In an unexpected development, The Nation published a reasonable, intelligent article:
Abortion funds, which offer help paying for an abortion when Medicaid or insurance won’t, have become a thriving hub of grassroots feminism. They draw hundreds of activists, young and old, to donate countless hours to provide direct service and advocate for better funding for abortion. In the past few years, a number of the funds have quietly removed references to “women” from their messaging in order to be more welcoming to trans men and others who do not identify as women but can still become pregnant.
Oh, Lordy. Yes, let’s flush reproductive rights down the toilet in the name of a weird fear of using the word “women.” There is obviously no greater danger to abortion rights today that the word “women.” Just saying it aloud makes reproductive rights whither and die.
I’m going to argue here that removing “women” from the language of abortion is a mistake. We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant.
It’s not just a mistake. It is absolutely egregious that mentioning women and using the word “vagina” now has to be censored. The assault on reproductive rights victimizes women. Period. If anybody is upset by that, they should call their representative in the Congress and express their outrage about the rollback of reproductive rights. It’s not the word “women” that’s the problem.
It is very curious how nobody is in any hurry to get rid of the word “men” in order to prove how inclusive and intersectional they are. In my Spanish classes, I routinely outrage students when I tell them that if an a group of a billion women there is a single man, according to the rules of the Spanish grammar that entire group becomes male. Every time I deliver this statement, there is an outburst of anger in the classroom that I use to direct the conversation to the issues of sexism. But it seems like there are people who believe this is not just an archaic language rule from an enormously sexist culture. For some, this is an attractive approach to reality.
There has not been a greater obstacle to gender equality than women’s incapacity to control their reproduction. For millennia, this has been THE problem women everywhere encountered on the road to freedom. Just like the message of “Black lives matter” should not be watered down by the ridiculous “All lives matter” response, the message of “Women’s reproductive rights matter” should be allowed to exist on its own:
Once you start talking about “people,” not “women,” you lose what abortion means historically, symbolically and socially. It becomes hard to understand why it isn’t simply about the right to life of the “unborn.” After all, men get pregnant too!
If it’s OK for several major languages to refer to a group as masculine just because there is a single man among a billion women, then I’m sure the world won’t end if, in the context of reproductive rights, a couple of men have to “suffer” the intolerable burden of being called women.
The war on the word “women” goes to extreme lengths and ends up twisting itself into hugely idiotic contortions. If there is a difference between this position and the tantrums idiot MRAs throw because the word “feminism” makes them feel queasy, I’m failing to see it:
One organization tweeted that one in three “people” has had an abortion—actually, if we’re talking about people, it’s more like one in six. When the actress and feminist advocate Martha Plimpton organized an abortion-fund benefit lightheartedly named “Night of a Thousand Vaginas,” some activists were outraged, because some trans men don’t like that word (“birth canal” or “front hole” are favored alternatives to the V-word). Trans men should refer to their genitalia however they like, but it’s hard not to feel that there’s something seriously awry when women, who only got to call their genitals by the proper term in public a decade or so ago, are supposed to stop naming them in order to avoid offense.
The sulky narrative of “hurt feelings” is once again trumping the really desperate need for genuine political activism.
But thank you, The Nation, for finally publishing a meaningful article. Maybe I will renew that subscription after all.
Clarissa's Blog 
I really, really don’t know.
Any term broad enough to include everyone is broad enough to be meaningless and any term specific enough reduces people to their parts. “If you are pregnant or pregnancy capable, please feel free to call this hotline?”
[Front hole? Why don’t you just call it “down there”? ]
On a major feminist discussion board many many years ago, threads about trans men never failed to devolve into pages and pages of attacks about everything anybody ever did wrong. I remember one poetry professor would just write these multi-paragraph essays on her every post and I wondered how the hell she managed to do anything at her job.
LikeLike
“Any term broad enough to include everyone is broad enough to be meaningless and any term specific enough reduces people to their parts. “If you are pregnant or pregnancy capable, please feel free to call this hotline?””
“Front hole? Why don’t you just call it “down there”?”
LikeLike
My apologies. I should clarify. I just feel like it’s hugely offensive to be vague or cute about genitalia in a health related context. People can call their genitals whatever they want, but if a health professional started doing that, without my prompting, I’d be pissed off. I was reacting to the parentheses in the your original quote.
LikeLike
The real problem with this logic is that it assumes that anti-choice politicians and “activists” are motivated by some nebulous dislike of a particular set of genitals, instead of naming their anti-choice politic for what it is: Grotesque misogyny and a desire to control and subjugate women and keep them from having social, political and economic freedom. Gender neutral-language about reproductive health and genitals is useful in say, healthcare, but in the political sphere and when discussing reproductive justice history, it’s downright counterproductive.
I’ve got a lot of really weird stories of students acting like material is oppressive or wrong and shouldn’t be taught ever if it focuses too much on women. The worst one was when we were reading Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic”. Having a white majority class say that the work of a black lesbian was “exclusionary” and “oppressive” was a doozy for me.
LikeLike
“The worst one was when we were reading Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic”. Having a white majority class say that the work of a black lesbian was “exclusionary” and “oppressive” was a doozy for me.”
LikeLike
This kind of behaviour almost seems like laziness disguised as a zeal for purity. Why bother analyzing the work if you feel like you don’t owe it any respect since it doesn’t perfectly fit your 21st century North American western manufactured worldview that you believe was immaculately conceived to be the ultimate paragon of ideological correctness?
LikeLike
The yardstick in these discussions seems to be, “Does this text make me vaguely uncomfortable for reasons I don’t feel like exploring?” If the answer is yes, the text is dismissed as bad, wrong, oppressive, boring, etc. Of course, all of the good, useful texts do have the capacity to disturb. Dismissing everything that feels uncomfortable means eliminating any opportunity for critical engagement with a text.
LikeLike
There needs to be some sort of pedagogy book written on how to convey the message “Learning is uncomfortable. Get used to it.”
I got accepted to the Master’s Program at the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice today, so maybe I can write it after I graduate. 😀 (shameless self-celebration)
LikeLike
Wow, that’s amazing news!!! This is definitely cause to celebrate.
You will SO enjoy grad school. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!
LikeLike
Congrats! This is a time for shameless self-celebration! 🙂
LikeLike
That’s awesome!!! Congratulations, Leah!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
LikeLike
Congratulations!
LikeLike
I couldn’t agree more. The fact that “woman” and “vagina” have somehow become politically incorrect is monstrous. Women have just recently been able to utter the word vagina without reddening with shame and now that ( biological) word is politically incorrect? Insane.
The first time I experienced something like this I was on a “natural health” internet forum to look up some suggestions for non-pharmaceutical remedies for a menstrual issue I was experiencing. At any rate, a knowledgeable woman posted a very helpful entry about this very issue and in that entry she said something to the effect of “this is for all the ladies out there who experience xxx”. She proceeded to offer her very practical and safe advice. (Advice that worked for me I might add.) But she was absolutely excoriated on this forum. She was called sexist, misogynist, hoomephobic, transphobic, a “fake feminist”, and other terrible names because she used “exclusionary” language in her post; it’s “not only women who have menstrual periods!!!” her accusers declared in all caps.
It honestly took me about 15 minutes to understand this. I started doubting my abilities to understand the English language because I just didn’t get how it was offensive to say women had menstrual cycles. Finally it dawned on me that trans men could still have a menstrual cycle. But with all due respect to that community, it’s still a small percentage of the human beings who experience menstrual cycles. And the vast majority of women have vaginas and sometimes have very practical medical reasons for talking about the experience of possessing one. Ridiculous.
LikeLike
“It honestly took me about 15 minutes to understand this. I started doubting my abilities to understand the English language because I just didn’t get how it was offensive to say women had menstrual cycles. Finally it dawned on me that trans men could still have a menstrual cycle. ”
LikeLike