Reproductive Rights In The Time Before 'Gender'
When women were a sex class and they did not apologize
“Sex: Just The Facts” was a double gate fold pamphlet produced by Alabama Reproductive Rights Advocates (ARRA) in 2014. Reading it is like taking a step backwards in time to an epoch where women were understood as a sex class rather than a gender-feeling that only exists in the heads of men.
Founded by Elizabeth Potter Graham, a now-retired Birmingham attorney in her 70s, the organization appears to be defunct. ARRA stopped updating their website in 2017. The X account stopped posting in June 2024, while the last update on the ARRA Facebook page was a note about Costco providing Plan B in December 2024. Ms. Graham remains active on Bluesky under her own name.
Though I do not specifically recall an encounter, I may have met Ms. Graham during my reporting in the abortion clinic defense world. I encountered ARRA’s pamphlet at the POWER House located next door to the Reproductive Services of Alabama (RSA) clinic in Montgomery the same year it was printed. By happenstance, I recently discovered it in a sheaf of collected political literature.
“Sex: Just The Facts” would immediately get denounced as ‘transphobia’ today. It baldly refers to the vagina as a female organ and the penis as a male organ. Eggs are female, sperm is male. “Some women experience spotting and cramping” during their menstruation cycle. None of this would pass modern inspection.
Rather than satisfying the needs of the writer, the text is intended to be easy for a semi-literate woman to read, avoiding long or compound sentences. No ‘trans-friendly’ euphemisms — ‘uterus-haver’, ‘cervix-owner’, ‘people with penises’ — appear anywhere in the pamphlet. People are men and women, male and female.
All five abortion services locations in the state of Alabama at the time are listed alongside six rape counseling and support services. Across from these resources are one-paragraph explanations of available birth control methods and the symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases.
Read from a distance of 12 years, “Sex: Just The Facts” is a striking reminder of how much the reproductive rights movement has changed. Well before the Supreme Court Dobbs decision loomed in 2022, advocates were already switching to ‘inclusive’ language. ‘Trans men’ and ‘nonbinary people’ need abortions too, goes the argument.
It is a polite fiction that creates confusion. After all, the reason that trans- and nonbinary-identifying women might want access to abortion services is that they are female, whatever they call themselves. Exactly zero men have ever sought an abortion for themselves.
Efforts to avoid this reality strain logic for the sake of supposed kindness. For example, the ACLU acknowledges that “cis women” have abortions, and “the average person who gets an abortion is a woman of color who is already a mother and who lives at or below the federal poverty level.”
Nevertheless, it is allegedly “more expansive and more accurate” to make “non-binary people, some intersex people, some Two Spirit people, and some trans men” feel included by pretending that men can get pregnant, too. This change was deliberate and forced by activists.
“When conversations about abortion reduce it to a ‘women’s issue’ or an issue only for people who can carry pregnancies, we exclude a wide swath of people.” Slogans such as “no uterus, no opinion” can make men feel sad that they have no uterus. (Misspelling is original:)
There is a tendency to exclude men, without an acknowledgment that some trans men can become pregnant and despite the fact that cisgender men are not the only people who can’t become pregnant. Trans women, cisgender women who struggle with infertilty [sic] , some intersex people, some trans men, some non-binary people, and some Two Spirit people all cannot become pregnant.
It is no longer acceptable to refer to reproductive organs instead of ‘women’, either. “Never assume how someone refers to their body or body parts”, the Transgender Law Center advises journalists. “For example, many trans people refer to their genitals in different ways that are more gender-affirming than mainstream, limited definitions.”
Instead, the entire list of identities should be included in every statement alongside ‘cis women’. This “expansive” and “inclusive” language is supposed to strengthen the defense of reproductive rights rather than confuse readers and bloat text. Meanwhile, abortion access has not improved in Alabama, nor have abortion rights been secured nationally.
The magic words have not worked. They have only made the reproductive rights community look insane to normal people, such as the poor women of color who disproportionately seek abortions. Understanding that this would discredit the entire project was the single biggest impetus behind my departure from the Democratic Party and progressive politics.
Produced one year before Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn to global acclaim from the left, “Sex: Just The Facts” was quickly obsolete and its language soon became unacceptable. A decade after its publication, Democrats leaned on the abortion issue and bet everything on the support of female voters, losing to Donald Trump.
The ‘party of women’ was no longer able to say what a woman is, and women noticed. We are still living with the consequences.
I still listen to NPR in the car, and it drives me nuts when they do a story about abortion access and talk about the number of “people” crossing state lines to get abortions. Guess what? Every single one of those “people” is a woman. And it’s not just the NPR hosts using the terminology, it’s many of the individuals they interview (doctors, advocates, what have you) as well. All captured.
Or the bit I heard yesterday about an outbreak of whooping cough, which poses a particular risk to “infants and pregnant people.”
Sigh.
From "The Reckoning:"
But, but, but…what about abortion? I know. I get it. I have been in favor of abortion rights since I wrote a letter to Tip O’Neill in eighth grade, asking him to scrap the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits the expenditure of Medicaid funds on abortion). I did abortion clinic defense in college, where I locked arms with women (and some men) who were protecting access to clinics from anti-abortion demonstrators. In law school, I volunteered at the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (which now champions the rights of men with woman identities over women themselves). My support for abortion has never wavered and it never will. But please understand that the Democrats cannot be counted on to protect abortion rights. President Barack Obama is on record in 2009 saying that protecting abortion rights was not a legislative priority for his administration. The Democrats in Congress had fifty years to codify Roe v. Wade into law and they didn’t do it.
What’s more, abortion rights supporters on the left (including some women) are handing Republicans the talking point that “abortion is not a women’s rights issue.” Feminists have always maintained that abortion is a women’s rights issue. Yet, in 2022, anti-abortion Republican Senator Josh Hawley sparred with University of California at Berkeley law professor Khiara M. Bridges over whether it is. During a hearing on a proposal to codify Roe into law, Bridges had referred to “people with a capacity for pregnancy.” Hawley asked, “Would that be women?” Her response was that “many cis women have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.” This presented the perfect opportunity for Hawley to retort, “So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue?” She had no answer other than to accuse him of “transphobia.”
...
In fighting for abortion rights, feminists often chant slogans like “no uterus, no opinion.” The point we are making is that men, who will never face the choice of whether to terminate a pregnancy, should have no say in the abortion debate. Seth Dillon is an anti-abortion conservative and a comedian, and the chief executive of the satire magazine The Babylon Bee. In 2022, after the decision overturning Roe was leaked, he posted, “You can’t say ‘no uterus, no opinion’ anymore. You gave that up when you said trans women are women.” He wasn’t wrong. The category of people who are colloquially referred to as “trans women” are men. Not a single “trans woman” (man) has a uterus. If, as many on the left like to insist, “trans women are women,” then every single one of them should have the right to an opinion about abortion, notwithstanding the absence of a uterus. Because of women who regularly claim that “trans women are women,” the left has given Republicans the talking point “You can’t say ‘no uterus, no opinion’ anymore.” The left literally handed the right these arguments to make in their advocacy against abortion. At the end of the day, we cannot protect women’s right to abortion if we cannot name women as a sex class. The right knows this, and they will not stop using the left’s nonsensical arguments against us. The left, in other words, is helping the right further erode abortion rights.