An Open Letter to the Lawmaker Who Has Never Met Me

Representative,

You have never met me, and you have written several bills about my body. I have read them. They are heavy with words like “protect” and “common sense” and empty of any sign that you have spoken with a single person they would actually affect.

Legislating a life you have never encountered is not caution. It is arrogance with a gavel. You took a complicated, mostly unremarkable human existence and flattened it into a wedge, because a wedge is useful in the weeks before an election. The people on the sharp end of it were never the audience. The donors and the primary were.

I am not asking for your sympathy. I am asking you to do the thing you would demand of any engineer signing off on a system: talk to the people it touches before you ship it. You did not. That is not governance. That is guesswork with the force of law, and the people it fails are real.