Re: And really Monkey...

"Why is it so difficult to recognize that every person has the right to choose a life and body in which he can feel at home?" Presumably, because we care about the future of kids, and not just their present; we recognise that childhood and adolescence is a formative time for the human personality, and that in our weird western societies adolescents are particularly prone to mental illness as a result of the pressures they face. This does not mean that all gender dysphoric kids will "grow out" of their condition; but it warrants a degree of caution in prescribing irreversible, costly or potentially harmful treatments, without a proper understanding of the condition and a scientific diagnosis based on individual cases rather than the "one size fits all" approach of the libertarians. For despite the mystifications of atomism and voluntarism, we are not in fact atomic individuals making "free", voluntaristic choices, but a product of the various social and cultural forces to which we are subjected, a cultural matrix that should be challenged rather than accepted as a given. I once knew a very nice 14 year old boy. The local drug pushers definitely agreed with you that he had the right to choose the life that he wanted. Two years later, he was dead. The "right to choose" that ignores the social and cultural framework may have very ambiguous results, and it is results that we should care about, isn't it? The libertarians here want free choice but have either given up on changing the culture or are in favour of it as it is. But it is the culture that is against us; it is the culture that leads people to view their childhood sexual experiences as abuse; it is the culture that teaches every child that any adult who shows the slightest erotic interest in them must be viewed with horror and immediately reported to authority. This is perhaps connected with another difference. The libertarians here look to America as the country that will embrace pederasty in some sort of massive sexual revolution, with the rest of the world following obediently behind. When challenged about the plausibility of this scenario they have been characteristically silent, which is no doubt wise on their part. Those on the other side are more critical of western capitalist culture and rather think that America will be the last country in the world to embrace pederasty. More likely, it will never tolerate pederasty at all. The libertarians cannot accept this, because this would conflict with their progressivist "everything's getting better" view of history, which cannot contemplate the idea that history is just a patchwork of societies and cultures that has no inner reason or logic, with here and there a toleration of pederasty breaking out, but always liable to eclipse by opposing forces. But it does seem to me that toleration of pederasty, if only implicit, is much more likely to come about as the tentacles of the US loosen their grip and withdraw into their homeland, leaving the rest of the world to pursue their own cultural trajectories rather than yank monoculture. Admittedly this will not happen before the second half of the century, but then it is hardly likely that the child sex revolution will happen in America by mid century either. The upshot is that, whichever of us is right, most of us won't be around to witness a more tolerant society anyway.