Ali to nije samo empowerment. Prije 24. juna, inclusivity je takodjer bio preci borcima za ova i ona prava, ispravljanje tih drustvenih i jezickih nepravdi, i borba po bolnicama za pregnant people umjesto nekakvih pregnant women:
The Failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex
JUNE 24, 2022
What is women’s empowerment in a world without Roe v. Wade?
Women receive more college degrees than men, young women outearn young men in some cities, and more women run Fortune 500 companies than ever before. And still, Roe fell.
More women are directing Hollywood’s highest-grossing movies, Ariana DeBose just became the first openly queer woman of color to win an Oscar, and there’s a woman playing Thor. And still, Roe fell.
More than 60% of American women consider themselves feminists, including 42% of Republican women. More than half of American women say they prefer to work outside the home, the highest Gallup has recorded in three decades of polling. And still, Roe fell.
How could a cornerstone of American women’s rights crumble at a moment of otherwise expansive economic, cultural, and social empowerment?
The fall of Roe exposes a crack in the foundation of mainstream liberal feminism that has dominated the past decade. This version of feminism—is it the fourth wave?—has been preoccupied with individual achievements, feel-good symbolism, and cultural representation. It has, in turn, paid too little attention to the thorny mechanics of federal courts and state legislative races. Many fourth wavers presumed that reproductive rights were basically secure, and that therefore the remaining obstacles for women were not legal or political but cultural and emotional. Every time a woman won an Oscar, or released a hit album, or got a big promotion, the refrain was the same: representation matters!
Of course it matters. Of course it should be cheered. But somewhere along the way, many in the mainstream feminist movement convinced themselves that the soft power of cultural representation seemed as important as the hard power of votes and seats. Empowerment became not a means to an end, but the end in itself. Many feminists—particularly rich, white, well-educated ones—assumed that changing hearts and minds was the difficult part. In a functioning democracy, winning seats and writing laws would inevitably follow.
But that’s not how our democracy works. Nearly 60% of Americans did not want to see Roe overturned, including more than 30% of Republicans. The number of Americans who identify as “pro-choice” reached a record high in the weeks after a leaked draft opinion showed the Supreme Court was poised to upend a half century of constitutional precedent. And yet, the course of American history doesn’t always follow public opinion. Just ask the two recent Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote, yet appointed four Supreme Court Justices who voted to overturn Roe.
Roe fell in large part because anti-abortion activists and policymakers better understood how power truly works in this country. They didn’t rely on inspiring movies or heartfelt Oscar speeches or Twitter hashtags to advance their cause. Instead, the anti-abortion movement has been extraordinarily successful at getting conservative lawmakers elected at the state level. Mitch McConnell used the hard power of the Senate majority to block a Supreme Court nomination by President Barack Obama, which in turn allowed President Donald Trump to appoint another anti-abortion Justice. Conservative judicial activists selected Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health as the vehicle to prompt this right-wing court to overturn Roe.
None of that was exactly the fault of mainstream feminism, and many feminists did sound alarms about the threat to abortion rights. Local reproductive-rights groups have been organizing to protect abortion access on the state level for decades, while feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Center for Reproductive Rights have been litigating to protect abortion rights (although some national organizations have been criticized for focusing more on national politics than state races). EMILY’s List has been working to elect pro-choice women at all levels. And now, in a post-Roe world, Democratic governors, from Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan to Kathy Hochul in New York, are the last lines of defense for abortion access in their states.
But overall, the fall of Roe signifies that liberal feminists were outmaneuvered. By focusing on empowerment and losing sight of the nuts-and-bolts of political mechanics, they failed to recognize what McConnell and his allies have known all along: only power is power.
I am as guilty of this as anybody. In 2014, I wrote a piece that now strikes me as the apotheosis of mid-aughts feminist myopia. Titled “This May Have Been the Best Year for Women Since the Dawn of Time,” the essay starts with this cringey hyperbole: “Since the dinosaurs roamed, since the pyramids were built, since the locomotive was invented, there has never been a better year for women than 2014.” I listed reasons that seemed important at the time, but look superficial in retrospect: the success of Frozen, a handful of new women CEOs, Beyoncé dancing in front of the word FEMINIST at MTV’s Video Music Awards.
Some call this thinking girlboss feminism. Others tie it to white feminism. I think of it as the Empowerment Industrial Complex. Whatever you call it, it now seems like a cheugy distraction at best.
While the Empowerment Industrial Complex spent the early 2010s debating the ever-changing contours of feminist soft power, anti-abortion Republicans were building hard power, seat by seat, state by state. In 2010, Republicans raised $30 million to gain control of 21 legislative chambers, including in many states that would go on to pass the toughest abortion restrictions.
While online feminists interrogated celebrities about whether they called themselves “feminists” and what “empowered” them most, conservatives were amassing the raw power to pass trigger laws in 13 states. While progressive nonprofits threw galas celebrating female inspiration, brands spent millions on body-positive ad campaigns, and celebrities partnered with NGOs to promote “women’s empowerment,” the state and local organizations fighting to protect reproductive rights—many of them led by women of color—got too little funding and attention.
While the left tallied the number of women nominated for Oscars and which top-grossing movies passed the Bechdel test, savvy Republican operatives were carefully building a pipeline of conservative judges with immaculate résumés in anticipation of future Supreme Court vacancies. 2014, the year I dubbed the best ever for women, was also the year in which Republicans won the Senate, putting McConnell in position to block Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the high court.
“The failure of folks to pick up the shovel and fight this on the state level is why we’re in the position that we’re in right now,” says Nsé Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan civic-engagement organization devoted to building the power of voters of color in Georgia. “I see that as a failure of the large influencers and culture makers and popular feminists to really flank state-level activists.”
It’s not that cultural representation is unimportant. It’s just not enough—not even close. “Representation is important but not sufficient,” says Amanda Litman, co–executive director of Run for Something, which recruits and trains young progressives to run for state and local offices. Gender representation doesn’t always align neatly with feminist advancement. Neither the first woman Vice President nor the first woman Speaker of the House has the power to change the makeup of the Supreme Court or save the constitutional right to an abortion. Of the record 147 women in Congress, 41 are Republicans, many of them anti-abortion. All the major national anti-abortion organizations are run by women. For the first time in history, four women serve on the Supreme Court at the same time—and Justice Amy Coney Barrett was key to sealing the demise of Roe. More white women voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. This too was representation. This too mattered.
The Trump presidency exposed the faulty arithmetic at the heart of the Empowerment Industrial Complex. The rallying cries of empowerment politics convinced many that seeing and being were inextricably linked, as if obstacles like wealth inequality, structural racism, and voter suppression could be overcome by enough feminist inspo.
Now that Roe has fallen, it’s clear that women have bigger problems than representation. In a post-Roe world, many women’s lives will be defined by new laws in their states restricting their bodily autonomy—not by someone’s empowering speech at the Grammys. When you are forced to deliver children you didn’t want to have and can’t afford to raise, you may not care whether you see yourself reflected in the latest superhero blockbuster.
“It was a boiling-frog situation,” says Meaghan Winter, author of All Politics Is Local. “People didn’t realize how bad it was until it was too late.”
And so, despite everything women have achieved over the past half century, Roe fell. Now it’s up to the feminist movement to regroup and recalibrate. Inspirational narratives are great, so long as they inspire people toward building real political power. Abortion rights can still be saved, but only if feminists focus their energy on electing allies at the state and local level. In a post-Roe America, that’s the kind of representation that matters most.
https://time.com/6190225/feminist-indus ... oe-v-wade/
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A Vanishing Word in Abortion Debate: ‘Women’
June 8, 2022
Progressive groups and medical organizations have adopted inclusive language, which has led to terms like “pregnant people” and “chestfeeding.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, whose advocacy on reproductive rights is of more than a half-century vintage, recently tweeted its alarm about the precarious state of legal abortion:
“Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black Indigenous and other people of color. The L.G.B.T.Q. community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.”
This tweet encompassed so much and so many and yet neglected to mention a relevant demographic: women.
This was not an oversight, nor was it peculiar to the language favored by the A.C.L.U. Language has been changing fast, even as the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn a constitutional guarantee to abortion rights and progressives face the task of spearheading opposition.
From Planned Parenthood to NARAL Pro-Choice America to the American Medical Association to city and state health departments and younger activists, the word “women” has in a matter of a few years appeared far less in talk of abortion and pregnancy.
Driven by allies and activists for transgender people, medical, government and progressive organizations have adopted gender-neutral language that draws few distinctions between women and transgender men, as well as those who reject those identities altogether.
This speed of change is evident: In 2020, NARAL issued a guide to activists on abortion that stressed they should talk about a “woman’s choice.” Two years later, the same guide emphasized the need for “gender-neutral language.”
Last year, the editor of The Lancet, a British medical journal, apologized for a cover that referred to “bodies with vaginas” rather than women.
Today, “pregnant people” and “birthing people” have elbowed aside “pregnant women.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a section on “Care for Breastfeeding People,” the governor of New York issued guidance on partners accompanying “birthing people” during Covid, and city and some state health departments offer “people who are pregnant” advice on “chestfeeding.”
The Cleveland Clinic, a well-known nonprofit hospital, posed a question on its website: “Who has a vagina?” Its answer begins, “People who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) have vaginas.” The American Cancer Society website recommends cancer screenings for “people with a cervix.”
This reflects a desire by medical professionals to find a language that does not exclude and gives comfort to those who give birth and identify as nonbinary or transgender. No agency appears to collect data on transgender and nonbinary pregnancies, but Australia has reported that about 0.1 percent of all births involve transgender men.
Ti-Grace Atkinson got on the phone from her home in Cambridge, Mass., and sighed. She has counted herself a radical feminist for most of her 83 years. She quit the National Organization for Women in the 1960s when it refused to aggressively push for abortion rights.
She is wearied by battles over gender and language, which she said are pushed by transgender activists and eager progressives and no less eagerly opposed by right-wing politicians. It is distant from the urgent needs of women, who make up 50.8 percent of the population.
“I want to see material change,” she said. “Taking away our reproductive rights is going to sharpen the battle. This is about women and our rights; it’s not a language game.”
Last year, Dr. Sara Dahlen wrote an editorial for a British medical journal in which she noted the pressure for clinicians in Britain, where questions of gender are no less charged, to use phrases such as “human milk” rather than “breast milk.” She cautioned they risked losing a larger audience.
“If the aim is to maximize respect for every person’s sense of self, it must follow that female patients who simply understand themselves as women cannot either be expected to ‘go along silently with language in which they do not exist,’” she wrote, quoting advocates of gender-neutral language.
For those who fight in the trenches of reproductive politics, the surprise is that a turn to gender-neutral language surprises. Louise Melling, a deputy legal director for the A.C.L.U., noted that not long ago male pronouns and terms such as “mankind” were considered sufficient to cover all women. Language is a powerful instrument, she said, and helps to determine political consciousness.
“Language evolves and it can exclude or it can include,” Ms. Melling noted in an interview. “It’s really important to me that we think about pregnant people. It’s the truth: Not only women give birth, not only women seek abortion.”
NARAL punctuated this point in a tweet last year defending its use of “birthing people”: “We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth.”
Feminists such as Ms. Atkinson and the writer J.K. Rowling have been outspoken in stating that women have a right to their spaces — locker rooms, domestic abuse shelters, prisons — that are separate from men and transgender women.
These and other pointed criticisms angered transgender activists and their allies, who denounced them as transphobes. Some object as well to the language of the abortion rights movement, which talks of a “war on women.” “It’s really difficult,” a transgender activist wrote, “to be present in a movement that is so incredibly cissexist.”
In New York City, the progressive Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America are political powers. When Politico obtained a draft opinion that indicated the Supreme Court was primed to overturn Roe v. Wade, which provides a constitutional right to abortion, these parties issued ringing denunciations — in studiously gender-neutral language.
The world of mainstream Democratic politics gives voice to these sentiments in a more familiar argot, one aimed at voters rather than activists.
Last year the Biden administration put out budget documents that reflected the gendered discourse of progressives and referred to “birthing people.” Conservatives pounced.
But this month, when word leaked of a potential Supreme Court turnabout, President Biden was unequivocal and practiced in his language choices. “I believe that a woman’s right to choose is fundamental,” he said. “Basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that it not be overturned.”
A few left-leaning congressional representatives have adopted movement language. Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, testified last year about “birthing people.” But it is far more common to hear senators and congressional representatives, female and male alike, refer to women. “We cannot go back to the days when women had to risk their lives to end an unwanted pregnancy,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who represents Vermont.
Prof. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College and Prof. Steven Greene of North Carolina State University have studied the growth of feminist identity by age and education. Many young activists, Professor Elder noted, reject male and female distinctions altogether. “But,” she said, “the reality is that the larger society is not there yet.”
Professor Greene questioned the wisdom of activists in insisting that a mass-based movement discard its base and core sexual identity. Why not, for instance, insist that women and transgender men are each embattled when it comes to abortion?
“Activists are adopting symbols and language that are off-putting not just to the right but to people in the center and even liberals,” he noted.
For this reason he was not surprised when most Democratic politicians declined to echo the language of progressive organizations. “You don’t become a candidate for the presidency or speaker of the House by being dumb about what works in politics,” he said. “Democrats were not going to be afraid to use the word ‘women.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/us/w ... n.amp.html
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The Abortion Debate Is Suddenly About ‘People,’ Not ‘Women’
MAY 14, 2022
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This isn’t the first time the ACLU has dodged the W-word. Last year, the group infamously rewrote a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote about abortion access being central “to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity” to remove the gendered language. In the revised version, Ginsburg fretted about “when the government controls that decision for [people].” (Which people? Do they share any characteristics that might be relevant? No one can say.) The ACLU’s chief executive later apologized, but here the group is again, removing biological sex from a conversation in which biological sex is unavoidable. The right has declared a war on women. The left has responded by declaring a war on saying “women.”
The ACLU is not alone in neutering its campaign for abortion rights. Last week, a friend who wanted to raise funds for the cause asked me to recommend an American organization still willing to acknowledge that abortion is a gendered issue. Finding a candidate was surprisingly tricky. The word women has been purged from the front page of the NARAL website, while the Lilith Fund helps “people who need abortions in Texas.” (However, the group notes elsewhere that most of those who call its hotline are “low-income women of color.”) Fund Texas Women has been renamed Fund Texas Choice. The National Abortion Federation’s response to the Supreme Court leak noted that it will “keep fighting until every person, no matter where we live, how much money we make, or what we look like, has the freedom to make our own decisions about our lives, our bodies, and futures.”
One of the most irritating facets of this debate is that anyone like me who points out that it’s possible to provide abortion services to trans people without jettisoning everyday language such as women is accused of waging a culture war. No. We are noticing a culture war. A Great Unwomening is under way because American charities and political organizations survive by fundraising—and their most vocal donors don’t want to be charged with offenses against intersectionality. Cold economic logic therefore dictates that charities should phrase their appeals in the most fashionable, novel, and bulletproof-to-Twitter-backlash way possible. Mildly peeved centrists may grumble but will donate anyway; it’s the left flank that needs to be appeased.
Pointing out that women are the ones who largely need abortions is very second wave, boring, old-school, so done. Witness those placards held by older women that read: I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit. Instead, the charities think: Can we find a way to make this fight feel a little more … now? And that’s how you end up with the National Women’s Law Center tweeting, “In case you didn’t hear it right the first time: People of all genders need abortions. People of all genders need abortions. People of all genders need abortions. People of all genders need abortions. People of all genders need abortions. People of all genders need abortions.” (No, that’s not my copy-and-paste keys getting stuck. The group really said it six times.)
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Language battles should not distract us from the true injustice raised by the potential repeal of Roe v. Wade: the removal of the right to privacy and bodily autonomy for 51 percent of Americans. But something is lost when abortion-rights activists shy away from saying women. We lose the ability to talk about women as more than a random collection of organs, bodies that happen to menstruate or bleed or give birth. We lose the ability to connect women’s common experiences, and the discrimination they face in the course of a reproductive lifetime. By substituting people for women, we lose the ability to speak of women as a class. We dismantle them into pieces, into functions, into commodities. This happens in many ways. This week I also saw an Axios editor rebuke a New York Times reporter for writing “surrogate mothers” rather than “gestational carriers”—as if the latter phrase were not dehumanizing, a whisper away from “vessels.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ge/629863/
Zabranilo abortus dok su ovi tabirili jezik i dumali kome.
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Why We Use Inclusive Language to Talk About Abortion
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a shameful ruling that decimated access to abortion. Adding insult to injury, this unprecedented assault on our fundamental rights and bodily autonomy took place during Pride month. Abortion access should concern everyone, and this ruling directly impacts everyone who can become pregnant. That’s why so many LGBTQ+ people are deeply invested in the fight for abortion access.
Who gets abortions?
There is, of course, the obvious answer: women. Cisgender women have abortions more than any other group of people. There is plenty of data to back this up. Abortion among women who can become pregnant is extremely common and nearly one in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime. The vast majority of data available about abortions and abortion access surveys women. That data tells us that the average person who gets an abortion is a woman of color who is already a mother and who lives at or below the federal poverty level.
The more expansive and more accurate answer is anyone who can become pregnant needs to be able to get an abortion if they need or want one, including many cisgender women, some non-binary people, some intersex people, some Two Spirit people, and some trans men.
Yes, people other than women need access to abortion care.
As a bisexual transgender non-binary person, I can become pregnant. I am not a woman — and yet, I could need access to abortion care. I also know that I never want to be pregnant. For me, access to abortion would be a matter of lifesaving health care. When trans people articulate the need for access to abortion services, or that we have accessed abortion care in the past, these experiences are often dismissed by those who want to deny that more people than just cisgender women need abortion. But we’re here, we’ve been here, and we’re not going anywhere.
The fight for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights go hand in hand because they are both ultimately about protecting our bodily autonomy. But they’re also intertwined because lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, queer people and yes, some trans gay men, can experience pregnancy and deserve control over if, when, and how we become pregnant, and whether or not we stay pregnant.
Yes, men and other people who can’t become pregnant can, and should, care about abortion access.
When conversations about abortion reduce it to a “women’s issue” or an issue only for people who can carry pregnancies, we exclude a wide swath of people.
There is a tendency to exclude men, without an acknowledgment that some trans men can become pregnant and despite the fact that cisgender men are not the only people who can’t become pregnant. Trans women, cisgender women who struggle with infertilty, some intersex people, some trans men, some non-binary people, and some Two Spirit people all cannot become pregnant.
Protest signs and messages often use the framing of “no uterus, no opinion,” ignoring that there are many cisgender women who have and have not carried pregnancies who have had hysterectomies and no longer have a uterus. Hysterectomies are, in fact, the second most common surgery for cisgender women.
Centering who gets to have opinions about abortion around whether or not people are currently able to become pregnant excludes people from our understanding of abortion rights, rather than expanding it.
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https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive- ... t-abortion