Guest post: Just a reminder
Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room 9.
Picture shared by Abortion Access Front (used to be Lady Parts Justice League):
Just a reminder… All gender identities get abortions! (And have since the dawn of time)
I beg to differ.
A reminder? No, a claim, and a false one at that.
All gender identities get abortions? No. Women get abortions. Women may or may not claim to have gender identities, these gender identities don’t’ get abortions, the women do. Men don’t get abortions. Men may also claim gender identities. The idea that the set of gender identities claimed by men (for example, “cis male”) is a subset of the set claimed by women strains credulity. So this fails in multiple ways.
Since the dawn of time? Not before the Earth existed. Not before humans existed. Not before language existed. Not before some people decided that how you feel inside was more important for classification than your actual sex. And that wasn’t until a small number of years ago. So, very far from “the dawn of time”.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that “trans men” and “AFAB nonbinaries” and the like are truly something other than women. So what? Even by the genderist account of reality, the overwhelming majority of people who seek abortions are women. No one has meltdowns when breast cancer-related activism frames breast cancer as a women’s health issue, even though breast cancer also affects actual adult human males, albeit in far lesser numbers. In fact, men could conceivably make the case that they are ill-served by the branding of breast cancer as a women’s disease. (I imagine that screening and treatment protocols and medical research are to a significant degree sex-specific.) Apart from the sting of invalidation, how are transmen and enbies hurt if abortion is treated as a women’s issue? They benefit if the fight for reproductive rights succeeds and suffer if it fails, regardless of the language used in the activism. No one is attempting to secure abortion access for garden-variety women while forcing women with self-induced endocrine disorders and bespoke pronouns to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.
I think the real pushback against the framing of abortion as a women’s issue is from TiMs. Campaigns for “inclusive” language that erase women by reducing them to body parts and functions is not equally applied to men. That tells you all you need to know about the politics and optics of this “movement.” Men are the Standard; women are the Other. The Other is defined by, and in contrast to the Standard. Can’t go messing with the Standard now, can we? There’s no telling where that might lead!
Who is it that benefits from the disconnection of the definition of “woman” from material reality? Men who claim to be women. Decoupling the material facts of female embodiment from the definition of “woman” (not all women have a uterus, some women have penises, men can get pregnant, etc.) dissolves that material definition, and removes it from a straightforward state of being, into an amorphous laundry list of attitudes, proclivities, and preferences. This allows men, who embody none of the material facts, to claim womanhood (and femaleness) through the idea of womanhood, by performative mimicry of some or all of this laundry list. Note that the performance is partial and often exaggerated; you’re going to see more glamourous, dolled-up, hypersexualized performances than those that take on the role of the underpaid, scut-working charwoman.
Notice how the fight for abortion rights is now often subsumed into a general fight for “bodily autonomy” that is the focus of TiMs (!) invited to speak at pro-choice events. They can never get pregnant, but such opportunities make a great platform to centre their own needs, whether it’s wrong sex hormones or ramping up the transing of kids to recruit the next cohort of fully committed trans activists. At some point this redirection and dilution will see nominal “abortion rights” campaigns that fail to use the word “abortion.” there are already plenty of such campaigns that have stopped using the word “woman.” See above. If you stop using the word “woman” it’s harder to see (or correct) the fact that bans on abortion target women. If it targets “all gender identities” then it’s no longer about women at all, and the underlying sexism and patriarchal power go unaddressed. Which is the point of the operation. Struggles focused on “gender identity” liberate nobody. The existing chains just get doubled, and painted in pink and baby blue.
It’s not uncommon to see online threads about Female Genital Mutilation get mobbed or trolled by men wanting to include or shift the focus to circumcision. So much easier to take over someone else’s campaign than it is to put in the hard work of launching one’s own. (See: forced teaming of T with LGB.)
TiFs and enbies are useful tools and camouflage, but the campaign isn’t really for their benefit. If this were a movement exclusively by and for them, it wouldn’t have got very far at all. They’re just convenient pretexts for dismantling “woman” and rebuilding it in Man’s image.
Your Name’s not Bruce? #2
As far as I know, the protest against male circumcision is older than the protest against female circumcision. As far as I can follow, I don’t see why male and female circumcision should be treated separately.
If one minority group starts to campaign against racism, do you think other minorities shouldn’t try to combine their cause with the first group?
@Your Name’s Not Bruce?
I agree with your analysis here, although I think that trans-identified females also deserve a large share of the blame for the current taboo against using the words “woman” or even “female” in connection with uniquely female anatomy/bodily functions. This isn’t true of all trans-identified females, but some of them truly seem to feel that being called “woman” or “female”—even if only by implication—is an intolerable insult, the most offensive hate speech imaginable. (But if you call the “gay” ones a homophobic slur directed against gay men, more often than not it will make their day. Go figure.)
aaxyaan @3
Cutting out a clitoris is not “circumcision.” Infibulation is not “circumcision.”
So, black people campaigning against police brutality should combine their cause with Central American immigrants campaigning against draconian immigration policies? Those are two different causes, each of which demands focused attention. I don’t see how combining them would help anyone.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Just a […]
Indeed. See: Strangio, Chase.
Certainly vocal TiFs like Strangio have much to answer for, but I don’t think they would have succeeded in expunging the use of “woman” as much as they have if it weren’t useful for TiMs. The dilution and erasure of so-called “cis” women allows TiMs to be the true torchbearer of “womanhood” to which “cis” women must accede. There is no equivalent pressure in the other direction for men (who are much less likely to be saddled with the term “cis” than women are) to give way and subbordinate themselves and their rights in favour of women who claim to be men. I’ve come across a few stories of gay men being pressured into sex with TiFs, but not nearly as many as the reports of lesbians being accused of bigotry and “apartheid” for refusing to accept dick. Maybe I’ve missed a lot of reports of the former and fewer of the latter, but I think that any attempt to get men to bow down to TiF demands to the same degree that women have been expected (and forced) to submit to TiM demands would be a non-starter.
Let’s look at sports.
If it were a matter of TiFs trying to get onto boys’ and mens’ teams instead of TiMs forcing their way onto girls’ and women’s teams, I don’t think there would have been much attention or support offered. It would be more a novelty story, a quirky and rare one-off more likely to be reported along the lines of “man bites dog.” But keeping boys and men off of female teams, as we have seen here on B&W, is almost universally framed as “banning trans athletes.” The actual, underlying issue is hidden by the way it is reported, giving TiMs an unwarranted sympathetic camouflage that disadvantages and villifies girls and women who dare to stand up to defend their rights. Of course the balance of physical strength and power militates against such a trend of TiF infiltration of male sports to start with, compared to the advantages that TiMs can bring to bear against female competitors. I don’t think that so many sporting bodies would have gotten away with giving away men’s positions as easily and willingly as they have women’s. Are any of them bending and breaking rules for “fairness” in order to make sure that things are more “inclusive” for TiFs wanting to compete on men’s teams? I don’t think so. TiFs are much less likely to make the cut against boys and men. And it’s accepted that nobody is going to step in to fix things so they can. Would men have been expected or forced to accept this sort of “inclusive” interference and told to “be kind” on penalty of ejection and disqualification? Not bloody likely. Inclusion is a one-way street which is for women only. Men need not worry. At all. For every Freddie McConnell “man gives birth” story, how many stories do we hear about boys/men, claiming to be female, getting places in female teams/short lists/prisons/shelters? I don’t think it’s because of lopsided reporting; it’s because of lopsided occurrence. I just don’t think it happens that much in the other direction. And if it were detrimental to the wider interests of men, I don’t think it would be allowed to.
@Lady Mondegreen #5
Whether they are the same is not the point. Why should male circumcision not be considered a form of mutilation?
When female “circumcision” was regularly in the news, here in Belgium I often read arguments in which practices that were limited to a prick with a needle in the labia, were called off limits.
As far as I understand there are four practices that hide under the term “female circumcision” in which the least severe is a prick in the labia with a needle. If that last one is to be considered mutilation, I don’t see why male circumcision shouldn’t be considered as such.
While the text on the image is hyperbolic, I do think it’s in line with trends in TA rhetoric. Maybe not “all gender identities”, but “lots of gender identities”, and if gender identities are limited to “man”, “woman”, and “non-binary”, then “all” applies. But they are not limited that way. And the TAs keep trying to push “trans” into the past, making various historical figures into “trans” people. (Is it always women? Has any man from more than 50 years ago been retroactively declared “really a woman”?) But “dawn of time” is several orders of magnitude beyond reasonable.