I’ve been writing a lot about abortion lately—find me an American feminist who hasn’t—and every time I sit down and start to type, I think about a conversation I had with a friend of mine who identifies as trans. This friend expressed feeling hurt when I had referred to abortion as a women’s rights issue and when I’d objected to language like ‘uterus-havers’ and ‘birthing bodies.’
I explained why I use the language I do: that I’ve thought a lot about the words I choose and that, for me, clarity about sex comes first, that I won’t use gender-neutral language to talk about sex, and that I find neologisms for sex dehumanizing to women since this language inevitably reduces human beings to functions and ‘services,’ language that I think is at odds with recognizing the personhood of women and the ways that access to reproductive healthcare reverberates across a woman’s whole life. I said I don’t see how progressive people can argue for women’s rights by talking about us as walking wombs. At the end of the conversation, my friend expressed the hope that I’d change the way I wrote about abortion going forward. I reiterated that I respected my friend’s point of view but that we don’t have the same perspectives or priorities and therefore we won’t use the same language to express ourselves, and that I hoped that my friend understood my reasons and didn’t interpret my language as an attack on their beliefs and values but an assertion of my own.. . .
I can feel the pull, though: no one wants to cause a loved one pain. Drop one person like this in a circle of friends and a vast silence settles around certain topics. No one wants to break this silence. I understand why so many people go along. But everything to do with being female falls into this dead zone of inconvenient facts and unspeakable truths because everything to do with the material reality of sex difference threatens the concept of gender identity.
Source: “Just say this/don’t say that, it’s not too much to ask.”
I find this whole matter difficult! I have fought discrimination most of my life? Not from my own experience but that of others and yet, here I am at age 95 feeling the need to resist trans from deleting my language and perhaps rights as a WOMAN? In all my years, as a Feminist, I never thought I would, at this age, need to be careful when talking about my body? I do not want to hurt people who have nearly always gone though enough hurt but I am NOT the ONLY woman for whom this matter is important as important as to women as to Trans! Marion Hosking OAM., Centenary Medal.
This whole movement reduces biological women to a list of functions – what about my hurt feelings at being so dehumanised and whittled away?
I’m xx and no well funded trans movement can change that fact!
Identify as a tractor if you want to- just leave me alone!