- cross-posted to:
- feminism@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- feminism@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/53734609
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Ok but can the boys wear whatever the girls were wearing?
My guess is no.
Permission, not “right”
Learn english, brits.
No, they’re being given the legal right to do it. It’s not the schools “giving permission” it’s going to be a law. You should probably look up what a right is too.
I’d like to see that it is a right, not whatever this headline implies:
“Right to wear trousers recognized by courts.”
If it’s a right, then you always had it and it was being denied to you. It cannot be granted unless the government owns you. So which of those would you rather it be?
Seems like a weird line of reasoning
It’s one of those foundational “where do our rights come from” debates.
Are rights: A) Granted by a government B) Derived from nature and recognized by the People
I’d it’s (A), then they can be taken away by a change in the law. They’re just you’re because some monarch or bureaucrat decides you no longer should have it.
If it’s (B) then you always have the right and the monarchs or bureaucrats denying it to you is an assault on your human rights.
While a trousers in school debate isn’t exactly life or death, I see the title’s wording as suspect. It says the girls are now “granted” the right, which means the government decides if you have rights. That’s (A), while I would hope an article writer would want (B), and say the girls’ right to wear trousers has been “recognized” by the courts, which means it should never be taken away without the removal being an act of supppression of human rights.
Language and fraking matters here.
I honestly feel like B isn’t really logical. In reality, practically, governments simply do grant rights. You can say you’ve always had a right to a thing, but if you don’t in practice, that seems like a hollow claim.
We didn’t have any natural right to anything as we were hunter gatherers fighting for survival; we collectively decided some things should be rights and enshrined those in law. Our right to self governance was hard won and the result of our choice… we have the power to establish and maintain rights, they aren’t handed down to us by some mysterious force.
This, to me, is more powerful and liberating than the idea we are simply “discovering” some innate right; the latter I think, similar to religiousness, almost definitionally just cedes logical argument in favor of a claim that something just divinely or naturally exists. You can’t make an argument a right should exist if you’re arguing it already does, but it’s totally unrecognized by anyone.
This ultimately is just claiming a thing to be true and hoping you have enough legitimacy for it to be viewed as such; after all, the divine right of kings to rule was exactly the same, a claimed right that simply exists as the natural order of things.
I’m uneasy accepting paradigms that relinquish logical argument and discussion in favor of pleas to a natural order… the latter can be turned against you just as easily as for you, in fact I’d argue they do exactly that more often. The former needs a logical consistency and leaves room for convincing others we should, prescriptively, do a thing rather than claiming it simply exists, descriptively. It directly puts power in our hands to expand rights.
With natural/divine rights, if two groups disagree on a right, there’s really no point that can be argued, they simply both believe they have a natural or divine claim to being correct. With granted rights, you have to argue your case on why it should be granted, and there’s a point of peaceful resolution to the disagreement.
Given that i had my right to live and work in the majority of Europe taken from me against my will and now half our political parties are looking to strip me of my human rights I’d say it’s pretty self evident that it’s A and governments can take them away.
Given you recognise it’s a foundational debate, why would you expect a journalist to have the same view as you on it?
Anyway I think it’s pretty clear a lot of rights only make sense in a social system - there’s no inherent natural right to things that don’t exist in a state of nature.
Even with (B) changing cultural attitudes can lead to rights being revoked without being viewed as suppression. The line between something being recognised by the people and granted by the government is a fuzzy one.
