Mastodawn

Cait the Proud Trans Woman Mar 29, 2023

I've seen a lot of crap being put about on the idea of parents' rights. I want to reject this idea outright.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PARENTS' RIGHTS.

Parents do not have "rights" over their children. The children have rights; the parents have responsibilities to see that those rights are upheld.

In order for the parents to have rights, then necessarily the child does not have them. The only situation in which we have allowed one human to usurp another's rights was slavery; and I would argue children are not property.

If they're not property, then they're people, and if they're people, then they have rights. If they have rights, parents can't.

This is such a crucial distinction. The parents don't have a right to have their child educated; the child has a right to a good education. The parents don't have the right to participate in sport; the child does. And so on.

Once you reframe the idea like this, that children are human beings with their own rights, you see what a disingenous line of attack this is from the right wing.

Parents have an awesome responsibility: the care and management of the human rights of beings not able to assert them for themselves. But it must be clear that the rights belong to the children, and that they are being safeguarded, not owned, by the parents.

This simple conceptual shift shows that children should have full bodily autonomy, including their right to assert consent to being touched by anyone (think touch sensitivity), and including the right to present as the gender they want. The right to religion, or freedom from it if they want. The rights are theirs, and the parents should have no power to abrogate those rights without due care and consideration.

Yes, by the way, I am a parent, as well as a grandparent. I stand by this. My kids are not my property, never were.

Show thread

AE Brown Mar 29, 2023

@oldladyplays

It’s notable that “parent’s rights” is almost never deployed in terms of _right to parent_. There’s a long history of work, by Black, Indigenous and disabled feminists alongside lesbian feminists, on the right to parent as the ignored flip side of reproductive rights. Sometimes those rights are talked about in terms of the child (the child has the right to know their own culture, for instance), but I think it is actually

Show thread

AE Brown

@oldladyplays important to spell out that there is a long history of certain people’s right to parent being taken away because of a belief that is better for the child to be away from “bad” parents, or better for society that certain people not have children at all.

The current parents’ rights crowd are almost universally UNinterested in the right to parent, unless it’s to oppose cps intervention into white xn homes or dept of education

Show thread

AE Brown Mar 29, 2023

@oldladyplays oversight of homeschooling.

I think everyone involved in either policy or the ethics of “rights” agrees that the child’s right to safety is preeminent over the right to parent.

But when we’re looking at queer kids removed from affirming cis parents, and trans people’s ability to parent is increasingly constrained (eg by bathroom laws), it is worth keeping in mind the long tradition of feminist thought on the right to parent.