Hi, Betty94. I live In Poland and this idea makes no sense to me. I’d like to explain why - and I’m sorry but it’s a long explanation.
What has happened here in terms of the law has real consequences - which hit women the worst and hardest.
I have friends here in Warsaw - I’ll call them Helena and Dawid to preserve their anonymity, but their story is unfortunately common. They’re married and have two children; they’re both from large families and wanted at least four. Last year, Helena became pregnant but started having a lot of abdominal pain she hadn’t had in the previous pregnancies. They discovered that there was an abnormality of the fetus and not only would the pain continue but the baby was almost certain to be stillborn or to die within a few hours of birth.
Helena had an abortion - not easy as she and Dawid are observant Roman Catholics (and not logistically easy in Poland even then). Carrying the pregnancy to term would have been incredibly painful for her, but also emotionally horrible for Dawid and their two young children. But that’s what they’d potentially face if she were to become pregnant with the revised laws in place. They have decided not to try for another child - even if this new ruling gets mitigated or rolled back somehow, it’s just too risky.
Helena is a doctor; she has not been out on the streets every day and didn’t strike last Wednesday. She feels guilty about that but COVID is surging here and she felt she had to go to work. Dawid, who works on line, HAS protested every single day, and he has brought his brothers and friends and even his 70-something devoutly Catholic father along.
If Polish husbands and fathers and grandfathers and boyfriends and brothers and just compassionate male humans in general can come out and march and protest with women in the explicitly-named “women’s strike” (Strajk Kobiet) WITHOUT demanding to be centered, why do trans people (or anyone) in another country have to hijack this highly contentious and volatile local issue to talk about discrimination against THEM?
And I’ll answer my own question: trans people can and do understand that this is an issue that impacts “people with uteri” disproportionately. And many Polish trans people can and have and do stand beside women in protest. I know, because I have met them out there doing it. It’s misogynists hiding behind “trans rights activism” who have a (manufactured, and frankly culturally imperialist) issue with simply saying: women are human, and women matter - in some specific contexts, even more than men.