David Boaz and Trans Rights

   

For me, David Boaz began as a writer who gave me an entry point to libertarianism proper, became a boss, then a mentor, then a close friend. I worked with him for twelve years, and for him through most of that. I learned more from him, in such a transformative way, that it’s impossible to imagine who I’d be now without his influence.

Toward the end of his life, after I’d moved out of DC and after David had been diagnosed with cancer, he and I would have dinner every time I was back in town, which was several times a year. On most of those occasions, we’d end up on the topic of trans rights.

We could both see the growing reactionary movement to marginalize trans identities and scale back the rights of transgender Americans. David didn’t live to see the Executive Orders the Trump administration has used to make that the official policy of the United States, by seeking to ban health care, declaring trans identities among children as abuse, compelling speech to out youth against their will, purging trans people from the military, and censoring books (such as Mont Pelerin Society president Deirdre McCloskey’s memoir). But if he had, he would have despised all of it.

David dedicated his life to libertarianism, and understood it as widely and deeply as anyone ever has. He wrote the book on it, after all. And yet, if you can point to the issues within that broad sweep closest to his heart—and which were most represented among the framed magazine and newspaper articles and covers that decorated his Arlington townhome—two stand out.

First was the war on drugs, which David saw not just as an imposition on the free choices of individuals to do with their bodies as they chose, but also a policy of control that inevitably led to the erosion of liberties, abuses of power, and an excuse to oppress society’s marginalized.

The second, though in no sense secondary, was gay rights, which David saw as the demand, by free individuals, to be left alone to love who they wanted to—and do as they pleased with their bodies as part of that. And he saw the crusade against equality, including marriage equality, as nothing more than a campaign by social conservatives to keep marginalized a group they corruptly preferred marginalized.

This is why David, even though he had some worries about some kinds of gender-affirming care for people of some ages, supported trans rights. It’s why he refused to partake in the full moral panic stoked by bad actors manufacturing a new front in the culture war after they lost a gay marriage battle David helped to win.

David was a man of principle, and a clear principle ran through all three issues: People have the right to peacefully do with their bodies as they choose. He saw, believed, and shouted with every opportunity he had, that it is wrong to use the state to oppress to restrict such peaceful freedom, and it is wrong to demand government power be directed in the service of privilege against the unprivileged. “Liberalism is a universal creed,” he said in his final public speech, weak from the cancer that would soon kill him, but strong enough to demand his audience stay strong in their own commitment to libertarianism. “We believe that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not just some people.”

David refused to cede libertarianism to the illiberals. “We libertarians, like most of us Americans, are liberals,” he said. He felt betrayed—and expressed that sense of betrayal every time I saw him—by libertarians, or self-described libertarians, who let an affinity for right-wing social and cultural preferences drag them away from a principled commitment to actual libertarianism as the free choices and free movement of free people.

That liberalism was the framework through which David thought about trans rights. I know this because I was his close friend for fifteen years, his colleague for twelve, and his right hand man for most of those. And, again, we talked about trans rights quite a lot towards the end of his life.

Yet David didn’t say much publicly on the matter. Why? Some of it was likely institutional. While was alive, the Cato Institute was mostly silent about the growing opposition to trans rights and the private medical decisions of trans Americans. But a big part of it was an intellectual trap of asymmetric credulity many like David fall into. He was a boy from Kentucky who got his start in conservative politics before realizing conservatism was as flawed as progressivism in its commitment to the nation’s founding principles. He was a fusionist before, towards the end, he came to see the mistake of tying libertarianism to a political party that cared so little for it that it became the enthusiastic vessel for bringing a man David correctly viewed as an authoritarian and a fascist to power.

Yet David was always skeptical of anything that, for him, was coded as being of the left, and that meant he was far too willing to believe what right-wing sources told him about trans people, and particularly about gender affirming care. On several occasions, he’d raise claims he’d heard, of the harmfulness of procedures, or the prevalence of care for minors, or supposed leaks from people with axes to grind, and I’d point out that the evidence didn’t support them, or they’d already been debunked, or the people with axes to grind had admitted the errors of their claims, and he just wouldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it, because doing so would mean many of the publicans and institutions he’d viewed as mostly reliable in fact weren’t. This was the case even when, as with one study, the institution he cited positively had, during the gay marriage debates, routinely put out studies on the harms of gay relationships on children he’d at the time easily recognized as junk.

But ultimately, I don’t think it matters that David held some false beliefs about the dangers of particular kinds of medical care, or just how many transgender athletes there were, because none of those beliefs, in his mind, pointed toward what he had spent his life pointing people away from: a need for the government to get involved. These were private people leading private lives and making decisions that, even if he disagreed with them, were, he’d say, not the government’s business.

This is another way of saying David wasn’t woke—though in the last couple years of his life he was definitely what we might call “wokening.” David’s skepticism of some kinds of gender-affirming care for people of some ages wasn’t philosophical, and it wasn’t coming from a place of anti-wokeism or sublimated bigotry that motivates many conservatives’—and reactionary centrists’—opposition to trans rights and identities. He never wanted that skepticism, his own or others, to mean abandoning liberalism, just as he never wanted worries, warranted or not, about the harms of some drugs to justify a war on the free use of them. For David, trans rights were human rights, and liberalism took those rights seriously.

David insisted libertarianism was radical liberalism, and that liberalism wasn’t just believing in free market economics. He had nothing but anger for libertarians who happily ignored the majority of liberalism, or happily embraced those who assaulted the majority of liberalism, because they thought it would get them maybe fewer government programs, or maybe lower spending, but at the cost of grave damage to the rest of liberal freedom. In his final weeks, he despaired for the libertarianism project, not just because he was convinced Trump would win and then seek to destroy the rule of law just as he in fact has, but because he saw so many libertarians eagerly calling for Trump’s victory.

There’s a passage in his ultimate speech where David set out a long train of abuses and usurpations, and which I’ve trimmed to highlight those relevant to the topic at hand: “So when you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates … talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy … or joining right-wing culture wars … recognize that for what it is.”

Notice the T. And recognize opposition to its equality for what it is. David would have.