The other fuss is a bill that expands reproductive rights including abortion. The bill re-affirms the body autonomy and decision-making right of a pregnant person of any age. The bill, HB2002B, also includes a provision protecting "gender affirming care." That means Oregonians permit -- and the Oregon Health Plan includes -- hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries to align a patient's mind and body. These are now litmus-test issues for Republicans.
Abortion was a bright line for Republicans back when Roe v. Wade made prohibiting abortion impossible. They taught GOP voters to accept "abortion-is-murder" messaging. Republicans now understand the electoral peril of saying, flat out, that the fertilized egg is a human soul and ending it is murder. Messages have adjusted. Opposition to this bill focuses on protecting parental rights and protecting children from themselves.
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| Oregonlive April 28, 2023 |
Oregon senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp wrote in an Oregonian guest column:
[T]his legislation will allow a minor at any age to have an abortion without parental knowledge or consent. A doctor may not disclose this information to a child’s parent unless the child provides explicit written permission – stripping away a parent’s right to know. . . .[I]t leaves children on their own to deal with the consequences of what might have been a crime, or at the very least a significant event deserving of parental guidance.
He brings up the pedophile, "groomer" threat:
Lawmakers may very well be aiding and abetting pedophiles and sex-traffickers who can pressure kids into telling doctors that a boyfriend got them pregnant to avoid criminal repercussions.
Opponents of the law posit a pregnant 10-year-old: Surely such young child needs parental guidance.
I have the opposite view. If a young girl finds herself pregnant and she does not want to talk to the people she lives with -- or parent she does not live with -- then there is clearly a grave problem somewhere. In the recent famous Ohio case, abortion was prohibited to a ten-year-old. Ohio lawmakers decided the girl must bear the child, regardless of the opinion of the girl or her parents. Oregon's proposed law neither requires nor prohibits an abortion, nor does it stop the child from getting parental guidance. The bill does say that the parents cannot force their ten-year-old to carry a pregnancy to term against her will. I am OK with that. I would consider that child abuse. My own sense is that if a very young girl is pregnant, there is, by definition, a grave problem, likely at home. If so, let courts get involved.
Republican messaging on gender focuses on two fears. One is the "predator male." This involves the fear that person who is "really" a man, will invade women's spaces, including bathrooms or athletic competitions. The other is a belief that gender is a clear binary choice, male and female, created at the time of fertilization. Therefore, with all the current skirmishes about gender, we are experiencing a social contagion fad. People are speaking and acting out, claiming to choose their gender, when they cannot. Biology is biology, and it is fixed. Opponents argue we must protect children from this error, and taxpayers from paying for it.
My own limited experience with people with untypical DNA, hormones, and orientations, and those who seek gender transition, are that they are victims of biology and that they may well have communication problems at home.
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| Albinism |
These gender ambiguous situations seem to me to be quirks of nature -- unusual but natural -- like left-handedness, or albinism, or eyes of different colors, or very high or low IQ. A culture can shame and stigmatize these quirks, and many do. Or one can take a God-doesn't-make-mistakes, live-and-let-live attitude. My observation is that people with unusual biology have a hard path, made harder when culture and laws stigmatize them. I am going with the second approach. It seems kind, freedom-loving, and congruent with my Judeo-Christian upbringing. But I am not a Republican elected official and I do not need to win a Republican primary election.
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10 comments:
Maybe the answer is to not have political party primaries or everyone become a republican and vote accordingly to their beliefs.
I hope you will expand your thoughts on the now 10 "senators" stopping any work in the State Legislature. Measure 113 Amended the State Constitution so that this situation would not happen again, with a 68% approval rating by Voters, including 55% of Republicans. It's quite obvious that Republican Legislators in Oregon care nothing about what a Majority of their Constituents want, so why do they keep getting paid. When Boquist threatened to shoot and kill any State Police sent to return him to the Capitol in Salem, he suffered ZERO consequences. There is something really rotten in this States Political systems, and it isn't fish.
Perhaps there is something left over, some little bit of primitive DNA, that recoils from diversity. Something like a herd of antelope that all must look alike to confuse a pursuing attacking lion as the herd runs away. People identifying as Republicans may have this genetic strand in abundance as they kill, metaphorically, any deviation in their ranks. Who knows maybe this will be a story in The Onion sometime soon? Hint, hint. Or perhaps more basic reason is cowardice and lack of conviction in their core beliefs? Standup and tell us why ghost guns should be legal and why minor women must have parental permission to obtain an abortion, or why people born with diverse sexual conditions must be denied treatment they need? Running away from our problems is making them worse.
Oregon is one of only four states that require more than a majority for legislators to meet. If we had any sense, we’d change that.
We did finally impose a consequence for walkouts, the voter-approved unexcused absence law, but the Senate minority leader has started a PAC collecting funds to fight it. This is just one more example of Republican contempt for the will of the voters, along with their refusal to admit that Biden won the 2020 election.
Since Republicans espouse such an unpopular agenda, they’re unable to pass it using the usual legislative process. By using walkouts instead, they’re trying to impose it on us at the state level. By threatening us with default on our debt, they’re doing the same on the national level. Their hostility toward democracy and the rule of law is going to be our undoing.
Gender ambiguous people are a tiny proportion, something like 0.2%. I have no problem treating these people with kindness and compassion. When people like this are trans, they typically express that from a very young age.
What we also have now is a social contagion, especially among teenage girls on social media, where friend groups convince each other that they are trans. These people typically have never shown any sign of thinking they are trans until the high school/social media ages.
Treating these people with kindness and compassion, does not involve immediately enabling them to get permanently life altering “treatments,” they could end up regretting for the rest of their lives.
I was totally on board with your first paragraph Michael. But you really lost me when you transitioned (so to speak) toward making remarkable assertions about teenage girls on social media convincing each other to become trans. I read quite a few right-wing websites (to keep appraised of what the wingnuts are going off about at a given time) and I've never heard that particular one. Perhaps you could share your source(s)??
Cause it sounds completely outlandish from my point of view on a number of levels.
Woke Guy,
Here’s one:
copy and paste
https://quillette.com/2023/02/10/social-contagion-and-transgender-identities/
or click
It's an interesting read, and I'll admit that if my kid told me he/she was transgender, it would be a tough pill for me to swallow, woke though I want to be.
Here's another article that details some of the pushback the study that the article you linked is based on. And there's been alot of pushback considering that much of the evidence for the study that the article you link uses as a primary source point was derived from openly anti-trans (and therefore biased) sources.
Check this one out and let me know what you think https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/18/1057135/transgender-contagion-gender-dysphoria/
Woke Guy,
I just read your article. It makes an equivalently convincing case in the other direction. I think that this issue is being driven by very strong feelings in both directions, and those strong feelings are overriding the large uncertainties that exist in this area.
Here’s an article that I think does a good job of being evenhanded as it describes these uncertainties:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/
I don’t doubt there are people who are legitimately trans and who should transition. I also don’t doubt that there are people who are caught up in either social contagion or something else that makes them think they are trans, when it’s really something else that’s going on with them.
I would be happy to go with “the science,“ if I could be confident that the science was not tainted by activism. But these days, that is a very unwarranted assumption.
Very interesting article. By Quillette I was sorry that the following article was pulled from the internet, but there’s still plenty of good info, I’d say. “In early September, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health put out a statement saying ROGD “constitutes nothing more than an acronym” and urged restraint in using the term.”
I also find it telling that groups of friends seem to “come out” with each other. Maybe that isn’t social contagion, but it’s easy to think so.
I also wonder, with admittedly no scientific basis, whether trans kids WITHOUT physical issues, are unpopular in school, and find acceptance among trans groups. Hard to say.
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