You don't get to defy the conventions of society
A recent academic
study revealed that the majority of heterosexual adults hold negative opinions about transgender individuals The researcher found the negative attitudes were associated with several factors, including political conservatism, endorsement of a binary conception of sex, and lack of personal contact with sexual minorities. Transgender individual rights remain murky because the American public struggles to fit transgender individuals into an archaic, rigidly fixed legal system.
In late 2012,
a Massachusetts District Court held that a prisoner’s gender identity disorder constituted a serious medical need that triggered Eighth Amendment protection, and the Department of Correction’s refusal to provide him with male-to-female sex reassignment surgery constituted deliberate indifference of his serious medical need. Moreover, in 2013,
the Supreme Court held that the Defense of Marriage Act violated the Fifth Amendment by defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. In making this finding, the Court recognized that spouses in same-sex marriages were entitled to the same rights and privileges as spouses in heterosexual marriages. With these cases and others, there is an emerging recognition in the law of the rights of persons with non-traditional sexual choices, orientations, and identities.
While the law takes baby steps to catch up with science, medicine, and society’s acceptance of non-majoritarian ideas, transgender individuals, and especially transgender youth, need immediate proactive reform. Schools, sitting in loco parentis, are left blindly navigating these difficult issues as they struggle to balance the interests of students struggling with gender identity alongside the safety and protection of the other students in their custody.
I find it thoroughly unprincipled of conservatives to condone "abridgement" of one's exercising freedom of speech, self-expression under the 1st Amendment, by undergoing sexual reassignment while simultaneously railing against "infringement" of certain individuals' exercise of their 2nd Amendment rights. Quite simply, just as the prohibition on abridgment of the freedom of speech is not absolute, so it must be re: the 2nd Amendment. [1]
Though I have my own preference on the matter, I, personally, can endure one's and the law's going one way or the other as goes abridgement/infringement of expressly provided and stated Constitutional rights. What I find unacceptable is the "cherry picking" whereby so many conservative groups and individuals are fine with infringing/abridging "this" right, but not "that" one. One simply cannot do that and be a person of sound principle. One either has a principle one applies and lives by in all instances, even though one may not like the outcome of doing so in some instances. How can one do that? By thinking rigorously and rationally about to what principles one will ascribe, analyzing the implications of the various available principles and determining whether "this" principle's downsides are more or less odious than are "that" one's and choosing accordingly. To do otherwise is tantamount to "putting the 'e' in "ig-nernt."
Note:
- What's the difference between "infringe" and "abridge?" Denotatively in basic substance, abridge refers to the written word, whereas infringe refers to actions; however, that difference didn't clearly exist in the 18th century when the Constitution was written. (The appearance of the "archaic" meaning of "abridge" remains in the dictionary because of the need to accurately construe the Framers' Constitutional meaning of that word.) Connotatively, there are differences, but in the context of rights accorded by law, they are differences without a distinction, for it becomes merely a question of how many logical steps it takes to show their congruity, not that it's a matter of such being impossible to soundly show:
- Infringe implies an encroachment clearly violating a right or prerogative.
- Abridge implies a reduction in compass or scope with retention of essential elements and a relative completeness in the result.
