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Notes -
The state of Minnesota has passed a trans refuge bill.
From my reading of this (not a lawyer, obvs): previously if a child ran away from home, and was found, the child would be returned to the child's parents. Now, however, if a child runs away from home, and claims a "transgender identity" the state will use its powers to keep the child from its parents.
This seems: absolutely pants-shittingly insane to me? Like I'm sortof reeling from disbelief at this and am still trying to figure out what I'm missing. This also seems to imply that if a child runs away to Minnesota, that the child will be kept in Minnesota away from his or her parents.
Can anybody help me understand this? This goes so far beyond anything that I had even considered in the realm of possibility that I'm sure I must be misunderstanding this.
As a related side note: I am reaching a point where reading things on this topic is becoming incredibly difficult. There seems to be so many seemingly double/triple/quadruple entendre words that its hard to follow.
If you consider children to be actual people with rights, then you reject the fundamental right of the parent to mold them into whatever they please.
Forget trans, every cultural standard that removes agency from children is up for review for exclusion from the eschaton.
Parents as the only role model and as an absolute force in a child's life is a single point of failure, at best it's a benevolent dictatorship and at worst its tyranny.
I find that framing disingenuous. If you take away the children from their parents, because you don't like the way they're raising them, you're not respecting the child's rights and actual personhood, you're merely transferring the right to mold them on to a bunch of bureaucrats.
That's fair. I don't think children should be "taken away". I think children should be free to go where they want to and systems should be configured such that roaming children remain supported.
Since this is not what is actually happening in the top post- it's fair to say I disagree with present implementation.
But I do absolutely think- what most parents who are afraid of transgender role models are afraid of- is their kids making the choice.
I claim the resistance to my ideal would consist of mostly the same people for mostly the same reasons.
Child liberation is opposed mainly by people who want the power to ensure that their children become the upstanding ideal of their culture, and are uninterested in any compromise that would free their children to pursue becoming the upstanding ideal of a different culture. See "Groomer" rhetoric.
I proudly own this label, and I ask you why it’s bad. Our society does not do enough to make sure children become an upstanding ideal of normiedom. Instead we leave them to decide what they want to do, which is usually something stupid but glamorous like ‘become an influencer’ and then when they grow up put energy into helping them become normies in the back end when a bunch of them have already screwed the pooch.
So why, exactly, is it bad to want children to turn out like their parents but better?
I appreciate the candor.
But you missed the other half.
Child liberation is opposed mainly by people who want the power to ensure that their children become the upstanding ideal of their culture, and are uninterested in any compromise that would free their children to pursue becoming the upstanding ideal of a different culture.
So why is it bad for them to become the upstanding ideal of a different culture? I agree that it is bad when a child fails to find any viable niche, which is what your argument describes, but why should every child be crammed into their parents' niche? Last I checked, most of us here value horizontal and vertical societal mobility. Forcing children to be their parents but better is... inhuman. Ant-like.
Seeds within a child should be nurtured. However, if you raise a child with ulterior motives, you are compelled to quash seeds that do not conform. This damages the child and perpetuates a culture of painfully breaking people into a mold. You are losing efficiency by cramming round pegs into square holes. This is an argument against modern conventional schooling as well, you may be more familiar with it in that context.
Longterm- I proudly hold the goal of seeding every ecological niche with human/transhuman intelligence.
Crushing children's exploration of new cultural niches is antithetical to this prospect. Instead legitimizing and teaching the fear of the Other and the New. It robs children of their innocence and teaches them fear.
Because they mostly don't.
Children need real, living role models that they interact with every day to absorb enough of a functional culture to smoothly take it up themselves. Right now, society is absolutely full of fake role models, cardboard cutouts of fictional cultures that attempt to lure children into their clutches to be used in some way, whether somewhat banally as brand dedicated consumers or more maliciously.
Children are impressionable. They lack good judgment and, especially, have no real concept of the long term until they are already quite mature, ie., until they have already been raised within one culture. There is a reason we don't just leave cigarettes or alcohol or sexual activity to the good judgment and curious nature of children: They will make bad, often harmful mistakes much more often than they will learn valuable life lessons and become the wiser for it.
The worst part? The children themselves are the only ones with the right incentives to raise themselves right. Because their judgment is impaired, we are left with the second best choice, those whose incentives are aligned with the child's the second most: The parents. Society has no skin in the game for any particular child and anonymous or large scale social institutions most of all. No parent is perfect and always has all their child's best interests in mind at all times, everywhere, but they're going to be significantly better than a teacher who only has that child for one class for one year, where they are but one of dozens of others. They're certainly better than any bureaucrat for whom the child is one of a faceless multitude.
In the past, face-to-face local society provided an additional set of adults whose caring and long term exposure to the child offered a non-exclusive alternative to the child's parents, but that culture is dead and the modern replacements are not up to the job.
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