Tag: forced sterilization

You Know…

I find that when you include trans women in your analysis of stuff that’s supposedly only an issue for cis women you actually get a way more complete and nuanced picture of the shape of patriarchy.

Like reproductive coercion often including forcible sterilization of trans women (as well as other groups of women the patriarchy hates especially hard), and like I was just thinking about how things considered to be “initiations into womanhood” are often socially considered to be marked by blood (menarche, loss of virginity) and then I realized that gender confirmation surgery for trans women is discussed a lot more than it is for trans men and talked about in terms a great deal bloodier and more violent than it is for trans men and I just think that’s really interesting (obviously one does not need to experience menarche, bleed during the loss of one’s virginity or lose one’s virginity at all, or go through gender confirmation surgery to be a woman, it’s just that society seems to consider these to be things that are initiatory into womanhood) so like basically whenever I think about stuff that’s supposed to be associated with uteruses and what not… I think there’s pretty much always something that’s like socially analogous that trans women go through and we’re never going to get rid of patriarchy if we don’t acknowledge that.

I feel like the patriarchy insists on pathologizing and sterilizing especially lesbian trans-feminine people

Because they are threatened by possibility of reproduction without men. The idea that trans women are not actually women or that their womanhood is dependent upon their sterility is a way to deny the fact that two women without any outside assistance may reproduce. The idea of autogynephilia is another way to deny the reproductive capacity of women. Reproduction without patriarchal domination scares them. They are terrified by women who without need of donor sperm, can create a child. You’ll note how male pregnancy is regarded as less threatening than impregnation by a woman. I’ve noticed that in media, trans women are only allowed to be bio-mothers if they got someone pregnant before they transitioned and are no longer coupled to the person who bore their children (OITNB, Hit or Miss) .

Hell even the fact that compulsory heterosexuality is stronger for trans women makes sense given this logic.

The transsexual empire is the opposite of what’s going on, gate keeping is patriarchy reluctantly trying to regulate a transgressive womanhood it wishes would just go away. It hopes by forcing trans women to conform to heteropatriarchal standards of womanhood, by sterilizing them, by denying the legitimacy of their womanhood if they refuse to comply with these dictates and making it at best conditional when they do, to cut off the possibility of resistance they represent
www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/02/23/watch-most-trans-europeans-face-nightmare-forced-sterilization-divor

m.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/most-european-countries-force-sterilization-transgender-people-map

This might be a Foucault-y baseless assumption but IDK I feel like I’m onto something

Like The Fact That Reproductive Care Provably Discriminates Against Marginalized People

and denies them access to true reproductive choice (through forced sterilization, discrimination and other nasty bs), is the other side of the coin that closes down clinics and makes the number of hoops one has to jump through to receive an abortion impossible for people without a certain amount of privilege

Both of them are statements of “I know when you should reproduce, not you”

It is an absolute necessity that we seize control over our own reproductive systems from state run institutions.  (also I think the medical gatekeeping done for trans people and trans women in particular may also be a part of this,  because trans women being women participate in social reproduction as women, even if they cannot give birth yet, and because it shares the same quality of state scrutiny of reproduction and choices pertaining to reproduction, for example the mandate that one must be sterilized to have one’s ID changed, is again the state regulating who is not allowed to reproduce, as well as deciding who must be forced to reproduce)

I also think the fact that the eugenics movement featured both positive eugenics (increasing the birthrates of certain groups) and negative eugenics (reducing the birthrates of other groups) is again very telling.  One could very well have a system where abortions are denied to some and forced upon others at the whim of the state, which is essentially what I feel to be happening.

Very few places have outright banned abortion, instead they’ve put in series of hoops one must jump through in order to be allowed one, and left more and more of it up to the discretion of doctors and the like, and you are still seeing forced sterilization of women in the massive American prison system and WOC pressured into sterilization in general, you are still seeing trans people being lied to about their reproductive options.  The curtailing of abortion rights and the regrowth of forced sterilization are not opposed to one another, in fact they are ultimately towards the same end: Control of reproduction being taken from the reproducers and given to bourgeois state authority. 

Maybe I’m outside of my lane here… but I feel like the link between these phenomenons is important.