The problem I'm having with "health care is a human right" (tactically; I believe it) is that some people's humanity itself doesn't get recognized.

"[Y]you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose and a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense." - Ivar Lovaas

http://neurodiversity.com/library_chance_1974.html

Other marginalized groups have plenty of evidence they are not regarded as fully human, too. Here is @myceliorum talking(open captioned video) about being an unperson: https://www.google.com/amp/s/ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/2006/11/03/being-an-unperson/amp/

On the night that Christopher Reeve sustained his injury, I had dinner at a group home where I was then the live-in. 7 people who lived there, and 2 staff besides me. The conversation was basically the other two staff chatting about how they'd rather be dead than disabled.

The last time I had Thanksgiving dinner with my family, my mom chatted conversationally about how great it would be to euthanize disabled children.

I have endured similar chats in the homes of disabled friends.

Nobody is ignorant about the presence at the table of the people whose deaths they are fantasizing about; it's just not relevant.

Rowling knows full well that the trans women whose murders and the trans kids whose suicides her rhetoric encourages are in her audience.

But who cares? She believes is entitled to hold her opinions, to voice her opinions, to be free of social consequence for her opinions. She deserves (I agree) to be free from emailed death threats.

Do her targets deserve to be free from physical attack?

This dehumanization happens to every marginalized group I know about.

The "access is a civil right" crowd routinely deny access to Deaf and blind people, and all but universally to people who need plain language and other cognitive accessibility features.

The disability rights lawyers routinely fight for certain categories of children to be subjected to behavioral controls they would never be willing to tolerate for themselves.

ADAPT and NCIL pay lip service to the idea that nobody should be forced into an institution even as they quietly circulate documents advocating that people with cognitive disabilities like Lois Curtis's should not have their Olmstead rights upheld.

What good are human rights to people who are not seen as human?

I keep going back to something the lawyer says in Paul Caune's excellent film "Hope is Not a Plan" (check it out: http://www.hopeisnotaplan.ca  ): an unenforceable right is no right at all.

It is not enough to agree that health care (and specifically health care that supports LIFE, not merely non-death) is a human right; you also have to believe we are all human. All of us. Including the people by whom we may be repulsed and the ones with whom we cannot empathize.

The insistence that human beings are human ought not to be a radical act. It is.

It ought not to itself make one the target of death threats and physical violence. It often does.

We will never achieve justice for all if we do not reckon with the meaning of "all."

Without exception.

That's what "all" means.

It means self-injurers and people who hurt others. It means people who do not have complex communication systems. It means people with severe mental illness. It means people with advanced dementia. It means undocumented people.

It means people from every race and ethnic and religious and irreligious background. It means people who have done, and are likely to do, horrible things. It means poor people. It even means rich white men possessed of the belief that God has selected them to rule.

Dehumanization is so deeply embedded in our culture -- and according to some, in human nature -- that we all do it unthinkingly.

I submit that to indulge in the dehumanization of others is to permit ourselves a luxury incompatible with the ends we seek.

This isn't about civility. I have no use for a system of etiquette that stresses gentle words and overlooks death-dealing. It's not about defending anyone. You can be appalling and still be human. It's about not seeing much gain in recognising human rights but not humanity.