorist organization recently (at the same time as the terrorists who took over Syria were removed.) I’m going to come back to this, because it’s important.

But, basically, the end of the cash economy has made it MUCH easier for authoritarian governments to crush dissent, and in general, the removal of cases from courts, plea bargains, lack of jury trials, making it illegal to tell juries about jury nullification and the rise of “sanctions” and administravie orders has been extremely chilling.

Europe is trending hard authoritarian, with Britain and Germany leading the way. The US, of course, is working hard to end Habeas Corpus and other legal protections. Canada is moving in the same direction.

We need a new conception of how societies should run and until that happens we need a new conception of how to run organizations that the elite doesn’t approve of.

We’ll cover this more, soon.

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“The Chief Justice Has Made His Ruling Now Let Him Enforce It”

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On April 14, 2025

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So, basically, the Supremes ruled 9-0 that Trump had to obey a lower court when they court said to return Abrego Garcia, whom Trump sent to prison in El-Salvador, who is not a gang member as Trump claimed.

This case is wrong in every way:

  • It’s not legal to send someone to another country’s prison;
  • The ICE agent who said the hairdresser was a gang member was kicked off the cops for dishonesty, then got a job with ICE;
  • There was no due process before the hairdresser or any of the other kidnapping victims were sent overseas, many of them are clearly not gang members;
  • ICE is making arrests wearing masks, not showing ID and grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans. Straight up Gestapo shit.

But what’s particularly offensive is that Trump is saying “I can’t get him back” at the same time as El Salvador’s President is claiming “I don’t have the power to return him.”

This is “I’m telling the sun is pink, with blue polka-dots” level bullshit. Everyone knows they’re lying. This, alone, should lead to impeachment, the sheer fucking insult of such an obvious lie. And every newspaper and news show should be leading with “President Lies.”

Next is the simple fact that legality aside, even Trump has admitted the guy is not a gang member and that they made a mistake. Anyone with even the faintest scintilla of decency would arrange for his return.

Assuming there is a “plan” here, and that’s always questionable when dealing with Trump it is obviously to put the President entirely above the law: what he’s doing is illegal, he’s lying to everyone’s face, the Supremes have ruled against him 9-0, and everyone knows he’s punishing an innocent man. His administration has said they want to start deporting citizens in the same way.

“I can do anything I want and you can’t stop me.”

The obvious next play from the judiciary would be contempt rulings and to start locking up administration members for perjury, which would cause an obvious constitutional crisis, but the US is already not a Constitutional Republic at this point. I can’t even count the number of actions Trump has taken which should lead to impeachment. Due process and the first amendment are clearly dead-letter, he’s violating separation of powers repeatedly and his unilateral shutdowns of Congressionally mandated departments and programs are 100% un-Constitutional. He doesn’t have the right to change Congress’s spending decisions that way. Oh, and he’s publicly blackmailing law firms and universities “do what I say or I’ll hurt you.” Publicly bragging about it.

His tariffs are all based on “national security” clauses allowing the President to declare tariffs, which is, again, obviously bullshit, though it’s also true that Congress is entirely complicit, since they could take that power back. (It shouldn’t be possible for one branch to delegate powers to another branch. The founders never intended for the President to be able to declare war, for example.)

But really, it’s the “sky is not blue” lying that is most offensive to me.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

– George Orwell, 1984

 

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Romania Bans Georgescu From Running Permanently

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On March 10, 2025

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I earlier wrote that the West’s elites were too tentative in their approach to lawfare, using Trump (where I’m right) and Georgescu as examples. With Goergescu they had initially just annulled an election, but let him run again.

Seems I was wrong about Georgescu. Using charges of Russian influence after “finding” weapons and cash and whatnot in his network. I’m—skeptical, at best, this looks like a stitch up to me, but I can’t rule out that the evidence isn’t planted.

So Romania has now banned Georgescu from running at all.

But here’s the thing, take a look at the polling:

The runaway leader. By far. So they’ve banned the most popular choice from running.

It’s hard to say this isn’t anti-democratic. If I were Romanian I’d feel fully justified in starting or joining a revolution in response and as a foreigner, I rather hope that’s what happens, because if it doesn’t, then this sort of election interference will spread in the West. “Vote for anyone you want, as long as the candidate is someone current incumbent can stand.” It’s not hard to imagine this being used against the left as well as the right: a populist left-winger like Corbyn, for example. (Remember there were threats that if Corbyn won the military would launch a coup.) Melenchon’s left wing might face the same fate if it it wins the Presidential election.

So far I haven’t seen the EU condemn this, and I rather assume it’s done with Brussel’s approval. A bad omen for change in Europe. And if change can’t be peaceful, at some point it will be violent.

The neoliberals have ruled for too long, and are too full of themselves to believe that anyone else even has a right to rule. The old post-war order disagreed with Thatcher and Reagan and their heirs, and had ruled for about the same amount of time, but they allowed the transfer of power to a new ideology.

Democracy requires this: if you can’t choose something radically different at the ballot box, then you don’t really have elections.

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Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

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On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

Britain Is Arresting Prominent Pro-Palestinian Activists

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On September 2, 2024

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For “supporting a proscribed organization”. Aka. Hamas. The arrests are by counter-terrorism police.

Sarah Wilkinson’s arrest:

The police came to her house just before 7.30am. 12 of them in total, some of them in plain clothes from the counter terrorism police. They said she was under arrest for “content that she has posted online.” Her house is being raided & they have seized all her electronic devices.

Others who have been arrested include Richard Barnard, Richard Medhurst and Craig Murray.

This is the law they are being charged under:

I have long opposed all “proscribed organization laws.” They destroy freedom of association and freedom of speech. In the US RICO is the primary culprit, justified by being used to go after the Mafia, but they’re all bad and they all wind up being misused. If someone commits an actual crime they should be charged, but freedom of association is fundamental and should not be abridged. RICO should be unconstitutional, but somehow isn’t. As for Britain, well, the laws on the books are draconian but were often not enforced.

Starmer, Britain’s PM, has always treated his job as crushing the left. This was clear when he was leader of the opposition and purged the party of the left, and now he’s done something even the Conservatives did not do, and done it to protect a genocide. When you look at the austerity politics his government is enforcing, it’s clear that he’s actually slightly worse than the Conservatives, which is quite the achievement. A monster in all regards.

In general the West, and especially Europe, is cracking down on freedom of speech. Strong, confident elites don’t need to do this. “Say what you want, it doesn’t matter” is how they think and feel, and they know it’s better to have people shooting off their mouths than acting.

But weak elites; scared elites; crack down.

A lot of this comes down “when times are good, people talk but rarely do.” In the best of times, most people fundamentally support the system. They want changes, yes, but they aren’t actually a threat to elites. But life in Britain has been getting worse for over forty years now and Corbyn scared the Labour establishment: he should never have been able to be elected leader and he should never have come within a hair of winning his first election.

So crush, crush away. Make examples of people.

The same is true of France’s arrest of the CEO of Telegram. This is all about instilling fear. Stay within the lines or we’ll crush you.

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Freezing and Seizing Bank Accounts To Stop Protests And End Bail Funds & Protests

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On June 1, 2023

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RICO, as you may know, is a law passed in 1970, meant to be used against the Mafia. It allows the government to seize money before a guilty verdict if there is a “pattern” of racketeering (defined very widely).

Of course, once you seize someone’s money, they generally can’t hire a defense lawyer, so they tend to have to plead. I respect public defenders greatly, but if you’re in real trouble using one is a crapshoot at best and even the best ones can’t put in the time and work a private defense lawyer can.

Back in 2008 I suggested using RICO against the banksters: there was a pattern of fraud. I did this because I hated the banksters and I hate RICO, and the best way to get rid of bad law is to use it against important people. (Same reason I wanted the banksters thrown into nasty prisons.)

Anyway, RICO is just one way to do what is becoming more and more common: seizing or freezing the money of those the government of the day dislikes, so they can’t oppose the government. Although I disagreed with the Canadian Truck protesters, freezing their without first convicting them of a crime was a tyrannical act. This strategy has been used against unions and protesters, and is why, as far back as 20 years ago, I was arguing that unions needed to find an organizing model which didn’t require a freezable or seizable bank account.

Domestic terrorism laws are also being used for this, and again, many people warned they would be. You think you’re creating a law to go after the Mafia or Nazis, but such laws are always abused. The rule of law is not “what would good people do with this law” but “what would bad people do with this law” because that’s always where it ends up. (And prosecutors in America are almost always bad people, though that’s another article.)

Yesterday we had what is (so far not a RICO case, but it looks like it might wind up being) this used in Atlanta to go after a bail fund:

And…

Bail itself is an abomination: a way of throwing poor people in prison while rich people walk free (unless their money has been frozen.) It’s vastly unjust and clear class warfare of the most common kind: the rich and powerful versus the poor and weak.

This sort of stuff is also why any movement away from paper cash towards all electronic systems must be resisted vigorously. The more you have no way to keep money out of the system, the more the system can be used to crush you. Any all-electronic money system will eventually be abused by those in power, even the “mostly electronic” systems we have are now regularly abused. (Regular readers will notice this is related to the recent article on how dominant systems want people out.)

But the basic principle is simple, no law should be legal if it inflicts punishment before conviction. The only (small) carve-outs must be for people who are a genuine imminent threat and even such cases must be rare.

Of course, to do this,  you need fast trials. You can’t have a system where it takes two years or more for a person to get their time in front of a judge and jury. The simple fixes for this is that if the government doesn’t give you a trial in certain amount of time, six months perhaps being a good upper bound, you get off. It should probably be less than six months, 3 months for complicated cases and 1 month for simple cases seems far more reasonable.

But, some may argue, “if we did that most people would go free.”

Well, yeah. Because the US justice system (and the UK one) are criminalizing way too much stuff. If your crime rate is too high for your justice system to keep up with something is wrong with your laws and your society. Probably a lot of somethings.

In the meantime, if you’re going to oppose the government or important corporations, whether from right or left, remember that, increasingly, the first thing they will do is go after your money. If they can’t nail you with a “crime” yet, this may just be credit card companies and/or other payment processors suddenly deciding they don’t want you as a customer as happened to Wikileaks, MintPress and many others, but piss off the wrong people and they’ll find someway of smashing you, using laws that should never have been on the books, or just using administrative sanctions and daring you to do anything about it when you’re suddenly broke and worried about food and having a roof over your head.

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Analyzing The Trans Panic

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On March 20, 2023

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This is an article I’ve been avoiding writing for a few years now because there’s no upside to it, much like a man weighing in on feminism or a white person writing about first nations or anyone who isn’t a racist piece of garbage writing about Israel. But because trans-rights have become a political wedge issue, I feel it has become necessary to discuss them.

I’m fifty-five years old. When I was growing up two things were true about transvestites (which we universally thought of as male to female). People didn’t like them, and people mostly didn’t think it was any of their business unless they were tricked into a romantic or sexual encounter with one.

I don’t want to underplay how much they were disliked. Watch the end of the first Ace Ventura movie to get a feel for it.

But I don’t remember many people saying transvestites (or drag queens) didn’t have a right to exist. Now, admittedly, this is the late 70s and 80s and 90s, not the 50s and 60s.

The current panic needs a dissection. It’s obviously something which conservatives have vastly amplified in an attempt to use it as a wedge issue, so they can roll back advances on GLBTQ rights. I say obviously because they’re the ones pushing it hardest, alongside one group of essentialist feminists, the TERFs. Conservatives always love to find an otherwise leftish group to work with: in the past they often worked with anti-porn feminists (whom I have some sympathy for.)

A wedge issue is meant to split. Split a coalition, split the public. Carve the T and Q off GLBTQ as gays, lesbians and bi-sexuals scramble to protect themselves and get mommy and daddy to associate cross-dressing with their kids and feel queasy about it, rather than with those two nice gays or lesbians who want to marry, or the bisexual whose bed-partners have nothing to do with them.

There are three main avenues of attack. Sports, safety in female only spaces like bathrooms, and “save the kiddies.”

Let’s start with sports. There’s a lot of back and forth on this and disagreeing studies, but my take on this is simple enough. If you’ve gone thru puberty as a man you’re going to have an advantage in certain sports due to skeletal structure. I used to run. Look at men running and women running: women’s mechanics are different and less efficient due to wider hips. It’s just that simple. In some gender divided sports I’m not sure that trans-women should be allowed to compete, as a matter of fairness. I don’t see an issue with trans-men competing in most sports, but it may turn out that there are some sports in which female puberty is an advantage. There are certainly sports where the best women are worlds better than the best men (real long distance swimming, as one example, though it seems like most of the advantage would go away with hormone treatment.)

Sports is fairly niche, however. The second issue is female only spaces, mostly public bathrooms. The bottom line here is that there doesn’t seem to be much trans-on-normie violence, but a ton of normie-on-trans violence and that trans-women are at great risk if forced to use men’s bathrooms. Trans-women get raped and beaten a lot and men’s bathrooms are a bad place for them. The “other” stigma combined with the fact that any post-hormone treatment transwoman is unlikely to be able to hide what she is makes them big obvious targets that a significant minority of men thinks it’s OK to rape or beat. A transwoman, while she has some skeletal advantages in sports where small advantages add up to victory, is not a big physical threat to other women, and there is no evidence of a wave of trans-women violence, though there have been some individual cases. The bathroom stuff is a panic, and largely irrational.

Now, the kids thing. This is the real problem, and this is what has people most worked up over and outraged. The first step is to admit that there’s some reason for it.

Understand clearly, the evidence is that people who go thru puberty as their preferred gender, having never gone thru puberty as their non-preferred gender have better outcomes, both psychologically and medically/physically. This is pretty settled.

But we have a culture where an ten to thirteen  year old isn’t supposed to make any important decisions for themselves. Our children, including out teenagers below the age of 18, are chattel. Their parents and other authorities make all the important decisions, with the state having the right to override the parents.

This is a time and social bounded case and has not been the situation in all societies. It’s good we don’t have child labor, but the lack of it means that we have come to believe that children and teens (really two different things) are incapable of making their own decisions well or of knowing what is good for them. Further, because of the amount of hormones in our food and water the age of typical puberty has dropped significantly. Many children used to hit puberty as late as 14, that’s rare now.

The problem is that outcomes ARE better if the decision is made at (or rather just before) puberty onset. Again, this isn’t in doubt.

But, yes, it’s a big decision and you’re given hormones to go thru puberty in your non-biological gender, that’s going to lead to worse outcomes if you change your mind.

To the best of my knowledge, however, fewer people change their mind than stick with it and who believe they made the right choice, at least with the time-limited data we have so far.

The other issue related to this is the use of hormone blockers. (Oddly I’m on hormone blockers right now, as they’re standard in one treatment protocol for cancer.)

Understand clearly: the vast majority of evidence and this evidence was accumulated before kid-trans became an issue, is that early puberty is bad for kids: they’re unhappy, they do less well in school, etc. Late puberty is associated with happier and better adjusted kids. Add that to the fact that puberty now comes earlier than it did before we polluted our food and water and a couple years on puberty blockers is close to a non-issue. Hormone blockers do sometimes cause medical issues, so they aren’t risk free, but the risks of growing up as the non-prefferred gender are significant.

But the bottom line here is simple. Should children be able to make their own decisions? Can they? There’s lots of conservative claims that children are unduly influenced by parents or teachers or whatever to become trans, but a cold eye that notices that being a transvestite is still looked on negatively by most of the population leads to the calculation that it’s more likely they’ll be persuaded away becoming trans than towards becoming trans.

Influence or no, though, the problem is that the decision to be trans is best made just before puberty, because not undergoing the other gender’s puberty leads to the best outcomes. This is a decision which should be made by young teens, and our society thinks that young teens shouldn’t make important decisions.

The body in question, however, and the future, is theirs. They are the ones who have to live with it. I am aware of no vast social interest in whether or not transvestites exist. As for the surgery, just leave that decision till they’re legal adults. But the hormone therapy decision should be made young and perhaps, for once, we should allow children to make a decision that matters to them, with the input of their family and doctors, when they need to make it to get the best results.

As for the politics, fuck the right. If people don’t own their own bodies and have the right to make decisions about them, they own nothing. The only reason this is an issue at all is because it involves children and we treat children like property. The rest of it is politically driven moral-panic bullshit. The existence of transvestites, male or female, does not harm you in the vast majority of circumstances (elite athletics is a tiny issue and bathrooms are largely bullshit) and is none of your goddamn business. Mind your own business and let them mind theirs.

(A summary from Scientific American of the evidence.)

Edit: Corrected to indicate improved psychological outcomes (very robust) and some issues from hormone blockers.

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And Roe Is Gone: What’s Coming Up on the Chopping Block?

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On June 24, 2022

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No surprise, leaked opinion was accurate. There’s a decent map here of what it will mean on the ground:

Republicans have spent generations stacking courts, doing whatever they could to put ideologues there. They understood what appointments meant.

If you think Democrats are going to do anything meaningful about this, you are delusional. Democratic leadership does not care, though they’ll fundraise on the issue:

The next time Republicans have the Senate, House, and Presidency they’ll pass a nationwide abortion ban.

Meanwhile, restrictions on guns will be increasingly struck down. Cops no longer have to read people their Miranda rights. Republicans want gay marriage gone. I think they’ll continue to allow cross-race marriages, at least as long as Thomas is on the court, and maybe longer, as they’ll need Hispanic votes. Free public schooling is also likely to go in many states. Contraceptives will be made illegal in many places.

America, fuck’yeah.

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