Appreciate the input. But I lean pretty far on the principle of autonomy, so if someone decides, and is an adult without disability or serious health issues, and knows, let them do it. Freedom means freedom to make mistakes too. People can’t change biology, true, but ultimately it is their body.
This is the mindset that needs to be beaten and hacked to death with a rusty machete if we ever want to make any kind of positive change in our culture. This is the mindset of Satanists and libertarians, and, in my humble opinion, is directly responsible for the vast majority of ills in our society today, including transgenderism.
I used to be like you, the libertarian hippy-dippy "just let people do what they want, maaaaan." Over the years I've realized just how asinine and braindead it is. Let me just touch on two points.
First off, the entire principle of "informed consent" is inherently flawed. How does anybody know what's good for them or not? How can somebody have access to all of the knowledge required to consent to something? What about the people who are being lied to and don't realize it? What about people who are informed, who know what they're doing is bad, and yet proceed to do it anyway? Nobody can possibly be aware of all of the ramifications of their actions. Every single one of us does things that, in our minds, seems well-reasoned and informed, and yet it blows up spectacularly in our faces. None of us have a crystal ball to see into the future with, none of us can ever be truly informed on our decisions and actions. This isn't to say that we should have
no freedom, or to say we should live in a nanny state where Big Brother makes all of our decisions for us, but it is merely to demonstrate that "informed consent" cannot be the baseline for all of our decision making. "Informed consent" is a mirage. It doesn't really exist.
Secondly, bodily autonomy is also false. Your choices are not made in a vacuum. Even choices that ostensibly only have to deal with you can have far-reaching effects on those around you. Think about how many things we ban that would absolutely fly in the face of "bodily autonomy." Take suicide as an example. Suicide, by all accounts, would be the perfect expression of bodily autonomy. It's my body, and I wish to kill myself, so why shouldn't I be allowed to do that? Why does anybody else have the right to intervene and prevent my suicide attempt? Wouldn't that be infringing on my bodily autonomy? Yes, it absolutely would, but it's because suicide
does not just affect me.
Me, personally, if I were to off myself, the effects would be devastating. My mother and father would never get over it. My mother would probably cry herself to sleep every night if I blew my brains out, and my father? My father would probably follow right behind me and off himself if I were to ever do it. My siblings would also have to deal with my self-deletion, and they would be impacted by it, which in turn would also affect all of their relationships. How would my brother's marriage turn out if my brother had to deal with the trauma of his older brother offing himself? How would my sister-in-law deal with that? What about my niece? All of those connections to me, severed by my suicide, and that unfathomably dark event would make waves like a boulder tossed into a tranquil river, disrupting everything around it.
Even if you don't have immediate family or friends, think about the people who have to witness your suicide. I've seen testimonies from first-responders, having to be the first ones on the scene for a person's suicide. They have to be the ones to see your pale, lifeless body hanging from the ceiling, or clean up the blood and bones from the wall from where you shot yourself, or however the method may be. That shit scars people for life. These strangers, people you never even knew, being profoundly affected by your choice. Some of them even go on to commit suicide themselves, because the trauma and depression you get from seeing that shit multiple times takes its toll on you.
All of this because someone decided to exercise their "bodily autonomy" and off themselves.
Think about other things besides suicide. Think about drugs. Drugs are another area where people - libertarians especially - will argue "bodily autonomy." It's my body, and if I want to do drugs in the privacy of my own home, why shouldn't I be allowed? Because again, it fucks up the people around you. Your friends and family have to sit back and watch you destroy yourself with drugs. You become a toxic element in all of your relationships. People no longer want to deal with you because you're high all the time. The drugs slowly poison your body and ruin your mind, and next thing you know you're a homeless person, terrorizing innocent people on the streets because you couldn't control yourself and made bad decisions.
Now think of transgenderism. You might want to modify your body in that way, but again, the people around you are hurt by it. Your parents have to watch their son mutilate himself, cut off his bloodline, and cross-dress because he's mentally ill and refuses to seek help. Think of all the trans-widows, whose marriages were selfishly and callously destroyed because their husbands wanted to put on skirts and LARP as women. I recall in the tranny L's thread, a tranny lamenting that his son decided to refer to his tranny dad as his "self mutilated not male y chromosome progenitor." Such is the level of hatred the son had for his father, a hatred born entirely out of dad's selfish desire to troon out.
There are many examples of laws against bodily autonomy, because the truth is this: it's not your body. What I mean by that is that you do not have ownership over it. You did not create it, you did not choose to live, you were made by forces outside of your control. At best your body is under lease; you are given temporary control over it in exchange for certain provisions. Those provisions include - but are not limited to - agreements to not commit crime, to not harm others, to not destroy yourself, to not be a nuisance to society, and other such stipulations. The lease can be rescinded if you violate the terms, as you will be thrown in jail, and eventually, even if you don't violate the terms, you will die eventually, and then the lease is up anyway.
You do not have the right to radically alter your body in such a way. You simply do not. It is delusional, it is insane, it is madness, and it is evil. You absolutely
do not have the right to behave in such a way. Fuck your bodily autonomy, and fuck your "informed consent." Both concepts need to be chucked in the bin with the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny as the myths they are.