Clarification as obfuscation
Nope nope nope nope.
A Conceited Empress @TheAngryFangirl Jan 7
Let’s clarify a few things about reproductive health and abortion specifically.Abortion IS NOT a cis woman only issue. Cis women ARE NOT the only people on hearth who get, want, or need abortions.
When you center cis women in your speech and activism around abortion, you’re excluding the other people who need access to it.
Who are these other people? Trans men, non binary people, agender individuals, etc. In short, a whole lot of folks.
Changing your language to say “pregnant people” or “people with uterti” is easy and super inclusive.
NO ONE is saying “women” is a dirty word. NO ONE is saying you should erase the word women from your vocabulary.
We’re asking you to EXPAND your vocabulary to INCLUDE all of these people so they’re not erased and forgotten.
Now, if you wanna talk about what cis women go through because you’re a cis woman and that’s what you know? That’s cool.
Speak about what you know and amplify the voices of others to educate not only yourself but your followers.
You do not, however, get to sit around and pretend like cis women are the only people on earth who need/get abortions.
Women are in fact the people who need abortions. Men don’t need abortions; women do.
When you remove the word “women” from your speech and activism around abortion, you’re obscuring the fact that abortion rights are contested because women are subordinated.
Trans men, non binary people, and agender individuals who get pregnant have the bodies of women and they share in the subordination of women for that reason. It doesn’t do them any good to pretend the war on abortion rights has nothing to do with women and the way women are treated as public property.
Changing your language to say “pregnant people” is politically imbecilic.
You do not get to pretend (whether you do it sitting or standing) that the war on abortion rights doesn’t target women.
I’m trying to imagine how self-centered you must be to ignore the situation of half the human species so you can concentrate on your own need for others to validate your ideas.
That’s some Nero-class violin playing there.
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-that’s all.”
Of course it’s not all just a numbers game (we can’t just look at the largest groups affected by some policy or position and refuse to consider the outliers), but if we do look at the numbers, what would they look like? What percentage of people who ever need, consider, or receive an abortion are women? 99+%?
It seems like this is still a problem of the sex=gender equation. We are using sex as our marker of who has abortions (which is legitimate here; pregnancy does affect those with particular biological sex characteristics). They are using gender (which we mostly read as a social construct, not as something essential), therefore men need abortions. If we could all just agree to discuss this on the basis of sex, the valid discussion for biological issues like abortion and reproductive care, it would render the problem non-existent. But the need for gender to be the crucial discussion factor is promoted because they need gender to be essential. We are talking past each other.
Exactly. But our point of view is dismissed out of hand as “bigotry.”
God I hate that autocratic tone.
It’s gone beyond the gender thing. While recognizing that sex and gender are separate things (in their rhetoric) these folks have now decided that sex and biology are also unrelated and that the term “female” has no meaning as pertains to human beings.
It’s a creationist type argument, that there’s something different about humans that makes stuff pertaining to other animals not apply.
But calling abortion provision a women’s issue doesn’t imply that at all …except to someone with acute narcisism.
How many female humans who identify as men, agender, third gender, bigender, genderfluid, etc. actually consider women’s rights to exclude them?
Because I think the majority of us are socially non-cis but politically women, because we know our rights are grounded in women’s rights.In a society that does not give women rights, trans men who fail to pass at all times will become victims. In a society that does not give women rights, genderqueer people (of either sex) are in danger.
Well said. Thank you for continuing to speak out about this.
Now, if you wanna talk about what cis women go through because you’re a cis woman and that’s what you know? That’s cool.
Actually… that’s not my experience of trans discourse. The loonier end of trans activism seems to think that using words like “vagina” or talking about “menstruation” is “trans-misogynistic”…
I understand – and completely agree with – the necessity for pregnant trans-men and the others to be able to access appropriate reproductive health services, to be welcomed there and treated with respect and dignity. Trans people can be treated very poorly by hospitals and health workers. However, I fail to see how replacing the word “woman” with “people” helps anyone at all. It won’t make health workers more tolerant or understanding. In fact, in my experience of working in UK healthcare, a change like that is likely to be counterproductive by being both resented and derided by the hands on staff. Surely, rather than cosmetic changes to labels, trans men etc need to be organising a way to educate health staff so that trans men etc are treated with respect and understanding.
I wish the female-bodied trans, non-binary and agender identifiers would realise that keeping “woman” on the table as a political class is important to keeping certain rights that affect them. We seem to be moving towards a situation where the new binary is “men” and “other”. That’s not helpful to any of the groups covered by the “other” label.
Plus… if the percentage of “X” individuals affected by a certain phenomena is over 98% then that issues can be fairly stated to be an “X issue”. It doesn’t mean the outliers making up the other 2% should be excluded, or don’t have rights, but the issue needs to be dealt with in terms of the vast majority of people who are affected by it.
98%+ of the people accessing abortions are biological females who identify as women. That makes abortion a “women’s issue”.
Back again… I went looking for statistics to back up my “98%+”. The only numbers I could find come from the Australian bureau of Statistics (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3301.0) and an Australian newspaper (http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/pregnant-men-new-statistics-reveal-men-have-given-birth-to-54-babies-in-australia/story-fni0cx12-1227124085631)
The stats show that in 2014, in the whole of Australia there were 17 779 births. The newspaper article (yes, I know that’s not a great source but I can’t access the medicare data they used) suggests 54 births to biological females identifying as men, and 44 D&C abortions accessed by biological females identifying as men. So 98 records of trans men accessing reproductive services compared to 17 779 women who gave birth.
That’s 0.55%. And that’s all trans men accessing pregancy related services as a percentage of women who gave birth so actually the figure would be lower. So 99.45% of the people who accessed pregnancy related services in Australia in 2014 were women. And 100% were biological females, of course.
17779 is ridiculously low for a country of 23 million people. Where did you get it?
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3301.0
299 697 Persons born.
Does not cover abortion.
Around 0.02%.
How can you simultaneously proclaim that gender can be ‘decided’ out of the blue (and therefore presumably subject to reversal or modification as many times as wished) AND maintain a completely essentialist position about ‘inherent’ femaleness (the ‘born in the wrong body’ thing) that applies to trans women, but NOT to ‘cis?’
The first person to get an abortion who isn’t a woman will be the subject of a Nova program.
Steamshovelmama @ 10 –
Exactly.
@13 H2s
Yes, you’re absolutely right, I fucked up the data. Somehow I read the “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander births” as the total and the smallness of the figure didn’t ring a warning bell for me. I shall go to the back of the class for carelessness in reading data charts… I agree, 0.02% is the correct figure.
I did point out I wasn’t including women having abortions in the stats so the figure will actually be even lower.
I’ve been looking for online sources of data about these issues for a while. There’s almost nothing available – in fact, I’m getting the impression this kind of data is not routinely reported. It must be gathered – at least in the UK gender is routinely collected as part of diversity monitoring for pretty much anything. However I get the impression that data doesn’t get used by the medical reports who largely still go on biological sex, rather than gender identity – because gender identity doesn’t normally affect treatment and, in this case, any person giving birth will be recorded as a biological female. It might be possible to get raw data via the Freedom of Information Act but, to be honest, that’s more effort than I’m prepared to go to.