Trans Liberation in a post roe v. wade world
In a post Roe v. Wade world, transgender individuals’ healthcare and reproduction rights have incurred a death-dealing blow. Roe V. Wade's dismantling has created a ripple effect of anti-trans laws that cripple an already undeserving healthcare system and violently stigmatized ethos toward transgender people. Through a virtue ethic lens in conversation with queer theorist bodily autonomy, this paper will unearth how the American healthcare system is ill equipped to serve transgender persons. By this unearthing, this paper will call in need for communal care and organizing for public policy within church structures that advocate for transgender healthcare, access to reproduction care and spiritual care that uniquely speaks to the trans experience.
How did we get here?
White evangelicalism has its roots buried deep into the systems that spent decades organizing to dismantle Roe V. Wade. In order to discuss reproductive rights, one must name the bodily autonomy of a human’s right to birth and protection is bound by racism. The birth of the Christian right in the 19th Century and its foundation of the Moral Majority, mobilized and formed organizations taking up morally based political causes and lobbying on their behalf in Washington. These “moral” issues were centered in maintaining white supremacy as the dictator over all other bodies. If one moral issue could be won, then white supremacy’s power could grow and become a mainstream viewpoint. This is why such a strong wave of anti-trans laws are being implemented. The door has been opened for other ways to restrict bodily autonomy that threatens the Christian Right’s particular moral framework.
This telos for the Christian Right, as Anthea Butler shares, comes from post-Civil War era efforts to form the Religion of the Lost Cause. The ethos of the reconstruction era movement was to preserve what was being destroyed for the sake of white supremacy and the Church, who played host and continues to play host to its modern day movements - silently, submissively and loudly. America has been at war with its foundation through the unjust systems that do not serve Americans fairly - healthcare being one.
Abortion in America: Do you really want to know the roots?
Reproductive justice is an intersectional justice issue. Reproductive rights are tied to economic security, health care access, class, race, gender and basic human rights. Denial of bodily autonomy within the womb of birthing siblings creates a direct impact to their physical and economic well being. Abortion isn’t new to America. And, as shared above, racism and control of bodily autonomy hosts deep roots of hypocrisy to its legal undoing.
Andrea Ritchie, co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, shares in Saving Our Own Lives the connective pieces of abortion to reproductive rights to the war on bodily autonomy of transgender individuals.
“Immediately after the proclamation of emancipation, Black women just left white homes in droves, where they had been forced to care for white people’s children, engage in reproductive labor for other people and were severely limited in their ability to use their reproductive labor in the way they wanted to, for their own families, or their own lives…they were subject to systemic structural sexual violence that sought complete control of their sexual and reproductive autonomy through forced parenting and abortions. Following legal end of slavery, criminalization facilitated continued control of Black women’s reproductive capacity and autonomy.”
For Ritchie, this argument over whether abortion and reproductive healthcare is justice oriented is the wrong question. The key question and action is disrupting the system’s harm and looking toward liberatory harm reduction. This lens is a theory of justice rooted in queer liberation, which is indeed for all of us.
Liberatory Harm Reduction: A theory of Justice
Gustavo Gutiérrez shares that a justice-based society is created by a feet-on-the ground anchored in the realities of the disenfranchised. “More than ever, it is time to remember that God has given to all humanity what is necessary for its sustenance.” With this in mind, Liberatory Harm Reduction goes to the margins and demands new ways of being. Instead of continuing to respond to crisis, to trauma, to violence, to harm, Liberatory Harm Reduction pulls out the roots of harm and plants something new. Its virtue is rooted in action using real-life strategies to reduce the negative health, legal, and social consequences that result from stigmatized life experiences. Liberatory Harm Reduction believes in total body autonomy and communal care for autonomy.
Without Liberatory Harm Reduction in view, transgender individuals have been and will continue to be erased from this argument over reproductive healthcare. This does not have to be the case. Contrary to belief, the Bible has a lot to say about bodily autonomy.
A Queer Eye for Bodily Autonomy
Invisibility is no stranger to the queer experience. Invisibility is at the forefront of Mark 5:25-34. The vulnerable child who’s name we do not know and is only referred to as “Jairus’ daughter.” Jarius’ partner disappears within the clause of 5:40. They too, are without name, agency or relational presence. I can’t help but think of trans parents who’s birthing risk is already high from lack of access to sound health care and their identity erased by a culture that cannot call them by their names and pronouns while in care. This vulnerable child has zero agency. And here juxtaposed with this vulnerable child, is our trans parent (5:25-34). They too have no name, but they do have agency (5:27) and a voice (5:28) that demand their healing. In fact, our trans parent is the first (woman) character in the Gospel to speak (even if it was just to God). And in their defiance of social order, they reach out and touch Jesus for healing. Demanding through action their birth right to health care and autonomy.
Jesus (vv. 27- 28, 30-31) sees healing through tender touch as more important than state sanctioned death of the trans parent. Jesus’ subversion in being deemed “ritually unclean” has less to do with the body of our trans parent and more to do with state sanctioned laws. A woman’s menstrual status would classify her as ritually, not morally, unclean. “Ritual,” I argue, equates to modern day state sanctioned laws and not a moral view that deems transgender healthcare as impure. Ritual (state sanctioned laws) equates to the oppression and manipulation of human bodies. Michel Foucault, a queer theorist, states, “the soul is the prison of the body.” Jesus’ touching of our trans parent re-embodies the soul of queer and trans individuals to their bodies and corrects pervasively death-dealing ideologies of their existence and the rights to the bodies and choice.
Arguments against & for transgender reproductive health care
Transgender people continue to be deemed invisible in our modern context. Trans siblings experience high rates of discrimination in health care. Twenty-eight percent report facing harassment in medical settings, 19% report being refused medical care due to their identity and 50% report postponing preventive care which encompasses reproductive health care. Because of these discriminations, transgender individuals have alarming suicide rates. The Christian right calls those in favor of trans health care TERFS and considers trans children to be misgendered demons. Flordia's “Don’t Say Gay” bill holds the argument that children cannot be whoever they want to be - or more so, it’s inappropriate for a child to not be male or female.
Returning to Abundance: Communal Care
“Everyone deserves care that honors the dignity and sovereignty of our bodies and our kin.” - Susan Raffo
Returning to abundance means to center our justice ethic lens from a euro-centric scarcity hetro-normative patriarchal view toward a kin-ship truth that our bodies are our own and denial of anyone’s body is denial of the Imago Dei.
Congregations can re-posture themselves away from complicity of harm and practice harm reduction polices and strategies for the betterment of its transgender members and the community. The telos of this practice and advocacy begins with asking: 1.) How can we make sure that transgender humans involved in situations of harm are being taken care of as much as they can be? 2.) How are we demonstrating grace in action? 3.) Is our care relational and in solidarity of the particularities of transgender people? 4.) Are we committed to bodily autonomy that seeks flourishing and choice in the pulpit, in the public square and within our buildings? 5.) How can our buildings become community hubs for harm reductive care?
The church’s response to transgender oppression can be that of Christ in Mark 5. State law does not override God’s creation of unique bodies and choice to those bodies’ experiences. The church can be a care place and in doing so a voice in a sea of hatred.
Cite: Rachael Ward, they/them (@queerinfaith)
Bibliography
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