Drivebyhaiku

You are partially correct. Judges are allowed to perform marriages in their off hours as they are ordained to do so.

Big HOWEVER here...

Courthouse weddings are an offered service of the state. These judges are officially on the clock to perform these services which are booked through government infrastructure meaning that when they are performing this service they do so as government employees operating on Government funding. This is provided by the Government as a means to make marriage accessible to all protected legally marriagable couples. When a judge is engaged this way this is specifically what they are being paid by the government to employ their time. They cannot spend their time on other matters.

Lets be clear here. This is not a "health care ban for minors". If you are under 18 and you are looking for gender related care - which can include psychological support you require the consent of all involved parents and guardians and a licenced medical professional.

The average team who all have to agree for a young trans person's gender health to go forward and continue forward is as follows.

• Guardians : need to be supportive, willing and be capable to demonstrate informed consent.

• Pediatric Doctor : Serves as the baseline General practitioner since a young person's body development has specific differences from an adult.

• Psychiatric Doctor : To repeatedly assess whether the young person is a good candidate and adhering to diagnostic frameworks of similar cases to lessen risks should there appear to be any oddities or reticence in continuing.

• Social Case Worker : Investigates the child's relationship between parents and guardians to make sure coercion is not at play.

• Endocrinologist : In the event of pursuing hormones or blockers this specialist observes the process and paitents must routinely go in to make sure no adverse effects are occurring.

Any of these parties may revoke their endorsement for treatment if something appears to not be going to plan. It is this panel OF ADULTS who consult and operate with informed medical consent that these laws are stripping the choices to pursue recognized treatment plans from. Not minors who are by default powerless if these adults do not align with their wishes.

Does that look like a "gentleman" to you? By familiarity of this particular sort who broadcasts his open distain for trans people on his shirt I warrant he is not a chivalrous, courteous, or honorable man.

I think "male" is probably polite enough and better than he deserves.

Huh, I've been banging on about this for awhile in isolation after talking to a lot of cis people about gender and it's really weird to see it in an article by someone else.

Weird and validating.

Depends on your context of "proud". Pride movements for instance aren't nessisarily about being specifically proud of your gender / sexual orientation in the same way one is of your accomplishments. The movement co-opted the word to mean something subtly different. When some says "I am a proud gay man" for instance the statement does not imply "I think I am particularly special given this trait and am worthy of praise because of it" what is actually being implied is "I am not ashamed by this trait and will not be treated as if I should be. "

The movement has it's own language and "Pride" specifically was chosen as being the opposite of shame which was the affect people were expected to have by society. The people who created the idea did so out of participation in gay support groups at the time where the social norm was always that you had to perform a performative regret like being gay was a habit akin to a drug addiction. You were reinforced to adopt a narrative that you were unhappy and struggling - even when actually your partner and community might be a source of great joy. Gay Marches were shirt and tie events where one soberly asked for people to see you as a human that passes for straight, all the culture and actual proclivity tucked behind a neat mask where that undercurrent of shame was still at play.

True Emancipation, according to the Pride movement, was fighting the narrative that there was anything shameful about being happy. They decked themselves in rainbows as an allusion to the joy they wanted to show the world, modeled Pride events on Independence day events and affected instead of performative shame performative pride. Something that would allow them to be unapologetic in their fight for actual rights to exist in the light of day as opposed to the former affect of shame that turned them into pitiful beggars asking for scraps of patchy tolerance to exist in the shadows as people who would treat their own way of being as a failure state.

I dunno if it is much a right of passage as it used to be. Where I am we've had bathroom freedom for a long while now and since we have a larger than usual trans population (Vancouver BC) folk transition bathroom use a little earlier than double take type passing but like anybody who crosses into the other side at minimum definitely looks properly trans. Abroad I have been bodily chased out of bathrooms by women when I was younger and passed for more androgynous even though I am an AFAB who never went on T. I ended up using the gents for awhile just because it meant nobody tried to clock me in the head with a purse but like... it sucked worrying that someone would clock me the other direction while I was waiting for a stall. Never personally happened so I never figured out how that experience shakes out but I was definitely trying to lay low.

Even with it being a city that puts "trans people welcome" over the bathrooms us enbies / non physically transitioned folk tend to have a pretty brutal self assessment of how we clock before we pick which restroom to take. It's really sucky how people take the whole "We don't owe you presentation" quote to infer like the way we personally choose to present doesn't actually factor into how we make choices or navigate the world... Like we still don't want to make people uncomfortable! Half of us enbies are so socially anxious that causing social friction gives us the bloody horrors and we accommodate other people at our own expense more often than not.

Like really... It boggles the mind how so many straights seem to think we operate as some kind of all powerful gender authoritarians who can force people to unquestioningly not even glance at us sideways or else we trot them to the censorship guillotine!

Hi, trans person here.

So what gets left out of these arguments a lot or misunderstood about being trans is not that this is a 'belief' based system. We are very individually aware of what we look like to other people and how we are being "clocked" by others. Take me, I am trans masculine but bodywise I have opted not to transition because of specific reasons. I don't automatically feel comfortable using the gent's washroom.

All of us are looking to find the path of least resistance in this binary that wasn't designed for us. Trans women I know who don't seemlessly pass often get stares regardless of what bathroom they use but while women might be horrible, going to the mens means that transphobes can follow you to a secondary location to assault you. If there's an individual third non gendered option that's often what we use because for me, I feel weird about being in women's spaces even if they don't hassle me and my clockable trans grildfriends don't have to deal with the anxiety of other people staring.

If I did go on hrt though it would be a different story. I, like all of us, want to use the option that makes everyone around me the most comfortable and the whole thing pass by without any incident.

Under a system that allows trans people to make the call to use what allows us to make the call about what is safest and the least path of social resistance you really don't find trans people who look like big scruffy men entering women's washrooms and claiming to be a women because that isn't a path of least resistance move. It's not that we "believe" we are our preferred gender and just automatically switch to everything right away. We are very aware that we do not fit in but why we're doing what we are doing is that our brain looks at our natal sex characteristics as abhorrent which means visually speaking we do dress so that other people can pick up on our deal and don't keep reminding us in language.

Non-binary folk are kind of the standouts but generally speaking we make the exact same sort of social risk assessments and do our business in the bathroom that other people tend to clock our gender as, not nessisarily the one we feel closest aligned with.

So really under a situation where bathrooms are a free for all a fully masculine looking and coding person wandering into a women's room not making any attempt to pass IS still a red flag worthy of heightened caution... But if you are in a place where trans men are forced to use a women's room then more than likely that's a person following the law and in following that law is risking getting the security or police called in because they had to pee and then spending the next hour being treated like a sex offender while they have their documents checked all because they weren't permitted to make the bathroom choice of social least resistance for themselves.

Even if you trained relentlessly to preserve your original tone - lean muscle mass, fat distribution, bone density and skin thickness are all tied to your sex hormones and your cells are constantly being replaced. The oldest a muscle cell (exempting heart cells) gets is like 15 years with the average being more like 10. The good senator has been on HRT for over a decade. There's not any even negligible physiological advantage of experienced testosterone puberty left.

Like anything trained skill and age is more important a factor. Unless either is a trained martial artist the advantage most at play would be that McBride is like 20 years younger. Greene does however give the impression like she has punched out a few people over low cost electronics at Black Friday events so I dunno.

Gunna say it's a close toss up.

Well yes... Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We've had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.

But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it's a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it's day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.

Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it's evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.

This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase "God given rights" but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.

Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn't about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.

Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it's on the books doesn't mean it's in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.

There is an idea of an international code of human rights... But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.

Bit weird to so publicly and enthusiastically proclaim you'd tap that, but whatever I guess.

My hometown has a bookstore like this. It's open every day of the year and was the first business in the town to display a pride flag. The lady who runs the store is a bloody hometown hero who is forefront to organizing both the small town Pride and the Mural festival. They partner with the local animal shelter to foster adoptable cats in the store and whenever you purchase a book you get a poker chip to determine where a small portion of the sale gets donated to pick between three non-profit options.

It sells all manner of gifts from quill pens and fancy dice to LGBTQIA+ jewelry and does new and used books. Back before other businesses started showing support as being safe places it was the one. The town it is in is majority conservative and the people who work and frequent the shop are known to be grassroots fighters who show up to city councils to fight for all manner of progressive causes. Whenever I go back to my hometown I visit that store and I buy at least one glossy new book or a cool set of dice.

It has not been easy as over the years the store has been physically attacked. It's had windows smashed and employees targeted by bigots... But everytime I'm in there I see happy faces on teens and adults excitedly browsing or chatting who love the place.

It is possible to make these places but it requires a lot of support. It's not enough to just run a business, you gotta make a networked community who protects you back.