Say it. Say WOMEN.
Alabama’s bill banning virtually all abortions in the state is a “violation of human rights,” Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
Which is true as far as it goes, but it’s more specifically a violation of women’s rights. If Amnesty talked about police shootings of black people it wouldn’t call that “violation of human rights,” it would call it a violation of black people’s rights, because it’s that specific issue. Somehow though the rules are different when it comes to women.
“Alabama’s vote is the latest in a string of abortion bans specifically designed to strip away people’s reproductive rights. These bans will be deadly, endanger pregnant people’s lives and criminalize doctors and health care providers for simply doing their jobs and providing care,” Tarah Demant, the Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. [emphasis added]
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Program at Amnesty International USA didn’t try to erase women? She did manage to spit out the word at the end, but only at the end.
“These bans reinforce violence against women by victimizing survivors of rape and sexual violence twofold by denying their right to access abortion.”
In future say it from the beginning of the statement.
I don’t see anything wrong with the idea of a violation of human rights, if it is followed up by women’s reproductive choice and pregnant women. After all, human rights is the term we usually use, but then specifying that the humans affected are, in fact, women.
I agree, iknklast, up until the point where they wrote endanger pregnant people’s lives
I have just read of the story of a pregnant man’s “tragedy” when his pregnancy went wrong. It seems the medical staff were at fault for not recognising the man was pregnant, rather than the man being at fault for not being clear about the possibility of pregnancy.
A woman showing up with similar symptoms “would almost surely have been triaged and evaluated more urgently for pregnancy-related problems,” the authors wrote.
A man showing up with similar symptoms and being ask if he was, in fact, a woman, would have squealed about “misgendering”.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/a-pregnant-man-s-tragedy-tests-gender-notions-20190516-p51o5c.html
“… his electronic medical record listed him as male.” What’s the goddamn point of listing “gender” rather than sex on medical records if it doesn’t mean anything? So the staff can use the preferred honorific? Not to, I don’t know, distinguish people susceptible to sex-linked medical conditions? What could they possibly have put on this person’s record that is clearer than “female”?
is a line I never thought I’d ever read. That article linked to by Roj Blake is just full of wrong. For example:
No it doesn’t. It points to issues about people refusing to accept that they are what they are, even when denial leads to such cases as this one. The entire article seems to be laying the blame wholly on the medical staff for ‘assuming’ that a male-presenting patient who was recorded as male on medical records wasn’t pregnant. It states that the patient told staff that he was transgender, so maybe the medical staff might have tried to clarify the patient’s actual sex, but surely when there’s risk of confusion it’s the patient’s responsibility wherever possible to clarify things such as, you know, ‘I’m not surgically transitioned to male and have had unprotected, intra-vaginal sex with a male sexual partner. Oh, and my weight gain has been very recent and I’m sure that I have felt something kicking inside me.’
And there it is again, the insidious conflation of trans issues and racial issues.
Rightly? How can a pregnant person not be female? If there wasn’t the absolute insistence on Universal validation of their identities, those records would have referred to a male-presenting woman, and that one word, ‘woman’ would, when combined with the patient’s symptoms, have set the correct alarm bells ringing.
There’s more, but I’ve got to go out now.
Still problematic, though, at least from the standpoint of gender critical feminism. Is a person who dresses “like a man” actually male-presenting? Or are they maybe a woman who likes to wear the clothes they like to wear? This is where the whole trans thing falls apart – if a person is a woman who likes to wear pants, keeps their hair cut short, wears no make up or jewelry, that does not make them a man, or even male-presenting. That makes them a woman. Who wants to be a woman in their own way.
What caused this trans-man the problem is that he managed to drink the Kool-Aid, believing he was male because he liked to do things and wear things and act in ways that society claims are the domain of men. In a well-run world, this person would have been recognized as female, and allowed to dress the way they wanted, have the hobbies they wanted, etc. And when they got pregnant, there would have been no problems, because they would be listed as woman and therefore the pregnancy would have been recognized.
I agree entirely, iknklast. I should have used the phrase ‘male-identifying’ rather than ‘male presenting’.
My general point was that if there’s one place where ambiguity over someone’s sex is potentially dangerous to that person, it’s the emergency room. Accurate medical notes are vital when a medical emergency is sex-specific; they certainly should not be written to conform with the fantasies of the patients. I mean, imagine the problems if you were to be rushed to hospital, the doctor takes a look at your notes and says ‘What’s this otter doing here? Take her to a vet, for crying out loud’.
The journal paper is titled, “The Power and Limits of Classification — A 32-Year-Old Man with Abdominal Pain”. I paid $20 for 24 hour access at the journal’s Pay Per View here. The journal made me register an account, which was a minor pain, but worth it for my curiosity. My browser let me print the article to PDF, so I have it for reference. Or for free, we can hear the managing editor of the journal interview the lead author Dr. Stroumsa in an MP3 file here. I’ll note three points:
• The paper says that in general, “classification systems never correspond perfectly to the complex world they purport to describe,” citing Foucault’s book The Order of Things.
• I note that in particular, the words “man” and “woman” are never defined in transgender resources like the Stonewall UK glossary of terms.
• Yet the lead author Dr. Stroumsa said the patient “was rightly classified as a man” (in the Associated Press article that Roj Blake linked above through The Age).
In other words:
1) Classifications are imperfect in general.
2) The classification of “man” is undefined in particular.
3) The classification of “man” was correct.
I might leave a comment at the journal about the incoherence of that.
Doctors might benefit from using the definitions included in their freshman biology textbooks. Then they wouldn’t make a mistake like this. In the human species, it is the woman who gets pregnant.
What would be really bad is if they had an old record from when I was a lemur.