What Being Pro Choice Really Means

Agree sineed, seems weird to me too, as there is just no compare.

Sineed wrote:

RTTG, I support your right to physically reflect the gender you feel you were born, and would never restrict the access of any MTF to spironolactone, etc.  But women have been dying in childbirth for millennia, and dying from botched abortions for at least hundreds of years.  When my mother was a young nurse, she remembers, before abortion was legalized, there were entire wards full of women with massive pelvic infections subsequent to their being butchered in their desperation to avoid carrying a pregnancy to term.  And speaking of a lack of choice, there's the women who get pregnant from rape, so they have the potential double whammy of denied choice, forced to have sex against their will, and then forced to bear a child against their will.

So there's the right to reflect the gender to which a person feels they were born.  And there's the reproductive rights for which women fought hard for in this country, and eventually won.  And these are entirely separate things, see?  RTTG, I respectfully request you do not conflate the two.

You will forgive me, but I think Kimberly Nixon, for one, can speak much more accurately than I can about issues of rape, intersectionality and how women's rights ought not just extend to the fertile. I'd come back with statistics but, the perception still exists that being openly trans is dangerous, sometimes physically, but much more often socially and professionally, so that most who transition disappear from view, so I have no numbers  with levels of accuracy that I would be comfortable using on the incidence of rape, or murder, or butcherous medical treatment of trans women. We fall into the fallacy of economists like myself: If we are immeasurable, we probably don't exist, and definitely don't factor into decisions.

I will continue to assert my section 7 rights are just as worthy of respect as any cis woman's, that to call one's self pro-life, one cannot believe society's obligation to life ends with a requirement of pregnancy to term, that one must then support that life, through a reasonably wide range of sectors of society. The same applies to pro-choice. One must deal with the full implications of that choice, or use modifiers to state the parameters of your desire to fight for choice over one's body only in the sector of pregnancy. Women still, for example, don't have full reproductive choice in Canada, are denied tubal ligations, and other medical treatments which put their own comfort and safety above their fertility, often, in the case of some women, even after multiple unwanted and physically dangerous pregnancies, because society clings to a notion of a functional person as being fertile.

Perhaps it's because I live these issues, but I see little to separate these rights except the unwillingness to acknowledge our genders and our agency with precisely the same validity of the cis. That on some level, my gender is not a core, and biological fact; that it is some sort of hobby, which I may be indulged in, instead of something that people have been correcting for at least since 'male' pagan priestesses rode pregnant mares through Europe centuries ago.