Reproductive Rights Are Trans Rights
by Z
Transgender people. Cisgender women. Our struggle for body autonomy is one and the same. We are all pawns on the political battlefield as we watch men that don’t understand how people with vulvas pee and think pussies are ruined by penetration debate our humanity. We have less rights and more regulations than firearms in the great US of A. Land of the free…if you’re a cisgender man. Add white to that. We should be far more up in arms about our obvious oppression and cruelty by their hands.
The same people stripping back abortion protections for cisgender women are advocating for the erasure and dehumanization of trans bodies. They are banning healthcare and sports for trans kids while forcing kids who are raped to give birth. These men (and women) cry, “Protect the children!” while defending child marriage. They are criminalizing doctors who provide gender affirming care AND abortions.
It’s the same tired patriarchal playbook! They wield the same weaponized language against us. They think they can play god while praying to the same mythical man in the clouds who conveniently reflects the bigotry they present as objective morality. But our divinity is inherent. Trans people are as ancient as sentient life itself, which is to say…our spirits are eternal.
I’m a genderqueer, transmasc person with a uterus and ovaries. My factory default parts! Trans guys such as myself who still have our assigned at birth bodies are risking more than cis women, even, should we wind up pregnant. Not only could we be charged with murder for taking testosterone if the fetus grows malformed, but we are at greater risk of complications. For a healthy pregnancy, we must pause vital HRT and also risk losing transition progress…at least temporarily.
Our dysphoria rears its roaring head again with full ferocity despite our desperate attempts to tame it. This isn’t to discount enthusiastic seahorse dads at all who embrace their bodies softening and stretching and curving. Good for them! Most of us just don’t consent to what men have always expected of us for having pussies due to our designated gender markers: popping out their prodigy to add to their long patriarchal legacy. And of course, this all could publicly out us if we are going stealth!
Furthermore, HRT and gender affirming surgeries can be a form of reproductive healthcare! Many of us want to willingly lose the ability to bear children anyway, whether that be risking infertility the longer we’re on T, getting a full or partial hysterectomy, or some other method. What cis people may decry as body mutilation (just like they smear abortion as murder), we view as a medical miracle.
Fuck the state for forcing births and restricting our ability to prevent pregnancy! From an intersectional perspective, they doubly claim ownership of our bodies for our capability to both birth and be transgender. But we rebel against the enforced femininity of AFAB people regardless. We also deserve equal access to abortion and contraceptives.
I think we as trans people need to win cis women to our shared struggle for body liberation. We must unite over the onslaught of legislative attacks stripping away our rights and our NOs, our protests and our votes. Our liberation is intrinsically intwined as the marginalized genders in a man’s world. Trans people are not here to occupy cis women’s spaces. There is room for all of us! No need to elbow our way to the front. One group gaining more rights doesn’t mean less for another.
We want a voice at the table in the reproductive rights conversation too since we are always talked about, never listened to. Never asked our opinion while our bodies are policed and picked apart for public display. Too many find our persecution entertaining or at least too unsavory for dinner party small talk.
Gender affirming care and abortion access are two heads of a massive hydra attacking our inalienable rights. Only we get to determine the trajectory of our future and what happens to our bodies, and I hope each and every one reading this commits to heart that there we truly have more common ground with each other than enemy lines drawn. While the Right is united in their homogenous hatred, the Left’s strength is our rich tapestry and history of diversity!
People of all genders with uteruses are able to procreate, and it’s about damn time that we are get some time on the mic, because transgender justice is reproductive justice.
Reproductive Justice is Trans Justice; Trans Justice is Reproductive Justice. Borealis Philanthropy⇲