whatfreshhellisthis:
Cis women are not being specifically targeted by the anti-choice, anti-reproductive rights lobby.
For cis women to be specifically targeted by the anti-choice lobby, they would have to allow that non-cis men, non-men and non-cis women exist.
And. they. do. not.
You seem to think that in this shoot-out you’re being aimed at, and we’re just being hit coincidentally.
That is not what’s happening.
What is happening is that they are aiming at all of us but only calling us by your name.
They are only allowing for your existence, assimilating us into you because of our biology.
They are actively denying our existence by simply calling us you. They are counting our dead under your name.
And you know what happens when you only acknowledge yourselves?
You don’t even count our dead at all.
They’re also ignoring the ways that we’re cut off from treatment. Writing about birth control with women-only language DOES stop us from accessing it. I have extreme difficulting reading about uterus/vagina/vulva related health because of the constant misgendering. I have to get my partner to read it outloud for me with the right pronouns/terminology sometimes, and not everyone has that option. Doctors appointments that involve being misgendered, especially if it involves pap smears/breast exams/prostate exams/etc which are already dysphoria-inducing, those can ruin our mental health. If they involve going into “men only”/”women only” areas then they can be inaccessible or extremely dangerous as well.
If we don’t “look cis”, trying to get treatment for those parts becomes dangerous or even impossible (especially for trans women). You think those situations of letting trans people die on hospital side walks because “We ain’t treating those freaks” are limited to gunshot wounds? They aren’t.
I don’t know what would happen if someone who passes as male tries to go in for an abortion. I imagine it varies, but I can also imagine it being more difficult or impossible even in places where it’s legal. ESPECIALLY if the person is stealth, that could be extremely dangerous.
Also, here’s the thing about reproductive rights that too many people forget: It’s not all about choosing NOT to have a baby. A lot of it, for less “acceptable” people, is not being allowed to choose TO have a baby. People of color, poor people, trans people, a lot of groups face/have faced forced sterilization, doctors telling them half-truths or withholding treatment to get them to sterilize themselves, pressure from society not to have kids, etc. The history of forced sterilization on women of color is nauseating and recent, I’m not even sure it’s over.
Focusing on cissexism- this is still true. I’ve seen quite a few trans men told they can’t transition/they have to get a hysterectomy before transitioning because their partner is a cis man. Why? Because we can’t have men getting knocked up. No one’s going to bother looking into better hormone options that don’t cause infertility in trans women, and most of the times I see someone told to store a sperm sample is when it’s a pre-pubescent girl where the therapist is trying to withhold treatment. Every time a trans person has a kid and people find out about it, people start squawking about how awful it is- what kind of life can the child have, it’s child abuse, etc etc etc. Our birth control options, birth control options that specifically consider trans people, are all too often “cut it out/off”.
Thinking that reproductive rights are limited to the right to choose NOT to have a child is inaccurate, and I’m sick of the issue being framed that way and erasing all the people who have been and are being denied the right to decide whether or not they have a child by a busted system.
This is everything I’ve been trying to say but couldn’t because these blowups inevitably give me full-blown panic attacks. This.is.important. I can’t stress enough how important this is for people to understand.
