This! You know, I just came from reading mainstream press reporting that the Montana Supreme Court has ruled that minors have a fundamental right to abortion without parental consent. Their legal rationale is complex and layered, but the overarching point of their decision is that control of one's own body and one's own reproductive functions and potential are core human rights that the state constitution holds supreme.

I'm thinking about the time I contracted gonorrhea during the height of the AIDS era, before effective HIV treatment existed. To say I freaked out would be to understate the fear I felt.

And me a professional HIV advocate and educator! I had to take a mental step back and remind myself that we taught "safer sex" rather than "safe sex."

I had to remind myself that I had joined colleagues urging NYC officials not to crack down on newly emerging gay sex clubs — that safer-sex initiatives and peer-to-peer education efforts in those establishments were doing more good than could ever be accomplished forcing sex into the shadows.

As people (queer people) who were facing the existential threat of HIV and AIDS, we had to make informed decisions for ourselves, living out our inalienable bodily autonomy every day.

Like all human beings, we were inevitably going to exercise our bodily autonomy, with or without the cooperation of the state or punishment by the state. That's just humans for you.

Safer-sex education campaigns like the ones I helped with gave free people the power to make good decisions for their own bodies. Even though some people made poor decisions.

I reminded myself that gonorrhea is a lot easier to contract than HIV, and I examined my sexual history carefully to determine if I could be smarter or safer going forward.

I ended up deciding, as a free human being with bodily autonomy, that I was fine. I was reasonably certain I contracted gonorrhea by performing penetrative oral sex, and I knew from medical data that the odds of contracting HIV like that are slim to none.

I remembered that "safer" does not mean "safe," and I carried on, comfortable with my own decision about how much risk I was willing to accept.

The other thing I was comfortable with is that you can't force other people to make decisions about their bodies. You can try! But the very circulation of HIV showed how fruitless restrictive laws and policy efforts are in that arena.

The only thing that's ever stemmed the circulation of HIV is empowerimg free people with safer-sex education and access to medical treatment they can afford.

Because ... bodily autonomy is something we all instinctively exercise, whether we say we support it or not.

It seems like the Montana Supreme Court understands that with respect to abortion, but but I wonder if they would extend their same legal reasoning to trans youth? I certainly urge them to!

I wish the rest of us would think much more carefully about bodily autonomy and understand how fundamentally important it is to human freedom.