Freedom Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on freedom.

Freedom is something that everybody has heard of but if you ask for its meaning then everyone will give you different meaning. This is so because everyone has a different opinion about freedom. For some freedom means the freedom of going anywhere they like, for some it means to speak up form themselves, and for some, it is liberty of doing anything they like.

Freedom Essay

Meaning of Freedom

The real meaning of freedom according to books is. Freedom refers to a state of independence where you can do what you like without any restriction by anyone. Moreover, freedom can be called a state of mind where you have the right and freedom of doing what you can think off. Also, you can feel freedom from within.

The Indian Freedom

Indian is a country which was earlier ruled by Britisher and to get rid of these rulers India fight back and earn their freedom. But during this long fight, many people lost their lives and because of the sacrifice of those people and every citizen of the country, India is a free country and the world largest democracy in the world.

Moreover, after independence India become one of those countries who give his citizen some freedom right without and restrictions.

The Indian Freedom Right

India drafted a constitution during the days of struggle with the Britishers and after independence it became applicable. In this constitution, the Indian citizen was given several fundaments right which is applicable to all citizen equally. More importantly, these right are the freedom that the constitution has given to every citizen.

These right are right to equality, right to freedom, right against exploitation, right to freedom of religion¸ culture and educational right, right to constitutional remedies, right to education. All these right give every freedom that they can’t get in any other country.

Value of Freedom

The real value of anything can only be understood by those who have earned it or who have sacrificed their lives for it. Freedom also means liberalization from oppression. It also means the freedom from racism, from harm, from the opposition, from discrimination and many more things.

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Freedom does not mean that you violate others right, it does not mean that you disregard other rights. Moreover, freedom means enchanting the beauty of nature and the environment around us.

The Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech is the most common and prominent right that every citizen enjoy. Also, it is important because it is essential for the all-over development of the country.

Moreover, it gives way to open debates that helps in the discussion of thought and ideas that are essential for the growth of society.

Besides, this is the only right that links with all the other rights closely. More importantly, it is essential to express one’s view of his/her view about society and other things.

To conclude, we can say that Freedom is not what we think it is. It is a psychological concept everyone has different views on. Similarly, it has a different value for different people. But freedom links with happiness in a broadway.

FAQs on Freedom

Q.1 What is the true meaning of freedom? A.1 Freedom truly means giving equal opportunity to everyone for liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Q.2 What is freedom of expression means? A.2 Freedom of expression means the freedom to express one’s own ideas and opinions through the medium of writing, speech, and other forms of communication without causing any harm to someone’s reputation.

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  • Freedom Essay

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What is Freedom?

If we ever wonder what freedom is, we can look around and see the birds flying high up in the sky. While we in the land work in order to get something, we are actually captivated by that invisible power of want. The former indicates what freedom is while the latter indicates slavery. Well, this is a philosophical justification of what we mean about the term ‘freedom’. The real meaning of freedom is the state of independence where one can do whatever one likes without any restriction by anyone. Moreover, freedom is defined as the state of mind where we have the right and are free to do what we can think of. The main emphasis of freedom is we need to feel freedom from within.

Freedom is a very common term everybody has heard of but if you ask for its exact definition or meaning then it will differ from person to person. For some Freedom may mean the Freedom of going anywhere in the world they would like, for some it means to speak up for themselves and stay independent and positive, and for some, it is the liberty of doing anything whatever they like.

Thus Freedom cannot be contained and given a specific meaning. It differs from every culture, city, and individual. But Freedom in any language or any form totally depends on how any particular person handles the situation and it largely shows the true character of someone.

Different Types of Freedom

Freedom differs from person to person and from every different situation one faces. Hence Freedom can be classified as

Freedom of association.

Freedom of belief.

Freedom of speech.

Freedom to express oneself.

Freedom of the press.

Freedom to choose one's state in life.

Freedom of religion.

Freedom from bondage and slavery.

The list can even continue because every individual's wish and perspective differ.

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FAQs on Freedom Essay

1. What is democracy?

Democracy can be defined as - "a government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system". Also, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government that is "of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Democracy is such a form of government where the rulers are being elected by the people. The single chief factor that is common to all democracies is that the government is chosen by the people. The non-democratic government can be the example of Myanmar, where the rulers are not elected by the people.

2. Why is freedom important in our life?

Freedom is very important as this gives us the right to be ourselves, and this helps to work together after maintaining autonomy. Freedom is quite important as the opposite is detrimental to our own well-being and which is inconsistent with our nature.

Freedom is a necessary ingredient for the pursuit of happiness for an individual. Freedom also may be negative or positive – freedom from the constraints on our choices and actions, and the freedom to grow, in order to determine who and what we are.

3. What do you mean by ‘Right to Freedom of Religion’?

We all have the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and also religion. This right includes the freedom to change our religion or belief. We can change our religion either alone or in community with others in public or in private, to manifest this religion or the belief, in worship, in teaching also in practice and observance.

4. Why is Freedom essential in everyone's life?

Freedom is a space or condition in which people will have the sole opportunity to speak, act and pursue their own happiness without unnecessary or any external restrictions which may even involve their own parents, friends, or siblings. Literally no one has the right to get involved in someone else’s life and try to fit in their opinion. Freedom is really important in everyone's life because it leads to enhanced expressions of creativity and original thought, increased productivity in their own view, and overall high quality of life. 

5. What does real Freedom actually look like?

Real Freedom is being able to do what you want and whenever you want without someone actually getting involved in your life, being duty and responsibility-free but that doesn't mean being unemployed and this means Freedom to choose your own career and working in your own space with full acknowledgment not really bothered by what other people think, being careless but not being irresponsible about whatever happens in your life by taking full control of your life in your hands, being Spiritually Free is definitely another form of Freedom from certain beliefs and superstitions and finally having enough money to enjoy your life in your taste is the most important form of Freedom.

6. Is Freedom a better option always in every situation?

It is definitely a no because we Indians are brought up in that way that we always tend to be dependent or rely on someone for at least one particular thing in our life. Because we tend to make mistakes and make wrong decisions when we are in an emotional state, hence it is good to have one soul you might go back to often when you are confused. Our parents have brought us up in a way where we are expected to meet certain family standards and social standards so we are bound to get tied under some family emotions most of the time. But it is necessary to decide what is good for you in the end.

7. What does the feeling of finally enjoying Freedom look like?

You will have an ample amount of energy for desiring and taking the required action, and you will finally move whole-heartedly towards your own decision. You feel happy with the Freedom of just existing on this earth itself. You think your individuality has value now among both family and society. It's important that you do not just have the right to do what you want but can also choose happiness over adjustments and don't do what you actually do not want.

8. Why is Freedom of Expression more important than anything else?

Freedom of Expression is the most important human right which is essential for a society to be democratic and equal in serving both men and women or anyone. It enables the free exchange of ideas, opinions, and information and thus allows members of society to form their own opinions on issues of public importance but not only public opinion but also regarding families or any relationship for that matter. Expressing what one feels or what they actually go through is absolutely their own right which no one can ever deny.

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Essays About Freedom: 5 Helpful Examples and 7 Prompts

Freedom seems simple at first; however, it is quite a nuanced topic at a closer glance. If you are writing essays about freedom, read our guide of essay examples and writing prompts.

In a world where we constantly hear about violence, oppression, and war, few things are more important than freedom. It is the ability to act, speak, or think what we want without being controlled or subjected. It can be considered the gateway to achieving our goals, as we can take the necessary steps. 

However, freedom is not always “doing whatever we want.” True freedom means to do what is righteous and reasonable, even if there is the option to do otherwise. Moreover, freedom must come with responsibility; this is why laws are in place to keep society orderly but not too micro-managed, to an extent.

5 Examples of Essays About Freedom

1. essay on “freedom” by pragati ghosh, 2. acceptance is freedom by edmund perry, 3. reflecting on the meaning of freedom by marquita herald.

  • 4.  Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

5. What are freedom and liberty? by Yasmin Youssef

1. what is freedom, 2. freedom in the contemporary world, 3. is freedom “not free”, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning freedom, 5. freedom vs. security, 6. free speech and hate speech, 7. an experience of freedom.

“Freedom is non denial of our basic rights as humans. Some freedom is specific to the age group that we fall into. A child is free to be loved and cared by parents and other members of family and play around. So this nurturing may be the idea of freedom to a child. Living in a crime free society in safe surroundings may mean freedom to a bit grown up child.”

In her essay, Ghosh briefly describes what freedom means to her. It is the ability to live your life doing what you want. However, she writes that we must keep in mind the dignity and freedom of others. One cannot simply kill and steal from people in the name of freedom; it is not absolute. She also notes that different cultures and age groups have different notions of freedom. Freedom is a beautiful thing, but it must be exercised in moderation. 

“They demonstrate that true freedom is about being accepted, through the scenarios that Ambrose Flack has written for them to endure. In The Strangers That Came to Town, the Duvitches become truly free at the finale of the story. In our own lives, we must ask: what can we do to help others become truly free?”

Perry’s essay discusses freedom in the context of Ambrose Flack’s short story The Strangers That Came to Town : acceptance is the key to being free. When the immigrant Duvitch family moved into a new town, they were not accepted by the community and were deprived of the freedom to live without shame and ridicule. However, when some townspeople reach out, the Duvitches feel empowered and relieved and are no longer afraid to go out and be themselves. 

“Freedom is many things, but those issues that are often in the forefront of conversations these days include the freedom to choose, to be who you truly are, to express yourself and to live your life as you desire so long as you do not hurt or restrict the personal freedom of others. I’ve compiled a collection of powerful quotations on the meaning of freedom to share with you, and if there is a single unifying theme it is that we must remember at all times that, regardless of where you live, freedom is not carved in stone, nor does it come without a price.”

In her short essay, Herald contemplates on freedom and what it truly means. She embraces her freedom and uses it to live her life to the fullest and to teach those around her. She values freedom and closes her essay with a list of quotations on the meaning of freedom, all with something in common: freedom has a price. With our freedom, we must be responsible. You might also be interested in these essays about consumerism .

4.   Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

“Freedom demands of one, or rather obligates one to concern ourselves with the affairs of the world around us. If you look at the world around a human being, countries where freedom is lacking, the overall population is less concerned with their fellow man, then in a freer society. The same can be said of individuals, the more freedom a human being has, and the more responsible one acts to other, on the whole.”

Carlson writes about freedom from a more religious perspective, saying that it is a right given to us by God. However, authentic freedom is doing what is right and what will help others rather than simply doing what one wants. If freedom were exercised with “doing what we want” in mind, the world would be disorderly. True freedom requires us to care for others and work together to better society. 

“In my opinion, the concepts of freedom and liberty are what makes us moral human beings. They include individual capacities to think, reason, choose and value different situations. It also means taking individual responsibility for ourselves, our decisions and actions. It includes self-governance and self-determination in combination with critical thinking, respect, transparency and tolerance. We should let no stone unturned in the attempt to reach a state of full freedom and liberty, even if it seems unrealistic and utopic.”

Youssef’s essay describes the concepts of freedom and liberty and how they allow us to do what we want without harming others. She notes that respect for others does not always mean agreeing with them. We can disagree, but we should not use our freedom to infringe on that of the people around us. To her, freedom allows us to choose what is good, think critically, and innovate. 

7 Prompts for Essays About Freedom

Essays About Freedom: What is freedom?

Freedom is quite a broad topic and can mean different things to different people. For your essay, define freedom and explain what it means to you. For example, freedom could mean having the right to vote, the right to work, or the right to choose your path in life. Then, discuss how you exercise your freedom based on these definitions and views. 

The world as we know it is constantly changing, and so is the entire concept of freedom. Research the state of freedom in the world today and center your essay on the topic of modern freedom. For example, discuss freedom while still needing to work to pay bills and ask, “Can we truly be free when we cannot choose with the constraints of social norms?” You may compare your situation to the state of freedom in other countries and in the past if you wish. 

A common saying goes like this: “Freedom is not free.” Reflect on this quote and write your essay about what it means to you: how do you understand it? In addition, explain whether you believe it to be true or not, depending on your interpretation. 

Many contemporary issues exemplify both the pros and cons of freedom; for example, slavery shows the worst when freedom is taken away, while gun violence exposes the disadvantages of too much freedom. First, discuss one issue regarding freedom and briefly touch on its causes and effects. Then, be sure to explain how it relates to freedom. 

Some believe that more laws curtail the right to freedom and liberty. In contrast, others believe that freedom and regulation can coexist, saying that freedom must come with the responsibility to ensure a safe and orderly society. Take a stand on this issue and argue for your position, supporting your response with adequate details and credible sources. 

Many people, especially online, have used their freedom of speech to attack others based on race and gender, among other things. Many argue that hate speech is still free and should be protected, while others want it regulated. Is it infringing on freedom? You decide and be sure to support your answer adequately. Include a rebuttal of the opposing viewpoint for a more credible argumentative essay. 

For your essay, you can also reflect on a time you felt free. It could be your first time going out alone, moving into a new house, or even going to another country. How did it make you feel? Reflect on your feelings, particularly your sense of freedom, and explain them in detail. 

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

essay on freedom is precious

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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English Summary

1 Minute Speech on Freedom is Precious In English

Good morning to one and all present here. Today, I’ll be giving a short speech on the topic of ‘freedom is precious’.

Freedom, more often than not, is earned through struggle and pain and ought to be cherished, it’s worth never to be forgotten.

India gained her freedom on the 15th of August, 1947. It was no easy task. It took years and years of struggle, tears, and pain under the tyranny of British rule. It took the courage, sweat, and blood of hundreds and thousands of patriotic citizens who fought against the oppression valiantly and did not fear to even give up their lives for the cause of the greater good. It took resistance on all ends, slowly building up to become a massive revolution enough to drive out the British.

It is the struggle of these brave Indians who have made it possible for us to enjoy the liberty and freedom that we have today- to study, voice our opinions, and live independently.

Rejoice in this freedom!

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Awareness: The Most Precious Kind of Freedom

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Burdens of Freedom

Lawrence m. mead.

essay on freedom is precious

O ur politicians love to say that the United States is a free country. In a sense, they are correct: Americans enjoy the rule of law and civil liberties; our government is elected; and the authorities cannot arrest citizens on account of their opinions. While the government enforces certain tough laws, levies taxes, and reserves the right to conscript — prerogatives that some conservatives consider to be excessive — it remains true that Americans are indeed freer than most people in the rest of the world.

This common view presents freedom entirely in negative terms, as a lack of outside constraints. When we casually say "it's a free country," we mean that American citizens can do or be anything they want, that no artificial hindrances will stand in the way of their pursuits. To be free is to be surrounded, so to speak, by empty space, which permits the free person to move in any direction he chooses.

But this sort of language overlooks the many obligations that freedom demands. The constraint is not only that each free person must respect the freedom of others. To say that still assumes a negative idea of freedom. Rather, it is that freedom directly produces obligations. Freedom is not negative but something positive — a set of responsibilities. The burdens of freedom are inseparable from freedom itself. Most immediately, even a free government must make the demands about law-abidingness and taxes just mentioned. But other burdens follow from the nature of a free society and even from living a "free" life.

Not freedom but the burdens of freedom, which impinge upon us at many levels, are the real center of American life. Despite living in a free country, most Americans do not experience life as free at all. Instead, life is a constant struggle to satisfy mundane demands, some of them coming from government, but some from other people and others from one's own goals. Freedom is precious, not because it liberates us from constraint, but because it enlists citizens in worthwhile efforts toward life's central purposes. In every arena of life, American institutions work to transmute freedom into responsibility. And that is exactly what a meaningful life requires.

THE ECONOMY

Consider above all the economy. By most measures, America is the wealthiest country in the world. And yet, in spite of that fact, ordinary Americans face constant economic pressures. Many people struggle every day simply to make ends meet: to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, and clothes on their backs. Few feel surrounded by empty space; rather, they slog forward daily as if through a solid substance. There are several chief economic burdens our country faces:

First is the job market. Unemployment reached 10% of the labor force during the Great Recession. It has since fallen to under 5%, which some economists regard as full employment. But long-term unemployment persists, with over 2 million people remaining jobless for more than half a year. And the share of the adult population that is working or looking for work has fallen below 63%, more than three points lower than before the recession. Why do so many Americans seem to have trouble finding and keeping jobs, and why have so many — especially older men — given up on work entirely, even in good times?

The second is increasing income inequality. Historically, Americans boasted of their affluent society, which continued to grow still richer to the benefit of all. But, for decades now, most Americans have seen little gain in their standard of living. Some of the lowest-skilled have even lost ground. The country is still getting richer overall, but most of the recent gains have gone to people who were already affluent or rich — including the top 1% derided by liberal commentators. Why can't the economy, or the government, spread the wealth more evenly?

The third burden is growing debt. Hardly able to afford the bare necessities, many Americans have gone heavily into debt to pay for home mortgages, college educations for their children, or health care. Many have been unable to save much for their retirement. While the federal government subsidizes all these expenses, it is now heavily in debt itself. Despite recent improvement, the government budget deficit is still over $600 billion a year, and the national debt has soared to $19.4 trillion. As the Baby Boomers retire, debt is projected to rise higher still. Why can't a rich country, with a high standard of living, afford to pay its individual and collective debts?

In an effort to explain these travails, our leaders often blame some error or injustice wrought by the hands of government. Conservatives say taxes are too high or government has mismanaged the economy, while liberals say the rich enjoy unfair privileges. Both sides, that is, fasten on some un freedom that could be avoided, and then, they say, the economic pressures would ease. Then America could be freer and richer than it is now. For politicians, freedom is always seen in the negative, as freedom from something.

That view, however, is an illusion. While both parties point to more-or-less serious problems, no reform drawn from either of their platforms is likely to free up American life. Conservative rhetoric sometimes depicts the market as a deus ex machina that produces wealth without much effort. It certainly outperforms the statist economies of the old communist bloc. The market is simply more efficient than collectivism, yielding more for the same productive effort. However, it also increases that productive effort. In a market, incentives to work hard are far stronger, for both producers and consumers, than under collectivism. The "free" market, just as Marx said, is a taskmaster that demands far greater effort than any other system. Affluence exacts a price in elbow grease.

Liberals, for their part, suggest that those at the top have it easier than the masses struggling beneath them. In a plain sense, that's right. But it's also true that the affluent become that way, in part, simply from working hard. Lower-income people typically work far less. In 2014, less than half of family heads in the bottom fifth of the income distribution worked at all, while in the top fifth more than 70% worked full-time and full-year. That is the reverse of the pattern during the Gilded Age, a century ago. Then, New York plutocrats relaxed at their seaside vacation homes while immigrant masses toiled long hours just to survive. If today's poor worked this much, they would seldom be poor at all, and incomes would be a lot more equal than they are. Of course, improved opportunities would also help them, but in the economic struggle nothing can substitute for sheer working hours.

The economic burdens that the American people endure are not avoidable but deeply rooted in the nature of a free society. The struggle arises, in the first place, simply from competition. If freedom in America were given to just one person, he might indeed be able to do or be anything. But the rule of law opens opportunities for a great many people. And the vast majority of them want the same basic things — like good jobs and income — so they compete to get them. The very freedom to compete is what generates great wealth, but at the cost of great effort.

Liberal critics blame economic burdens on the power producers have to charge what the market will bear. To them, that license is exploitative. But for the producers, too, there is no free lunch. As Adam Smith showed, if the market is at all open, any successful business endeavor will attract competitors. Unless there is a monopoly or producers collude, competition will drive prices down closer to costs and thus minimize profits. Most Americans feel better served by capitalism, despite its demands, than they do by government, which faces no market test. In the end, the market enslaves the producers to serve the society. So both buyers and sellers must work hard and endure the risks of buying and selling — and no policy reforms will change those basic facts.

Like the economy, our society is apparently open to all. That means a citizen can live wherever he wants, however he wants, with his chosen associates, and so forth. The rights to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as one sees fit are written into America's founding documents. Recent social trends, such as the growing acceptance of gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and the proliferation of charter schools, indicate that Americans are constantly expanding their idea of personal liberty.

But again, as with the economy, competition restricts access to the things people want most. That includes careers that are interesting and pay well, in contrast to low-paid, monotonous work. Many people also aspire to live in affluent communities where good schools will give their children a head start in life. The economy can raise absolute levels of reward, at least for the society as a whole, but it cannot similarly elevate rewards that involve standing relative to other people. Status is a zero-sum contest. For some to do well, others must do less well. That places a limit on how productive even a free society can be.

In today's America, the meritocracy — meaning especially competition for success in school — largely determines social status. Children who do well in the classroom are the most likely to ascend to elite colleges, which propel them toward well-paid careers and to nice houses in the suburbs or high rises in New York or San Francisco. That largely explains why, for many families in the middle class, the competition for top colleges has become all-consuming. It is one reason why marriage has firmed up at the top of society compared to several decades ago — parents know that their children need two parents behind them if they are to compete successfully for high social rank.

In the meritocracy, even more than in the economy, the rich get richer. The most talented have the confidence that goes with their gifts, and then they also win the best social positions as well. The less talented lose on both counts. Yet here, as in the market, it is socially optimal that competition reign. The most demanding careers have the greatest impact on the society as a whole, and therefore require the highest talent available. Though the market does not distribute talent perfectly, it does so in a relatively efficient way.

Some say that the playing field is far from level. The affluent can pour funds into their progeny, which helps them to succeed educationally and professionally in ways the less affluent cannot. And yet very few of the very successful can bequeath their eminence to their children: According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, only about 60% of children born into the top quintile of families will end up better off than their fathers, compared to 85% of those born into the bottom quintile. Mostly, heirs have to make it on their own; chances for success and failure abound for everyone, no matter their social station. Standards are much higher at elite high schools and colleges than at lower-ranking ones. And even among the most privileged there are not enough top colleges and careers to go around. So even the most favored must still work quite hard to "make it."

Schooling was not always the stern arbiter of success that it is today. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our most gifted president, succeeded with hardly any formal education at all. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college before founding their world-beating companies. Many people still rise to the top of politics or business from obscure backgrounds. But the chance to do so has declined in recent decades. Competitive success through education has a grip on the culture that it never had before.

Social competition seemed inclusive during most of the 20th century because the whole society rose to higher levels of education and employment. A large majority of Americans gained at least a high-school education and, along with it, white-collar employment and homes in the suburbs. It seemed as if almost everyone was "making it" together, although in terms of relative status many probably gained little. Only the poor, who usually lacked skills and regular employment, dropped off this upward escalator. But in recent decades, "good" jobs have come to require at least some education beyond high school. That is more than many, maybe most, Americans can achieve. So now far more people are manifestly not making it, and class divisions appear much deeper.

In government, too, the institutions appear wide open. At all levels in America, governments are elected, so they largely do what the people want. Yet polls show that voters are deeply alienated from the government they elect. Somehow, it has failed to save them from their current struggles, especially the fear that middle-class jobs are disappearing. Why can't the government do more to help ordinary people — for instance, by reducing income disparities, making jobs more secure, or shielding American producers from foreign competition?

In part, government cannot accomplish these things without denying the economy the freedom needed to sustain America's general welfare. There is a tradeoff between security and dynamism. With less struggle, many people would not work so hard, and affluence would decline. In part, as well, the voters are inconsistent; the will to punish government is stronger than the will to use it to enact protections. So the current alienation has pushed public policy mostly to the right rather than the left. Republicans share in the general debunking of government, even though this weakens the very institutions they hope to lead.

Popular economic grievances have not generated a coherent economic program. One might have expected a New Deal-like movement from the left to do more to protect struggling workers. But what most Americans want from the economy is simply the availability of good jobs; concern about inequality in any wider sense is surprisingly tepid. On the left, Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders got far more vocal support from students flexing their ideological muscles than from workers trying to protect jobs. On the right, lower-skilled white men may have powered Donald Trump's campaign, but what concrete, detailed government action could assuage their grievances remains unknown.

Economists say that, in a democracy, political incentives always favor redistribution, since the distribution of votes is far more even than the distribution of wealth. Indeed, in the past, government has done many things to help struggling working families. But as mentioned already, today it is hamstrung by the debts it has already incurred. So government can do little more to shield ordinary people from the demands of the economy or society.

The real obstacle is, again, competition. The political arena may be open to all, but to prevail in it one must organize support from others, and today mass mobilization has withered. For lower-income Americans, asserting their political will is harder than ever. Most of their time and energy goes into coping with confused private lives and irregular employment. Nor do they have the strong local institutions to rely on that they once did. The aggrieved are now usually spoken for by better-off advocates, but that is a lot less effective than marching on Washington themselves. In the 1960s, oppressed African Americans did march, and they were largely successful, since they had strong families and churches to mobilize support. It would be tougher to do the same today.

THE LIMITS OF REFORM

Thus, American institutions transmute freedom into obligation. They do not produce "justice" in the sense of some final deliverance from life's trials. Some will say that with all institutions the problem is really class. The system may be formally open, but in the competition for rewards the rich enjoy huge advantages. The sharpest edge of Marxist rhetoric was always to contrast the formal fairness of a democratic regime with its actual biases toward the rich. As Anatole France famously remarked, "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

In response, as mentioned above, advocates typically seek out some denial of opportunity or equity that explains the struggles; reform it away, they promise, and freedom will expand. The Progressives a century ago persuaded most Americans, with some difficulty, that bigger government could serve individual freedom. Even successful reforms, however, have not produced the hoped-for deliverance, because the rest of the competitive system remains intact. The labor movement did indeed produce expanded opportunities for workers, as the feminist movement did for women, and the civil-rights movement did for African Americans. But once formally liberated, those groups still had to compete fiercely. The playing field was now more level, but they still had to go out there and win the game. Only in a few places does America provide even partial shelters against the storm.

Besides competition, another aspect of a free society that generates burdens is democracy itself. Individualism promotes a democratic spirit, which encourages individuals to seek the respect of others. One's competitors are also one's peers. The point is not only to best them, but also to impress them with the ability, effort, and character one has shown. In principle, that reward is not competitive. It is potentially available to all who give their best in the competitive struggle. In that contest, all may emerge with honor and self-respect — even the losers — a fact that can considerably assuage the ruthlessness of the competitive scramble.

Alexis de Tocqueville described such a society in America in 1835. The fledging nation celebrated an egalitarian vision of itself. In class-ridden Europe, most people accepted the place into which they were born, and society was "calm and immobile," Tocqueville wrote. But in democratic America, with its far weaker class divisions, "all [was] activity and bustle" as people strove to get ahead. Such a society could also generate cooperative effort for common ends, such as running local government or founding schools. That capacity partly reflected the respect that Americans won from each other through their own efforts to succeed.

To gain this reward, however, takes effort. Winning is not required, but one must at least be in the game, striving to get ahead. Americans still look for that effort — the thirst for competition — today. What many find hardest to accept about poverty is not the cost of social programs but rather the faint effort that many poor adults appear to make on their own behalf. In America, we would rather the poor were more assertive than they are, even if that made them more formidable as competitors.

ESCAPING COMPETITION

American life could become less burdensome only if it became less free, or less competitive, or if protections against competition were given. Freedom might decline, for example, if the country installed a dictator to solve its current struggles — similar to Franklin Roosevelt and his "first 100 days." It could also become less competitive if people cared less about getting ahead than they once did. Europe, for instance, has recently become less competitive than it once was. It has thus lost much of the vigor and dynamism it once had.

The United States has limited competition in several areas where we view it to be unnecessary or unjust. One of these is education and employment, with affirmative action, or preferential selection of the beneficiaries of the recent reform movements, especially minorities and women. More important is probably government employment, protected as it usually is by civil-service rules. While unions have declined in the private sector, they remain strong in government work — in fact, membership in public-sector unions has actually grown by 1.5 million since 1983. Those protections have allowed public-school teachers to resist serious accountability to the public that pays their salaries, except where charter schools are strong. Another protected niche is academia, where many faculty enjoy tenure and, effectively, cannot be fired.

All of these protections are under attack today, partly because they are costly but also because of populist resentment. Most Americans struggle in the market, and they wonder why anybody should be protected against it. If some must struggle, everybody should. The majority still might favor more general protections, but not privileges for these or other specific groups.

More important is the welfare state — public programs that support certain vulnerable groups outside employment. The recipients include people whom no one expects to work, such as children and the elderly, but also groups like the disabled and unemployed whose inability to work is more subjective. At its origin in Europe and America more than a century ago, the welfare state was seen as a "safety net," meant to catch those thrown out of work by impersonal forces such as injury or mass unemployment. The recipients were seen as convalescing from economic injuries before returning to work. They were seen as more vulnerable outside employment than in.

Recently, however, doubt has arisen as to whether many, even most, of the working-aged recipients living on benefits are really unable to work. Could not most of the jobless find work if they were willing to take low-paid employment? To many Americans widespread illegal immigration indicates that many such jobs are available, even during hard times. We used to see poor single mothers as unemployable because they had children to tend to, thus qualifying them for aid. Today we expect them to work like most other mothers, with public benefits merely supplementing wages. Even the disabled face rising pressures to undertake at least some useful activity in return for support, unless they are totally incapacitated.

The United States reformed family welfare radically in the 1990s, requiring more welfare mothers to work and driving most of them off the rolls and into jobs. Even in Europe, where generous benefits for the working-aged once went unquestioned, demands that recipients work in return for aid have toughened. Europe is no longer a land of social democracy, as Americans used to think, where no one really has to work.

Again, the motive behind these reforms is not only to save money. Welfare for the poor is relatively cheap in the United States compared to larger middle-class benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare. Rather, the motivation stems from the deeply rooted belief that all employable adults must share the burdens of a free society. The nonworking are now seen as less, not more, vulnerable than the employed. Because they avoid the competitions that freedom engenders, many of them are free-riding on the majority who struggle to get ahead — the effort that generates affluence for everyone. So community is expressed precisely by insisting that more people pursue employment, not by excusing them from it.

REASSESSING FREEDOM

Freedom is the supreme American value, but its current burdens are enough to make some question it. The problem is not fundamentally inequality or class. "Liberty to all," Lincoln said, is America's "apple of gold." The worm in the apple is not capitalism, whose excesses can be tamed, and social reformers have tamed them to an extent, as already mentioned. They have not, however, challenged the fundamental character of American society. They have not made it uncompetitive, and they have not stilled the democratic demand that citizens show effort that other citizens can respect. Thus the prophets of socialism were far less radical than they imagined: Even if the economy were totally collectivized, and even if the rich were totally expropriated, American life would remain competitive, strenuous, and insecure. The less-favored would still have to justify themselves by effort.

True radicalism, rather, must question American individualism, the very idea that one person's success can be separated from another's. The deepest critic of a free society is therefore not Marx but Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The great Swiss anti-liberal saw the competition of individuals to get ahead, which Americans prize, as the great evil in modern society. As we each struggle on behalf of our own amour propre , we tear each other down and lose the harmonious life that we might have together. Only a communal society could really achieve freedom or democracy in any form worth having.

European social democracy went partway down that path, but Rousseau would go much further. His social ideal was not Athens but something like classical Sparta — a traditional, communitarian polity into which citizens sunk their identities in order to become the greatest soldiers in Greece. They thus triumphed in war but gave up the individual striving that empowered Athens — like America — to lead an entire civilization. Just as Athens was the "school of Hellas," so America has led the entire West toward the furthest reaches of what individualism can achieve. To give up those sunlit heights for a more tranquil life is a bargain most Americans reject. American freedom cannot be carefree. The labor to compete and to excel is too central to it.

The answer to current strains, then, is not to give up individualism but to bear its burdens more gracefully than we now do. Education, broadly defined, has replaced structural reforms as the main basis of American social policy. Despite the ongoing kerfuffle over inequality, little fundamental change is likely on that front, and, following Obamacare, significant expansions of the welfare state seem impolitic. More likely, we will pour further money and effort into improving education so that more young Americans gain the ability to earn better wages in the current, demanding economy. We will also use the social programs we do have to promote employment rather than escape from it. Our chief goal is not equality but competence.

This focus on individual skills disappoints many on the left. They view it as superficial, even a form of "blaming the victim": Why focus on individuals' shortcomings when we need changes in the basic institutions that weigh heavily on ordinary people? But society cannot just award status to people at one moment in time. To achieve belonging, it is far more important that citizens be in motion toward their own goals over time. That depends on lifestyle and ultimately on capacities. A free society always moves onward. Without capacities, the less-favored will always be left behind, no matter what resources are transferred to them.

From Aristotle through John Rawls, political philosophers defined justice as giving everyone his due. That typically meant assuring people of more equal rights through some reform of basic institutions. But recently, some thinkers have reformulated justice in more personal terms. To Amartya Sen or Martha Nussbaum, the substance of development is not simply that society becomes richer and fairer overall, but that it promotes the capabilities that people need to live well. Justice now connotes not equal claims but some common minimum of talents.

That idea suggests the actual substance of a free life today. It captures the shift we need in how we conceive of freedom, from the negative to the positive. Freedom no longer means to be surrounded by empty space into which one may move. Nor is it to be granted additional freedoms or rights from the society. Rather, it is to have the capacity to lead one's own life well, and thus share in a democratic society. The answer to struggle is not freedom but strength.

Lawrence M. Mead is professor of politics and public policy at New York University and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is drawn from his forthcoming book, Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Roots of American Power. 

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  • Death Penalty Essays

Life is Precious Essay

To argue against the death penalty is to argue for what is right and just. This is the mark of a civilized and informed people. To argue against the death penalty, one must argue against people with absurdly unreasonable, underlying assumptions, with emotionally-based arguments, made nearly invisible by cultural programming. Our cultural mythology leads us to expect that evil must be destroyed and that happily ever after will win out in the end. We have to look carefully beyond our underlying mythology to understand the science of evil, to understand value relativity and the consequences of abuse and damaged lives. If we are critical thinkers who want to do the right thing, we have no choice but to be firmly against the death penalty, under all circumstances, because life is precious. To sentence someone to life in prison is a far more effective deterrent to crime than to execute (Meserli). The threat of execution can be seen as a thrilling gamble by some, like a game of Russian roulette. In risking life, it becomes an extreme sport, to a career criminal, to do violent crime. Death is an honorable drama, especially if faced without remorse. But there is no honor, not even criminal honor, in living a life of no freedom, wasting life behind bars. Life in prison offers a long time for self reflection and places a criminal, who preys upon others, into the role of prey for even worse others. This might eventually lead to an understanding of life’s worth. When the State kills someone for having killed someone else, this teaches only the uncivilized doctrine of revenge. This is obvious to Australia and Canada and European countries who understand the hypocrisy of killing for killing, and therefore do not support the death penalty. America has not reached this level of maturity, on this matter, unfortunately. I have noticed that when yet another execution is scheduled to take place in Texas, for example, the public turns its sympathetic energy away from the crime victim, toward rescuing the convicted felon with a last minute reprieve or yet another appeal. Even when this support proves to be inadequate, and the execution proceeds, nothing is restored to the victim, or to the victim’s loved ones. The victim is still wronged and still dead. The family still grieves. The attention around an execution surely cannot help the family. Families sometimes say they do not want the death of the perpetrator. They understand it serves no purpose and they choose to forgive (O’Shea). Those who strongly want an execution are thinking emotionally, and not rationally. They have been reduced to immoral thinking when they, like the criminal, lust after death. The State should be sensitive to how they feel, but should not commit murder to make them feel better. It severely victimizes the prisoner’s family to see a relative put to death by the State. This is inhumane, and it violates our constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. This is especially critical in the case of mistakes, in which innocent people are convicted and executed, or cases in which mentally ill people or mentally retarded people are executed. Even with all our fancy technology, mistakes in judgment and evidence are made. To put a face on one of those mistakes, we can consider the case of Leo Jones. Florida police arrested Mr. Jones as a suspect in the killing of a policeman. For the next 12 hours, Florida police beat him, threatened him, tortured him, and forced him to play Russian roulette (Griffin). Leo Jones was understandably afraid that the police would kill him. In fact, the police repeatedly told him they were going to kill him. Responsive to this, he signed a confession, even though he was innocent. The circumstances of the coerced confession were presented to the court, and still this innocent man was declared guilty and sentenced to die by the electric chair. Mr. Jones appealed, but his appeals were denied. When personal justice was not achievable, he turned his attention to an issue of social justice. He tried to get the State of Florida to reconsider “Old Sparky”, their execution implement, which was an antique, and dubiously functional. When he lost that petition, he asked to be put to death by an alternate means. This too was denied. Leo Jones, still protesting his innocence, was unjustly put to death, by electric chair, 17 years after being wrongfully accused. When it was too late for Leo Jones, the State of Florida recognized that he was innocent, and they also decided to retire their electric chair. The State’s excuse for murder was that they thought he had committed murder. To me, and to any clear-thinking person, killing someone for killing is senseless. Do we bite our children for biting? Do we force a marriage partner to eat burnt toast, because they burned the toast? Do we eat a cannibal or rape a rapist? Should we sprinkle germs on those who inadvertently spread them? Should we deprive a newborn of sleep because we were kept awake? Yet we kill someone for killing. In Leo’s case, 12 people said he was not involved in the killing of the police officer, and these 12 people told authorities who they knew to be involved (Griffin). In Leo’s case, the facts were ignored. A post-death exoneration by the State cannot undo what happened to Leo Jones. His life was given no value by those who are charged to protect citizens, in a country with guaranteed rights to life and the pursuit of happiness. Not only is Leo Jones irreversibly dead, but he was tortured, physically and mentally abused in the name of the State. He had 17 years of his life stolen from him, and then, in a final betrayal, this innocent man lost his rightful future. If Leo Jones were an anomaly, we could reason that sometimes bad things happen unfairly to innocent people. But Leo Jones is not alone. His abuse, stolen freedom, and execution is one of many mistakes made by an imperfect system. His is one story among a collection of stories. His blood is on our hands. Execution is expensive financially and emotionally. The execution of a prisoner is two to five times more expensive than life imprisonment, and the appeals process clogs the court system (Meserli). Probably most of these crimes would have been inexpensively preventable with early intervention. Most people on death row are the victims of child abuse and poverty (O’Shea). If society would invest in alleviating poverty, supporting education and parenting skills, and funding child protective services adequately to enable them to follow through on abuse reports, immediately, then we would not be faced with the financial challenge and ethical debate about execution. I believe that each person has worth. The problems of abuse extend beyond the circumstances of any one family, and must be seen in the context of poverty, materialism, fractured spirituality, nature disconnection, broken families, substance abuse, educational inequality, unequal access to medical care, and social class and racial inequality that determines who is arrested for crime and who is not, who gets off and who does not. These are complex social issues and no easy answers are engaged by killing our social failures. They are not the failures of a single monster, but are the failures of us, the society they depended on to back them up when they were too young and vulnerable to save themselves. To kill them supports a delusion that we are innocent. It is a lie, and the death penalty is unreasonable in all circumstances. If life is precious, then everyone’s life is precious. Works Cited Griffin, Michael. “Cop Killer is Innocent, Attorney Tells Court.” 1998. Sun Sentinel. Web. 19 February 2012 . Meserli, Joe. “Should the Death Penalty be Banned as a Form of Punishment?” nd. Balanced Politics. Web. 12 February 2012 . O’Shea, Elizabeth. “Unspeakable Wrongness of Death Penalty.” The Sydney Morning Herald 19 July 2011: Opinion Page. Print.

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Essay on Time is Precious

Students are often asked to write an essay on Time is Precious in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Time is Precious

Understanding time.

Time is a unique resource. It is precious because it’s limited and irreversible. Once gone, it cannot be retrieved.

Value of Time

Time is valuable. Each second can be used to learn, create or help. Wasting time is like wasting opportunities.

Time Management

Proper time management leads to a balanced life. It helps in achieving goals and reducing stress.

Remember, time waits for no one. Use it wisely, for it is the key to a successful future.

Also check:

  • 10 Lines on Time is Precious

250 Words Essay on Time is Precious

Understanding the value of time.

Time is a non-renewable resource, a unique aspect of life that flows in one direction, never to return. It is invisible, yet its impact is profoundly visible in every sphere of life. The concept of time is fundamental to our existence, and it is a common denominator that unites all beings.

Time: A Precious Commodity

The phrase “Time is precious” encapsulates the significance of time. Each moment is a precious gem that, once lost, can never be regained. Unlike material possessions, time cannot be stored, saved, or controlled. It is a constant, moving at its own pace, indifferent to our desires or needs.

Time Management: The Key to Success

Effective time management is crucial for success in any endeavor. It is about making the most of the time available, prioritizing tasks, and avoiding procrastination. Time management is the art of aligning our actions with our goals, ensuring that we are not merely busy, but productive.

The Paradox of Time

Interestingly, time is both abundant and scarce. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, yet how we utilize these hours defines our success or failure. The paradox of time lies in its seemingly infinite nature, yet its finite availability to each individual.

Conclusion: Time as a Life Force

In conclusion, time is more than a mere measurement; it is a life force. It is a priceless asset that should be respected and used wisely. Understanding the value of time and making conscious efforts to manage it effectively can significantly enhance the quality of our lives and our potential for success.

500 Words Essay on Time is Precious

Introduction.

Time, often regarded as an abstract and intangible entity, is one of the most precious resources we possess. Unlike other resources, it is both finite and non-renewable. Once a moment passes, it is gone forever, leaving only its impact on our lives. This essay explores the value of time, its management, and the importance of making the most of it.

The Intrinsic Value of Time

Time is precious due to its unique characteristics. It is a resource that is distributed equally among all living beings. Regardless of our social status, economic power, or geographical location, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. However, how we utilize this time separates the successful from the unsuccessful, the fulfilled from the unfulfilled. Time, therefore, is a great leveler and an impartial resource.

Time and Opportunity

Time is intrinsically linked to opportunity. The adage, “Opportunity knocks but once,” is a testament to the fleeting nature of opportunity that time presents. Opportunities are temporal; they exist in a moment and then they are gone. If we fail to seize them, we lose them forever. As such, time management becomes crucial. We must be able to identify and capitalize on the opportunities that time presents to us.

Time Management and Success

Effective time management is a critical aspect of success. It involves setting goals, prioritizing tasks, and allocating time accordingly. Effective time management not only increases productivity but also enhances the quality of life. It reduces stress, improves focus, and allows for a balanced life. It is a skill that must be learned and mastered, especially in an era where distractions are abundant.

Time: A Nonrenewable Resource

Time is a nonrenewable resource. Unlike other resources, time cannot be stored, saved, or replenished. Once lost, it can never be regained. This characteristic of time underscores its preciousness. It makes it imperative for us to use our time wisely, to invest it in activities and pursuits that are meaningful, fulfilling, and contribute to our growth and development.

In conclusion, time is indeed precious. Its value lies in its impartiality, its link to opportunity, and its nonrenewable nature. It is a resource that, when managed effectively, can lead to success and fulfillment. However, it is also a resource that, once wasted, can never be reclaimed. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to treat time with the respect it deserves, to use it wisely, and to make the most of the opportunities it presents. In doing so, we not only enrich our own lives but also make a positive impact on the world around us.

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Freedom of Sex

The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies..

Portrait of Andrea Long Chu

One often hears today that gender is a social construct. The idea is sometimes credited to the book Gender Trouble, published in 1990 by a handsome young philosopher named Judith Butler. In fact, sociologists began thinking of gender as a social achievement distinct from sex as early as the 1960s. What Butler proposed was more radical: that the repeated citation of gender norms — things like wearing heels or drinking Scotch — produced the illusion of a biological sex just waiting to be infused with meaning. For Butler, gender was performative, a term they borrowed from the philosophy of language, where it referred to sentences that seem to do things: “I promise,” for instance, a phrase that literally makes a promise. Gender, too, was a kind of promise — “It’s a girl” — one that, because it was not anchored in biological sex, had to be constantly reaffirmed through performative acts, thus allowing the dominant norms to be renegotiated or even subverted. Butler’s example was drag performance, which, by exaggerating the normal rules of gender, acted as an allegory for the way everyone performed gender every day.

These ideas were tremendously influential in the formation of gender studies . But two principal criticisms of Butler soon arose. The first was that they had effectively denied the reality of biological sex; after all, there was a big difference between a drag queen and your average woman. The second was that Butler had made gender sound like something you could voluntarily opt into. Butler would spend the better part of their career trying to acknowledge the materiality of sex — even as they downplayed its relevance — while fending off the idea that gender could be assumed through a spontaneous act of will. It was not as if, they wrote, one simply “woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night.”

What Butler could not have anticipated is that, some 30 years later, people really would be waking up one morning and choosing a new gender. At least this is the impression one gets from the “debate” now raging in this country over the rights of transgender youth — a rapidly accelerating campaign that has united the far right, the liberal center, and certain feminists on the left. Last year — the worst so far — Republicans introduced hundreds of bills that would ban gender-affirming health care for minors, restrict the participation of trans kids in sports, and force schools to out students to their parents. (They are increasingly turning their sights on adults.) Around half of all transgender youth — some 140,000 kids and teens — now live in a state where minors have, or may soon have, no legal access to gender-affirming care . To whom should they turn? The New York Times regularly runs stories playing up the perils of youth gender medicine; the author of Harry Potter is anxiously projecting her fears of sexual assault onto them from across the sea. The public increasingly believes that what the kids call gender is really just trouble : depression, anxiety, autism, family dysfunction, peer pressure, or social media, any of which — not to mention the universal awkwardness of puberty itself — are better explanations for why a child might question their identity.

In This Issue

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The left must reckon with its part in this. It has hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity, a concept clumsily adapted from psychiatry and strongly influenced by both gender studies and the born-this-way tactics of the campaign for marriage equality. This has won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance. But we have largely failed to form a coherent moral account of why someone’s gender identity should justify the actual biological interventions that make up gender-affirming care. If gender really is an all-encompassing structure of social norms that produces the illusion of sex, critics ask, why would the affirmation of someone’s gender identity entail a change to their biology? As a result, advocates have fallen back on the clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria , known until about a decade ago as gender identity disorder, defined as the distress felt at the incongruence of gender identity and biological sex. The idea that trans people fundamentally suffer from a mental illness has long been used by psychiatrists to decide who “qualifies” for transition-related care and who does not. By insisting on the medical validity of the diagnosis , progressives have reduced the question of justice to a question of who has the appropriate disease. In so doing, they have given the anti-trans movement a powerful tool for systematically pathologizing trans kids.

How to respond to all this? Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? , is one attempt, and it promises to ignite another round of public conversation about trans rights when published later this month. They write well of the global panic over “gender ideology” and acknowledge that the theory of gender performativity seems “questionable” in light of subsequent criticisms. But they continue to treat gender as the more promising terrain for political struggle. One suspects that, even after all these years, Butler is still afraid of sex. They are not alone: Many trans advocates worry that if they concede the significance of biological sex — as opponents of trans rights demand they do — this will thwart their political claims. The focus on gender, given its substantial psychic and social components, appears to be a more plausible ground for self-determination. But this fear has left a vast swath of political territory open to the anti-trans movement, which now hides its repressive goals behind the rhetoric of neutral biological fact.

It seems to me that this is a fear we can no longer afford. To confront the reality of biological sex is not, by definition, to swear fealty to that reality; no one knows this better than a child who wishes to have their biological sex changed. We must be able to defend this desire clearly, directly, and — crucially — without depending on the idea of gender. Back in the 1970s, sociologists hypothesized that the withering away of gender roles in a liberal society would lead to a decline in the number of people who wanted to change their sex. We may now say this hypothesis was wrong: An increase in gender freedom has coincided with a rise in the number of people wishing to change their sex. For these people, sex itself is becoming a site of freedom. This freedom is not unprecedented: Many Americans, though they may not realize it, already enjoy a limited version of the freedom to alter their sexual biology. What is new is the idea that this freedom can be asserted as a universal right by a group as politically disenfranchised as the young. This is why the anti-trans movement is so desperate: It is afraid of what sex might become.

essay on freedom is precious

A decade ago, when Time magazine memorably declared the arrival of the “ transgender tipping point ,” the public was dimly prepared to accept that trans people were like gay people — that is, safe, legal, and rare. The successful corporate boycott of North Carolina over its 2016 law restricting trans people’s use of public restrooms seemed to bear this out; even candidate Trump considered bathroom bills a losing issue . But the nation’s first pangs of dutiful charity have rapidly subsided — in no small part because the focus has shifted from adults to children. In 2018, The Atlantic published a long cover story by the reporter Jesse Singal called “ When Children Say They’re Trans ,” focusing on the clinical disagreements over how to treat gender-questioning youth. The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it. First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights. This tactic has been successful: The political center has moved significantly on trans issues. The public now appears to favor protections for trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces in line with the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County . But a growing majority of Americans also believe gender is determined by sex at birth , and even more (almost 70 percent) oppose puberty blockers for trans kids.

Three main tendencies compose the anti-trans bloc in America today. The first, and most obvious, is the religious right, a principally Christian movement that holds that trans people are an abomination and that “gender ideology” is part of a broader leftist conspiracy to corrupt the youth. The second tendency is also obvious, if smaller: gender-critical feminists, better known as TERFs. This group has its roots in the lesbian feminism of the ’70s; today, the polemical acronym, which originally stood for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” is used to describe any feminist who justifies her anti-trans views by citing women’s rights. These views include the idea that gender must be smashed rather than affirmed; that women constitute a “sex class” on the basis of their shared biology; and that the trans-rights framework exposes natal women to sexual violence at the hands of trans women, who are imagined as predatory males. (Most TERFism in the U.S. is imported: TERFs have their strongest foothold in the U.K. )

But the most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this country is, quite simply, liberals. Butler, in their survey of the political landscape, misses the liberal faction altogether. I suspect this is because the anti-trans liberal sees himself as a concerned citizen, not an ideologue. He is neither radical nor a feminist; he is not so much trans-exclusionary as he is broadly skeptical of all social-justice movements. He is a trans-agnostic reactionary liberal — a TARL. The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left , which, by forcing the orthodoxy of gender down the public’s throat and viciously attacking anyone who dares to ask questions, is trafficking in censorship, intimidation, and quasi-religious fanaticism. On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.

The leading voice for such ideas in the United States is the Times. In the past several years, the paper has vigorously normalized the idea that sustained public debate over the rights of trans kids is not only justified but urgent. In 2022 alone, it devoted more than 28,000 words to the topic of trans youth, including a lengthy New York Times Magazine piece by staff writer Emily Bazelon on the “ unexplained rise in trans-identified teenagers .” The paper paints a consistent picture. Genuine transgender people, its reporters suggest, are a very small clinical population of adults with a verified mental illness whose persistent distress entitles them to gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and transition-related surgeries. Trans-identified youth — whose numbers, we are told, are “ small but growing ” — are beset by comorbidities like depression or autism spectrum disorder that stymie clear diagnosis, yet they are being rushed into life-changing treatments that many of them may later regret, as evidenced by the cautionary tales of people who detransition later in life . To make matters worse, the “overheated political moment,” inflamed by both right-wing backlash and the strident tactics of trans activists, is preventing the medical Establishment, which is trusted implicitly, from coming to a sober consensus.

At the same time, the paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter. Last year, the Times ran a story on a small Missouri gender clinic that had been overwhelmed by an “unrelenting surge in demand.” But the paper did not present this as an issue of access, as it has done with the national shortage in affordable home care or the inundation of abortion clinics with out-of-state patients post- Dobbs. Rather, the demand itself was suspect, a result of poorly explained psychological and social forces that had “bewildered” experts, whose warnings were as usual being drowned out by activists. Indeed, the average Times -reading liberal is left with the impression that, because politics obstructs the slow work of scientific consensus-building, trans people’s best shot at receiving health care is to stop asking for it.

The Times is not alone; it is one of many respectable publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist , engaged in sanitizing the ideas promoted by TARLs in the more reactionary corners of the media landscape . Here one finds journalists like Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Helen Lewis, Meghan Daum, and, of course, former Times staffer Bari Weiss. Many of these writers live in self-imposed exile on Substack, the newsletter platform, where they present themselves as brave survivors of cancellation by the woke elites. But they are not a marginal force. (It was Weiss’s media company that first broke the story about the clinic in Missouri .) These writers are far more likely to be militants than their counterparts at the Times ; they are especially preoccupied with the “science denial” of radical activists, who have put wokeness before rational standards of care. In the words of one TARL, “Biology has been canceled. ” Of particular note here is Singal, who has often accused trans activists of mounting an Orwellian campaign to discount “ the relevance of biological sex .” It would be “profoundly unfair,” he wrote last year, if a “large male” like himself were to suddenly demand that others see him as a woman. (It did not occur to him that this is precisely why trans girls, who are well aware of their biology, are asking for puberty blockers: so that they do not grow up to look like Jesse Singal.)

Trans skeptics have seized on the idea of “ rapid-onset gender dysphoria ,” a term proposed by the public-health researcher Lisa Littman in 2018 to describe children with no history of gender variance who suddenly developed gender dysphoria as a result of “social influences and maladaptive coping mechanisms.” The study was a sham. It surveyed parents, not kids, whom it recruited from trans-skeptical communities online , and it assumed that clusters of trans kids were proof of social contagion as opposed to, say, self-selection. The idea that children were being unduly influenced by the internet was especially rich coming from participants harvested from a private Facebook group. But the general notion that trans kids have confounding diagnoses and high rates of desistance (the natural fading of symptoms with age) has proliferated throughout the anti-trans movement.

Now, to be clear, the TARL will typically acknowledge the existence of a group of fully developed adults whose medically verified gender dysphoria is so persistent and distressing that the argument for compassionate care outweighs the Hippocratic prohibition on harming a perfectly healthy body. The basic strategy here is to create a kind of intake form with exactly two boxes on it. Every trans-identified person is either a participant in a craze or certifiably crazy. (Checking both boxes is permitted.) There is a touch of genius to this approach. It draws a bright line between the kids who say they are trans and the kids who really are while pathologizing all of them as either delusional or dysphoric. This line is as old as gender medicine itself, which for decades was careful to distinguish impersonators and fetishists from the “true transsexual.” So in most cases of gender variance, the TARL informs parents that it is perfectly healthy for boys to wear dresses and for girls to climb trees regardless of their biological sex, which need not be altered after all. He reassures them that the risk of suicide among trans-identified youth has been inflated by cynical activists trying to blackmail the public ; what he means by this is that he does not think most kids are suicidal enough to be trans. In those rare instances of true misery, he advises the practice of “ watchful waiting ,” preferring to see the patient through the often-irreversible changes of puberty to adulthood, when her childhood experience of gender incongruence will finally acquire the weight of medical evidence. If only she had said something sooner!

This is obviously not a vision of justice; it is a response plan for an epidemic. This should not surprise us. The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be. The anti-trans bloc has in general targeted children because Americans tend to imagine children both as a font of pure, unadulterated humanity and as ignorant dependents incapable of rational thought or political agency. This has allowed the movement to infantilize not just kids but all trans people, whom it only wishes to shepherd through the ravages of mental illness and the recklessness of youth. If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more. It is quite possible, for instance, to believe that cancer patients should have access to aggressive treatments with potentially life-altering effects while also sincerely believing that, in a perfect world, no one would have cancer.

We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is “unexplained,” he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation. But any model of where trans people “come from” — any at all — is a model that by default calls into question the care of anyone who does not meet its etiological profile. This is as true of the old psychiatric hypothesis that transsexuality resulted from in utero exposure to maternal sex hormones as it is of the well-meaning but misguided search for the genes that “cause” gender incongruence . It is most certainly true of the current model of gender identity as “ consistent, insistent, and persistent ,” as LGBTQ+ advocates like to say. At best, these theories give us a brief respite from the hail of delegitimizing attacks; they will never save us. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history. This may strike you as a vertiginous task. The good news is that millions of people already believe it.

In October 1958, a young woman appeared at the UCLA department of psychiatry with an unusual complaint. Agnes, as she is known today, had supple breasts, smooth skin, and a narrow waist. She also had, much to the consternation of her boyfriend, a typical set of male genitalia. In interviews with the psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller, Agnes related how she had been raised as a boy but had always believed she was a girl — a belief confirmed at puberty, when she naturally began developing breasts. Testing showed that Agnes lacked a uterus or ovaries but that her testes were producing high levels of estrogen. Satisfied, the doctors surgically replaced her genitals with a vagina constructed from penile and scrotal tissue. Stoller, who had become quite fond of Agnes, saw evidence for his theory that the endocrine system had a strong determining role in a person’s conscious or unconscious awareness of their biological sex. (He and his colleagues in Los Angeles had taken to calling this “gender identity.”) Years later, Agnes casually divulged the truth: At age 12, disturbed by the onset of perfectly typical male puberty, she had begun taking her mother’s estrogen pills. “She is not an example of a ‘biological force’ that subtly and inevitably influences gender identity, as I had reported,” Stoller admitted in his 1967 book, Sex and Gender. “She is a transsexual.”

Agnes had simply told the doctors what they wanted to hear . But why did her mother have estrogen pills in the first place? In passing, Stoller noted that the latter had been prescribed a synthetic estrogen following a total hysterectomy that included her ovaries; in other words, she was one of the millions of 20th-century women who would be prescribed estrogen for treating symptoms of menopause. In his 1966 best seller Feminine Forever, the gynecologist Robert A. Wilson argued that menopause was basically a hormone deficiency, like diabetes, that could safely be treated through estrogen therapy. He claimed his patients were part of a new sexual revolution: They had supple breasts, smooth skin, and legs that looked good in a tennis skirt. After Wilson’s death, it would come out that he had been receiving payments from the makers of Premarin , an estrogen medication derived from the urine of pregnant mares. Nevertheless, many women really did find hormone therapy effective for a wide range of menopausal symptoms, from hot flashes to vaginal atrophy, and in 1992, Premarin was the most prescribed drug in America . “Women, after all, have the right to remain women,” Wilson had written. “They should not have to live as sexual neuters for half their lives.”

So when Agnes visited UCLA, she did not need to prove that a right to female biology existed. She was simply trying to convince the doctors that this right also applied to her. In fact, the vast majority of Americans have long believed everyone has a right to keep their biological sex. The prospect of forcible sex change is the stuff of horror movies. In 1997, the Times ran a front-page story about an anonymous man, later identified as David Reimer, who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision destroyed his genitals . His care was overseen by controversial psychologist John Money, Stoller’s colleague, who gave Reimer estrogen to induce breast growth and allegedly had him perform sex acts with his twin brother. After learning the truth as a teenager, Reimer started testosterone, had his breasts removed, and received phalloplasty. That this was something of a small national tragedy went without saying. The Times compared his struggle to the travails of Oedipus or King Lear ; when he committed suicide in 2004, the paper ran his obituary . Reimer’s story is popular in the anti-trans literature because, alongside the general depravity of the affair, it appears to prove that gender has an inescapable basis in biological sex: Reimer knew he wasn’t a girl, no matter what the doctors did to him. He told Oprah Winfrey he had never fit in as a girl , preferring to climb trees and play with trucks even as his mother tried to convince him that he was simply a “tomboy.”

This is, of course, the exact conversation many trans kids are having with their parents today. What Reimer’s story actually illustrates is that we are perfectly comfortable with sex changing when we understand it as changing back. This happens more often than one might think. The historian Jules Gill-Peterson has shown that the earliest treatments in the field of gender medicine were developed to “correct” intersex children by bringing their ambiguous biology within the range of what society considered normal. Even when these treatments were later charily extended to “transsexuals,” it was often on the assumption that some original biological sex, perhaps endocrine in nature, was being excavated. (This was why Stoller was so excited by the idea that Agnes’s testes were producing so much estrogen.) But as the medical understanding of sex ballooned to include things like gonad development and hormone activity, so did the risk of losing one’s sex as a result of age, heredity, disease, physical trauma, or the side effects of medical treatment. This was the cleverness of Agnes’s plan. She presented herself as a person who, just like her mother, needed to become female again. In fact, following the removal of her testes, she cannily discontinued her secret estrogen pills, leading to mood swings and hot flashes. The doctors promptly diagnosed her with — what else? — menopause and placed her on the same estrogen therapy that would be enjoyed by millions.

So what we today call gender-affirming care is part of a larger history of sex-affirming care governed by strong normative ideas of health, productivity, and moral worth. Many of the treatments in this field are broadly uncontroversial today: breast reconstruction following cancer, vasodilators for erectile dysfunction, antiandrogens for hair loss and hirsutism. In 2023, The New York Times Magazine ran a long, sympathetic essay on the “reassuring” evidence base for menopausal hormone therapy , which the writer called “a lost opportunity to improve women’s lives.” A few years earlier, the Times hailed the first successful transplant of a penis, scrotum, and the surrounding abdominal wall — the result of Pentagon-funded research aimed at restoring the dignity of soldiers whose genitals were damaged or destroyed by improvised explosives . (The donor’s family sent the patient a message: “We are all very proud that our loved one was able to help a young man that served this country.”) Even the recent rush on the part of the Alabama GOP to enshrine the legality of IVF treatments endangered by a surprise state supreme court ruling is an excellent reminder that many religious conservatives support significant medical interventions in biological sex — gonadotropins to stimulate follicle production, GnRH agonists to prevent the unplanned release of eggs, not to mention the whole business with the test tube — when the payoff is a human infant.

The real question is which sex can be affirmed — and why. It so happens, for instance, that GnRH agonists like those used in fertility treatments are also used to delay puberty in trans kids . This means your average Alabama Republican now ostensibly believes it should be a felony to give a child the same hormone blockers his mother may have used to conceive him . Our politician may rightly protest that the same drug is being used for very different purposes. But this is the point: It is the purpose of sex change, and not the change itself, which determines its acceptability. This is why sex-affirming care has historically entailed both the withholding of sex change from some and enforcement of it for others. Like most fields of medicine, it has a bloody underbelly of coercion: the vaginal surgeries tested on enslaved women in 1840s Alabama; the testicular transplants performed on gay men in Nazi Germany; and the surgical modification of infants with atypical genitalia , which continues today. Even Wilson was clearly preoccupied with keeping women perky and lubricated for their husbands. In Feminine Forever, he drolly recalled a man who laid his .32 automatic on the desk and declared that if the doctor could not “cure” his wife of her harridan ways, he would surely kill her himself.

Most people are not being made to change their sex at gunpoint. But it should be clear by now that when members of the anti-trans movement argue that sex cannot change, what they really mean is that sex shouldn’t change except in accordance with social norms. Butler has written a great deal on this subject; a robust theory of normativity is arguably their life’s work. For Butler, a social norm is not a belief or a cultural attitude. It is a deep structure of power that makes one’s sense of self possible. Norms precede us, form us, and act as our “constitutive constraints”; at the same time, since they depend on being constantly reiterated, they never capture us fully and can be reinterpreted. (They have called this “working the weakness in the norm.”) Butler tends to think of gender norms in terms of meaning; in fact, they often assume that gender itself is the symbolic structure through which sex comes to matter at all. This is part of their broader political strategy: to show first that something is saturated with social meaning in order to make it politically questionable.

But it is not enough to know what sex means ; we will have to understand what it does. Obviously, gender norms do not issue directly from the organs. One imagines that, even after her hysterectomy, Agnes’s mother was still expected to be nurturing and emotionally available. Yet to speak only of norms is to lose sight of the role of biological sex within a larger system of material relations. It is difficult to explain why the above gender norm would exist in the first place if it were not for the actual fact of reproduction, which at this point in the descent of man still requires very specific biological conditions in order to occur, including the presence of at least one of each gamete type (sperm and ova), a well-functioning uterus, and a reasonably sound endocrine system. This is sex as biological capacity ; in this sense, it is no less of a material resource than water or wheat. Every human society invested in perpetuating itself — which is to say, every society — has regulated the production, distribution, and use of biological sex. This is more than the sex-based division of labor (hunter-gatherers and all that). It is the actual division of sex.

It may sound as if I am saying sex is more real than gender — a proposition gender studies has abhorred since its inception. I do not think that sex is more real. But I am not terribly bothered by saying that the division of sex determines gender norms, so long as we remember that it never remotely finishes determining them. There is always a wide, shifting, and irregular gap between the two. One finds a brutal example of this in the antebellum South. As Hortense Spillers has written, the genteel system of southern patrimony was bluntly waived when it came to the rape of enslaved Black women by white slave owners, who could effectively produce new assets — that is, new enslaved people — in the form of their own disavowed children. Gender alone cannot explain such an arrangement; it cannot speak to how sex functions as a kind of material base, as the Marxist feminists might put it: a source of labor, wealth, and power from which the elaborate superstructure of gender continually emerges, breaks off, and reforms in unintended ways. (An old-fashioned name for such an arrangement is sex-gender system, coined by the anthropologist Gayle Rubin in 1975.)

No wonder “gender identity,” understood by well-meaning LGBTQ+ advocates as an abstract feeling, has done such a poor job of justifying sex change. If biological sex is part of a material structure of value, then society has a concrete interest in any potential gains or losses that may result, feelings be damned. Gill-Peterson tells the story of Robert Stonestreet, a 10-year-old boy who was brought to the Johns Hopkins Hospital for a rare urethral defect in 1915. When the doctors informed his father that the boy had ovaries and should be reassigned as a girl, the man refused, explaining that he already had six girls at home and his son was a great help around the family farm. Of course, Stonestreet was prepubescent. Whatever biological advantage he had over his sisters was the natural spoils of working daily on a farm. The point is that his father’s social validation of his gender was the basically incidental result of an economic calculation about his sex. Twenty-one years later, Stonestreet asked the same doctors to certify him as male so he could wed his fiancée. They refused — one suspects because a marriage with no reproductive potential struck them as dead in the water, especially with the national birth rate at an all-time low. Three days later, Stonestreet committed suicide — the victim of a society that could not make up its mind on how best to make sense of his gender while also extracting value from his sex.

This is the larger historical reason why the anti-trans movement does not want transgender people to receive sex-altering care. It is not clear how, if at all , such people will fit into the division of sex in America. The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a women’s restroom. Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis — an organ to which, as Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence. (TERFs often seem to reject the idea that trans women are women on the basis that they are not sufficiently rapeable, when in fact trans women face much higher rates of sexual assault .) Liberals, meanwhile, object to trans girls’ participation in sports not because sperm swim faster than eggs but because trans girls, they suppose, will swim faster than their own little girls, who may then be deprived of athletic scholarships or other opportunities . Even Singal admits this is ultimately an issue of “ competing rights claims ,” not biological fact. Widespread discomfort at the largely fantastical idea that trans girls will always dominate in their chosen sports reflects a basic patriarchal belief that the physical advantages of being male are perfectly acceptable so long as they are possessed by men. (In this sense, sex division in sport is meant to enshrine inequality, not to mitigate it.)

The anti-trans bloc does not care about what sex is in some bloodless, positivistic sense. It cares about what sex does — or what it might not do, in the event that transition-related care becomes widely available. One of the greatest fears of the anti-trans movement concerns a shift in the population of trans kids seeking care, who by some counts are now predominantly female-assigned. (The accuracy of this claim has been disputed .) This idea was popularized by Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which hysterically claimed that an epidemic of anxiety and depression is leading “a generation of girls” to confuse the tribulations of female puberty with true gender dysphoria. Shrier wrote that the cost of this epidemic was “a pound of flesh,” and it was no secret which pound she meant. The book’s cover features an illustration of a girl with a physical hole — you can put your finger through it — where her uterus should be. The specter of mass infertility cannot be underestimated. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the anti-trans movement is driven by a deep, unconscious dread that society will not have enough working female biology to support the deteriorating nuclear family — and, with it, the entire division of sex itself.

This probably will not happen. Sex-altering care can indeed affect one’s fertility but not always irreversibly, and the trans population is still far too small to bring about that sort of demographic apocalypse. What we are witnessing is a potential reconfiguration of the division of sex — one that is highly disturbing to anyone with an instinctive loyalty to the status quo but that is no more inherently revolutionary than, say, the contraceptive Pill. The Pill was, after all, one of the most important advancements in sex-changing medicine of the 20th century. It had a dramatic effect on women’s sexual freedom and economic independence, but it did not bring about women’s liberation. On the contrary, it became an essential part of a new regime of rational management within the division of sex known as “family planning.” One can likewise imagine a marginally more benevolent society integrating hormone therapy and puberty blockers into its own division of sex without accidentally abolishing the family or smashing the patriarchy. True political change we must bring about ourselves. Sex-affirming care has always served someone’s moral vision for society. There is no reason it cannot serve ours.

What if we make freedom into the air we together breathe?” Butler asks at the end of Who’s Afraid of Gender? It is a beautiful thought. It would not mean the abolition of social norms — an impossible task — but rather a collective reimagining of them through alliances forged across our many differences. Butler argues that the struggle for trans rights cannot be merely cultural but instead must be connected to the fight for “the basic rights to housing, food, non-toxic environments, unpayable debt, and health care.” They are entirely right. But their principled commitment to coalition building can lead them toward a needlessly conciliatory position. It is hardly clear, for instance, that “trans rights to self-determination take no one else’s rights away.” This may be technically true, if one means trans people can be granted social recognition and legal equality without spoiling anyone else’s claim to the same. But if sex really is a biological resource, then there can be no remaking of the division of sex without real material losses — this would be like saying that socialism does not take away the rights of the wealthy. Such is the limitation of a social analysis like Butler’s. It imagines the anti-trans movement as consisting primarily of religious zealots and scheming politicians, and it does not consider that many might have a material interest in opposing what we should rightly call the redistribution of sex.

We need a stronger demand. Butler argues that it would be “counterproductive and wrong” to chalk up the existence of oppressive systems to biology. But why? I am of the opinion that any comprehensive movement for trans rights must be able to make political demands at the level of biology itself. This is an old radical-feminist idea, most famously found in Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 classic The Dialectic of Sex. Suppose women’s oppression really is a product of their biology, Firestone wrote. What follows? Only that feminists must work to change biological reality. The genius of this gambit was to refuse the idea that biological facts had some kind of intrinsic moral value that social or cultural facts did not. Biology could not justify the exploitation of human beings; indeed, it could not even justify biology, which was just as capable of perpetuating injustice as any society. When Firestone wrote of women as a “sex class,” she — unlike the TERFs who followed her — had in mind the Marxist dream of a classless society, something that could be achieved only by freeing humanity from the “tyranny of its biology.” For her, this meant a “revolutionary ecological programme” of fertility control, artificial reproduction, and the full automation of labor. That may sound unrealistic. But this is the point: Justice is always an attempt to change reality.

Sex is real. So is global warming. To believe in their reality is an indispensable precondition for making normative claims about them, as we know from climate activism. But the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism. What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too. We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.

I am speaking here of a universal birthright: the freedom of sex. This freedom consists of two principal rights: the right to change one’s biological sex without appealing to gender and the right to assume a gender that is not determined by one’s sexual biology. One might exercise both of these rights toward a common goal — transition, for instance — but neither can be collapsed into the other. I am put in mind of a bicameral system. Each chamber has its own prerogatives, but neither the exclusive upper chamber (sex) nor the boisterous lower one (gender) has the ultimate power to overrule the other. (Not all trans people wish to change their sex; some trans people are also gender-nonconforming.) By asserting the freedom of sex, we may stop relying on the increasingly metaphysical concept of gender identity to justify sex-changing care, as if such care were only permissible when one’s biological sex does not match the serial number engraved on one’s soul. The same goes for “sex assigned at birth,” which unhelpfully obscures the very biological processes that many people have a right to change. In general, we must rid ourselves of the idea that any necessary relationship exists between sex and gender; this prepares us to claim that the freedom to bring sex and gender into whatever relation one chooses is a basic human right.

What does this freedom look like in practice? Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others. Let people use the gender-segregated facilities of their choice; desegregate whenever possible. Do not out children to their parents. Do not force anyone to change their sex or their gender. Give everyone health care. The anti-trans movement has collected the public’s rising awareness of the staggering injustice of the American health-care system and directed it, like a syringe full of air, at a small population of children. The effect is to make it appear as if trans people do not want good health care or trustworthy providers, when the truth is that trans people face health disparities across the board, including higher reported rates of disability, asthma, and heart disease . No single federal program would benefit trans people more than Medicare for All. As for transition-related care itself, the right to change sex includes the right to receive counseling, to understand the risks, or to be treated for comorbidities; in fact, society has a duty to make these resources freely and widely accessible to trans kids. But these are practical options, not obligations. To make “thoughtfulness” a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.

The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right. Yet we let this happen every day — and not without casualties. I am not speaking of suicide; I am speaking of the many opponents of trans rights who observe with horror that they too might have transitioned given the chance, so intensely did they hate being teenage girls . I do not know if they regret their biology today. I do suspect they regret that they never got to choose it.

A choice! The thought is impossible. Yet we have no difficulty believing that 300,000 trans kids can choose to stop being trans. Freedom is easy to imagine when it is the freedom to do as you’re told. What we cannot conceive is why they are making all this gender trouble in the first place. They do not owe us an explanation. They are busy taking charge of their own creation. They may not change the world, but they will certainly change themselves. “Possibility,” Butler once wrote, “is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.” We have not yet begun to understand the courage of the child who says she is a girl for the first time without any biological “proof” to back this up. This is especially true if she lives in one of the many states that are working to ensure that saying so is all that trans kids like her will ever have. But still she speaks. The sentence “I am a girl” is performative speech in the classic sense: It performs an action. She is not only declaring her intent to exercise her freedom of sex in the future; she is, by uttering these words, already exercising it. She is working the weakness in the norm. She is not afraid of sex — she is against it. That is not nothing. There is, in fact, a very important population of Americans who do want trans kids to exist. I am told they are small but growing.

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Judge to Review Prince Harry’s Visa Papers in Dispute Over Release

The documents have been sought by the Heritage Foundation in a freedom of information lawsuit. The group wants to know if the prince’s drug use was considered in granting him a U.S. visa.

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A side view of Prince Harry.

By Zach Montague

Reporting from Washington

A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to submit documents related to Prince Harry’s visa for the court to review after the department refused to release them to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Heritage Foundation has sued the department, contending that it has a right to see the documents as part of research into whether Prince Harry had been improperly allowed to reside in the United States given his admissions in his 2023 memoir and elsewhere that he had used cocaine and other drugs.

The foundation had sought the documents specifically to investigate how the prince had been admitted, since certain visas on which he could have entered the United States require applicants to answer questions about past drug use and drug-related legal violations.

Judge Carl J. Nichols of the Federal District Court in Washington ordered the department to submit the papers in question for his confidential review to determine whether they should be released in some form.

The possibility that the prince concealed the drug use in applying for a visa could carry immigration consequences, and waivers he may have been granted generally would have been precluded by the nature of the drug use he described in public interviews and his memoir .

“Widespread and continuous media coverage has surfaced the question of whether D.H.S. properly admitted the Duke of Sussex in light of the fact that he has publicly admitted to the essential elements of a number of drug offenses in both the United States and abroad,” the foundation’s lawyers wrote in their original complaint.

The complaint cited numerous other cases in which celebrities and public figures such as the soccer star Diego Maradona and the singer Amy Winehouse ran into immigration problems or were denied entry over reported drug use.

The legal dispute began in May after the department returned the Heritage Foundation’s request, deeming it “too broad in scope.” It did not immediately deny the request but directed the think tank to resubmit and identify more specific records for it to consider.

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, had been living in California for some time before his memoir was published, and he has expressed interest in becoming a U.S. citizen.

Zach Montague is based in Washington. He covers breaking news and developments around the district. More about Zach Montague

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  28. Judge to Review Prince Harry's Visa Papers in Dispute Over Release

    The documents have been sought by the Heritage Foundation in a freedom of information lawsuit. The group wants to know if the prince's drug use was considered in granting him a U.S. visa.