This is a long article for what should be an argument so simple that even a Republican could understand it:
- It’s your life.
- It’s your body.
- You have the right to be yourself.
- You have the right to determine your own identity.
- Your name and gender are whatever the fuck you say they are.
I’ve said all of this before. I’ll keep saying it until I’m assassinated by some right-wing stochastic terrorist. Trans rights are individual rights. If you can’t bring yourself to let people be themselves and live their own lives as long as they aren’t violating anybody else’s human rights in the process, you’re no friend of mine. No person’s rights should be subject to majority opinion. We possess them because we are human. We possess them because we cannot be fully human without them.
It is time to stop pretending that conservatives have valid arguments against letting individuals live their own lives, free of interference. They never have. They never will. And eventually somebody is going to teach them that ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings, is also the last argument of free people.
I say trans rights. I also say that if conservatives find women and LGBT people paraphrasing Patrick Henry by saying, "Give me liberty or I’ll give you death," they have nobody to blame but themselves. If I was on a jury judging a woman or LGBT person accused of murdering a conservative I’d vote to acquit, the law and state’s case be damned. When the law is no shield, the oppressed find recourse in the sword.
Speaking of violence in defense of liberty, today is March 15, the Ides of March — AKA International Shank-a-Tyrant Day. The ideal way to celebrate would be to put a transphobe in their place, but non-violently lest we make martyrs out of morons. After all, rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s did not save the Roman Republic. His assassination merely sparked the civil war that ushered in the Roman Empire.
If we’re going to put transphobes in their place, I say we start with Chaya Raichik, the asshole behind Libs of TikTok. She may well have gotten Nex Benedict killed, but I wouldn’t count on ever seeing her stand trial in connection with their death, or for the stochastic terrorism Raichik helps foment with her demagoguery. At the very least, she should be driven off the internet and hounded back into obscurity.
More importantly, every adult who allowed Benedict and others like them to be bullied for being nonbinary or transgender ought to stand trial for child neglect and negligent homicide. They had a duty of care to Benedict commensurate with the authority they claimed in loco parentis. They abused their authority. For this they must be made to pay.
The shade of Nex Benedict demands justice. That of Hypatia is still screaming for vengeance. The vast majority of transphobia reeks of rank misogyny to me. And don’t even get me started on Christianity. That religion was irredeemably corrupted when Constantine made it the established religion of the Roman Empire. Thanks to him, the cross is but another symbol of oppression.