First of all thanks dear publico, for the comments and notes of support you've sent my way in the last week. I appreciate it. So this great org in Oakland asked me a while ago if they could reprint an article I'd previously written. I said of course, but that I'd love to expand it a bit to talk about some of the current struggles around linking the reproductive rights, queer and trans movements. But then I realized I had so much to say on the topic that it turned into its own thing, which you see below.

I wrote a lot of this in the jobsearch office and had many great discussions with the people sitting next to me about queerness, abortion, sex, genders and people's thoughts, experiences, understandings and misunderstandings about all of these things. I was surprised at how receptive and eager people were to discuss all of this, especially because this is a relatively conservative, Catholic and militarized area. It reafffirms to me how powerful and effective one on one dialogue can be in making connections and getting people to consider things from a different perspective.

So it's a draft and you can hit me up with feedback which I always appreciate, either thru comments, or by the email button to the right and down.


Linking Movements, Linking Lives

While there is much common ground between the movements for reproductive rights, queer liberation and trans liberation, much of the focus on linking the movements has centered on the right to parent and make families. This is a natural connection, and one easy for the movements to unite around. Yet the predominant vision put forth by the mainstream movements fails to address some of the core issues that are challenging to the linking of these movements and is only one part of a very complex struggle. Oftentimes the ways in which the mainstream movements tend to address this common ground around parenting and reproduction are in ways that are only relevant to people with considerable privilege. Often it is done so from a perspective that does not acknowledge the dynamics of systemic oppression at the root of the movements and inadvertently perpetuates them.

For example, one issue is the call for greater access to reproductive technologies as a reproductive right for queer people. While it’s a fundamental right for queer people to create families, we need to be able to examine, acknowledge and engage around the racist, ableist, classist and sexist dynamics of eugenics that many reproductive technologies have been and are still used for. Recipients of public benefits, immigrants, female bodied people of color, farm workers, people in recovery from substance abuse, incarcerated individuals, and many other individuals and communities have been affected by coercive sterilization and other reproductive technologies and experiments without knowledge or consent. Reproductive technologies are also used to define who is an acceptable human in terms of ‘desirable’ traits and characteristics, many times employing racist and ableist preferences in modification or selection of traits. Potential donors can also market themselves as high quality genome sources. This has profound social and capitalistic impacts, placing value on certain bodies and lives over others.

Additionally, many of these reproductive technologies are only accessible to economically privileged people. Poor queers don’t have access to pricey reproductive technologies or reproductive assistance services. We then encounter the dynamic of the economically privileged having access to such technologies and services as a matter of choice, similar to abortion being only accessible as a matter of choice to people with privilege. As Loretta Ross has often said “Choices are for people who have them, and lots of people don’t.” In making links between movements, it is important to shift the paradigms beyond advocating for the things that only the privileged have access to or benefit from.

In thinking about reproductive technologies, it’s important to take into account the experience of trans people. I think it‘s imperative that the voices of trans people be at the center of discussions around linking movements. As a non-trans, gender conforming woman with femme privilege, I can’t speak to the experiences of trans people, nor on behalf of trans people. Hence I offer these thoughts as an ally, and as a person who has been dissatisfied and disappointed with the hesitancy of the reproductive rights movement to take on issues affecting the reproductive, sexual, and general health and well being of trans and gender non-conforming people, and for the many ways in which transphobia manifests in the reproductive rights movement. As part of the process of undergoing a legal change of sex, many states mandate that people undergo surgical procedures through which they are sterilized as a precondition to a legal change of sex Oftentimes people aren’t notified of any options for banking eggs and sperm for future use. This is another example of coercive sterilization and a way in which reproductive choice is unfairly limited to a group of individuals.

Yet what’s left out of this dialogue is the experience of trans people who choose not to, or don’t have the economic resources to undergo gender reassignment therapies. The positioning of this as a central issue of reproductive justice does not account for the many issues of day to day survival facing trans people with less resources, and the ways in which having less resources, especially when coupled with transphobia, affect overall health and well being. Some of the challenges facing trans people with less resources that affect health might be things like access to basic, fundamental needs such as food and shelter, as well as employment and housing discrimination, violence, and barriers to accessing healthcare. Because reproductive justice is really about survival, all of these matters deserve our attention, advocacy, and allyship as a matter of justice.

Many of these issues and systems around reproduction and parenting for queer and gender variant people further enforce who gets to be a parent both within and outside of the queer community by privileging one type of family over another. This is the case with transracial and transcultural adoption. Transracial adoption determines what sort of people have the ability and resources to parent without acknowledging the imperialist, racist and classist dynamics of white, first world people adopting children of color from third world countries. We need to consider not just the sovereignty of nations when thinking about working against imperialism, but of individuals who are not able to parent their children due to conditions created through imperialism, as well as the effects of globalization and the many violations of human rights that occur as a result of these things.

Similarly, when we think of fostering children involved with the child welfare system, we often don’t think of the conditions which compromise survival for the split families. We don’t often consider the ways in which certain families and communities are targeted and policed more than others, such as single mothers, low-income families, differently abled parents, families of color, and queer, trans and gender non-conforming parents of color or with lower incomes. We need to recognize this as an extension of the targeting, criminalization, and state intrusion these individuals and communities already unduly receive. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 stipulates that a parent loses parental rights to a child who has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. This has a specific impact on incarcerated women.

78% of incarcerated women have children, and two-thirds of incarcerated women are women of color. Due to the remote locations of many women’s prisons fewer than half of these women are able to see their children and families while incarcerated. Incarcerated women are at a high risk of losing their children as many of the children are placed in foster care for the duration of their incarceration. Further compromising survival for some people who have been incarcerated is legislation specifying that anyone who has been convicted of a drug-related felony is barred from receiving cash or food stamps and living in public housing.

The implications of all of these facts are many: that the legislation around retaining parental rights disproportionately affects women of color, that when facing incarceration women of color also face being dislocated from their communities and isolated from their resources and support networks, making it more difficult to ensure survival. And finally, that the legislation around drug felony convictions and access to benefits also compromises survival and one’s ability to provide for their families. This is all particularly alarming when we think about differences in sentencing such as the difference in minimum mandatory sentencing between convictions involving crack and convictions involving cocaine. Our movements need to think about the implications of these facts, particularly in the context of the state deeming certain individuals acceptable parents and others as not.

There are multiple ways that the right of people of color to parent their children and the right of communities of color to know dignity, autonomy and safety are threatened all the time, every day and without consequence. The truth of the matter is that we are still having our children stolen from us. Through the foster care system, through the juvenile detention system, through incarceration, through transracial adoptions, from nations the US has fucked with, through war. As long as the cycles of racism, classism, imperialism, and the criminalization of our communities continue, this will hold true. If we are going to talk about reproductive justice in terms of individuals not being able to make decisions about their bodies separate from what is going on in their communities, then we need to talk about dismantling the United States government and its racist and imperialist practices, and consider the far-reaching impacts of this racism and imperialism that make it difficult and often impossible for individuals, families, and communities to survive and be sovereign.

The movement for abortion rights hasn’t always been clear in articulating the right to have children. While white feminists during the second wave were engaged in battles over legality – mainly the struggle to legalize abortion, and keep it legal - women of color were engaged in daily struggles just to survive, further complicated by the added challenges of facing racism in all sectors of their lives like employment, housing and shelter, parenting, and in the navigation of social service systems. The reproductive rights movement has rarely accounted for any of this, but especially the rights of families and communities to just exist without daily hassle, harassment, and turmoil. This has resulted in a distancing between the reproductive rights movement and the actual lived experiences of whole communities. In re-envisioning our struggles and in envisioning the linking of them, we need to think about creating movements that account for all of our varied experiences, truths, realities and lives.

Furthermore, the mainstream movements for reproductive rights, queer liberation, and trans liberation historically have been, and primarily still are headed by white, middle class people. The primary platforms of all of these movements are framed around issues of legalization - in the reproductive rights movement, around abortion, in the queer movement around legalizing gay marriage, in the mainstream trans movement to include gender reassignment therapies as part of comprehensive health insurance coverage. But all of these movements need to recognize that struggles framed around legality reinforce the body’s dependence on the nation state, and that this makes it very hard for people from communities that are targeted by the nation state to connect to the movements.

Laws were established, and largely are still designed, to protect the rights of white, wealthy citizens, and in many cases legalization primarily benefits people with considerable privilege. In many cases laws don’t protect the best interests of people of color, the undocumented, poor people, differently abled people, and queer and gender variant people. How can we place trust in a legislative system that has continually hurt and oppressed us? Given this, how can we believe that struggling within this system is going to be in our best interests? We cannot. When we get caught up in fighting for legality, our fundamental needs and the things we need to survive often get left by the wayside.

If our fight is solely focused around upholding Roe vs. Wade, we might not be acknowledging how inaccessible abortion remains for most people due to location of clinics, transportation issues, the cost of the procedure, parental notification acts, the Hyde amendment, 24 hour rules, lack of adequate, appropriate and multi-lingual information and care, and childcare and work restrictions. If we are fighting to uphold Roe vs. Wade, we are probably not thinking about the barriers facing many families in their struggle to survive and live their lives with dignity and autonomy, free from undue harassment and targeting. If our fight is solely focused around gay marriage, or for insurance coverage of gender reassignment therapies, or for access to cyropreservation services, we might not be talking about our hungry or our homeless and the basic, fundamental needs that are unmet for many lower-income queer, trans and gender non-conforming people. If we frame our fight around these issues, we make the assumption that everyone has access to affordable health insurance and appropriate health care. We might not be talking about the employment and housing discrimination that many queer, trans and gender non-conforming people (especially people of color) face.

Given the realities of the world we live in most of us, and our bodies, are dependent on the nation state. But we can work towards change and work towards creating autonomy for our bodies and communities. There is more than one way to imagine connections between the reproductive rights, queer liberation and trans liberation movements. A more expansive vision would not only bring together people interested in the issues that our movements encompass, but would also critique the inherent oppressions in the systems surrounding survival, sex, parenting and reproduction and fight for ways to make them just for everyone. The tenet of the movement for reproductive justice is that you can’t make a decision about your body separate from what’s going on in your community. Considering this I think we can push further the analysis around linking movements.

Reproductive rights activists, queer activists and trans activists need to make the connections and expand the visions of our movements, reframe and re-prioritize the platforms, and work towards a society in which each community and each individual can live with dignity and autonomy. We can unite around the places that our movements do intersect, and do so from an anti-oppression perspective. We can advocate for and we can provide comprehensive sexuality education in our communities, and encourage healthy, positive and fun dialogues and attitudes around sex and sexualities. We can, and we will share resources and remedios in the way that we always have, trusting in our collective wisdom and knowledge. We can support sex working, or street-involved people from our communities. We can create social safety nets, and we can work towards undoing the way that current safety nets such as shelters, domestic violence programs and sexual health programs are heavily gendered, and therefore make them safer and more accessible places to go.

We can demand and advocate for better access to healthcare and health education for everybody. We can work towards establishing clinics and community health centers in our neighborhoods, on our terms, in our languages, and with our best interests in mind. We can work towards ending interpersonal and state violence in our communities. We can educate our young people on our histories and provide them with anti-oppression training and in doing so we can ensure that the next generation of queer and trans people has a safer world to live in. We can acknowledge the beautiful history and legacy of the many varied and creative ways that queer people, particularly poor queer people and queer people of color, have found to parent and make families. And we can go on being our fierce, resilient, resourceful, beautiful, brave selves. We’re just too sexy not to.

Cherry is a West Coast based queer Chicana writer, organizer, educator, theater artist, and mother. Her work focuses on sex, reproductive justice, anti-violence organizing, and qpoc movements through the lens of whole community health, as well as documenting the lives and histories of queer people of color for future generations.