Brooke Obie On Trans Rights: Trans People Are Not The Enemy
Cisters, we need to talk. (By “cis” I mean cisgender women–people who were assigned female at birth and also identify as women).
We’re living in scary times, battling multiple pandemics, and in the wake of the Supreme Court gutting abortion rights, the assault on autonomy over our bodies continues. With lives at stake, many trans and gender non-conforming people have come out to say to cis people, “Hey, please don’t forget about us in the fight for abortion rights,” as many trans men and gender non-conforming people have uteruses, are also able to give birth, and are already facing disproportionate harm when it comes to receiving healthcare. The backlash has been swift.
Many famous cis white women like Bette Midler and Pamela Paul in the New York Times have gone so far as to say that using inclusive language like “birthing people” or “people with uteruses” instead of just saying “women” when talking about abortion rights, is “erasure,” and just as violent as politicians and judges making anti–abortion laws. Unfortunately, Black cisgender women have also been attacking trans people. The latest Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) to join the fray is singer Macy Gray who went out of her way to be a guest on noted racist and misogynoirist Piers Morgan’s show to say, “Just because you go change your parts, doesn’t make you a woman, sorry.”
This is straight up transphobia and just not true. Trans women are women. And “womanhood” is a social construction–which means its rules are made up by what a society decides at a point in time. It is not biological. (Even in biology, there are more than two sexes.) And looking to “parts” to make up the definition of a woman is dangerous.
Last week, a pregnant 10-year-old child, a rape victim, had to flee Ohio to get a legal abortion last week. This child has the “parts” to give birth, but is in no way a woman at 10 years old. There are women who have no reproductive organs. There are women who are unable or uninterested in giving birth. There are women who don’t want to ever be mothers. There are innumerable ways to be a woman. But when you reduce women to their “birthing parts,” you should not be surprised when your society dictates what you are and aren’t allowed to do with those parts. Motherhood is a choice and for all of our protection, it must be separate from womanhood.
Read the whole article on xoNecole.