It's kind of strange how many people over here rail against individualism while simultaneously advocating for more individual agency even if it would come at the cost weakening the control of their community.
Youth rights, trans rights, reproductive rights, no-fault divorce, etc. are all centered around giving various groups more agency and freedom to resist the demands of those around them, especially the patriarchs who tend to be in charge of their closest social unit.
But people hear the word and think something like an oil CEO setting the world on fire for short-term profit or a lack of social safety nets (even though they actually increase average freedom) instead.
Personally I just love being able to go no contact with my father and decide who I want to marry and having the ability to just be a childless atheist. Not being parental property: Pretty great.
I think the phrase "rugged individualism" has given the concept a bad rep, as well as all the libertarians who spent the first quarter of the 2020s parading the phrase around to mean "the freedom to not wear a mask and reject vaccines and go anywhere I want no matter how sick I am"
i think this is true and that there is a lot of value in reclaiming individualism for social justice -- giving up the framing that individualism is just about being atomized, both through lack of having any support and of providing any, is really damaging to any attempt to use individualism to defend self-expression and human rights.
plus it seems that a lot of rights issues become sort of absorbed into "community, us vs them" framing by pure collectivist advocacy. i.e. i want to be able to be trans without having to align myself with some concept of a "trans community". it is fundamentally an individualist thing
how would you define individualism other than “valuing the individual over the community”?
as i understand it, there is no concept of transgenderism without societal idea of gender, and no social or medical transitioning without community
Then your understanding might be incomplete.
I am a gender abolitionist. I consider gender norms to be coercive and limiting, more so for trans people if anything. I still want a right to change my own body as I please and that's my own business and no one else's because I am the sole owner of my body. I also don't want to be forced to perform some arbitrary gender role to satisfy a sexist gatekeeper before I am allowed to do this.
And the community I happened to be born into was my biggest obstacle to doing that. My parents did not want me to transition (in fact my father did not want to have any daughters at all) and my country of birth was one of the most dangerous to trans people in the world. My father explicitly considered the rest of the family to be his property by default.
Being able to leave was life-saving for me.
But to answer the question: I am not saying "don't have a community" but rather that you need to have the ability to choose which one you have according to your individual preferences and that communities should not exert this much control over how you're allowed to live your life.























