I was going to start this post by saying it’s terrifying to be a woman right now, but then I remembered it’s terrifying to be anything but a straight white dude right now, so there’s that, I guess.
I knew I didn’t want kids, so I tried to get permanently sterilized the last time a Republican was in office, and couldn’t manage it. Too young, didn’t have kids, doctors wouldn’t do it. 🙄 I was in my thirties and Obama was in office before I could finally find a doctor I could talk into a sterilization procedure. And even then I had to sign a waver promising not to sue him “when” I changed my mind.
There are a lot of birth control options out there, but the way things are going? I wouldn’t settle for anything less than a permanent option. The way some of these bills are written outlaw all kinds of birth control – even IUDs.
Every day I wake up glad I had that shit sorted out permanently. Every single day.
There’s a few laws like this one ☝️☝️☝️ floating around various states’ congresses, too, laws criminalizing “false reports” of rapes. Which, y’know, on its surface sounds okay, right? Like, obviously it should be illegal to falsely accuse someone of rape. Sure. Except it already is? Making a false police report is already illegal. You don’t need an extra law for this.
Y’know, unless you’re one of these turds who think women just go happy-assing around falsely accusing men of rape eight times a day. Which is not a thing that happens, by the way. Rape is wildly underreported because it’s so damn difficult to get a conviction and the process is, itself, traumatizing. False rape accusations are pretty damn rare. This is not, as far as anyone sensible can tell, actually a problem.
What is a problem, what the point of these laws are, is a lot of men being super mad about women getting all uppity and thinking we ought to have rights and be treated like actual human beings, and maybe be able to get through a whole day without some entitled asshat groping us or harassing us at work, or catcalling us, or raping us, or telling us what we can do with our own damn bodies.
Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I hear a lot of centrists complaining about the emphasis on identity politics on the left. “It’s going to cost us the election,” they say. But in case you’re not aware, it is goddamn terrifying out here if you’re not a straight white man. Every single day I get up and read a new story about dicks in congress trying to take my rights away, about black women dying during childbirth because doctors won’t treat them as well as white women, about black guys getting shot in the street by cops, about brown kids getting ripped away from their parents and held in cells and dying preventable deaths because ICE assholes on the border can’t see non-white people as human, about LGBT+ people dying for any of a million reasons because straight people hate them, about non-white people losing their votes.
I am a straight white woman with a ton of privilege living in a fairly blue state, and I am out here scared to death of what these fuckers are going to do to me. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be LGBT+ and/or non-white right now. I’m amazed they’re leaving their houses and getting about their lives at all. All I want to do is hide under the bed until there’s a Democrat in office.
So you want me to trust a man in public office? Dude I don’t know. You’re asking for a lot. You want me to set aside identity politics, act like it’s not important? That’s crazy talk. Any Democrat is probably better than a Republican in office right now, and I guess I’ll have to vote that way regardless of who ends up getting the nod, but you better believe identity politics are at the top of my To-Do List right now. You better believe it’s at the top of a lot of To-Do Lists right now. Ignoring that and acting like it isn’t important is going to bite us right in the ass.
