GulagsMyArse So the communists (the party that my DH and I support incidentally) said the following in Parliament when the issue was being (barely) debated:
(Sorry it's so long, but I find it quite interesting, so I thought I'd include a sizeable chunk of what they said.)
"An individual's right to resolve an incongruence between his officially recorded sex and the sex to which he feels that he belongs, needs to be based on objectively scientific criteria. And the institution of a scientifically evidence-based evaluation as well as social support measures not only do not infringe on his individual rights, but rather make the exercising of these rights actually possible.
"The proposed bill moves in the opposite direction, because it rejects even the most minimal social prerequisites in favor of personal choice and the right of self-determination of the individual.
"Individual, subjective experience is made absolute to the detriment of collective experience, in the rejection of objective reality itself, given that the sole criterion is simply, the experience of each individual. Such an obscene distortion of objectivity opens the way for the disfigurement of even the very meaning of 'rights' at all.
"A series of biological facts, such as sex, but not only, are associated with the recognition of rights, and with one's access to those rights. For example, the age of a person - which I would like to assume we can all accept as an objective fact that is not subject to self-determination - is connected to the right to the pension, under conditions of course which thanks to the currently dominant politics [neo-liberalism, basically] are continuously deteriorating.
"The state's coverage of prescribed medical exams is associated with age, as with sex.
"Much more significantly, individual and social rights must be assigned on the basis of biological facts.
"We seek to defend, for example, the need for protective measures for women in the workplace. Hard-won rights such as these have, today, been cancelled. With the rejection of sex as an objective fact and the consideration of it as something that relies entirely on the desire and self-determination of each individual, we are moving even further away from that need to produce, to recognize, and to protect rights on the basis of sex.
"Would anyone want to defend the right of a parent not to vaccinate his child? If the criterion is the desire of the isolated individual, whatever knowledge each family has, personal experience, the opinion and position of the parents, then we have to accept not only that the vaccination of a child has to fall entirely under the choice of the parents, but also to understand this reality as a 'right'. But if we make the criterion 'scientific knowledge and the collective experience of society' as it relates to the benefits of vaccination, then the concept of the 'right' takes on new meaning. The right refers now to the right of all children to the protection of vaccination, free of charge and with the responsibility of the state that vaccines be proven safe and effective, but also as the right of parents to be kept informed in a responsible fashion about vaccination, including its necessity and its benefits.
"The government with this piece of legislation has as its goal to unhook individual rights from collective social rights, from financial, social, and political conditions. No individual right is guaranteed outside of collective rights; the development of one's self does not happen outside of society; nor can it be left to parental choice.
"The government and the other parties prioritize the same old bourgeois view that proclaims individual responsibility, individual competence, and choice as the greatest human right, with an aim to dissolve and do away with the non-negotiable, ecumenical character of the societal right, on the altar of Individualism.
"Especially in an era when a whole series of collective social rights are being torn asunder, in labor, in education, in healthcare; bourgeois authority and its tools see particular profit from the development of obstacles to consciousness raising for the need for class struggle for modern rights, for everyone of both sexes.
"They are attempting to wall off the only road to change our social reality, which road would be, the overthrow of the exploitative relationships of production."