Trans women, abortions, immigrants: canaries in our cultural coalmines

Photo by Marcel Biegger: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-a-red-fur-coat-6779242/

There has never been a golden age where rights were perfectly equitable, and where women were on parity with men. Indeed, history shows that rights have always been in flux, with periods where equity was creeping closer before the inevitable backlash undermined progress for the sake of those who already have the whip hand. I have watched for the last decade as both trans and women’s rights globally have been rolled back all in the name of protecting women from themselves, while the perennial brigading against immigrants has been increasingly focused on this same premise: women need protecting from themselves and those marginalised groups who threaten to show why equity is a necessity. These three groups are our cultural canaries because once you strip the rights from one group it becomes easier to strip rights from anyone who is not normative.

Fighting for rights requires understanding that all rights are a narrative process. There are no universal absolutes because each of us is required to balance out our individuality with every other individual in our societies. The right to exist as yourself is tempered by everyone else’s right to do the same, so we all exist in a perpetual pas de deux of individual liberty and the collective desire to move forward. To thrive we are all required to accept that our absolute self needs other people to thrive, else we will simply scratch a meagre living at the margins.

All of this means that for any of use to fight oppression we need to see the texture and weave of society, the intersecting lines which connect us with others, not simply seeing others as a means to our personal ends. Normative values which serve the majority are ill-fitting because they essentially squeeze everyone into a median that becomes narrower over time unless we actively resist it. Trans people are cast aside because it is easier to see the median rooted in a reductive understanding of dichotomous sex. Abortions are banned because the media demands that womanhood is rooted in motherhood irrespective of the harms caused to mother and child. Immigrants are exorcised because the median is defined through strict cultural, linguistic, and ethnographic rules. The media exists only to serve those who get to define what it is, as anything outside of that median is a controlled threat that requires punishment and control.

Abortion access is often framed as murder by pro-life advocates because they invest more value in the potential for viable life than the life of the mother. This reduces womanhood down to the role of walking incubator, only good for reproduction. These framings roll over into the attacks on trans women, with “biological womanhood” used as the whip to beat trans women with, once more reinforcing the notion that women are nothing but their reproductive potential. Finally, immigrants are deconstructed due to their blood, seen as impurities polluting the bodies of native women, only good for corrupting the soul of the national flesh. All three issues are conflated into notions of purity because to control women and womanhood first you have to define what a pure woman is, then demand that every woman conform to that media.

This is why racists, gender critics, pro-lifers, and Christian nationalists are heart misogynistic because they all seek to control women’s bodies. Womanhood is not a purity test a girl is forced to undergo prior to cultural assimilation into pre-ordained boxes. Womanhood is not a prison within which the only option is perpetual baby making. Nor is it an empirical test you fail if you reject normative beauty standards and fashion. You are no less a woman if your childhood was overseas, including a boyhood, or you slept your way through half your high school. Motherhood is not a synonym for woman, it is a life path that ought to be a choice, the same as rejecting womanhood entirely to become non-binary and a man.

A first step any authoritarian regime takes is controlling women’s bodies. Time and again throughout history it is the purging of women’s rights, restrictions on LGBTQI+ rights, and denial of equity to immigrants that have signified the closing of the State to all but a handful of elites. Women, cisgender and transgender, are used as weapons to demand strict adherence to suffocating standards, to the point that any woman who rejects or refuses to bend the knee is imprisoned, tortured, and potentially executed. Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Iran, and now increasingly the US show the tortuous routes society goes down when women are forced to conform irrespective of their personal wishes.

Globally women are imprisoned and executed for standing up for their rights. Trans inclusive women’s voices are marginalised in favour of those which seek to enforce strict sex based segregation rooted in personal biases. Immigrant women are denied shelter and support simply due to their country of origin, with many suffering from systemic abuse even when shelter is grudgingly provided. Power, greed, and fear drives this, but as Paris Paloma so eloquently points out in Labour this is in the main due to the way men frame women’s role in society. It is systemic, and the sematic framings are being passed on from men to boys through social media because no society has the willingness to confront the degradation of all women.

Pluralism is an essential part of any society because it allows everyone to exist on their own terms without being sadistic towards anyone else. Karl Popper laid out the tolerance paradox, specifically pointing out that if we allow those who marginalise and demean others parity of discourse we shut down the rights of marginalised people to exist. Trans women, abortions, and immigrants are our cultural canaries precisely because the complexities around these issues are being shut down in favour of those who push women’s safety as a means of getting power. Trans women, abortions, and immigrants are not an existential threat to women, it is the abusive partners, honour killings, pregnancy complications, rapists, male murders, and social media misogynists who demand they conform who are. If you choose to ignore women’s voices in favour of those who seek to control and narrow the median to exclude your preferred scape goats you are part of the problem, and you actively chose to harm all women.