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Abolish Age
Every person deserves both freedom and support, regardless of how long they’ve been alive.
I’ve been writing about youth liberation a lot recently, particularly in this piece encouraging queer people to interact generously and patiently with the minors they encounter on the internet, and this one arguing that we should all treat sex as a neutral fact of life that kids are not hurt by learning about.
This line of thinking draws a lot of questions from people. The idea that children are fundamentally different & separate from all other human beings is a cornerstone of how our educational and legal systems work, and the concept of legal “minority” does a lot of heavy-lifting in helping us figure out questions of consent, abuse, and collective responsibility involving kids.
If every child is completely incapable of directing their own life, then moral questions about how to treat them seem easy: give them a guardian with almost unlimited power to make decisions and protect them from themselves, until they get old enough to handle themselves. Usually, it’s assumed that the proper guardian for a kid is their parents. And typically, it’s assumed that a person is finally old enough to direct their own life when they become 18 (though increasingly, many people point to really badly done brain-science to argue that the…
