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You Can’t Fight Patriarchy Without Fighting Transphobia
Reproductive rights, women’s rights, and transgender rights are not competing for causes — they are one and the same
Transgender rights are reproductive rights, and vice versa. It’s a connection that is not stressed often enough in a world where cis women and trans people are pitted against each other by bad-faith liberals and bathroom-obsessed conservatives alike. Yet nothing could be clearer — as witnessed by recent legislation, here and abroad, that aims not just to define women purely as bearers of children, but to prohibit trans people from building families at all.
The most recent proposed legislation comes from Utah. The so-called Vital Statistics Act Amendment is intended to prohibit transgender people from changing their gender on their birth certificate. This in itself is a civil rights issue — trans people often need to change that documentation so they don’t get outed every time they’re carded at a bar or pulled over by a traffic cop. However, in forcing trans people to identify with their “birth gender,” Utah legislators were forced to clarify what they believe gender to be. A woman, as first reported by Imani Gandy on Twitter, is defined as an individual born with genitals that “appear to have the purpose of performing the natural…
