Trans Awareness Week
It’s Trans Awareness Week, a time to raise up the trans community, offer education and advocate for trans rights and issues.
According to Stats Canada, transgender people are more likely to have experienced inappropriate behaviours in public, online and at work than cisgender people, and in the United States we have witnessed a recent onslaught of transphobic legislation (more than any point in US history) to restrict the lives of trans people. Meanwhile TERFS (trans exclusionary radical feminists) have grown louder in public anti-trans rhetoric, forcing trans folks to deal with the toxic debate over whether their identities are real.
At Choice in Health we recognize that trans, gender-non binary, gender non-confirming and gender diverse people are experts on their own identities and health, and abortion providers must continue to evolve in making their policies and practices inclusive. At CIHC, we have eliminated exclusionary hiring policies that once required all personnel to identify as women, and educated ourselves on using gender neutral language in all of our documentation and discussions. Our intake forms invite clients to share their pronouns, and we have committed to treating it as a serious disciplinary issue when staff fail to respect the information they provide.
While second-wave feminists often established spaces like CIHC as “women’s clinics,” it’s time to expand our language, and our culture’s narrative about who abortion care is for. Including gender diverse people in abortion care language does not detract from women’s experiences, and this popular TERF rhetoric is a poor front for transphobia and transmisogyny. According to AC Facci of the American Civil Liberties Union “When trans people articulate the need for access to abortion services, or that we have accessed abortion care in the past, these experiences are often dismissed by those who want to deny that more people than just cisgender women need abortion. But we’re here, we’ve been here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
We want to amplify trans voices and experience in abortion and reproductive health care in our stories this week. We’ll highlight some of the amazing trans artists, activists, educators and organizations working in our community. Supporting the rights of trans and non-binary people in abortion care means listening to their perspectives, and showing up everyday to provide inclusive, non-judgemental, affirmative services to anyone who can get pregnant.