What Gives You the Right?
Questioning the Rights Narrative
Based on last week’s episode of Morning Tinto with
, here are some thoughts on “rights”.I woke up, wide awake, at 3:50am which was 9:50am UK time, and saw there had been a breaking news alert, (which hadn’t woke me up), but which said that the UK Supreme Court was about to make a ruling on the definition of a woman.
I knew that was a big deal for the UK (and the world).
The question was what the definition of a woman is when it comes to equal rights legislation. And they emphasised that this does not mean trans folks don’t have rights, too. I won’t get into the details of that legislation but I want to look at rights and whether they protect us.
In various different podcast episodes, and in various podcasts, I have shared with you a book by H Peter Steeves called Up from Under the Rulers: The Anarchic Phenomenological Communitarian Manifesto. It's a mouthful.
I really love this book. It's been about a year since I have read it and what I keep coming back to is the section on rights.
Look at what we (supposedly) have the right to as humans. Then look at the genocide of Palestinians and Sudanese people. Do they have the right to life? International courts may say so but what does that mean on the ground? Nothing. It's just so many words. There are places where it might make sense to try very hard to get your rights — I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying that relying upon the rights discourse is pretty much saying that you're putting your trust into these institutions to protect your rights.
Because, first, you need to have your rights recognised by whom? Who are these people that have the power or the right to give us rights?
It’s really poor logic. People who are stateless, do they have rights? Do you need a state to give you the right? I had a friend who died in an immigration detention centre in England who was stateless. He couldn’t be deported and they wouldn’t let him out.
From the book:
In 1994, when the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional, a revolutionary force in Mexico, announced their demands, the world was confused. The Zapatistas, it seemed, didn't want more and better jobs or access to free healthcare or greater participation in the institutions of their society, including the government. They did not demand any rights. What did they hope to gain if they made no demands for their rights to be respected, for more rights, for different rights, for greater rights? The Zapatistas wanted only to be free to live on their own, to get out of the system of rights and laws completely, to be in charge of their own lives and land and future without persecution. The Mexican government was quick to respond. The Zapatistas had no right to ask for such a thing.
What would that be like to live in a way where we don't need rights? They don't even make sense, like, in your house. He gives some examples of the brother taking the toy from the sister, and: are there rights? Can she say, “You have no right to take that!”
It's very impersonal. It's individualistic. The whole book is basically about the problem with liberal framing of things, how it's very individualistic: I have the right to this. Women have the right to this, and trans folks have the right to that. It puts people in competition with one another.
When, of course, we want women, including trans women, to be safe, to be able to live their lives without fear, to be able to have the jobs they want, to play sports, we just want everyone to be able to flourish, to live lives without fear. And people keep talking about things like prisons. People feel unsafe in prisons no matter what gender is in there. Thinking about putting anyone in a space like that with violent people, no matter what gender, is problematic. It's not like a trans woman going into a women's prison and then the other women feel unsafe. There are women who feel unsafe in there because of the guards, because of other women, because of etc, etc. It's not caring about everyone's safety.
This also brings up what's happening with the deportations to El Salvador, and how the court ruled that they couldn't do what they were doing, and they ruled that the US government needs to facilitate the return of one of these guys from Maryland. So now the government is defining the word “facilitate”. They ignore the fact that they could have returned these flights mid air when the ruling happened. It just shows that a lot of this is just a gentleman's agreement: people need to go along with it for it to work. (Just like using money.) Otherwise it all falls apart.
And the Trump administration and the international courts, they are saying, “Go ahead and try to make us comply. Make us.”
And no one can make them. I mean, I think they probably could, but it would be in a way that liberals would find very hard to stomach, because it would mean a kind of (violent) coup.
Liberals think, well, if you've been caught out, you resign. You're supposed to resign if they find out that you've broken national security by adding a journalist to a signal chat. But no. “Make us.”
Trump can't run for a third term? Try to stop him. Make him not run for a third term.
This book by H Peter Steeves says that putting faith into institutions is like giving up part of what it means to be human to something that is not human. It doesn't protect rights.
What if we lived like the Zapatistas in a way where we're just meeting each other's needs. I’m not feeding my neighbour because they have the right to be fed. I'm feeding them because they are humans and I have access to resources that they need. And this is what it means to be human, to look out for each other.
With the internet and planes and easy travel and everything, we can have a larger concept of who's out there, who needs us. And who do we need.