Woman: A Section of Me |
“Intersectionality is simply about how certain aspects of who you are will increase your access to the good things or your exposure to the bad things in life.”
-Kimberlé Crenshaw
A few months before I was born the Roe vs. Wade ruling gave women governance over their own bodies. And some years prior to that Griswold vs. Connecticut struct down bans on contraception. And some years prior to that Christine Jorgensen began publicly advocating as a transgender woman. So, for my entire life, women have been the determinants of their own destiny in this country as it pertains to controlling what happens to their bodies…until now.
I had to learn through history lessons what restrictions were placed on women prior to those landmark cases. Like, a woman’s husband, or father, had complete dominion over her medical decisions, and in many cases doctors would talk only to them about what needed to be done to her body. Or the horrors of back alley abortions that would sometimes cause women to end up in the hospital anyway and reveal what they were trying to conceal.
It’s unfathomable to believe, as I move into the third quarter of my life, that many areas in this country are running back to those days. And it’s absolutely gut wrenching to watch women leading the charge backwards. Especially when the women who are leading that charge are leading a movement built on misinformation and a political platform that wants nothing more from them than their voting power. I’m sure there are many who truly believe they are doing the work of God; though I’m not sure how they rationalize that while being proponents of guns also, but I digress. Regardless as to what feelings and motivations are driving the “pro-life” movement now, the introduction of it into politics wasn’t centered around doing God’s work. It was introduced to build and energize the voting block of conservative women with an underlying message of preserving the diminishing majority.
Before I move forward in this essay, it’s important to me to point out that abortion is a personal choice I was never able to make. As a scared, unwed woman who had just legally crossed the threshold into adulthood, and was in a turbulent relationship that was sure to fail in the near future, I couldn’t resolve that abortion was the best choice for me.
As I reflect on what it has meant to be a woman in my lifetime, this first fifty years of life has also led me to the understanding that there is one primary emotion that is centric to governing the lives of most women on this planet. Fear. Our responses to that emotion resonates in statistics that show direct correlations between our life expectancy and our relationships with men including: our fathers, our partners, our brothers, our work colleagues, and our societal peers.
When unregulated, fear causes us to cower mentally and physically. We define ourselves as we believe others perceive us. We trust and follow those who rarely hold us in high regard. We mute our voices and instruct our actions to follow the silence.
When harnessed, fear becomes fuel. We protest boisterously. We welcome adversaries and strategize on how to use them to our own advantages. We recognize our strengths and strike mighty blows with it.
Women are masters at harnessing fear into fuel. In the last five decades, the harnessed fear of being regimented to a life out of our control has contributed to the soaring percentage of women in the workforce, along with the growing number of women as elected officials. It is worth mentioning, however, that those soaring numbers are disproportionate for BIPOC and transgender women.
BIPOC and transgender women invented harnessing fear into fuel due to the need of navigating oppression internally in their cultures as well as from external cultures. This is a unique entity that CIS gendered, white women have not had to face historically, because their oppression, in this country, has never been from an external culture. Though there has been a perpetual figment that their virtue is heavily sought by men in other cultures. And though the BIPOC and transgender women’s invention has been used to catapult women forward, the message sent to BIPOC and transgender women over these last five decades is, “You don’t matter.”
As a 50-year-old BIPOC American Queer woman, I only matter because all the women before me mattered.
In this current age of women’s presence in unprecedented spaces, life-altering technology, and an American society transformed by the civil unrest of the 1960s and 70s; I am still a unicorn. Fifty years prior to my life, I was a dream. Fifty years prior that, I was unfathomable.