Roe V Wade - intersex, binary and trans

[Dahliasaremyfavouriteflower]

I was on a US site yesterday (Peloton). People use 'tags', for example Black Lives Matters, to raise awareness, I guess, and so you're a member of a group allied with your values. Someone suggested #womensrightsmatter which many people thought was a great idea (including me). Then a poster chipped in saying: let's not forget that trans, intersex and binary people have the right to safe abortions, too. I said that could we not just focus on women on this one, awful day. I promptly got banned (also politely objected to the use of the word cis).

Did I do an awful thing? I want every one to have access to safe abortion and, yes, I suppose people in these groups may also need abortions. But is it really wrong to centre women for once? Not least because how the hell would you meaningfully get all those categories into one tag!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No, not at all. They're a truly great company. This was an unofficial Facebook group.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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)?

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

I trust women, As soon as possible as late as necessary.

Op no you didn't do anything wrong. We all need to challenge it as without a word to define us we have already lost.

Hippopotamus - you might want to read the Overton window thread. You have just demonstrated it beautifully.

I don't think aborting a healthy fetus at term has ever been a popular opinion. TFMR is a different case, it's a form of euthanasia pretty much to spare future suffering, if that's what your referring to.

I don't care what I've demonstrated. I'm just stating the obvious, something which always upsets those who don't want manipulation of language exposed. It's important to analyse how you use words, whose words you are using and how it has conditioned the way you think.

Sure, but that wasn’t part of the thread. The claim was made that the Suffragette movement included all women and that it was new and newly woke to insert different identities that divide women. I pointed out that wasn’t true, and that many branches of the Suffragette movement explicitly excluded various women - black women, immigrants, disabled women, poor women - and that it is no solution to simply ask women who aren’t white to ignore those realities in the name of unity: a unity that requires silence of some. You are now trying to ignore that and make it about (black) men being violent etc. which I don’t think is very relevant.

In fact, this history both of white feminism’s exclusion and racism, and the sexism of black men in Civil Rights/Black Power leading to the formation of black feminist thought and organizing to address the “double burden” of racism and sexism faced by Black women is exactly what Crenshaw’s 1991 essay on intersectionality is about.

Anyway, black women in the US already have a maternal death rate on par with many developing countries, a rate 10s of times higher than white women due to the lack of healthcare coverage and so the repealing of Roe v. Wade will kill black women in particular. At the same time, despite evidence of forced sterilization in ICE facilities of (largely Indigenous) migrant/refugee women and of black women in prisons in the US, the pro lifers are silent on the connection between forced termination and deportation/prison regimes which they wholeheartedly support. There are many cases of police beating pregnant black women into miscarriage, also never causing outrage among the pro lifers. Rural women and girls - particularly women living in poverty - will also suffer. Pollution and environmental destruction also affects pregnancy and birth. Recognizing these connections helps us bring a feminist lens to these issues (poverty, environmentalism, healthcare, incarceration, immigration) and strengthens, not divides, the feminist collective for women. I don’t think this is a “hobby horse” diverting from the one true issue but rather, making connections between movements that shows us how vital feminism is to understanding the world.

I don't want to see gay or trans people disadvantaged, any more than I want to see women disadvantaged.
But someone shoehorning in trans issues in a discussion about something so fundamentally sex-based is tone-deaf, not to mention narcissistic.

I should be fair, some Catholic pro lifers do take a principled position on the death penalty. This obviously, though, is not the mainstream Republican view which is pro prison, pro deportation, anti universal health care, anti environment, etc.