Heather Brunskell-Evans and Bodily Autonomy

[arranbubonicplague]

Heather Brunskell-Evans gave a very accessible and topic dense talk at Let A Woman Speak Nov. 30 and one of the topics she explored was bodily autonomy and when it stopped being possible for women to speak about our bodies.

HBE addressed the idea that women's bodies are paradoxically powerful yet we are surrounded by cultural norms and images in which they're exploited. It is demanded that women should disassociate from our bodies and expect other women to collude in this in the service of maintaining porn, prostitution, and pregnancy surrogates. However, in our current involuntarily-assigned role of paracletes we are expected to be willing to sacrifice the right to discuss even reproductive rights to serve trans ideology (I may be guilty of a liberal paraphrase with that last part).

There is currently an astonishing example of this that would benefit from unpacking. For me, the movement that is being privileged rights to frame this march also has initiatives lobbying for medical intervention at a young age that is likely to result in the sterilisation of young people:

This march for Reproductive Rights has put out a statement that “TERFS” aren’t welcome. And there is a transgender symbol on the posters.

Bodily autonomy except being allowed to accurately define one’s body. Women’s reproductive rights must centre around men.

Women being banned from reproductive rights marches and the transgender symbol being placed on the poster. Colonisers.

twitter.com/radfemin/status/1068923860886544384

Jane Clare Jones (aka @LadyPrincesexual) comments:

Women who believe that women are the class of reproductive humans, are being banned from a march, about reproductive rights, in order to include the non-reproductive humans who identify as reproductive humans, and don't need reproductive rights.

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1069044352930988033

Can I say in passing that I still can not fully accept that the Women's Equality Party was so ludicrous as to discard due process and act as they did in respect to HBE. Their treatment of her was abhorrent and they were feckless to lose such a fine commentator.

Jane Clare Jones again - on gay shaming, sexual determination, the cotton ceiling, and the right to say, "No":

You know why this happens??? Because a male dominated culture has NEVER believed that women actually have their OWN FUCKING DESIRE.

If you are peddling an ideology that thinks FEMALE people's desire should be bent around MALE people's needs, YOU ARE THE FUCKING PROBLEM.

We are not supposed to either want, or not want. We are just supposed to give, and mirror, and bend ourselves, and let ourselves be used as resources for the meeting of other people needs.

How dare we want anything ourselves, or not want anything???(continues as a useful thread with good comments from Pam Thompson)

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1069226842857660418

Women are being expected to function as paracletes (I realise there is a substantial theological canon around the 'true' meaning of this paraclete but it was used to describe female characters in Dickens and other Victorian novelists and that's the sense in which I feel it here). (I also have a bee in my bonnet about the commonest reference point for female paracletes being Dicken's Amy Dorrit - a small-statured woman of child-like innocence and virtue who represents cultural salvation in some interpretations. I feel that she is being cloned in the legal sanction of the idea of allowing children to be stripped of puberty and full brain maturation as well as having their sexual and reproductive possibilities curtailed.)

legal sanction of the idea of allowing children to be stripped of puberty and full brain maturation
That is chilling.

Keeping adolescents artificially, deliberately immature in both body and mind.
This is so destructive to society.

Women banned from a march about reproductive rights is a serious concern.

Timely story in the Mail, covering the scandal of chest binders being given out to young girls by the MORF charity:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3440120-Mail-online-criticises-Manchester-MORF-charity-for-distributing-binders-to-young-teens?messages=100&pg=1

Young girls are being given access to binders as part of a gateway to transition with no regard to the physical harm this might cause them.

lilymaynard.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/im-feeling-ecstatic-and-scared-and-mums-feeling-sick-young-women-binding/

Rosa Freedman: Today’s reason to be a feminist, because reproductive rights and health, and bodily autonomy, do not make a woman a murderer: ‘Oklahoma lawmaker proposes draconian bill classifying all abortions as murder’.

twitter.com/GoonerProf/status/1069324173560987649

re: Oklahoma lawmaker proposes draconian bill classifying all abortions as murder
Any abortion procedure that results in the death of an unborn child is subject to the same laws governing homicide, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, and excusable homicide.

thinkprogress.org/oklahoma-lawmaker-proposes-draconian-bill-classifying-all-abortions-as-murder-32a127b24a83/

Brilliant links that tie in with Heather’s talk - thank you. It is terrifying what’s going on right under our noses. It’s become so normalised that we don’t even think about it.

We are our bodies. We need to reclaim that. We need to reclaim ownership. They are ours.