Fights For Abortion And Trans Rights Are Interconnected? Whaaaaat? Whodathunk!
Republicans attack them together. Now some lefties are making the connection the right way!
In the past week, national election advertising has continued down its ramp — yes, it will get worse than this — with an ever-greater emphasis on attacking trans people. But while Republicans work to taint Democrats with trans cooties and tie abortion rights ever closer to trans healthcare, a funny thing has happened: transfeminism is breaking out all over, and even national magazines are taking note.
Last week in Texas the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) debuted an ad attacking the relatively conservative House Rep. Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, which asserts Texans are seeing him “push sex changes for kids when [the narrator] could use that money in our community. Loco. Loca.” Ironically, Gonzalez is dramatically more conservative than the average Dem on queer and trans issues. His campaign website doesn’t mention them, and he actually voted with Republicans to prevent veterans’ benefits from paying for any transition-related care. He was one of only four Democrats to do so. In fact, the Texas Tribune reports:
Gonzalez, a moderate Democrat who has voted with Republicans in the past, said in a statement to The Texas Tribune that he “never supported tax dollars paying for gender transition surgeries and never will.”
The hook of the ad is Gonzalez’s support for the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit discrimination in public accommodations, including healthcare. It’s not at all clear what this would mean for access to gender-affirming care and to the extent it relates to healthcare at all is intended only to make sure doctors and hospitals don’t turn people away. Of course, courts could interpret the law broadly enough that some years down the line the EA’s provisions protect access to drugs or procedures like puberty blockers and breast reduction that are routinely offered to cis people, but that’s neither likely with our current Supreme Court, nor is it a reasonable interpretation of Gonzalez’s actual position.
Ted Cruz also dropped two ads against his opponent, Democratic nominee for Senate and current House Rep. Colin Allred, that rely on a vote for the Equality Act. The ads focus on bathrooms and sports (adding in Allred’s vote against HR 734 last year), while implying Allred doesn’t “know the difference between boys and girls.”
The ads use classic campaign tactics, filming in color the things viewers are supposed to love or value (like smiling children) then switching to black and white for scary images of … sports and Allred’s face and bathroom doors?
Meanwhile in Missouri, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Pits of Hell) took out his own ad using right-wing grift parade drum major Riley Gaines to accuse Democratic nominee Lucas Kunce of wanting “sex change operations for minors” and “explicit teaching in grade school.” In case it wasn’t clear, Gaines sums up, “It’s gross!” If she’s talking about the mendacious ad she just narrated, we agree!
Like Gonzalez, Kunce’s official website does not mention LGBTQ+ rights or transgender people in particular, apart from a petition form to ban conversion therapy in the city of Blue Springs.
What? This is my shocked face.
The truth is that the Democrats facing the harshest attacks are likely to be much more moderate, like Kunce and Gonzalez, because these attacks aren’t effective in Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, where the most progressive incumbents are from, but where — not coincidentally — the voters are also more progressive. Because of that, we shouldn’t be surprised to find, over and over, that the harshest Republican attacks are also the least true.
Red states and districts may feel more desperate this year with Donald Trump sapping energy at the top of the ticket and impacting fundraising down-ballot in congressional and statewide races (though not in state legislative races). But that’s not the only desperation at play. With Missouri’s Amendment 3 on the ballot, voters have a chance to upend the state’s restrictive abortion laws and put strong reproductive rights guarantees into the sates constitution. So what did Hawley have to say about that? “They’re eating the babies! They’re eating the transgenders!” Wait that’s not it. St. Louis Public Radio has the full quote:
“This is about an effort to come into our schools behind your backs without your knowledge, to tell our kids that there's something wrong with them and to give them drugs that will sterilize them for life, to push them toward procedures that will fundamentally change their bodies irrevocably for life,” Hawley said at the event. “And there will be nothing we can do about it.”
We could copy/paste Amendment 3 here to debunk this, but that article’s headline is probably enough:
Hawley falsely claims that abortion amendment is about transgender health care at Missouri event
This election is far from the first time that Republicans have attempted to connect reproductive rights with scary claims of surgerizing innocent kiddos behind parents backs. While some efforts to protect abortion rights have been relatively specific, where the language guarantees reproductive rights more broadly, theocrats and the far right have been happy to use this attack. Michigan’s Proposal 3 was attacked in just this way in 2022.
What seems to be changing is not the Republican anti-reproductive rights rhetorical strategy (the more desperate they get on this issue, the less they want to talk about how much they will restrict abortion), but the responses from the left. Just a year ago your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke wrote at you a critique of an article in Slate in which Christina Cauterucci argued that well, actually reproductive rights, including the call out to voluntary sterilization included in Proposal 3, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with trans people.
Except some trans healthcare does result in voluntary sterilization, and the fact that the drafters weren’t thinking about trans rights (if they weren’t) when they chose to protect one’s right to make sterilization decisions for oneself doesn’t actually change the fact that trans people have a stake in initiatives like Proposal 3. And Michigan could have taken better advantage of that, rather than trying to distance itself from trans people.
This position, that reproductive rights are linked with trans rights, and that trans advocates and reproductive rights advocates would both have stronger movements if they chose to work together, is something I have advocated for approximately all of the years. And for most of that time I’ve been that one raging lunatic howling at a blue moon. But last week something new happened at the same time that all these Republican attacks were set to drop: trans advocates and abortion activists organized a march in DC. Together. And unlike gatherings of a few radicals in the last independent bookstore in their town, this one attracted national attention.
Not tons, mind you, but TIME did a story on the September 14 march:
“Our abortion stories and our trans stories are connected and intertwined. We cannot liberate abortion without trans justice,” Renee Bracey Sherman, executive director of We Testify, a nonprofit that shares abortion stories, said in a speech Saturday.
Ho. Lee. Shit. TIME printed that? We just have to quote more:
For the organizers of the march, linking the two issues was an intentional strategy. “The idea was to bring together the energy stoked in the fight for abortion access and reproductive justice after the Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health] decision, and also the energy put into fighting for queer and trans folks who are facing attacks on access to health care,” Raquel Willis, a transgender activist and co-organizer of the march, told TIME in an interview ahead of the march. Eliel Cruz, a co-organizer, argues limiting access to abortion and gender-affirming care are part of a larger connected push to reinforce gender binaries and discriminate against people based on their identity.
The word “transfeminism” was coined by Diana Courvant in the early to mid 90s and popularized by Courvant’s colleague Emi Koyama with The Transfeminist Manifesto several years later. Way back then the connections were being made in tiny street protests and zines and personal conversations, but TIME?
While the word “transfeminism” hasn’t quite become mainstream enough to find in TIME’s article, the stamp of this once tiny movement is in the very DNA of the march, child as it is of trans advocacy and abortion advocacy. And people are beginning to understand the power of addressing gender liberation comprehensively. 19th News also covered the march, and their reporting included this:
“The overarching goal here is to make these connections, to get folks to start understanding that all of our rights are on the chopping block,” said Raquel Willis, a transgender writer and activist who co-organized the march. She wants to remind Democrats that abortion is also a trans issue, she said in an interview with The 19th.
Willis is right: all our rights are on the chopping block. And even if Cauterucci’s hot take was correct (it isn’t) that our rights are on entirely separate chopping blocks, so long as Republicans are going to use the existence of trans people to scare gullible voters into voting against reproductive rights, then abortion access advocates owe it to themselves to create a world in which trans folks are no longer exotic and frightening, a world in which trans cooties have been neutralized. And any minority as small as the trans community has much to gain in allying with other movements.
But of course our rights to various medicines and surgeries aren’t severable, which only makes these new coalitions more valuable. And while the GOP will work harder and harder to scare voters between now and November, it looks like lefties are working smarter and smarter to stop them.
[Texas Tribune / St. Louis Public Radio / TIME]
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes other perverted stuff!
Kind of a bummer how that hed graphic gets truncated on Wonkette's front page. Gives me a sad.
Because of where I live, I was wearing my pro-trans t-shirt the other day at the store when a guy with that "gotcha!" smile came up to me (he's the only one).
"Are you a man?"
"I'm sorry, I'm not interested."
"But are you really a dude? People will think so!"
"Oh, that's fine!" I smiled vaguely and walked away.
I admit I was shaking a little, but then again, I'm way more safe than so many of our friends, and I'm also ready in a way to just let people know to leave us ALL alone.