Let me make myself clear

I’m seeing mixed reactions to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of an anti-trans bill that would have prohibited medically indicated and often medically necessary health care, as well as trans children’s participation in children’s intramural sports.

Some people are saying this is not particularly good news, since there are enough Republicans in the state lege to override the veto. Others are noting that this move might be entirely political, with DeWine seeking an undeserved reputation for sympathy towards trans children and adults.

I wish to go on record saying this:

Fuck that shit. Fuck all of it. Fuck it off the planet. Fuck it in an Elon Musk rocket. Fuck it all the way to Mars where it can up and fucking die.

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Abortion is a trans rights issue, and trans rights are reproductive rights

So memorably (to me anyway) I once gave a speech at a small but influential gathering in defense of the Lovejoy Surgicenter clinic in Portland, Oregon. The so-called “Lovejoy clinic” provided abortions to women and others in need for fifty goddamn years, starting before Roe guaranteed abortion rights at the federal level. It was not a Planned Parenthood clinic, though it did frequently work closely with Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette. This did not happen without attacks and certainly not without protest. So you can imagine that supportive rallies were needed there on many occasions.

At the rally I attended, and where I spoke, a number of people from the board of PP-CW and the Lovejoy clinic and Oregon NARAL also attended, and they were listening. I briefly spoke about the state of trans freedom and trans health care and the political attacks on both. Few people if anyone seemed aware of any of this, but that was kinda my point. I said that the attempt to assert public control over individuals’ genitals and health care and especially health care having anything to do with genitals was all of a piece. For that reason, I argued, trans people must stand up and count themselves among the fighters for abortion rights whether or not we are people who are able to become pregnant. After the rally I was approached by a number of heavy hitters in Oregon’s reproductive rights community and we spoke for maybe an hour, certainly much longer than I had planned to be at the rally. I remember being quite late to get home.

Within two years support for abortion rights among trans people in Portland had increased and PPCW had begun providing a small amount of trans health care. Now, I have no idea whether or not showing up that day had anything to do with the beginning of PPCW’s slow shift into providing more and more care to trans patients. And if I affected the trans community’s willingness to take on abortion access as a trans issue it was more from general haranguing over years in personal conversations than it was that rally where few if any other trans people joined up and no others spoke. But it’s clear that something was happening around then, and that I was a part of it, and that a community was opening up that had felt besieged and often had little time for issues like anti-domestic violence or reproductive rights work that didn’t seem to fit into the narrow definition of trans issues that then existed.

And look, if you don’t know what it’s like to be besieged, just try being an out trans person thirty years ago, whoo, sibling.

The point of all this is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to expand your issues. When you see your issues linked with issues that are historically not your issues a good approach to this might be to say, “Hey, I notice this link, and because I care about my issues, I care about yours.” This is not only good ally work, but it also can be the start of something special, as in Portland 25 years ago where we went further. As trans people and people fighting for reproductive rights, we held hands like Marcie and goddamned Peppermint Patty and told each other, “Because I care about my issues, your issues are my issues.” Trans people gave more money to reproductive rights organizations than they had previously and out trans people began working in reproductive rights organizations. At the same time reproductive rights organizations started offering care to trans people right there in their clinics.

It was a beautiful thing to witness (and none of my doing, since I did not work in those organizations and I have never provided abortions or trans health care or health care of any kind besides bandaids and such for kids) and I will always love Portland for it.

More often though, we fall short of that. Humans gonna human, right? I have limits on my expertise and I can’t always talk about Black women, chemical hair straighteners, racism, and cancer (though that’s an article I’ve been wanting to write for two weeks now) because white MtF person touching on Black women’s hair? That can get tangled and uncomfortable real quick, and as necessary as it is that white people talk about how racism is giving Black women cancer, it’s not entirely unreasonable to be afraid of fucking up on the topic and that can make writing about it a little more fraught, a little more draining, and a little more time consuming than writing about other topics. We’re human, and this is mostly okay.

But mostly okay is not ALL okay. When we get complacent, or when we seem to get complacent, it becomes necessary for one asshole to speak up and ask if we’re really doing our best here. It doesn’t feel great, usually, but it’s often necessary for the overall effort of getting better over time.

It is in this spirit that I’m gonna take some shots at Christina Cauterucci’s recent Slate article Abortion Is So Popular Republicans Are Inventing Conspiracy Theories to Trick Americans Into Voting Against It. Since this article appeared on Slate and was linked in the Wonkette TABS! roundup, I am sure all good liberals have read it. And if you know it then you know that a huge part of it is summed up here:

Abortion bans are unpopular. So unpopular that Republican extremists seem to have to invent conspiracy theories to trick Americans into voting for them.

That’s the major takeaway from recent political battles in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In all three states, abortion-related ballot initiatives and elections were framed by right-wing groups as the only thing standing between parents and “trans ideology” in the classroom. …

This is the new playbook. Using the specter of child corruption and social contagion, Republicans are attempting to manipulate parents, scapegoat trans and queer people, and erode multiple axes of bodily autonomy, all in one fell swoop.

Cauterucci brings the receipts. The article is, indeed a great summation of “the new playbook”.

What it is not, however, is any kind of call for trans advocates and feminist reproductive rights advocates to work together. The existence of trans people is portrayed as a chink in abortion defenders’ armour:

These groups believe that by agitating conservatives and uniting voters against a trans boogeyman, they can get people to ignore their own support for (or indifference to) abortion rights and eagerly line up to give those rights away.

And sure, we are that I guess. Cauterucci quotes a Republican scare-ad saying that we are

Malicious entities from out of state [that] are arriving in sheep’s clothing to “encourage sex changes for kids” and sneak “trans ideology” into schoolrooms

Fortunately Cauterucci has a more reassuring message. In her telling, cissexist scaremongering and the demonization of trans people is bad, but it’s also nothing to worry about:

It’s no surprise that GOP operatives are trying to divert the focus to literally any other issue where they perceive themselves to have the upper hand, though it is horrifying to see that they believe virulent transphobia is a winning enough position that it may convince voters to sign away their access to legal abortion. The only silver lining, in Ohio as in Wisconsin as in Michigan, is that the bait-and-switch doesn’t seem to be working.

In this article trans people aren’t the enemy. Instead, trans people are the helpless tools of the enemy. But we can be hopeful because trans people’s issues aren’t our issues, they are “other issues” and no one thinks that they’re protecting trans people when they vote for reproductive freedom.

And again, because I’m about to be THAT ASSHOLE, this is an article written by Cauterucci, not Cauterucci’s whole life and philosophy. For all I know, Cauterucci is trans. And lord knows I’ve had a piece or two of my own edited to say something that I didn’t want the piece to say, so let’s get together and agree here that no one is interested in demonizing Cauterucci.

And also, too, there’s room in the wide world for some articles that are single-issue. It’s popular to say in trendy living rooms within a ten foot radius of my fat ass that my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit, but sometimes the question for the day really is nothing more than, “What is the current GOP strategy?” with no room for any sidetracks into whether it’s good or bad or how best to fight it.

And, of course, we’re human beings with limited space in a brains and in our hearts for all the issues that matter. If you’re doing your best and you just don’t get trans issues and don’t have room in your whatever for trans people or trans advocacy, I would much rather you embrace and create positive momentum towards resolution on issues you do have the time and energy to address, whether that’s climate change or voting rights or abortion, than give up on everything because it’s not in you to do something intersectionally.

But there is a problem if pieces like’s Cauterucci’s work for Slate become common, and in my opinion they have become common enough to reach this threshold. However much you would like to give zero points to the theocratic right on any and every question, they’re not actually wrong to think that trans rights and reproductive rights are related. In many cases this is direct and explicit: governments often have and often still do require proof of sterilization before changes to legal sex can be made. FtM people can and do get pregnant, can and do access abortion. Trans people of all flavours use condoms and lube and antibiotics for our STDs. In other cases, it is more indirect. Indeed whether you believe (as I do and any reasonable person does) that the political right’s attacks on trans people during recent reproductive rights ballot campaigns have been deceptive to mendacious red herrings and demonization, it is certainly true that the theocrats are creating ever more links between the issues.

I said 25 years ago in that after-demo discussion that the desire to control others’ reproductive systems is related in the theocrats’ own minds, and if I tolerate fascistic reproductive control so long as there’s a special exception for me, I am tolerating the existence of an ideology that would destroy me the moment it had the chance. This is equally true for trans people who tolerate anti-abortion attacks and for reproductive rights advocates who tolerate anti-trans attacks.

I said at the time that I fight for reproductive rights for many reasons, but not least because it is in my enlightened self-interest. And so it is for people whose primary issue is reproductive rights: if the general lefty public went all in on fighting for trans rights thirty years ago, could the theocrats use trans people as a wedge to split (or threaten to split) support for abortion rights today? Well, of course not.

So it pains me to see the mistakes born of near-universal ignorance repeated in a time of near-universal access to information about trans lives. Take the passage in Cauterucci’s article that addresses the 2022 campaign for a reproductive rights amendment in Michigan. The amendment found in Michigan Proposal 3 read, in part:

Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.

The right wing opponents were going to try to make this about trans people, and the most convenient portion of the amendment for their purposes was the right to make decisions related to “sterilization”. Cauterucci explains:

Conservatives spent the months before the election trying to convince voters that the inclusion of the term “sterilization” was a sneaky admission, by Democrats, that they would be legalizing secret gender-affirming surgeries for children.

Now, Proposal 3 was not a secret effort to hack up children’s bodies, much less an admission of our dastardly plan to do so. Cauterucci goes on to explain that at some length, citing the fact that puberty blockers do not cause sterilization and that

[l]egal analysts who responded in the Detroit Free Press said the abortion rights amendment in Michigan was not written to legalize clandestine procedures for children, nor could it be reasonably interpreted as such by a judge.

None of this is wrong, of course, but there’s a really odd element to all this. Cauterucci quotes a theocratic opponent of human rights thus:

“A constitutional right to ‘sterilization’ surely includes a right to be sterilized to align one’s sex and gender identity,” wrote a spokesperson for Citizens to Support MI Women & Children, the PAC that funded the ads, in an email to the Detroit Free Press. “The majority of voters do not support a 12-year-old girl’s right to sterilization without her parent’s notice or consent.”

And while she does an admirable job attacking scaremongering about trans kids getting access to surgery without parental notice or consent, never once does her piece even acknowledge, much less find importance in, the fact that the first part of this terrible statement is actually correct: sterilization is a normal and expected result for most gender confirmation surgeries that alter the reproductive organs. Thus Michigan’s Proposal 3 is a constitutional amendment with provisions of special importance to trans people.

Now as I said, not every piece of journalism needs be intersectional, but Cauterucci in this piece does everything possible to convince readers that trans lives have nothing at all to do with reproductive rights and there is nothing related to trans persons or trans health care on the ballot in the measures the article analyzes. Sure, the focus is on countering myths about trans health care for children, but when the quotes an author brings in explicitly raise a valid connection (trans people have a health care interest in a right to sterilization), it is up to the author to address that. By remaining silent on the issue Cauterucci gives the impression of believing that not only is the connection to trans children scare mongering that should not (and did not) prevent people from voting for reproductive rights, but also that any connection to trans adults is illusory. As a result, trans people are being given the impression (rightly or wrongly) that we are unimportant to Cauterucci and her fellow travellers, at least in a reproductive rights context, beyond the extent to which we are useful weapons of the Right.

This is, of course, wrong. I was denied health care in the early 90s specifically because the treatment path I sought included surgical removal of the gonads, and doctors wanted to prevent me from “suffering” sterilization. Nor was I alone in that experience. Other trans people around the world in cultures as disparate as Iran and Sweden have been forced or coerced into sterilization by government law or policy. The trans struggle for the right to self-determination on health care which includes sterilization (even when that is not the primary goal) has been waged for decades.

The inclusion of sterilization in Michigan’s Proposal 3 was therefore a huge win for trans people who had been both denied sterilizing procedures and forcibly sterilized. (It was also, by the by, a huge win for black women, women with certain disabilities, and poor women on government assistance because all of these are groups that have been targeted for sterilization without consent throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.) While the Proposal 3 vote had concluded before Cauterucci began writing the article, it is an odd choice to omit any notion that the much-contested sterilization right might have been a point of attack for the theocrats, but it also served as an opportunity for diversifying and expanding support among people with disabilities, poor people, trans people, and Black women.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that trans people and trans advocates being spoken of as if an irrelevant distraction to issues of reproductive rights rather than a vital constituency and natural coalition partners was not accidental. This was almost certainly an intentional framing for this article (possibly by Cauterucci, possibly by an editor). And to my dismay, this is far from the only article to be written in such a way. Cauterucci’s piece is not uniquely guilty, but it was reading it that it become clear that now is time to push back.

If you are a reproductive rights advocate, I want to first say thank you. But then I want to tell you that it’s fucking time you stood up (if you haven’t been already and for years the way Planned Parenthood Columiba Willamette has been) and interrupted the framing that portrays trans rights and abortion rights as separate issues unfortunately and erroneously connected only by the actions of a mendacious and theocratic right wing.

If nothing else, do it for your own fucking self-interest. If trans people weren’t societies’ demons, then the existence of trans people and the protection of trans rights could not be used against the efforts to protect reproductive rights. If our demonic status didn’t make letters about us such good fundraising material, the enemies of reproductive rights would have less cash on hand with which to work mischief. And while trans people are society’s demons, we are also natural allies you should be targeting for recruitment. You should be aware of how the fight for the right to self-determine access to sterilizing or potentially sterilizing health care gives racial justice advocates, disability rights advocates, economic justice advocates and, yes, trans advocates a huge stake in this fight. It motivates us. It causes us to join with people that have not been historically welcoming of us prior to the 1990s and in many areas are still not. You should know how to rally your allies, to bring people together, to forge a movement. You should know this even if you don’t actually give a fuck about trans people or Black women or folks with Down Syndrome. You should know this because it will make you more successful in fighting for the cause you hold most dear to your own heart.

But I’m hoping that at least some of you will challenge articles like this one in Slate because my issues are your issues. I would like you to see that Cauterucci’s attempt to divorce trans rights from reproductive rights bisects actual human beings, people you care about, people you might even love if you got to know them.

Abortion is a trans rights issue. Trans rights are reproductive rights. Just because people who lie about adolescent trans health care say that our issues are linked doesn’t actually mean that they aren’t. Nor do we suddenly have to avert our eyes from our common interests.

So when you’re speaking or writing about reproductive rights, don’t use the framing that trans rights aren’t reproductive rights. Don’t let the trans people unafraid to be associated with baby killers be braver than reproductive rights advocates that risk being associated with child molesting mutilators. We can counter the harmful myths about child predation without throwing each other out of our purer organizations.

In short: be my goddamned Peppermint Patty and I will be your Marcie and the world can be a whole lot better than if we each ignore the other’s issues as irrelevant distractions from our own, at best worthy but unrelated causes wrongfully conflated by the Right and at worst frustrating vulnerabilities which we must disavow, even excise from our movement.

We’re in this together. Let’s act like it.

that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough

So one of the things I have said about my activism in the past is that my job is to work myself out of a job. I want to end domestic & sexual violence generally, fully fund services for all victims who have been (and will be) harmed before we finally do away with D/SV, and along the way to end heterosexist barriers to sex and gender variant victims ability to access relevant services. I want many other things, too, but these are at the core of my activist career, if I can be said to have had one.

I have always maintained that as the world changes, I’ll be the wrong person to talk to about next steps, because I won’t have lived my life where that next step is the biggest problem. i won’t have felt the lack of that next step so acutely. I won’t be able to speak from personal experience about how that next step would have changed my life for the better b/c we’ve already taken so many steps that it’s hard for me to imagine **only** lacking that next step.

And in many ways, I’ve been successful. Where once I was a voice in the wilderness talking about the interrelation between cissexism, heterosexism, and sexism, and how the first two play a role in how even straight, cis women are treated by our governments and our service providers, now many people are talking about these things, often with a specificity that makes them far more expert in their area than I could ever be.

But in some ways, I have been frighteningly unsuccessful. While I primarily discussed access to gender segregated services for victims of trauma, harassment, and stalking, as early as 1998 I was asked a question about trans athletes in women’s sport. Not an expert in sports (my close friends will recognize this as hilarious overstatement of the scope of my knowledge), I fell back on how I had seen cissexism and heterosexism used to exclude even straight, cis women from the services with which I was more familiar.

It is inevitable, I told the audience in approximately these words, that efforts to exclude trans people from any social pursuit will end up harming cis women. The reason is that people will look for hints that reveal a participant to be the stereotype of the deceptive transsexual who lies about her past to conceal the tenuous validity of her womanhood. This presupposes, however, that trans people can get away with passing as non-trans at least for a time. Clues revealing secret transness, then, must be subtle, and because they must be subtle, they can be found in any number of women. As a result, the desire to communicate cisgender and cissexual state of being will result in women voluntarily curtailing any social expressions deemed too masculine. Women who do exceed the boundaries of feminine behavior and presentation will initially receive the worst consequences of gender policing that nominally targets trans people, but as the outliers are pressured to conform, the boundaries of femininity collapse. As a result, freedom for all women is eventually constricted. And though trans people will suffer from gender policing, and out trans people will be the individuals who suffer more than any other individuals, because the group of cis women is so much larger than the group of trans persons, when considering all suffering in total, cis women will surely suffer more than trans people from any increased gender policing of social activities. 

Thus, I argued, even if you hate trans people, you should advocate against gender policing that targets trans persons. The investigation and accusation and prosecution process will never harm only trans people.

Well, if all y’all cis people had listened to me 24 years ago, we could have saved ourselves a world of hurt. Unfortunately some of you are bigoted Mormons who just can’t comprehend the benefits of gender liberation. Or, perhaps, they embrace sexism, so the incidental sexism of cissexist persecutions seem a feature not a bug.

From the Deseret News:

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

Entirely unsurprising. Utah is one of the states that has legislated a system ostensibly banning k-12 trans students from participating in school sport save in categories open to their assigned gender at birth. What it actually does, however, is allow any random person to trigger a state investigation into the most private aspects of a child’s life. In the particular case here, the complaint was considered resolved through a thorough check of multiple records going back a decade or more, but more intrusive investigations, including medical ones, apparently are authorized by statute and cannot be said to be ruled out in the future.

And, of course, what’s compounding the horror here is that the excessive masculinity triggering the investigation wasn’t a tracheal prominence or tiny boobs. What triggered the investigation here was athletic excellence itself.

Given that the ostensible rationale for passing laws regulating trans children’s participation in school sports was to ensure that girls have a chance to experience being celebrated for their excellence, this punishment of excellence would seem to be proof that such laws not only fail to support and celebrate athletic girls, but rather punish them for their greatest successes, encouraging them to fail.

One might hope that this would cause some second thoughts, perhaps an effort to repeal this repellent and sexist regime. One would, of course, be mistaken. This is Utah, after all. Read and then weep over this most telling part of the Deseret News article:

Spatafore [David Spatafore, the UHSAA’s legislative representative] said the association has received other complaints, some that said “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

The association took “every one of those complaints seriously. We followed up on all of those complaints with the school and the school system,” he said during an update on HB11, a ban on transgender girls from participating in female school sports, which was passed during the final hours of 2022 General Session.

And we come full circle. What I predicted 24 years ago has come to pass. Girls looking insufficiently feminine is now a complaint that the government takes “seriously”, and that the government then investigates.

I understand that women’s and girls’ athletic achievements are not sufficiently celebrated. And I understand that there’s fear that permitting trans children to participate in gender segregated sports in the manner that is most healthy for them, even if that means participating in sports originally conceived as being only for students of a different assigned sex at birth will inevitably mean a few celebrated wins for trans athletes that might otherwise have been wins for cis girls or cis women.

But giving the government the power to investigate deficient femininity, or to treat a woman or girl as an object of suspicion for her athletic excellence itself, does nothing to support cis girls or celebrate their achievements.

If you can’t oppose such laws because of their cissexism alone, oppose them for their sexist, for the power they give governments to crack down on anyone who violates gender norms even in so innocuous a manner as being a girl winning a medal in girls’ sports.

 

 

 

Guy Fawkes: Good Activists and Social Change

So the first official entry in our Guy Fawkes series is from a great thread on Pharyngula about Beyoncé’s feminism. The whole thread is worth your time, but let’s pick up where beloved commenter chimera mentions

One of my favorite philosophers said something on the radio the other day that struck me. He said his favorite black civil rights leaders of the 60s were The Black Panthers because they had no pretension of being “good” (read: appropriate, upstanding, notable, conforming, respectable, moral, role model for your kids, and all that….). And that a person doesn’t have to be “good” (in that sense) to call for political change.

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Privilege, Deference, and Moral Certainty

GG has been discussing in other threads the concept of epistemic deference, focused on epistemic deference of members of empowered majorities with respect to members of disempowered minorities. As it happens, I’ve lectured on just this topic at Portland State University, the University of Vermont, and a couple other places. (University of Minnesota I think… but I’m not entirely sure, and it would have been my visit to the Minneapolis campus, if you’re wondering PZ: I’ve never been to Morris). I even spoke to it when speaking to a North American conference of human rights officials and boards. So I’ve been thinking about this problem for a LONG time. More than 20 years, certainly. As a result, I have at hand things I’ve written right here on FtB available to quote.

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kathleenzielinski’s “gay rights movement”

So, over on Pharyngula kathleenzielinski has been having a bit of a say. I will likely go into other things said by kathleenzielinski (and issues that they raise or raised) later. But for now, I want to talk about the Great kathleenzielinski Gay Rights Movement, which, she would like you to know, is much, much better than that icky trans rights movement to which she would like to compare her GRM:

I will say this: The gay rights movement moved as quickly as it did because we took the time to win over our opposition using their own language. Conservative arguments were made in favor of gay marriage and legal equality. Some of us even quoted the Bible. We didn’t demonize people whose real fault was that they didn’t understand us. We won them over.

The trans rights movement is, if we are to believe kathleenzielinski, both moving much more slowly than her cherished GRM and is also much less friendly and compassionate to the bigots who oppose trans rights than the gays were to the bigots who opposed gay rights.

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Ignoring abuse to focus on lexicography

Okay, this is turning into a thing.

So in the thread created to talk about the phenomenon where people announce on the internet that they’re too afraid to discuss issues central to (or sometimes merely implicating) trans persons’ human rights before immediately launching a conversation about their concerns about granting trans persons equal human rights, one new commenter, GG, decided to change the subject. Although I feel vexed that what I wrote seemed to be ignored in favor of the commenter’s preferred conversation, the comment and request for response were both respectful and, as it turns out, the issues that GG unknowingly raised are actually significant. So I decided to respond, but I’m not going to allow that thread to be derailed so I have created this new post to discuss what GG brought up. Let’s start with GG’s comment, which itself begins with a quote from a BBC news article:  

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Pervert Puns for Justice

On my last post reader lumipuma was surprised to hear I had conceived of my blog’s title as a pun, and wrote this comment:

This blog’s name is a pun? Now I’m slightly perplexed on why you’d want to pervert justice, in addition to just wanting pervert justice.

I had always assumed the verb/noun pun was apparent, but as it is not, Lumipuma deserves a serious answer to what is a serious question.

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Anti-Trans Activism is Anti-Feminst and Anti-Woman

So let’s start with saying straight up that I know nothing about Ireland. Never lived there, never visited there, and I’m pretty much less confident in my knowledge of what constitutes Irish experience than I am that Ireland’s plants are purple. But what happened in Ireland during the RepealThe8th movement to overturn Ireland’s lethal ban on abortion is important for everyone to know. So I’m gonna reprint the shit outta the words of someone who does know something about all this, The Slothmare Before Christmas, AKA @CaseyExplosion on Twitter.

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Rewatching Juno: Page’s Story Is One of the Most Important of 2020

As soon as I can find time today or tomorrow, I’ll be rewatching Juno & posting some more thoughts on the Elliot Page news from yesterday. But why am I rewatching Juno at all? Well the answer bears on another question raised in the comments to yesterday’s post by sonofrojblake:

He was in Inception and X-men. It baffles me a bit why this story leaves those off the headline almost everywhere I’ve seen it.

The Umbrella Academy reference is understandable as it is Page’s most recent (and still Netflix-current) work. But why Juno, instead of a much more well known film (or at least one higher-grossing)?

The answer, I believe, can be found in the fact that is that it is the best and best-known pro-choice film for at least a generation. Over the last decade trans persons’ struggle against invisibility and for access to services has gained the attention of abortion providers and others responsible for family planning & reproductive health services as well as organizations that advocate for reproductive rights. This attention is not insignificant. In 2018 during the campaign to repeal Ireland’s constitutional Amendment 8 which banned nearly all abortion in the country, one excuse for some feminists to oppose the movement fighting for the repeal of A8  was that the movement was too supportive of trans persons and the ballot language was written in a way that included trans persons. Fascist fuckfaces argued with apparent seriousness that granting equal abortion rights to trans persons with vaginas and uteruses who might get pregnant would be to permit the proverbial and unacceptable camel’s toe into the tent.

Despite well-publicized pregnancies of a few trans men, and the obvious biological fact that merely coming out as non-binary or trans masculine does not give a body the means to automatically shut that whole thing down, there are people who struggle with the idea that we might want reproductive rights for everyone, even when inconvenient for pithy rhetoric. These people aren’t necessary bad people because they haven’t necessarily consciously thought through what it means to privilege rhetoric over human lives, nor have they necessarily thought about trans people enough to even realize that this is what they’re doing. But when the lead actor in such a tremendously important movie exploring the complicated nature of, the interpersonal and social limitations on, and vital importance of reproductive self-determination comes out as something other than a woman it becomes impossible for honest persons to see Juno as applicable only to women.

Juno will not lose its resonance for cis women. Juno will not become unimportant to cis feminists or cis reproductive rights advocates. It can be and is still a powerful movie addressing issues with which many (if not most) cis women who have sex (or experience sexual assaults) involving sperm will struggle. A cis women doesn’t even need to become pregnant to experience these issues. She need only believe that she is pregnant or has a high chance of being pregnant. A late period, a false test, a test that appears false because of a spontaneous abortion which will never be known, any of those things can be enough.

But without changing anything in the movie itself, trans and non-binary persons capable of getting pregnant (or who believe they are capable of getting pregnant – infertility isn’t announced at birth) can now point to the movie Juno and say, “These are our issues too,” with new credibility. With a credibility, frankly, that can’t be denied by any honest person.

I’m happy for Page, really I am. But I didn’t write about Page’s coming out because this is some random celebrity who happens to share some experiences in common with me.

I wrote about, and will continue to write about, Elliot Page’s experience of trans life because the importance of a specific piece of Page’s work to feminism is now presenting a moment of choice to every feminist who has found Juno valuable in the past. Umbrella Academy can help identify who Page is to those who aren’t automatically familiar, but this isn’t a moment about an actor, and that’s why Inception and X-Men: Last Stand are irrelevant to the story.

This is a moment when feminists have the opportunity to become transfeminists, when feminists can decide again whether they seek reproductive privileges for some or reproductive rights for all.

It presents a moment when feminists may ask each other, “If we fight for abortion access only for those whose gender is acceptable, what, in the end, do we stand to win?”

That question is truly dangerous for those who believe that feminism is compatible with demanding conformance to a broader stereotype, or one’s choice of a few new stereotypes. Elliot Page’s announcement has the power to force a fundamental moment of dawning awareness, a moment in which one can hear one’s own brain sound a feminist :click:, a moment in which those of us feminists who reluctantly support (or fight against) trans inclusion finally understand that to do so means that they have, all unknowing, continued to believe that some stereotypes are acceptable, and that all rights are ultimately conditional on good gender.

What will we, as feminists, choose next when we hear that click?

That feminists now face such decisions is the real news, the important news, in Page’s Instagram announcement. And after 25 years of fighting for feminism-informed trans-advocacy and trans advocacy-informed feminism, I can’t tell you how exciting this moment has become.

Let’s see some change.