#if you’re anti surrogacy you HAVE to be pro choice

[theamazingannie]

Conservatives: Surrogacy is WRONG. You are allowing people to BUY a BABY and stealing it away from its MOTHER and putting her through COUNTLESS RISKS because pregnancy is HARMFUL and she gets NOTHING OUT OF IT except LIFELONG INJURIES and her baby STOLEN from her.

Also conservatives: No you cannot get an abortion! You NEED to gestate the baby. No, we don’t care about the risks involved to the birth mother. No we don’t care about the emotional effects of a long pregnancy and then giving away your child. If you don’t want it, just give it away to a loving family who wants it. You never have to think about that baby again and your body will bounce back from the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth. It’s what you are made for! That is your purpose! To birth children!!! (Just as long as it isn’t consensual and you don’t get paid for it.)

[peakblr]

rad asks: 3, 10, 16

ah hey!!!!!! thanks for asking 💕💐 sorry this took so long

3. Are there any parts of radical feminism, or beliefs commonly hold by radical feminists that you strongly disagree with?

im actually having a hard time answering this ahshskshdlska i wrote a really long rambly response but i ended up justifying what i was describing as disagreeing with LOL so like. idk no widely held radfem beliefs are coming to mind, sorry im just as disappointed as you are shdkshdlsjds i hope this doesnt sound sheepish or anything. So i’ll say what i do agree with, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone probably.

i’m anti porn, i think porn should be illegal, should not exist and all of it should be destroyed, pornstars should be given justice and compensated somehow for the govt allowing this shit, and all pornographers should be considered lower than dirt and killed publicly LOL. and i don’t feel bad about that, they don’t feel bad about filming rape and selling it, having the pornstars they abuse lie about how they love it when asked. i feel the same way abt prostitutes and their pimps, that paid consent is not consent and pimps can all drop dead.

i’m all for separatism, no it would not stop men from being men, but it would save women and girls a lot of grief, hurt and scarring.

i think gender isn’t real, is used to oppress women and helps no one, and that id rather it be abolished than exist to validate some people who like gender roles, ackshully.

ive been agnostic for a long time; my mom and my brother are atheists, my dad is a deist. but i will sooner believe that the creator of everything is female, having given birth to the universe than a male. A man’s involvement in creation is his ejaculation. No more, no less. life does not begin in the testicles, or you wouldnt see all this anti abortion stuff, you would see more anti male masturbation stuff–if it weren’t mostly about using women as incubators, lol. that being said i’m pro choice clearly.

i am anti surrogacy, for similar reasons. same sex couples should absolutely be allowed to adopt, but no one has the right to have a baby except the woman who can use her own uterus for her own baby. even with infertile women, there is no justification for paying another women to rent out her uterus.

i currently am not vegan but i admire the ideas behind it, and i see the similarities between how animals and women are treated. i do know however that those who are farming this produce are not necessarily treated well either. disclaimer i know literally jack shit about it so i can’t really speak much for it either way at this moment.

i know there are trans identified, detransitioned or reidentified females who don’t like words like “mutilation” to describe the surgeries they have had to remove their breasts or to alter their privates to mimic penises, and while i don’t insist on mutilation being the word used, i don’t see how it is inaccurate and i find it hard to talk about it in a positive light, less i be endorsing that women get these surgeries to ease their discomfort with their bodies. that being said i don’t want tifs or detransitioned/reidentified women to beat themselves up and constantly regret it. it is not their fault that they were made to be so disconnected from their bodies. they did not want that, and with the trans movement there were not a lot of people telling them that there are other ways besides transitioning to deal with these feelings. i don’t see how this can be hard to believe seeing as we call it the trans cult all the time, which is an accurate name by the way.

i like the alternative spellings of woman and women. womyn, wombyn, wimmin, womxn, a mon, wom or whatever it is. i don’t currently use them myself but i love them and i don’t care how “stupid” you think it is. you know whats stupid??? the words “trans woman,” “trans man,” and “nonbinary.” “Cis woman.” yeah ill take wombyn any day rather than agree that i “identify” as a woman for not subscribing to the transgender religion.

political lesbianism is shitty, i understand some straight women don’t wanna be celibate, but dating lesbians to stick it to the men and not because you love that lesbian is selfish i think. if youre bisexual then you are also not a lesbian but by all means be a febfem or just a bisexual who does not fuck with men.

prostitution will never be empowering. make up, nails, impractical clothes, revealing clothes is not empowering, having men think you are sexy or fuckable is not empowering. you are not “doing it for yourself.” “Poly” relationships are not empowering or woke, making yourself more accessable sexually to men is not empowering in the same way that it empowers men to have sex with multiple women.

idk ive been writing this for a million years but thats some things off the top of my head that i know i Do agree with, i know that wasnt the question but i still wanted to say something lol. i realize now this answered multiple questions from that ask post so im sorry if anyone else thought of asking those things that i answered LOL

10. What’s your relationship with the term “terf”?

ah! i do jokingly call myself that occasionally, you can see it right there on my about page. but in all seriousness it’s horseshit and goes to show how narcissistic the trans movement is. I see people, newly self described radfems who haven’t figured out what the point of it all is, who try to say “there’s a difference between terfs and radfems! You can be radfem and trans inclusive!” or whatever. To which I say, 

these are not two separate groups. Actual radfems are called trans exclusionary because they don’t think men who identify as women can be oppressed by women, and that having been born as a woman is not a privilege, regardless of how that woman identifies. 

radfems aren’t even trans exclusive, really. While there are many detransitioned, reidentified women, there are also many who have transitioned and intend to stay that way, or who are even transitioning currently for their own reasons and comfort, while still confronting their womanhood and how they have been affected or are effected by being a woman in our society as well as how transitioning is dangerous. it’s male exclusive more than anything, and rightfully so. any problems men have are created by other men, and as one user on here put it, feminism should not be “all lives matter.” 

i forgot to say this initially but being “trans inclusive” is interpreted by some to mean “trans endorsing,” that being trans is an innate thing just like homosexuality, that brain sex is real, and that there is nothing wrong with trans identified females getting surgeries they don’t need on perfectly healthy genitals, or getting hormones they otherwise wouldn’t naturally have that have life altering side effects. otherwise i would be called trans exclusive. LOL. so it really does not mean anything, ultimately.

16. How do you feel about the terms TIF/TIM?

i think they’re great. it says exactly what it means. it is much more appropriate than trans man or trans woman, and it makes it easier to talk about them with a little less word salad. the term trans man others tifs from females, and the term trans woman others tims from males. this is problematic. there is nothing differing tifs from females and tims from males outside of the fact that they are trans identified. the only differences they may have are if they have surgically and or hormonally transitioned, but it is not enough difference to make them the opposite sex, nor does it erase male or female socialization, and the benefits or consequences of being a man or a women, respectively. i worded this a lot better when i saved this draft last but tumblr seemingly ate it LOL so thats a drag. but yeah. tif/tim is great. i don’t think it should be offensive, there is nothing insulting or cruel about it. at best it is “invalidating.”

thank you for sending me these!!!! i’m sorry if my answers were unsatisfactory or hard to understand lmao i edited a lot of fluffy blabbering out of my responses believe it or not. i hope you’ve had a great day and that you’re having a lovely night 💌🌻😊

[gehayi]

by Glosswitch

When anti-choice Republican Justin Humphrey referred to pregnant women as “hosts”, I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether everything had got “a bit Handmaid’s Tale.”

I’m not alone in having had this thought. Since Donald Trump won the US election, sales of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel have spiked and we’ve seen a plethora of articles telling us how “eerily relevant [it] is to our current political landscape.” In an interview during Cuba’s international book fair, Atwood herself said she believes the recent “bubbling up” of regressive attitudes towards women is linked to The Handmaid’s Tale’s current success: “It’s back to 17th-century puritan values of New England at that time in which women were pretty low on the hierarchy … you can think you are being a liberal democracy but then — bang — you’re Hitler’s Germany.”

Scary stuff. Still, at least most present-day readers can reassure themselves that they’ve not arrived in the Republic of Gilead just yet.

For those who have not yet read it, The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Offred, who lives under a theocratic dictatorship in what used to be the United States of America. White, middle-class and college-educated, Offred once enjoyed a significant degree of privilege, but now belongs to a class of women whose sole purpose is to gestate offspring for high-status couples. Much of the shock value of the story comes from the contrast between Offred’s former life – in which she had a name of her own - and her present-day existence. If this can happen to someone like Offred, it is suggested, surely it can happen to any of us.

Or so that is what a white, middle-class reader – a reader like me – might tell herself. Recently I’ve started to wonder whether that’s strictly true. It can be reassuring to stick to one narrative, one type of baddie – the religious puritan, the pussy-grabbing president, the woman-hating Right. But what if it’s more complicated than that? There’s something about the current wallowing in Atwood’s vision that strikes me as, if not self-indulgent, then at the very least naive.

In 1985, the same year The Handmaid’s Tale was published, Gina Correa published The Mother Machine. This was not a work of dystopian fiction, but a feminist analysis of the impact of reproductive technologies on women’s liberties. Even so, there are times when it sounds positively Handmaid’s Tale-esque:

“Once embryo transfer technology is developed, the surrogate industry could look for breeders – not only in poverty-stricken parts of the United States, but in the Third World as well. There, perhaps, one tenth of the current fee could be paid to women[.]”

Perhaps, at the time her book was written, Correa’s imaginings sounded every bit as dark and outlandish as Atwood’s. And yet she has been proved right. Today there are parts of the world in which renting the womb of a poor woman is indeed ten times cheaper than in the US. The choice of wealthy white couples to implant embryos in the bodies of brown women is seen, not as colonialist exploitation, but as a neutral consumer choice. I can’t help wondering why, if the fate of the fictional Offred is so horrifying to western feminists today, the fate of real-life women in surrogacy hostels is causing so little outrage.

I suppose the main argument of these feminists would be that real-life women choose to be surrogates, whereas Offred does not. But is the distinction so clear? If Offred refuses to work as a handmaid, she may be sent to the Colonies, where life expectancy is short. Yet even this is a choice of sorts. As she herself notes, “nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. There wasn't a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.” In the real world, grinding poverty drives women of colour to gestate the babies of the wealthy. As one Indian surrogate tells interviewer Seemi Pasha, “Why would I be a surrogate for someone else if I don't need the money? Why would I make myself go through this pain?"

None of the feminists who expressed shock at Justin Humphrey referring to pregnant women as “hosts” have, as far as I am aware, expressed the same horror at surrogacy agencies using the exact same term. As Dorothy Roberts wrote in Killing The Black Body, the notion of reproductive liberty remains “primarily concerned with the interests of white, middle-class women” and  “focused on the right to abortion.” The right not just to decide if and when to have children, but to have children of one’s own – something women of colour have frequently been denied – can be of little interest of those who have never really feared losing it (hence the cloth-eared response of many white women to Beyoncè’s Grammy performance).

As Roberts notes, “reproductive liberty must encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy”:

“It must encompass the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child, and it must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice.”

It’s easy to mock the pretensions to pro-life piety of a pussy-grabbing president. But what about the white liberal left’s insistence that criticising the global trade in sexual and gestational services is “telling a women what she can and cannot do with her body” and as such is illiberal and wrong? “Individual choice” can be every bit as much of a false, woman-hating god as the one worshipped by the likes of Humphrey and Trump.

One of the most distressing scenes in The Handmaid’s Tale takes place when Janine/Ofwarren has just given birth and has her child taken from her:

“We stand between Janine and the bed, so she won’t have to see this. Someone gives her a drink of grape juice. I hope there’s wine in it, she’s still having the pains, for the afterbirth, she’s crying helplessly, burnt-out miserable tears.”

Right now there are women suffering in just this way. Only they’re probably not white, nor middle-class, nor sitting in a twee white bedroom in Middle America. Oh, and they’re not fictional, either.

The dystopian predictions of 1985 have already come true. It’s just that women like me didn’t notice until we started to be called “hosts”, too.