By Rose L, aka Rosenriot
Let it be known, I did everything I was supposed to do.
2017 was a different time. I still thought I was cis. I did not want children. I knew I wasn’t fit to be a mother. I have health conditions that I didn’t ever want passed down. I was abstinent at the time, but had been previously sexually assaulted. I knew getting pregnant wasn’t going to always be my decision.
So I did the responsible thing and I pursued sterilization. I went to my OBGYN, who had cared for me for the prior 10 years. The nurse came in to see me, and asked me about the nature of my visit. I told her I wanted sterilization. I’d done my research. I was sure. The nurse smiled and said, “I can’t imagine that being an issue. The doctor is a huge feminist.” I was so relieved.
The doctor came in. She sat down and proceeded to lecture me on what a disastrous procedure I was considering. What if I changed my mind? What would my future husband think? What if my inability to bear a child affected my desirability?
I was crushed. But I persisted. There were other doctors. I was eventually able to find a doctor willing to perform a sterilization on me. A male doctor, in fact, who only asked me three questions: Was I sound of body? Yes. Was I sound of mind? Debatable but yes. And did I want this? Absolutely, yes. A month later, I received a tubal ligation and uterine ablation, the latter being a doctor recommendation to ease my period, as I would no longer have use for a menstrual cycle.
But again, 2017 was a different time. Republicans had not yet started proposing total abortion bans. So when my doctor warned me that I would have an increased risk of ectopic pregnancy from my procedure, I didn't even blink an eye. I was so naive then.
Since getting my procedure, 14 states have passed total abortion bans. These bans not only criminalize abortions, they often conflate ectopic pregnancies with viable fetuses. The truth is that ectopic pregnancy by definition is not viable, as the fertilized egg plants itself outside of the womb. Ectopic is also medically and factually an abortion.
Lately Republicans have tried to redefine abortion to not include cases of rape, incest, and life-threatening medical conditions such as ectopic pregnancies. When being questioned by Rep. Ayanna Pressley about ectopic pregnancies, Erin Hawley, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, a known hate-group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, used such rhetoric: “That’s not an abortion because it does not have the intent to end the life of the child.” This misunderstands abortion: abortion is not subject to intent. It is objectively a medical procedure, and a safe one at that.
Abortion bans often prohibit doctors from prescribing methotrexate in the early stages of an ectopic pregnancy to abort the unviable egg and to save the pregnant person. Without early intervention, an ectopic pregnancy can result in hemorrhage, sepsis, or organ failure. These can only be prevented by abortive surgery, a surgery doctors are now terrified to perform for fear it will violate their state’s abortion laws. These laws put doctors in the position of going to prison for saving a pregnant person’s life. It puts the pregnant person in the position of dying, waiting on the operating table for help that will never come.
I did everything right in 2017, but Republicans would still have me and others like me dead. They’ve consistently moved the goalposts of what is acceptable behavior for people with uteruses, pushing it farther and farther to outlaw exceptions for ectopic pregnancy, to outlaw exceptions for incest, to outlaw exceptions for rape, to outlaw contraception, to make sure that everyone with a uterus slowly but surely loses their bodily autonomy.
But Republicans didn’t stop there. When I came out as trans and nonbinary in 2019, I was still in the state of Tennessee. There were only a handful of doctors willing to prescribe Hormone Replacement Therapy, or HRT, a treatment I wished to pursue in my transition. At least when I found a doctor for my sterilization, I only had to wait a month. For HRT, the waitlists for these doctors were years long, with spots only opening up as trans patients moved away or passed away, either of old age or by their own hand. And many did pass away by their own hand, as increasingly oppressive laws around trans people passed left and right without any consideration for their quality of life or existence.
And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Our right to exist, autonomous, as we are, as we choose to be.
I hear controversy in the pro-choice movement about using terms like “pregnant people” or “people with uteruses” and whether trans people deserve to be included or considered the same way as cis women are in this struggle. But the fact of the matter is, when we’re in the hospital, and I’m bleeding out from an ectopic pregnancy, and you’re giving birth to a child you were forced to have because there were no abortion clinics in your area, it’s not going to matter that you’re cis and I’m trans; that you’re a woman, and I’m not. It’s going to matter that we had wombs and we tried to use them in ways that were unacceptable to the heteronormative cisnormative patriarchal establishment.
Trans or cis, our bodily autonomies are intertwined. Our right to exist unyielding is intertwined. It might be easy for you, if you are a cishet ally, to think that the shooting at Club Q doesn’t affect you. That bills like SB49 aka the “Don’t Say Gay” bill have nothing to do with you. That drag shows being protested by Proud Boys are a problem, but not your problem. But my people, queer and trans people, are canaries in the coal mine. If you think violence against abortion clinics and feminist spaces won’t increase too, if you think violence in general will not increase, you haven’t been paying attention. Any deviation from the path that Conservative Evangelical fascists would prescribe to you will be met with extreme violence.
In just the last few months I have watched my fellow drag performers, of all genders, be targeted by hate groups. I myself was targeted by Libs of TikTok for a drag brunch I wasn’t even in, a drag brunch that Proud Boys showed up to, heavily armed, threatening my fellow performers. I watched a livestream of Proud Boys protesting Naomi Dix in Moore County, before shooting up a power station and cutting electricity to an entire population for days on end. After Club Q, I attended the Trans Day of Remembrance Vigil in Raleigh and spoke the name “Daniel Davis Aston”, a bartender at Club Q, before major news outlets had even grabbed hold of his name. I learned he was one of the victims through a drag performer I knew from Colorado Springs. That drag performer said when he moved to Colorado Springs, Daniel was the first friend he made there, and Daniel even helped him obtain top surgery. Daniel’s mother said his death is “a nightmare that you can't wake up from.”
We are about to be in that neverending nightmare, too. Violence will increase against all marginalized peoples. No longer is this a fight for women’s rights or trans rights. In fact, our greatest mistake was ever thinking these fights were separate. The struggles of all those marginalized and targeted by Conservatives and Christo-Fascism are united. They will not stop until trans and queer people are dead or conforming, they will not stop until women are dead or conforming, they will not stop until Black people are dead or conforming, they will not stop.
So it’s time for us to begin. It’s time for us to embrace the intersectional approach they know will defeat them, that they try everything to dissuade. If we continue to fight this fight separately, we will not survive.
NC Triangle DSA has several ways to get involved with the intersectional fight facing us. The Socialist Feminist Working Group is making headway on shutting down a local Crisis Pregnancy Center, aka Anti-Abortion Center, via pickets and escalations. The Queer and Trans Solidarity Working Group is focusing on building mutual aid support networks for Queer folk in the Triangle to rely on whether the federal or state governments are blue or red or fallen. These, and several other Working Groups, fall under our chapter’s Priority Campaign, a resolution voted on by our chapter to increase our focus on bodily autonomy issues.
We must unite. We must realize that many of us here are both oppressed and oppressor, and to unlearn the systems of supremacy that make us perpetuate harm into our communities. We must learn how to protect ourselves, to heal ourselves, to create the skills that help us cultivate safety.
The time for awareness is over. The time for action is now.
About the Author:
Rose L (they/them), also known by their drag persona ROSENRIOT, is a member of NCTDSA, activist, and queer performer living and working in Central NC. They’ve lived in the South for over half their life, and can be found working on sewing and craft projects in places you wouldn’t expect sewing or crafting to occur.