A Dyke A Broad #89 The Abortion Edition
It's official. I'm turning into my mom. Plus the battle for abortion and why dykes have lost the plot of their own herstory.
Hello from Paris!
It’s official. I’m turning into my mom. I’ve spent the last several days going into shops trying to buy stuff for our upcoming Italy trip, and, after circling the racks for far too long, trying on this and that, imagining Ana in it, I’d finally take a few things home where I was immediately stricken with regret. The shorts didn’t fit the way they had in the dressing room. That waterproof pouch thingy for the beach was overpriced, and I couldn’t make it work anyway. Ana thought the swimsuit an instrument of torture.
The next day I’d trudge back, return most of the haul, repeat the store-circling, purchases, regret. Just like my mom.
Though with her, it wasn’t utilitarian items but mostly shoes. And I don’t know if there was regret, just that she’d drive to the mall, try on everything in the store, come back with several shoe boxes, and after a couple of days go back there with her sales slips, boxes, and a hesitant smile.
I wonder what the sales ladies thought when they saw her coming, this woman who bought and returned and bought and returned, and probably kept five percent finally of the stuff, or she’d’ve had a closet like Imelda Marcos. Does anybody even know who Imelda is anymore? And is 3000 pairs of shoes still a lot? Things get normalized—like the erosion of women’s rights. I’m out of the loop.
I don’t know what was behind it all. Did she just like to whip out the credit card that had her husband’s name on it? At first thrilled, then constrained she didn’t have her own, in fact couldn’t until I was eight in 1974. Did she get a kick out of consuming something that wasn’t quite necessary in the midst of her penny-pinching on behalf of an uncertain household governed by a man who made a habit of losing jobs? Or did she know all along they’d be returned and just liked to wear new shoes around the house? Part of an active fantasy life in which she was invited not to church soirées or bridge at the neighbors, but to elegant parties where she was admired by all?—maybe had never been married.
She often said she wished she had never gotten hitched. Never birthed us kids. Was so happy when her tubes got tied, since abortion wasn’t legal. I should say that we weren’t always miserable, but this sentiment was there, poisoning our lives. I wonder what she’d think now. When once again abortion’s illegal in so many southern states like ours.
One common response to the ruling was that it was inevitable. Even Justice Ginsburg said Roe v. Wade was based on weak law, so of course a right-wing court would profit from it. Jessica Winter begs to differ. In her New Yorker article, The Supreme Court Decision That Defined Abortion Rights for Thirty Years she argues that Roe was strong. And that it was centrists in fact responsible for gutting Roe when they crafted a terrible decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
Law and history Professor W. Burlette Carter wrote a long Twitter thread identifying a different problem—the legal tactics used to defend Roe v. Wade:
The effort to replace biological sex with gender made the advocates for Roe/Casey incompetent to argue for women’s rights. Men are not women and the difference matters on a lot of levels. The left & Biden marched forward with a brief that ignored women and their history. They refused to make historical arguments women could make—they insisted on making the due process argument, the same one essentially made in Obergefell, but relying on modern changes in how we think about women.
I’m not sure it would have made a difference in the Supreme Court’s decision, but there are vast ramifications for activists if Burlette Carter’s correct to characterize the defense’s approach as:
male-centered — focused on males in the lgbtq movement, not women. Under it women can only make arguments that upperclass, white, oppressed males think vindicate rights they want. If it helps women great; if not, too bad. This is a problem across the board in academic work and beyond. The voices of women who insist on arguments that view women as a sex and recognize biology are suppressed because they don’t aid minority males. And this power of the left to limit women’s arguments is itself a function of racial, gender and class privilege. (Read the whole thread.)
What’s undeniable is that activists can’t win a fight for abortion rights if they don’t acknowledge that sex is a material reality, and is the reason why an entire class is discriminated against, and deprived of their bodily autonomy.
I wonder how dykes will come down on this. Long a mainstay of the pro-abortion movement in the U.S., many of us are now propper-uppers of the new queer ideology that says gender is important and not sex. Which means we’ve lost the plot of our own herstory. Deludedly believe that women’s gains—female gains—are irrelevant to us.
In fact, access to abortion and birth control are central to our lesbian lives because so many of our rights depend on bodily autonomy for females, not just the right to say No to being pregnant, but the right to say No to sex with men, No to dating them, No to marrying them, No to serving them. And instead say Yes to a lesbian future independent from them.
Will dykes recognize the danger and dig in for the long, long fight it will take for women to regain our rights? Or wedded to wokeness, will we shrug, walk away, force other women to submit to having children they don’t want? Go shopping to escape them? After all, why should we care?
Stay tuned for notes and a few photos from Italy.
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Women Can Be Regulated, But Not Guns
In a second decision…
Lesbian Avengers in the News
While I’m still pissed that the so-called LGBTQ+ community either sidelines or scapegoats dykes, at least every year around pride the Lesbian Avengers get a mention, this time in an article and audio bit from NPR.
And if you want to see the originals in action…
A reminder that…
When it comes to prison reform, “The constant instinct is to refer to more-sympathetic criminal classes, like the gold-standard “first-time nonviolent drug offenders,” when calling for an end to mass incarceration. The trouble with this is that a huge majority of our incarcerated population is not in fact drawn from those more cinematically compelling victims. Most people locked up in state prisons are there for violent offenses and most people in local jails awaiting trial and sentencing who end up in state prisons will be too. 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our criminal legal system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession.”
That’s it for this time.
Stay cool. Stay cranky.
Disgruntledly yours,