What is now known as LGBT rights have firmly taken precedence over women’s rights. In 2021, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood, an organisation originally established to provide women with contraception, wrote an apology in the New York Times, saying Planned Parenthood had focused “too narrowly on ‘women’s health’, we have excluded trans and non-binary people”.
It makes me want to smash things. “Too narrowly.” Imagine BLM saying “We’ve focused too narrowly on Black people” – saying it and apologizing for it. Imagine trans people saying they’ve focused too narrowly on trans people…and apologizing for it. It’s only women who are expected to go hungry while the real people eat.
(“What we don’t want to be, as an organisation, is a Karen,” Johnson added, for good measure.)
It makes me want to smash all the things and then set fire to them.
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4 responses to “Precedence”
Nice article by Ursula Le Guin that I came acroes today:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html
Maybe you all knew about it before, but it was new to me.
and so on for several paragraphs.
I used to donate to my local PP; I have even joined in protests in support of the organization when they were under threat of being defunded. Times have changed, though, as this demonstrates. Women–especially poor women in underserved areas–still need the same reproductive health care; that need hasn’t just gone away. And yet PP now thinks that they need to reassign resources to give hormones to children and to “counsel them on the options” for sterilizing surgeries.
They still regularly call me to ask for more, but I give them an earful, and that’s all. (The same or similar earful that I give to the ACLU now.)
That’s a good article, except for the lumping in of the T with LGB. It’s not the LGB movement that’s at odds with feminism, it’s the T. In fact T is largely at odds with LGB as well, as we have seen. T is not a sexual orientation, it’s a gender presentation. It’s so entrenched now to use LGBT that I doubt it can ever be separated. Maybe if feminists did the same thing, start calling it LGBF, they would see how inconsistent it is. Frustrating.
James, I did, too. And volunteered for them. I was actualty proud of my role. Escorting is still needed, but I’ve been finding it difficult to get back into the mindset for it, even though it’s not likely that I’ll end up shielding anyone who is there for “trans care.”
It’s just that, and especially with that “Karens” reference, it’s really hard to put out for an organization with a record of service to women yet now aligns with a misogynistic social movement.