Guest post: How to defend the squicky things
Guest post by Josh Spokes.
If we talked about LGBT rights the way we “defend” Planned Parenthood, it would sound like this:
1. “Did you know that 98 percent of equal rights used by LGBT people are used by normal, monogamous families?”
2. “Protecting gender-deviant radical people is only 2 percent of the the entire equal rights budget we’re proposing. If you can hold your nose at them, think of all the deserving people you’d be helping.”
3. “If you want to prevent non-standard living and family arrangements, our equal rights project is the best way to do that. When everyone can marry, fringe LGBT people won’t have any desire to live non-conventionally or in ways that you don’t approve of. Equal rights prevents more non-standard sexuality expressions than any other government effort!”
4. “No federal funds are spent protecting the rights of deviant, non-standard individuals!”
So true! It’s so disheartening how we seem to generally apologize for the existence of Planned Parenthood. Yet I don’t know one woman with whom I’ve been close enough to have an intimate conversation, that has not benefited from Planned Parenthood, and who is not grateful for its existence.
One of the things that always annoys me about the conversation around abortion is the attempt to focus on “good” girls who don’t have sex for the “wrong reasons” and who are married, mothers with cute children, and have suffered “legitimate” rape or health issues. Or, there is the constant drumbeat of women who need contraception for issues of health unrelated to pregnancy prevention.
Those are important issues, but the most important issue, and the one we should be talking about, is a woman’s right to her own body. The issue of autonomy should trump all those other issues. If choice advocates continue focusing on those “good” girls, they run the risk that abortion will be limited to only those narrow parameters, and the rest of the women, the “sluts” who have sex because they feel it is their right and what they want to do, will be stuck with illegal back alley abortions.
We need to take charge of the conversation, and quit letting the moralists on the anti-choice side define the limits for us. This is a moral issue – the issue of allowing women to have full, complete human rights. It is not a moral issue in the way they think it is. We need to take back the conversation and steer it toward the full humanity of women.
And yet, and yet, and yet: that’s exactly what you yourself are doing, Ophelia Benson, when you remove trans people from discussions of abortion, sanitizing a political issue you think belongs to you by extracting the icky and the deviant. What a card. Not too surprising (although very hilarious, indeed), that you don’t recognize that.
Except Ophelia has not suggested removing trans people from discussions of abortion. She has objected to removing women from discussions of abortion, and argued that women need to be central to our framing of the issue.
Not too surprising (and not at all hilarious) that you don’t recognize the difference. Get the argument right before you attack it.
If Ophelia’s argument were, “we need to remove trans people from discussions of abortion, because trans people are icky and deviant and controversial, and so mentioning them makes abortion harder to sell to Middle America,” you’d have a point, Chingona.
But it isn’t. You’re committing a category error.