How we frame
Lauren Rankin wrote about abortion rights as a “not just women” issue at Truthout in July 2013.
The subhead, by Rankin or an editor, puts it this way:
The “War on Women” isn’t just a war on women. Trans men and gender-non-conforming people are losing their rights too, and we need to rework how we frame these “women’s issues.”
The war on women is in fact just a war on women; that’s merely tautological. Saying there’s a war on women isn’t saying there is no war on anyone else. Saying there’s a war on women isn’t saying there is no war on trans men and gender-nonconforming people. I think when people start telling us we should rework how we frame women’s issues, with women’s issues in scare quotes…we need to be skeptical.
Trans people have their own issues. I don’t see why we need to stop talking about women in order to talk about trans issues. I don’t see why we can’t do both.
The last month has been particularly brutal for abortion rights activists and women’s health advocates, as state after state has proposed and/or passed various bills that restrict abortion access and undermine abortion care. In response, there has been a re-energized reproductive rights movement, with many across the nation stating that they “Stand With Texas Women” or “Stand With North Carolina Women.” But in this response, abortion rights activists have overlooked and dismissed a very important reality: Not everyone who has an abortion is a woman.
But everyone who has an abortion does have a female reproductive system. The trans men and gender nonconformists who need abortions are oppressed by misogyny and sexism and the system that controls female reproductive systems in exactly the way that women are, and for the same reasons. They didn’t ask to have that reproductive system, but then neither did anyone else. The social arrangements that demand the right to control those systems really don’t give a fuck how anyone identifies, they just want to maintain their lock on the baby factories.
Abortion is so often framed as a women’s issue by both those who advocate for abortion rights and those who seek to dismiss abortion as frivolous. And for abortion rights, a movement that took root in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this makes sense. Prior to a deeper understanding and problematizing of gender and the way that it works, in our social construction, only women had abortions because only women could get pregnant. But in 2013, we should know better, and we need to do better.
But it isn’t better. Trans men are harmed by misogyny too. It doesn’t help them to try to obscure the fact that attacks on abortion rights are highly political in a particular way – a sexist way, a misogynist way, an anti-women way. A trans man who needs an abortion is caught in a system that was organized to thwart women’s autonomy. If we start to obscure that fact, we start to lose the accumulated energy and power that feminism has painfully worked to gain over the past few decades.
That is some convoluted logic there. And the author is making transgender issues look silly. there are so many dangers and obstacles that the transgender community has to deal with. The article is a distraction from both abortion rights and transgender issues
Whether or not they mean to, writers like this are acting as fifth columnists, doing the work that the hyper-religious and reactionary right wing are desperate to have done, and undermining the work that feminists have been stoically doing for decades.
These are ‘women’s’ issues. The vast majority of people who get pregnant are women; and all of us have female reproductive organ, by definition. We can sort out friendlier signage etc. for trans men at reproductive health clinics only if those clinics still exist.
If these people are allowed to make trans people look bigoted towards women, and vice versa, thus creating wholly unnecessary rifts in feminism, the movement will be weakened to the point that there will be no-one to stand up for the rights of people with female reproductive systems, aka women (mostly) and trans men (a very few of us, comparatively) and the patriarchy will win.
I’m not saying that we cannot be inclusive in our language – of course we can. But how is it ‘inclusive’ if we exclude women?
This reminds me of discussions concerning German concentration camps. There were homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, communists and other groups in these camps, but although it is good not to forget that, you usually do not see these groups protesting when KZs are described as camps designed to exterminate jews.
I happened to skim Stephanie Zvan’s article on this. It seems there is a woman who is chastising people for saying pregnant person instead of woman. I was wondering if saying pregnant person takes away from the message that abortion rights are being attacked. Yet, telling people that they need to be inclusive in terms of the abortion debate towards trans men is also nitpicking. We are getting so caught up in language and anxieties about not being inclusive enough.
A better way of talking about this is to say abortion rights are being attacked. Attacking abortion is part of a misogynistic culture that affects women and people who are transgender. Misogyny is about devaluing anything female. Misogyny also adversely affects men by telling them they have to be a certain way to be acceptable.
Now I am wondering if being too inclusive does dilute the message. What is clear is we need to discuss these issues without attacking the individual discussants
Trans men and women are partly targeted because of misogyny. Trans men because they’re uppity women trying to pass for men, and trans women because they’re men who are lowering and demeaning themselves by pretending to be women. They suck because women suck, you see, and they either are women, or have the bad taste to wish they were.
Gay men similarly. They let themselves be “used as women.” In classical times, gay men were not stigmatized equally; it was specifically the one who allowed himself to be penetrated who was stigmatized, for being “effeminate.”
I agree that the “war on women” is by definition aimed at women, but it has collateral damage. As well as a vicious cycle: hating “effeminacy” only makes sense in an environment in which women are demeaned, so misogyny both prompts and is reinforced by bigotry against “effeminates.” And similarly, hatred of butch women, trans men, and lesbians, is rooted in hatred of women who don’t know their place.
It’s pretty usual for war to cast too wide a net. War with Japan led to incarceration of Japanese Americans. The war on terror prompted attacks on Indian people, including Sikhs and other non Muslims, within the US.
[…] In the exact same way, abortion restrictions are put in place specifically because women are seen as incubators. Their bodies are such that men can fuck them, wait nine months, and remove a (hopefully male) child. Female human beings who don’t want to identify as women still possess those bodies, and they inherit the violence that has been constructed to keep those bodies down – a violence that is specifically tied to misogyny. As Ophelia Benson writes on her blog: […]
[…] In the exact same way, abortion restrictions are put in place specifically because women are seen as incubators. Their bodies are such that men can fuck them, wait nine months, and remove a (hopefully male) child. Female human beings who don’t want to identify as women still possess those bodies, and they inherit the violence that has been constructed to keep those bodies down – a violence that is specifically tied to misogyny. As Ophelia Benson writes on her blog: […]