Happy pride month, let’s go women… or wait… not women… nonbinary people, queer people, everyone I guess. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about queerness and where it falls in the women’s rights movement. The past few weeks at Choices, I’ve been working on creating reproductive and sexual health materials for transmasculine individuals because even though the clinic is called Choices Women’s Medical Center, their services are still vital for people who don’t identify as women. Last week in our readings, we talked about the Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist movement (TERF) and how they feel that accepting trans individuals undermines womanhood and is an act of patriarchal oppression. This thought process is very present in reproductive rights movements (not to the extent of TERFs) because there is a very specific kind of violence enacted against people who are assigned female at birth. I think it’s important to acknowledge this, and I am still trying to figure out how to improve inclusivity without minimizing this harm. I think that what I’ve been realizing recently is just how much all of these different forms of oppression really intersect, and the roots of the violence live in the same place.

Before I came to New York, I was already reflecting about this summer, and I wrote in my notes app “Feminists who overlook or support violence against trans and queer people are not feminist, they are happily uplifting and committing violence on behalf of the patriarchy”. I wrote that while listening to a podcast and walking my dog along the greenway, and I think that I even feel more affirmed in that response now. By undercutting the rights of other groups we were just fighting each other rather than addressing the overarching perpetrators of harm. I think that this also makes intersectionality near impossible because it forces people to think about their oppression in very narrow facets of their identity. 

I feel very excited by this project I’ve undertaken at the clinic because it really gets to the core of a lot of things I’m passionate about. I certainly don’t have the answers for how inclusive the language used around reproductive rights should be. I just want the resources to be out there and those resources can evolve as the conversation evolves. I understand that the vast majority of the people that the clinic serves are cisgender women, but the whole goal is that every individual person is given another shot to make their life what they want. So, if even one trans person is able to access those services, then that is a win on behalf of the clinic and a middle finger to the patriarchy. So happy pride! Only the patriarchy wins when feminism turns on queer and trans people.