Roe V Wade - intersex, binary and trans

shudders this is why using language honestly is so important. The media have manipulated the way we talk about abortion to the extent that things which are obviously heinous become justifiable.

There is an argument that life = breath, so yes you could argue terminating a pregnancy right up to the moment of birth. Though personally I wouldn't use that argument.

Follow that thinking to its logical conclusion, and you can justify the killing of the child right up until they're coming out of the birth canal.

Thats an opinion - another opinion is that you don't become a person until you are independent of the women gestating you.

As we're talking about language, it should be pointed out that there is no such thing as a "safe abortion". For an abortion to be successful, someone always has to die. This is a nonsensical term used by the media and by activists to condition the way we think about the reality of abortion.

(same goes for "forced to give birth". There is no force involved in childbirth. Birth is the natural outcome of a pregnancy. "Force" is what is used to terminate a pregnancy).

Did I do an awful thing? No you did not.
Reproductive health including contraception is a sex based issue. Not a gender issue. If genderists can't put their issue aside, they should step aside.

Black men had the vote because men had the vote. Women didn’t have the vote in 1870 which included white women and black women.

Interesting how sex is an insurmountable hurdle but race isn't and also how men were not (and still are not) chastised for looking after themselves instead of looking more broadly and campaigning for women too.

Let's talk about men's violence against women, shall we (no matter their skin colour)?

Black men had the vote because men had the vote. Women didn’t have the vote in 1870 which included white women and black women. Of course, there were rapidly efforts to disenfranchise black men preventing them from registering and using white terror groups (the KKK and others) to intimidate Black communities - resulting in black men being effectively stripped from the vote in Southern States post-reconstruction. The campaign for white women to vote specifically argued that white women needed the vote because black men could vote and that white votes were needed to offset potential black political power. The campaign for white women’s votes was often explicitly racist, and about shoring up white power.

The largest women’s organization in Indiana in the 1920s was the WKKK - the women’s KKK for white Protestant women.

I know you may not like this history of racism within the women’s movement but it is there and it is true. It sounds like you’re disingenuously trying to divert this onto black men as if they were equally responsible for post-reconstruction terror and racism.

I wonder whether Kendrick Lamarr will be cancelled for using the words "women's rights".

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61946649

The Suffragette movement didn’t have all women included at all. In the U.S., there was very specific rhetoric that votes for white women were necessary to shore up white political power against free black men. The whole point of the Ain’t I A Woman speech is that black women weren’t included. Many U.S. suffragettes were also extremely classist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic etc.

Black women were not included in the campaign for black men to vote either.

Words I never thought I'd hear myself saying: today's Thought For Today - Radio 4 7.50 - was particularly good on this subject.

www.theguardian.com/law/2022/may/18/abortion-prosecution-fetal-homicide-law

And the Guardian ties itself in knots trying not to say the dreaded woman-word.

To be honest I’m conflicted about this issue. These people have been telling us for years they’re not women, feminists don’t fight for them, calling us terfs and bigots for daring to stand up for women’s rights, encouraged the removal of the words used to discuss women’s health, and now they want women to fight for them? Why? If they’re not women they can go and fight on their own. Then I remember as a feminist, I fight for all females, even the horrible ones. It’s just sad they could not have given women the sane courtesy and stood with us when we were fighting for rights to sane swx spaces.

i have added Peloton to my list of companies that fail women, good to know.

Abortion rights or lack thereof mainly affects women and girls. The people attacking you are trying to distract you from the main issue and have you concentrate on them and their issues.. You're not in the wrong. Find another forum and continue the fight.

This.

And every time we take a step further and further away from defining abortion as a woman's issue, the easier it is for anti-choice activists to say that this issue is not about women's rights to bodily autonomy.

Dividing women into smaller groups also helps the Patriarchy.

Campaigns succeed by having large numbers in support, they succeed when groups come together.

The abortion ban may affect poorer women more disproportionately, but it also affects middle-class women too, so surely just keeping this as "women's rights matter" than "poor women's rights matter" is better? It has more support.

You've completely missed the point (and anyway I believe I was somewhat quoting a statement), or perhaps you're just seeking to be outraged?

Of course women of colour are women. That's not in doubt. There are female sex workers and female non-binary too.

My issue is that to say that this is a women's issue is already an inclusive statement, we don't need to divide that group up into smaller groups, and then campaign for each subset of that group. Stronger together. Not divide and conquer.

Trans are going to be pretty much the least affected. Trans women can’t get pregnant, and trans men tend supposedly trying to live “as” men, so won’t tend to choose to, and many are on a cocktail,or hormones that mean that they can’t.

It’s like when the Guardian tried to claim that women were the group most affected by COVID despite it killing twice as many men.

I agree that statistically LGBT +folx are much less likely to even get pregnant let alone seek an abortion, Men can't get pregnant for starters. But...they seem to get whatever they ask for unlike women so perhaps leave them at it.

As a related thing: I got an email advertising a livestream conversation about Roe v. Wade, and it includes this sentence:

Women of color, those facing economic hardships, and queer and trans people who need abortions are likely to lose the most with this decision.

This is an interesting example of piggybacking, in my view. to add "queer and trans people who need abortions" to the two overlapping groups (woc and the poor) who, indeed, are likely to lose the most. It's interesting that inclusiveness quite often now doesn't mean just to include some groups but to center them.

I can't see how the overturning of Roe has any greater impact on queer or trans people who need abortions than it does to women, in general, who need abortions.

I can see a better case for arguing the reverse, i.e., that it is going to affect queer and trans people much, much less.

That's because even if we exclude those queer and trans people who have penises, the remaining group still consists of a much higher percentage of female people who cannot get pregnant due to having had hysterectomy, being on testosterone or being in a sexual relationship with another person who also doesn't have a penis.

In 2017 only 0.06% of legal abortions performed in the US were on people who didn't identify as women.

In fact, as I am writing this I start getting angry about the wholesale erasure of the actual target group in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

If we can't have a name for the group whose rights are threatened, how are we going to mobilise around the issue? This is not just about erasing all the names for the female sex in some woke abortion discussions, it's about all the issues where oppression is based on sex. Sex-selective abortions, FGM, sexual trafficking (where most of the victims are female), son preference in many cultures, religious rules limiting women's and girls' lives based on sex and so on.

Without a clear name for the targets of sexism and misogyny, data collection and analysis and even debate will be difficult and confusing and that benefits those on the other side.

Also, I am a woman because I inhabit a female body and that has affected my life both directly and indirectly. When someone decides that 'woman' is an abstract gender identity instead, my gender identity, in a loose sense, is erased and invalidated. So the new inclusiveness excludes many people of my kind.

This post has sent me off on some very interesting searches on Google - thank you!