Dear River Page, The Problem Isn't The Democrats

by David Balashinsky

I don't know how it wound up in my feed or even where I first saw it but I recently came across a column by River Page entitled ("entitled" being the operative word, here) "How the Democrats Lost Men Like Me" (The Free Press, 06.03.2025).  What Page means by "like me" is that he is a young, White, cis man, although he also happens to be gay which, to the credit of the gay rights movement, is not nearly the liability that it once was. 

It's no secret that young White men have been turning away from the Democratic Party and turning toward Trump, instead.  Page's column is, in large part, advice to the Democratic Party as it tries to figure out why and how it should be "Speaking to American Men" if it is to have any hope of reversing this trend.

Writing from the perspective of one of these alienated young, White male voters - "someone the Democratic Party once won and lost" - Page identifies several causes, including "the Democratic Party's demonization of white men," its "embrace of an extreme version of identity politics," its "inability to name an enemy, apart from Trump and the Republicans, or articulate a vision for the future," and, equating the Democratic Party with the Harris campaign of 2024 (which is not an unreasonable thing to do), that it "ran on nothing at all."  

One of the most frustrating and annoying aspects of the 2024 presidential campaign was having to listen to the constant repetition of the claim that the Democrats didn't "articulate a vision for the future," or offer a coherent agenda for the next four years.  Now, six months into the Trump regime, here is Page lecturing the Democratic party for losing White men like him by failing to articulate a vision for the future and the Harris campaign for running "on nothing at all."  Evidently, Page never bothered to read the official 2024 Democratic Party Platform, which is close to 100 pages of concrete policy statements and legislative goals, many of which are in line with the very "economic populism" Page claims to support.  Leaving aside the fact that the only thing that mattered in 2024 was defeating Trump, is this willful ignorance?  Or is Page gaslighting us?  And are White men really being demonized?  Or is it, rather, that Page is blinded by - and blind to - his own privilege?  

I should mention that, being White, male and cis myself, I know something about privilege.  And in these three particulars I share what surely are Page's most important attributes.  Also, like him, I was an enthusiastic supporter of Bernie Sanders - in 2016, before he dropped out and endorsed Clinton, and again in 2020, before he dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden.  Unlike Page, however, I am not young and in that respect I consider Page more privileged than I am (not just in a social sense but in an existential one, too).  Also unlike Page, I am not gay.  On the other hand, I am Jewish which, it turns out, is now probably much more of a liability than being gay is.  There were a reported 2,402 anti-gay hate-crimes in 2023 but four times as many antisemitic hate-crimes that same year.  On balance, this makes Page even more privileged than I am.

Why does this matter?  Because when White men complain about being demonized, it's hard even for another White man like me to take them seriously.  And if that's my reaction, one can only imagine how galling it must be to others with far less structural advantages in our society to hear us White guys complaining about how downtrodden we are.  (The entirely understandable if morally inconsistent intolerance for men's claims of unfair treatment in the exceptional cases when those claims actually are valid is one of the chief causes, I believe, of the failure of the movement to ban male genital mutilation - to cite the most conspicuous example - to gain traction with feminists and progressives more broadly.  But it's worth pausing to remember, here, that patriarchy harms boys and men, too.)

Two of the basic questions raised by Page's column are whether White men are really being "demonized" and whether the Democratic Party, in particular, is guilty, as Page claims, of demonizing them.  The reason the Democrats have been losing the support of young White men like him, he argues (and to quote him a little more fully),

. . . is the Democratic Party's demonization of white men, ostensibly in the service of "social justice."  As Rod Dreher put it in The Free Press . . . "Think what it must be like to be a white boy growing up in a culture that tells you that you are what's wrong with the world.  You are not only demonized by cultural elites and institutions - not because of anything you believe or have done - but because of who you are."

Dreher expands on this in an essay he wrote subsequent to the publication of his Free Press piece:

[I]t's not hard to see why certain young white men are drawn into radical-right politics.  They have grown up in a culture dominated by wokeness, which tells them that everything wrong with the world is their fault. . . .

I've tried but I cannot find any evidence supporting Dreher's claim that our culture is telling young White men that "everything wrong with the world is their fault."  I also haven't been able to find a single instance of the "demonization of white men" by the Democratic Party, which is what Page explicitly accuses the Democratic Party of doing.  I'm not saying that misandry doesn't exist.  Anyone who follows social media is bound to come across memes now and then that vilify men.  But these anti-male messages obviously represent a minority viewpoint, especially on social media.  Anti-White bias and misandry are not being inculcated in children in America's schools, they are not dominant ideas in our culture, and they certainly are not espoused by the Democratic Party (the majority of the Democratic caucus of the current congress is White and male).  I realize that absence of proof isn't proof of absence, and maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough.  But, still, "he who asserts must prove."  If Page is going to level a charge like this against the Democratic Party, the burden of backing it up with at least a couple examples rests with him more than it does with me. 

I do know that it's a favorite rhetorical tactic of the right wing (a convenient catchall that, for my purposes here, includes but is not necessarily limited to the MAGA movement, White nationalists and Christian Nationalists) to claim that White people and Christians, and now men, are persecuted, but this is a patently absurd claim in a predominantly White and Christian nation that has never had a non-Christian or Christian-adjacent president (Trump, himself, of course, represents the antithesis of actual Christianity, but that's another matter), has never had a woman president and has had only one non-White president in its entire history.  I also know that young White men like Page hate the word "privilege" and don't want to hear it but the fact is that White men are privileged and have been throughout most of our nation's (and our civilization's) history.  

Rather than that White men are being "demonized," what I think is going on in our society is that White men are finally losing some of our privilege.  And if someone is accustomed to a certain amount of privilege, it seems plausible that having it taken away can make him feel as though he is being deprived of something to which he is entitled.  But that sense of being discriminated against or oppressed, in this context, is less evidence of being treated unfairly now than it is simply of having been accustomed to receiving unfair benefits previously.  One of the privileges of privilege is not having to recognize one's own privilege.  This is what I meant when I suggested that Page is both blind to and blinded by his own privilege.

But privilege is precisely what is wrong with Page's worldview.  A good example is the emotional reaction he attributes to "most men," among which I have to assume he includes himself, when listening to a land acknowledgement - a reaction that he describes without a whiff of compunction as "secondhand embarrassment."  I don't want to come off here as holier-than-thou but, honestly, to me that seems remarkably indifferent to the suffering and misfortunes of others.  "Embarrassed" by a land acknowledgement?  The America we know today was made possible, at least in part, by acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Is it really asking so much to acknowledge this?  If Page is more outraged by the fact that young White men like him might be made uncomfortable or experience "embarrassment" when listening to a land acknowledgement than he is by the misery, displacement, and death of the people whose former land is being acknowledged, then Page definitely needs to do some honest and serious soul searching.

Similarly, Page excoriates "identity politics": "General respect for minorities is one thing; deification is quite another."  (Several paragraphs below this comment, incidentally, and without a trace of irony, Page approvingly mentions Charlamagne tha God, a popular DJ and podcaster who literally refers to himself as a god.  Don't get me wrong: Lenard McKelvey can call himself whatever he wants.  But if he can call himself a god, why can't a transwoman call herself a woman, or a non-binary person use "they/them" pronouns and ask others to respect that?)  Page counters that

What young men want is someone who's willing to let them fight for themselves - together.  Economic populism allows for that without turning into a sinister form of identity politics.

Page's entire piece is written, of course, from the perspective of young White men and amounts to a plea on their behalf.  That's not identity politics?  "Sanders could give me - and lots of men like me [my emphasis] - a better life," Page declares.  (Agreed, but Sanders wasn't running only to improve the lives of young White men.)  If it counts as identity politics (and "sinister" identity politics, at that) when minorities, women, gay (and, yes, I know that Page is gay, but that just means that he should know better) or trans people invoke their identities as being central to their lived experience but doesn't count as identity politics when young White men do exactly the same thing, it is because White men still enjoy the privilege of being regarded as the standard, default, neutral person in contrast to which everyone else is an "other."  That, too, is White male privilege.  Surely the unconscious bias - by which I mean sexism - to which this can lead is also behind Page's contrasting characterizations of Sanders's and Clinton's quests for the White House.  Page represents Sanders's campaign as an act of pure selflessness and virtue.  Clinton's, on the other hand, Page denigrates as mere "political ambition." Apparently, running for president is noble when a man does it but self-serving when a woman does it.

Another example Page offers of the Democratic Party's "embrace of an extreme version of identity politics" is a "fat activist screaming about privilege."  Okay, I get it - do fat people really need their own liberation movement?  And, while we're at it, what about those self-righteous disabled people?  What makes them so special?  They even have their own law granting them special rights!  The point is, though, unless you've experienced fat-shaming or have been on the receiving end of weight-bias in the medical profession, or have been discriminated against on the basis of any number of other characteristics that you yourself may not have, you simply don't know what it's like.  But being ignorant about other people's adversity, too, is a form of privilege.  Instead of snickering at fat activists, god forbid we should put ourselves in their shoes and try to understand what they have to deal with, day in and day out.  I would say that it particularly behooves Page, as a gay man (just as it does me, as a Jewish man), to try to muster a little bit of empathy and understanding for other minorities, however they define themselves.  Gay men, too, were once the objects of scorn, ridicule, and oppression, their very gayness pathologized by the medical profession.  Gay rights, too, were once attacked as being "special rights."

Where Page perhaps (and I use that qualifier advisedly) comes closer to a least having his finger on the pulse of mainstream opinion is in his criticism of the Democratic Party's 

embrace of the most extreme goals of the trans movement, such as allowing children to transition or for transwomen to participate in women's sports. . . .

But nowhere in its Master Platform of 2024 does the Democratic Party explicitly call for either of these things.  The short, extended quote that follows is by no means everything the document has to say on trans rights but this is the closest that it comes to addressing the questions of children's transitioning and transwomen participating in women's sports:

Democrats will vigorously oppose bans on gender-affirming health care and respect the role of parents, families and doctors - not politicians - in making health care decisions.

Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by . . . guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school. . . . 

(A much more thoughtful and thorough analysis of this hugely controversial topic, by the way, written by Andrew Sullivan, appeared just the other day in the Times.  In his op-ed, Sullivan, a prominent, White, gay, cis male who identifies as a conservative critiques "gender identity" specifically from the perspective of a longtime champion of gay rights.)

It's not necessary to take on the fundamental questions raised by the phenomenon of gender dysphoria, by gender identity and by gender-critical feminism, here.  (Full disclosure: I tend to fall into that last camp.)  It's enough to point out that what the Democratic Party advocates in its 2024 Platform is not "the most extreme goals of the trans movement," as Page characterizes it, and certainly is not "allowing children to transition."  It merely opposes the criminalization of gender-affirming care - that is, it opposes legislation that would deny access to gender-affirming care to children and adolescents for whom, with the guidance and support of their parents and physicians, such care has been deemed medically necessary.  That hardly seems "extreme" to me.  What's more, the Democratic Party's support for gender-affirming care and trans rights must be viewed in the context of - and as a response to - a concerted effort to politicize the issue by the right wing.  It also should be borne in mind that "gender-affirming care" in children in almost all cases entails the provision of puberty blockers, which do not change a person's sex or secondary sex characteristics but simply delay the onset of puberty, hence, delay the development of secondary sex characteristics, buying the child time so that, once s/he matures, and if s/he still wishes to transition to the opposite sex, that child will not have undergone physiological changes that are much harder to reverse.  Additionally, once puberty blockers are stopped, puberty will proceed normally, albeit delayed.  And surgery involving a child's genitals or to other parts of the body is, in fact, extremely rare.  This is in contrast to the gender-affirming genital surgeries that are routinely (more than one million times per year) imposed on children and infant boys without their consent in the United States with no objections whatsoever from the anti-trans chorus, including Trump - or from River Page, himself, for that matter.  But nowhere does the Democratic Party Platform call for "allowing children to transition."

As for allowing "transwomen to compete in women's sports," the only text I was able to find in the 2024 Democratic Platform that seems to have any bearing on this (and even this, it seems to me, is open to interpretation) is what I quoted above, namely, "Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by . . . guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school. . . . "  Fairness, by definition, means balancing the sometimes irreconcilable interests of two parties.  I'm perfectly willing to concede that if a transwoman student athlete had already developed secondary sex characteristics before transitioning that would give her a meaningful and unfair advantage over natal women athletes, it's not necessarily unfair or intrinsically transphobic or anti-trans to take that into consideration.  But neither does it strike me as "insane," as it does Page, to treat transgender students "fairly and with respect," even if in some cases this results in allowing a transwoman to participate in women's sports. 

One of the things that is especially irksome about Page's blame-shifting onto the Democrats for supposedly embracing policies that alienate young White men and failing to articulate an agenda that would appeal to them is that he is writing at a time and in a political context in which the Democrats represent the only viable political alternative to Trumpism.  (It's not for nothing that Sanders ran as a Democrat in the Democratic primaries.)  A significant portion of Page's column is, in fact, dedicated to drawing a contrast between the corporatist tendencies of the Democratic Party and the economic populism - or democratic socialism, to be more precise - of Bernie Sanders.  Page pays lip service to criticizing the Republicans but, by focusing on the Democrats, he basically lets the Republicans off the hook:

I was drawn to Sanders in 2016 because of his message, which was that Americans had been screwed - not just by Republicans, but by the Democrats as well - the party that refused to punish the executives who nearly brought down the financial system in 2008, and who preferred to dine with the country's oligarchs instead of attacking them.  Democratic administrations were just like the Republican ones:  Heads didn't roll.  The rich got richer.  The poor were forgotten.  And nothing fundamentally changed.

The post-financial-crash period of 2008 on, of course, was when Obama was president.  And, while it's true that no corporate CEOs went to prison, it's also true that the Justice Department under the Obama administration managed to secure over 125 billion dollars in fines (or "settlements") for faulty mortgages.  A democratic socialist administration, to be sure, would have done better and, one hopes, would not have allowed the greed, corruption, and mismanagement that led to the Great Recession (which began under a Republican administration in 2007) to have festered in the first place.  But a Republican administration?   For years, the Republicans have been attempting to repeal the most critical piece of legislation that was enacted to protect consumers, investors, and the American financial system in the wake of the 2008 market crash, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  The Republicans have also been doing everything they can to kill one of this legislation's most important provisions, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB).  And, now, while Page is busy complaining about the Democrats and the Harris campaign of 2024, Trump has effectively killed the CFPB, ordering it to cease operations and closing its building.  In contrast, Kamala Harris consistently supported the CPFB and said so time and again during the 2024 campaign.  I wouldn't call that "unprincipled" or "believ[ing] in nothing at all."

Yet not only does Page fail to credit the Democrats (and Harris in particular) with their adoption of a populist, pro-family agenda in 2024 but, midway through his piece, he pivots from contrasting the Democrats unfavorably with Sanders to contrasting them unfavorably with Trump by portraying Trump, of all people, as some sort of an economic populist.  "If Democrats want to win back young men," Page writes,

they cannot promise reform.  They have to admit what Americans already feel is true: that there is something that's going very wrong with the country - and it's time to radically change it.

Trump knows this.  He leaves you in no doubt as to who his enemies are, and they happen to be some of the most unpopular people in the country: a governing elite in both parties who have gotten all the big calls wrong.

Really?  The governing elite are Trump's "enemies"?  Trump is the governing elite.  Trump is the very embodiment of an oligarch.  What's more, he's an oligarch who has spent years maneuvering himself into a position from which he could hijack the levers of power for the personal enrichment of himself, his billionaire family and his billionaire friends.  In the first three months alone of the Trump administration, Trump's family has become three billion dollars richer.  Trump has "assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts."   Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will effect the largest upward transfer of wealth in our nation's history.  It gives most of the tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations while depriving millions of lower-income Americans of health insurance and threatening access to and raising the cost of healthcare for everyone else.  It is the clearest evidence yet that Trump is waging class warfare on poor and working-class Americans, including young White men.  Completely ignoring this, Page creates a false equivalence between the Republicans and the Democrats while lamenting that, after 2008, "[t]he rich got richer."  Well, thanks to the Republicans and to every young White man who didn't vote Democratic in 2024, the rich are now going to get even richer.

In the real world, the Democrats and the Republicans do not represent a distinction without a difference.  The reconciliation bill just passed by congress is not the creation of the Democrats.  Not one Democrat in the House of Representatives or in the senate voted for it.  It is a Republican bill through and through.  More than that, it is Trump's bill, his signature legislative accomplishment.  Yet to hear Page describe Trump (and if the description weren't so obviously false), one could easily get the impression that Trump is the champion of the little guy - a populist who's only concern is to give hard-working (or undeservedly unemployed) Americans (the "real" Americans, that is, and we know who they are) their due.  But what has Trump actually done for working Americans?  His biggest achievements (if you could call them that) so far have been to increase the cost of goods by imposing tariffs (which is basically a tax increase for the American consumer), to make it harder for Americans to access their social security benefits, and to throw close to 60,000  federal workers out of work.  These civil servants, incidentally, are hardworking, good people with mortgages, student loans and families to support - our fellow Americans - people who didn't deserve to be treated this way.  Some of them are young, White men, too.  Not only did Trump take away their jobs but he enlisted the world's richest man (an immigrant, by the way) to do it.

In Page's version of reality, that all this has come to pass is somehow the Democrats' fault for insufficiently ministering to the special needs of young White men.

Page is right about one thing.  Trump leaves you "in no doubt as to who his enemies are."  But they are not the "governing elite," as Page claims.  Rather, Trump's enemies-list includes the press ("They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE"; "scum"), Mark Milley (a four-star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whose actions Trump characterized as being "so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH"), Jack Smith ("deranged," "evil and sinister"), women, assorted ("Horseface," "Lowlife," "Fat," "Ugly," "dog"), Democrats ("totalitarian," "willing to do illegal acts"), public servants ("crooked," "dishonest"), immigrants (they are "poisoning the blood of our country"), the Biden administration ("scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds"), Mexicans ("drug dealers," "criminals," "rapists"), Blacks ("low IQ"), Judge Juan Merchan ("psychotic," "corrupt," "incompetent"), intellectuals ("Marxist Maniacs and lunatics"),  science and scientists, universities, and probably others.  But Trump's fellow oligarchs?  Not so much.  (It's true that Trump has recently attacked Elon Musk, however, it wasn't for being part of the "governing elite" but simply because of Musk's opposition to Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill.")

Page's column, as I have already mentioned, was written in response to news about a research project being undertaken by the Democratic Party in order to "reverse the erosion of Democratic support of young men, especially online."   Page refers to the $20 million earmarked for the project as "money well wasted."  The problem, in his view, is obvious: it's not the young White men like him who have been turned off by the Democrat Party but the Democrats themselves.  It doesn't seem to occur to Page that it could be the other way around.  It is this blind spot that makes me wonder whether Page's own White privilege obscures for him a darker truth about White flight from the Democratic Party - and toward the Republican Party, about which Page has little or nothing to say.  Steve Phillips, writing in The Nation a year ago, also looked into this question.  But, rather than blaming the Democrats, as Page does, Phillips provides what I think is a more realistic and, sadly, a more likely explanation.

In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83% of GOP voters, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls).  White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump's ascendance and continued political relevance.  Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters.  Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.

The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous.  Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back.

That might be a slight oversimplification - I'm sure that not all Trump supporters are racists.  And it's also true that, in the last election, Trump gained support even among Black and Latino men.  This could be due to legitimate concerns (among young White men, too) about the economy but it could also be explained by what some researchers have referred to as "precarious manhood theory" and the degree to which it, in turn, explains the role of "masculine anxieties" in support for Trump.  Clearly, the "Democrats have a masculinity problem."   

Page concludes by counseling the Democrats that if they "want to win back people like me, they have to go to war with the rich."  It's hard to see how that would help, given that, in 2024, the young White men who didn't vote Democratic either enabled the oligarchy by not voting at all or actively supported it by voting for Trump.  

Phillips takes the exact opposite approach and advises the Democrats, rather than trying "to woo white voters," to focus on targeting "the right white people [my emphasis]."  "Democrats," he points out, "need to realize that if Donald Trump's felony conviction won't weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will."

On balance, maybe the fact that the Democratic Party has lost men like Page has less to do with the reasons that Page cites and more to do with the fact that Trump is just so adept at appealing to the identity politics of young White men.  It would be great if this cohort could see themselves as part of a broader, racially- and gender-diverse coalition that opposes Trump's authoritarianism, his contempt for the rule of law and his class warfare against average American people but there is probably always going to be a segment of young White men for whom the allure of fascism and the seductive appeal of persecution-envy are just too great.  At least for these young White men, maybe the fault, dear River, is not in the Democratic Party but in themselves. 

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About me:  I'm originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York. I'm a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics. I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.

 

Daylight Losing Time

by David Balashinsky

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

These slogans, examples of "doublethink" from George Orwell's 1984, come to mind about this time every year when much of the United States artificially advances spring by about one month as we switch from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time.  Turning the clocks ahead by one hour does not, of course, "save" daylight.  It merely steals daylight from its rightful owner, morning, and gives it to nighttime, who neither needs it nor wants it.  And while this artifice may give the illusion that we have magically time-traveled forward one month into spring when sunset occurs an hour later, the illusion only works in the afternoon and evening.  Every morning, Daylight Saving Time unnaturally prolongs winter by a month, depriving us of an hour of sunshine and making it appear as though it were not early March but early February.  

To be fair, "Daylight Saving Time" may not be a perfect example of doublethink because it does not equate one thing with its opposite.  (For that matter, "ignorance" and "strength" are not opposites either.)  Yet, at the very least, "Daylight Saving Time" (DST) is a misnomer that is intended to promote the fiction that, by legislative fiat, we can increase by an hour the amount of time each day that we experience daylight.  Since that is manifestly not true, and since the additional hour of sunlight that we get at nighttime can only come at the expense of the hour of sunlight that we lose every morning, it makes as much sense to refer to Daylight Saving Time as "Daylight Losing Time."  It really depends on one's perspective and preference.  An unbiased or neutral name for the time-keeping system now in force would be "Daylight Shifting Time" but this doesn't describe which way the shift was made: toward more light in the evening or toward more light in the morning.  Moreover, the neutrality of this phrase does not, in my opinion, adequately convey the harms of DST that result from shifting the clocks away from morning light and toward morning darkness.  On balance, then, "Daylight Losing Time" (DLT) is a more accurate designation for "Daylight Saving Time."

The name of legislation (which has been pending in congress for several years) that would make DLT permanent - the "Sunshine Protection Act" - represents an even more audacious use of language to foster the deception that DLT creates an additional hour of sunshine each day.  Reading some of the speeches and statements that have been offered in support of this bill one would think that it were actually possible, through an act of congress, to increase the number of hours that the sun shines.  According to Senator Patti Murray, "every winter in Washington state, folks despair at the prospect of losing an hour of precious sunlight when we are forced off Daylight Saving Time. . . .  This is about . . . just putting a little more light in families' lives so they can spend time together, outdoors, in the sunshine."  Senator Martin Heinrich claims that the Sunshine Protection Act will create "More time for sunshine."  Similarly, Senator Katie Britt justifies the bill by asserting that "Alabamians want more sunshine. . . ."  As reported in the Congressional Record (March 15, 2022), Senator Tommy Tuberville (yes, that Tommy Tuberville) celebrated the senate's passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by unanimous consent with the observation that "[i]t is especially timely given that we all had to change our clocks this past weekend and we are now experiencing longer, sunnier days. . . ."  Incidentally, that procedure - "unanimous consent" - by which this bill passed in the senate, with Kyrsten Sinema presiding (yes, that Kyrsten Sinema), occurred, apparently, without many senators even realizing what it was to which they were consenting.

What's also striking is the frequency with which many of the politicians who are so eager to unnaturally alter our sleep-wake cycles invoke what they claim are the positive benefits of DLT.  Senator Markey, for example, has stated that "[s]tudies have found that year-round daylight saving time would improve public health, public safety, energy policy, [and] mental health. . . ."  A press release from Congressman Vern Buchanan in 2023 in support of the Sunshine Protection Act claims that "[t]here are enormous health and economic benefits to making daylight saving time permanent," including reduced car accidents and accidents involving pedestrians, decreased childhood obesity and increased physical fitness, as well as decreased crime rates and energy usage.  Senator Britt, likewise, claims that DLT is "better for our mental and physical health."  Patty Murray also cited "public health" and the economy as justifications for switching to permanent DLT.

But just as moving our clocks forward by one hour at the close of each winter doesn't "save" or "protect" daylight, neither would permanent DLT be the panacea its boosters claim it would be.  On the contrary, the consensus among the experts - the people who actually study these things - is the exact opposite.  They cite numerous harmful effects of DLT - whether permanent or even just for eight months out of the year, as is currently the case - and argue that it would be healthier and more beneficial overall to adopt Standard Time (ST) year-round.  The list of organizations representing the many experts who have endorsed the adoption of permanent ST is long.  It includes the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Medical Association, the Canadian Sleep Society, The National Sleep Foundation, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, the American Academy of Cardiovascular Sleep Medicine, the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, the American Association of Sleep Technologists, the American College of Chest Physicians, the National Safety Council, the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine, the Sleep Research Society, the World Sleep Society, and scores of other organizations.

The increased risk of harm and the actual harms of advancing the clocks by one hour every winter are well recognized and include acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), stroke, sleep-loss, increased motor-vehicle accident fatalities, depression, anxiety and seasonal affective disorder.  Aside from the disruption to my own circadian rhythms (more on this below) and, obviously, the increased darkness that result from switching to DLT, my chief objection to it originates in my love of nature and the inspiration that I draw from natural phenomena.  This is especially true of the waxing and waning of daylight as the seasons change.  Part of what makes the lengthening days of winter and spring so appealing, after all, is that each day is just a little bit longer than the one that preceded it.  This portends summer's inevitable triumph over winter as daylight supplants darkness by a few minutes each day, culminating in the arrival of the summer solstice.  It's like watching something beautiful grow.  At the latitude where I live, the change in daylight - not just how much of it there is every day but even its color - is noticeable as the angle of insolation changes.  To experience firsthand, and in such a salient way,  the reminder that we live on a planet that rotates on a tilted axis as it revolves around the Sun is to witness, every single day, one of the wonders of the universe.  How can one not be awed by that?

Yet with DLT, all this is ruined every March.  It is not just jarring but an affront to the cosmos to artificially advance this natural cycle by an hour.  It cheapens and demeans the experience.  DLT is the epitome of a toddler's need for instant gratification.  It's like reading a novel and, halfway through, skipping ahead by a hundred pages just to get to the end more quickly.  If one engages with literature this way, can one really appreciate the book?  Can one even claim to have read it?  Likewise, if one knows time, nature, and daylight only in their manipulated state, can one really appreciate them? 

The fact that congress has come as close as it has to getting rid of the biannual time shift indicates that our society is at a tipping point.  No one seems to like switching the clocks forward and backward every year (that's an exaggeration: nineteen percent of Americans actually do) but the question is what to do about it.  Obviously, there are two sets of choices here, one contingent upon the other.  The first is whether or not to continue setting the clocks ahead in March and back to Standard Time in November.  If that is resolved in favor of scrapping the biannual time-shift, the next question would be what to replace it with.  One option would be a permanent return to Standard Time, or Natural Time (NT).  I say "return" because this is the system under which humans have prospered, phylogenetically speaking, throughout our evolutionary history.  It is also the system that we have consciously used throughout most of our recorded history.  (DLT originated in Canada in 1908.  The first nationwide implementation of DLT was by Germany in 1916 and it wasn't until 1918 that DLT, then called "War Time," was established in the United States.)  I also specify "Natural Time" because this system is based on the position of the Sun relative to the Earth.  Twelve noon is twelve noon because that is when the Sun is at its highest point overhead.  The alternative would be the establishment of permanent DLT or Unnatural Time (UT).  I say "Unnatural Time" for the obvious reason that a system that offsets time by one hour rather than indicating the time that actually is, is by any measure unnatural.  If the position of the Sun relative to our location on Earth creates a natural noontime, it follows that it's unnatural to designate noon as one o'clock.  It's equally unnatural, albeit less noticeably damaging to our circadian rhythms, to designate 11:01 p.m. Sunday as 12:01 a.m. Monday, or 11:01 p.m. December 31st, 2025, as 12:01 a.m., January 1st, 2026, which is what permanent DLT/UT would force us to do.

From a health standpoint, permanent DLT would be better - and not by much - than the biannual time switch but it would still be unhealthy.  The main reason is that permanent DLT would force us to live our entire lives in "circadian misalignment."  As Beth A. Malow explains in a position statement on behalf of the Sleep Research Society, under permanent DLT, "[t]he timing of natural light becomes desynchronized from normal physiological processes, with dysregulation of melatonin and cortisol.  Disruption of these hormones contributes to stress, altered metabolism, and inflammation [citation omitted]."  The reason for this circadian misalignment, as Matthew Solan points out, is simply that our "[c]ircadian rhythms largely depend on light exposure. . . .  Less morning light can decrease levels of the mood-boosting hormone serotonin.  In contrast, exposure to light later in the evening can delay the production of melatonin, the hormone that helps you fall asleep."  The result is that, under permanent DLT, it would be harder to wake up every morning and harder to fall asleep every night, year-round.  As Horacio de la Iglesia, another specialist in the study of circadian rhythms, puts it, living under permanent DLT "would be like Monday morning every day for the rest of your life."

One of the ways that sleep- and circadian rhythm researchers gauge the effects of light on our health is by studying the "western edge effect."  Here's Malow, again:

The literature on time zone border effects has been used to support the role of DST in contributing to sleep loss and circadian misalignment.  Compared to those living on the eastern edge of a time zone, people living on the western edge of a time zone, who get light later in the morning, and later in the evening, self-report getting less sleep. . . .  This sleep loss is believed to be secondary to evening light exposure delaying the brain's release of melatonin.  Sleep loss in adults has been associated with weight gain and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke, depression, and increased risk of death, along with impaired immune function, increased pain, impaired performance, increased errors, and greater risk of accidents.  Sleep loss in children has been associated with attention, behavior, and learning problems along with increased risk of accidents, injuries, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts [citations omitted].

Malow also notes that residents of western edges had higher rates of many kinds of cancer and other health problems as well as lower per capita income and higher health care costs.  "Those supporting a return to permanent ST," she observes, argue that permanent DLT "would exacerbate these effects." 

There are also practical consequences of pushing day into night and night into day.  As I have already mentioned, unnaturally prolonging daylight by an hour at nighttime necessarily entails prolonging darkness by an hour every morning.  The result of permanent DLT, then, would be that, in some locations, sunrise wouldn't occur until after 9:00 a.m. during the winter months.  In my location, Binghamton, NY,  under permanent DLT, sunrise wouldn't occur until after 8:00 a.m. for three months out of the year.  That means my wife would be leaving for work in darkness from the middle of November through the middle of February.  The children who live across the street from me get picked up by a school bus at 7:00 a.m. every day.  For them, permanent DLT would mean that they'd be waiting outside in the dark every morning for close to six months out of the year.  This is a semi-rural area so, fortunately for them, the bus picks them up in front of their house.  But what about the millions of children who walk to school, or walk to bus stops?  As it happens, it was partly due to the entirely valid anxiety of parents over the safety and welfare of their children who had to walk to school in darkness that permanent DLT was abandoned - less than a year after it was established, so unpopular was it - when it was tried in the 1970s.  I'm an early riser so, for me, getting up at 5:00 a.m. every day means that under permanent DLT I'd be getting up in darkness 365 days per year.  (If you want to know when sunrise and sunset would occur in your location or in any location in the United States under any of the three alternative time systems - permanent ST, permanent DLT or switching back and forth -  Save Standard Time has an easy-to-use interactive sunrise calculator that you can use to find out.)

This is what 6:00 a.m., DLT (Daylight "Saving" Time), March 19, 2025 looks like at my house:

 

This is what 6:00 a.m., Standard Time (Natural Time), March 19, 2025 would look like:

Still another consideration is energy consumption.  That was the original rationale for "War Time" back in 1918.  For the life of me I cannot see how burning one kilowatt hour of energy at 7:00 a.m. uses less energy or costs less than burning the same kilowatt hour at 8:00 p.m. would.  Sure, I can turn the lights on an hour later at night under DLT, but that just means that I also have to turn the lights on an hour earlier in the morning.  Nevertheless, the proponents of permanent DLT continue to claim that it would result in less energy usage.  Yet, here too, the facts are at odds with the claims.  A study of energy usage in Indiana under both systems determined that the adoption of DLT added $8.6 million dollars to the energy bills of Indiana residents each year.  As reported in the Toronto Star, the researchers concluded that "since 95 per cent of that extra energy was generated by coal-fired power plants, that meant much more atmospheric-warming carbon dioxide was spewed into the air.  Expanded nationally, these results would translate to at least two coal-fired electricity plants pumping power just to feed the daylight savings habit."

It goes without saying that enjoying sunshine during the day rather than at night is a personal preference.  Mine is for a time system based on the position of the Earth relative to the Sun and in harmony with our bodies.  I prefer Standard Time and dislike Daylight Losing Time in the same way that I would prefer not to have PFAS ("forever chemicals") in my food and water and would prefer not to have microplastics circulating in my bloodstream and embedded in my organs.  Call it what you will, nothing, including Orwellian euphemisms, can alter the fact that DLT is unnatural and harmful.  And, as bad as it is living with it for eight months out the year, making DLT permanent would mean that every minute of every hour and every hour of every day, 365 days per year, would not be what the clock says it is but a counterfeit time, told by a "false clock."  Much like the "innies" of Severance, we would be confined within an artificial reality but stuck there until the end of time itself.  

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For more information and to learn how you can help save Standard Time, visit Save Standard Time, the Coalition for Permanent Standard Time and the International Alliance for Natural Time.

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                                                                               The moon, photographed at 6:00 a.m. DLT, 19 March 2025

About me: I am originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  I am a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.

An Open Letter to President Zelensky

Dear President Zelensky,

First, allow me to apologize on behalf of the American people and the United States of America for the disrespectful treatment you received from President Trump and Vice President Vance at the White House on Friday.  Their behavior toward you was not just a breach of protocol - it was inhospitable and - there's no other word for it - rude.  President Trump's and Vice President Vance's disgraceful and sordid conduct was an embarrassment to the very idea of the United States of America - that ineffable ideal that exists in the hearts of Americans as a concept but that also exists as the political entity that we have been proud to call our nation and our home.  It was an embarrassment to me personally, as an American, just as it was to millions of my fellow Americans.  It was an embarrassment to us domestically because, acting in our name, President Trump failed in the very first duty of a host: to conduct himself graciously while treating his guest with courtesy, dignity and respect.  It was also an embarrassment to our nation on the world stage of international diplomacy.  The damage that Trump and Vance have done (this includes Vance's pro-neo-Nazi speech at the Munich Security Conference last month) to America's standing and reputation as a stalwart defender of freedom, democracy and the international rule of law is incalculable.  I can only hope that you can look beyond the pettiness, the smallness, the personal self-interest, the vindictiveness and the boorishness that are the stock-in-trade - the very essence - of Donald Trump and that you will continue to regard the American people and the United States as allies in Ukraine's courageous struggle against Russian aggression, imperialism and cultural genocide of the Ukrainian people.  

Speaking to you as an American, I also want to take this opportunity to set the record straight.  President Trump lied when he called you a dictator.  When he uttered that calumny, he was not speaking for the American people.  The American people know that you are a democratically-elected president who won in a landslide with 73 percent of the vote in 2019 and whom history has since thrust into the position of having to rally your countrymen and -women in support of the sacred cause of defending your nation's very existence; a duly elected leader upon whom circumstances beyond your control have imposed the unenviable task of seeking the financial and military assistance of freedom-loving democracies around the world in support of that noble cause. 

Trump also committed a lie - a lie of omission - when he refused to admit that it is Putin who is the real dictator.  It is not enough, you see, for Trump to try to discredit you.  He is also doing everything he can to legitimize a former KGB agent who "won" his fifth and most recent term as president in an election in which "[a]ll genuine opposition candidates were barred from running, imprisoned, dead, or in exile."   A dictator who has presided over massive and systematic political repression and wholesale human rights abuses in Russia.  An oligarch worth an estimated $200 billion (which would make Putin the third richest man in the world) under whose dictatorial regime numerous political opponents, free-speech- and democracy advocates have been murdered.  You may wonder, President Zelensky, why Trump is so obsequious to Putin - so nauseatingly servile on his behalf, parroting his lies and promoting his interests over Ukraine's and even over the interests of the United States.  All I can tell you is that we Americans, who are proud that our nation, along with our NATO allies, won the cold war, are wondering the same thing. 

Trump also lied when he claimed that your nation, Ukraine, started the war with Russia. The world will always know - and history will always record - that Putin's war against Ukraine began when Russia invaded and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and expanded when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of your sovereign territory on February 24, 2022. Since then, Ukraine has "endured relentless death, destruction and displacement," including the deaths of over 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, the deliberate targeting and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including a devastating and deadly attack on Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital, and the widespread use of torture and sexual violence against civilians and detainees. Russia's cultural genocide against Ukraine includes the abduction of over 19,000 Ukrainian children - a war crime for which arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, acting - perversely and preposterously - in her capacity as Russia's Commissioner for Children's Rights. Russia itself has suffered enormous casualties since its invasion of Ukraine, with 95,000 troops killed - many or perhaps most of them Putin's pawns, their lives sacrificed on behalf of Putin's revanchist-imperialist ambitions. One can scarcely fathom the depth of moral depravity of the man responsible for all this. Likewise, it's almost impossible to fathom the depth of moral depravity on display at Mar-a-Lago recently when Trump literally added insult to injury by accusing your nation, Ukraine - Russia's victim - of being the instigator of this horrific war.

Trump and Vance also lied when they accused you of being insufficiently grateful to the United States for its support of Ukraine - to say nothing of the arrogant, condescending and totally inappropriate tone and manner in which they did so. Numerous (credible) media outlets have documented at least 33 occasions on which you expressed your thanks to us and to our country sincerely and enthusiastically.  United24.media has documented at least 94 instances of your thanking the United States.  Please be assured that America acknowledges your gratitude and appreciates it.

Since our nation's founding, the United States of America has sought to embody the ideals of liberty, justice, and democracy.  We have fallen woefully short of our founders' aspirations for much of our history, beginning with the founders themselves when they wrote inequality on the basis of sex and race  into our founding document.  But the saving grace of our constitution was that it also included a mechanism for improvement - for an expansion of liberty and justice.  

As a nation that has formed alliances and waged wars, the United States has also gotten many things wrong.  But there are some things that we got right.  In World War II, for example, we were not only the right side of the war but on the right side of history.  One of the things the United States fought (and sacrificed more than 400,000 American lives) for 80 years ago was the principle that a powerful nation may not simply invade and conquer a less powerful one and be permitted by the other nations of the world to get away with it.  Because of this, the United States has long enjoyed a reputation for throwing in its lot with the underdog - and backing that up with our considerable military might.  We have not always been consistent and we have not always deserved that reputation.  There have been many occasions throughout our history, especially during the 20th century, when the United States helped to install or supported dictatorships in other countries, most notably in South America.  

And yet, because of our unique position in world history - from our humble beginnings as colonies that banded together to overthrow an oppressive distant monarchy to our present position as a superpower -  because of the enduring nature of our democracy, because of our wealth (the envy of the world), because of our formidable military strength, our role in defeating the Axis powers in WWII, and, above all, because of the ideals that we profess to ourselves and to the world, the United States has been looked upon as a defender of just causes - a bulwark of last resort against tyrants.  If this is how Ukraine has looked upon America from afar, it is also how Americans have come to view our great nation from within.

Helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian imperialism would not, of course, simply be an act of altruism.  Much of the good the United States has done internationally since WWII has been a manifestation of enlightened self-interest.  That is the principle behind much of the "soft power" that the U.S. has projected around the world.  By improving conditions for citizens in poor and underdeveloped countries, we can reduce armed conflict, war, criminality, poverty, starvation, disease, and political radicalization - all of which have led to large numbers of émigrés seeking to enter the United States any way that they can - while fostering good will toward the United States.  At the same time, the U.S. has filled a void - support for healthcare, nutrition, education and infrastructure - that our adversaries, such as China, would otherwise be only too happy to fill.  (This is one of the reasons why the wholesale dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development is ultimately so counterproductive to U.S. interests, to say nothing of the absolute moral abomination of allowing thousands of people to suffer and die for want of adequate medical care and nutrition). 

Additionally, history teaches us that those who would wage war on their neighbors for the purpose of territorial expansion and conquest do not stop of their own accord - they must be stopped.  You were absolutely correct, President Zelensky, when you reminded President Trump that, although we have "a nice ocean" between us and Europe and "don't feel now" the effects of Russia's aggression, unless Ukraine prevails it is inevitable that we "will feel it in the future." 

There is every reason therefore, why the United States should continue to support Ukraine in its fight for survival as a sovereign nation against its Russian would-be conqueror.   Not simply because it is in our own strategic national interest to do so but because, morally, it is the right thing to do.  And, as I have said, because doing so is consistent with the principles that the United States prides itself on standing for. 

It is against this historical background and in the context of all of these strategic and ethical considerations that the world witnessed - and you bore the brunt of - the current president of the United States effectively siding with Putin and Russia against you and the people of Ukraine at the White House last week.  As an American, to see the president of the United States treating an ally so shabbily while denying and repudiating America's role as a champion and supporter of peace and democracy was profoundly demoralizing.  But, for now, we here in America are, indeed, protected (at least to some extent) by an ocean.  For America, it is only our nation's good name that Trump is destroying.  For you and your people, the stakes are incomparably higher: without the necessary political, financial and military support, it is your freedom and your very lives that are on the line.  That President Trump would abandon you and your nation or do Putin's bidding by attempting to strong-arm you into what would amount to an abject surrender is reprehensible.  It is an affront not only to you and to Ukraine but to everything that America stands for.  Liz Cheney put it succinctly:

Generations of American patriots . . . have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend.  But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine.  History will remember this day - when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.

I can only express my support of this sentiment and my solidarity with you and the Ukrainian people.  I sincerely hope that you will not view Donald Trump's betrayal of America's values and his betrayal of the Ukrainian people as a reflection of the American people themselves.  On a purely human level, President Trump's and Vice President Vance's conduct at your last meeting was as antithetical to our values as Americans as their hostility to the cause of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty is antithetical  to our political values as Americans.  It is precisely because we are Americans - with all that that means to us - that millions of us continue to support Ukraine and encourage you not to lose heart nor hope.  A free and independent Ukraine will prevail.

Sincerely,

David Balashinsky

 

Massachusetts Becomes the Third State to Protect Cats' Right to Bodily Integrity. Boys and Girls Assigned Male at Birth Are Still Waiting for the Same Right.

by David Balashinsky

Before I say anything else, let me state for the record that I am a cat-lover and that none of my cats ever has or ever will be declawed.  I have long believed that cat declawing is both inhumane and unethical, which is why I supported efforts to ban this practice in my home state of New York and support banning the practice nationwide.  As a New Yorker, I am proud that my state became the first to institute a statewide ban on cat declawing.  Maryland became the second state to do so in 2022 and, now, Massachusetts becomes the third.

Still, I have mixed feelings about these laws.  The reason is that they create a legal protection for cats that, to this day, is denied people like me.  I am referring to human males and transwomen (anyone born with a penis) and to the practice of removing penile foreskins when not medically indicated, a practice known as nontherapeutic penile circumcision or, simply, "circumcision."  As much as I love cats, it is impossible for me not to view these anti-declawing laws from the vantage point of someone who had part of his body cut off without his consent.  Given that the part of me that was ablated without any rational reason or justification is just as important to me as cats' claws are to them, it is hard not to look at cats now without feeling some envy.  I feel demeaned by the fact that my cats now have a greater legal right to bodily integrity than I did when I was an infant and would still if I were under 18.  (By the same token, if my twin sister and I had been born after 1996, she would be legally protected against genital cutting whereas I would not.)

A word about the male prepuce, or foreskin, is in order.  Like cats' claws, the prepuce has evolved and been retained through millions of years of evolution because it serves important physiological functions.  One of these is providing protection for the glans penis in exactly the same way that the clitoral hood, its homologous counterpart in females, provides protection for the glans clitoris.  (Anatomically, both the male foreskin and the female clitoral hood are identified as the prepuce.  Unlike boys, however, in Massachusetts and the rest of the United States, girls are allowed to keep theirs.)  In addition, histological studies demonstrate that the male prepuce contains numerous sensory receptors.  These specialized, light-touch mechanoreceptors (known as Meissner's corpuscles), are found in particularly dense concentrations in the body where light-touch sensation is most important, including the finger tips, the lips and, it should come as no surprise, the prepuce.  Several studies have demonstrated that the male prepuce is, in fact, the primary sensory apparatus of the penis.  All of the sensation that the prepuce enables an individual to experience is lost forever when this part of his penis is removed.  Moreover, once the glans penis has been permanently deprived of its natural protective covering, the glans, itself, becomes keratinized (dried out and "toughened up"), making it even less sensitive.  In short, the male prepuce is not "excess skin."  It is an integral and essential part of a person's penis.  It is a part of his body that that individual has as much a right to keep as he has to keep any other part of his body.  And it is a part of his body that he has as much a right to keep as cats have to keep their claws.

A word about nontherapeutic penile circumcision is also in order.  Non-therapeutic neonatal penile circumcision (like cat declawing) is always performed without the consent of the one subjected to it.  It always entails the painful removal of a normal, functional and highly erotogenic body part.  And, in virtually all cases, penile circumcision is imposed on a child not because there is a pathological condition that needs to be treated or a congenital deformity that needs to be corrected but, rather, for reasons involving custom, social conformity, convenience, socially-influenced aesthetics about human genitals, specious medical rationalizations and medical profiteering (often at tax-payer expense through Medicaid funding).

Both cat declawing and penile circumcision, then, have a lot in common.  Both entail the removal of a normal, functional body part.  Both entail a surgical removal of healthy tissue without any regard to the wishes of the cat or infant human male who is subjected to it.  Both practices are inhumane, unnecessary, unjustifiable and unethical.  Not surprisingly, because the campaigns to ban both practices are based on the same philosophical and moral principles - especially, respect for the rights, the bodies and the welfare of living things - many of those who oppose cat declawing also oppose nontherapeutic penile circumcision.  

Also not surprisingly, just as there are parallels between the practices themselves, there are parallels between the movements to eradicate them.  Consider the legislative history of the New York bill banning cat declawing.  Passage of Senate Bill S5532B / Assembly Bill A1303B  did not happen overnight but was the culmination of a long, arduous process that required its sponsors to persevere against the stiff headwinds of an entrenched practice.  The legislation had to overcome the opposition of the New York State Veterinary Medical Society (NYSVMS), which opposed it for perfectly rational and, it could be argued, even humane reasons.  It had to overcome the resistance of legislators who, no doubt, initially scoffed at the notion that this is a matter worthy of the legislature's time.  It had to overcome the opposition of those who believe that cat "owners" have a right to make such medical decisions on behalf of their cats.  And it even had to overcome the opposition of those who profess to love cats and probably do love cats just as much as I do.  It is important to remember, in this regard, that people who subject their cats to declawing are not evil, sadistic monsters who want to harm their cats.  These are people who love their cats but who, for one reason or another, believe declawing to be beneficial, appropriate and ethical.  Thus, it was the combined resistance of societal and institutional acceptance of cat declawing, including, especially, the normalization of it, that the bill's sponsors had to overcome in order to get it passed.

These types of opposition to New York's anti-cat-declawing bill all have parallels in the campaign to eradicate nontherapeutic penile circumcision which, like the campaign to ban cat declawing, also faces stiff institutional and cultural headwinds.  Banning nontherapeutic circumcision is opposed by medical trade associations (whose members profit handsomely from the procedure), such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, both of which have issued statements that implicitly or explicitly endorse nontherapeutic circumcision while conceding that it is not medically necessary.  These position statements include one rationalization after the other that exaggerate the purported benefits of penile circumcision while minimizing or ignoring its incontrovertible harms.  In certain crucial respects, these organizations' position statements on nontherapeutic circumcision are strikingly similar to that of the NYSVMS on cat declawing.

Then there is the reluctance of legislators to take on this issue for a variety of reasons, not least of which is their mistaken belief that a ban on non-therapeutic circumcision would violate the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion. Of course, numerous state legislatures have demonstrated no such qualms about banning female genital cutting for religious reasons. 

Added to this is the persistent cultural view of children as property. Many parents who support nontherapeutic penile circumcision claim that, because their children belong to them, they (the parents) have a right to cut off part of their children's genitals.  This, too, mirrors the view of people who regard companion animals as property, to do with whatever they choose.

Finally, the genital autonomy movement has had to contend with the deep-seated conviction of those who endorse nontherapeutic circumcision that this is not something that one does to a child but for a child.  Those who practice genital cutting of any type - whether of boys, girls or intersex children - sincerely believe that the genital-modification surgery to which they are subjecting their child will benefit that child.  At the very least, they regard it as harmless.  Even when this blithe fantasy collides with the reality that any surgery is traumatic for an infant - especially one performed on one of the most sensitive parts of the body (and, typically, with insufficient or even no anesthetization) - still such parents reason with themselves that, in any event, "the benefits outweigh the risks" ("risks" serving, in this case, as a conceptual stand-in for "harms").  Those who opt to have their sons circumcised thus make a moral calculation that the overall good that results outweighs the potential and even the actual harms of the genital cutting itself.

Similarly, those who defend cat declawing do so on the principle that it produces an overall good when the alternative is abandonment or euthanasia.  (This was one of the rationales in support of cat declawing formerly offered by the NYSVMS.)  These cat-lovers likewise have made a moral calculation that the overall good that results from having their cats declawed outweighs the actual harms of declawing.

In both of these cases, however, it is not the person exercising this surgical option who must live with the consequences of the surgery but the cat or the human infant - and, of course, the man that that infant will one day become, since circumcision is irreversible.  Still, it must be acknowledged that parents who impose their own penile preferences on their sons' bodies are not evil, sadistic monsters who want to harm their sons.  These are parents who love their sons but who, for one reason or another, believe nontherapeutic circumcision to be beneficial, appropriate and ethical.  This is no less true, by the way, of parents who subject their daughters to what is known in our culture as female genital mutilation (FGM).  The parents in these cultures love their daughters just as much as we love our sons.  And when they choose genital cutting for their daughters, they do not do so out of malice, nor do they regard it as "mutilation."  They regard it as beneficial, as something religiously mandated and as something culturally meaningful.  Above all, like parents in our society, they regard it as their right to make this decision on behalf of their daughters.

If the similarities between cat-declawing and non-therapeutic penile circumcision were not  plain enough,  a statement by one of the New York bill's sponsors, Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal, which she made when she first introduced her legislation, underscores the point:

There's no reason to do it unless the animal has [an] infection that is never going away, or if there is a cancer or tumor-related issue in the claw.   It's basically done because humans want it done, and I don't think it's our right to mutilate our animals for our own satisfaction.

Exactly the same can be said of nontherapeutic penile circumcision:

There's no reason to do it unless the infant has an infection that is never going away, or if there is a cancer or tumor-related issue in the prepuce.  It's basically done because humans want it done, and I don't think it's our right to mutilate our sons for our own satisfaction. 

All of which leads me to wonder how, in passing these anti-cat-declawing laws, these legislators can exude such compassion, empathy and respect for the bodily integrity of cats while remaining perfectly indifferent to the bodily integrity and the right to bodily autonomy of people with penises.  After all, don't we deserve to have the same rights as cats?

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About me: I am originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York.  I am a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, politics, and sometimes cats.  I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.