It’s always the time for solidarity

[Note: HB originally wrote this as part of our July 2022 newsletter]

As I was driving back to Brattleboro recently, I was listening to Vermont Public (Radio)’s broadcast of the NYTimes podcast The Daily. The main story featured lawyer Nancy Sterns, who had a precursor case to Roe v. Wade in New York State in 1969-70. Her case ended up being superseded by a change in NY law in favor of abortion access before it traveled up the judicial chain. 

In this interview, Nancy cited what she was describing as a serious injustice at the time of her case: the need for people seeking an abortion to receive letters from two psychiatrists verifying they were going to end their own life in order to access an abortion. Nancy says: “Abortion was prohibited in New York, except to save the life of the woman. It was one of the stricter ones…But if you had the money to pay for two psychiatrists to say you were going to kill yourself if you were pregnant and had to carry the fetus to term, then you could get a legal abortion.”

I was struck. YES. That is awful. AND this is exactly (some of) what trans and nonbinary people currently have to go through to access basic, life-saving, life-affirming healthcare. Letters from multiple specifically credentialed professionals who can “verify” that we should be permitted to receive the kind of care we are seeking. That is true here in Vermont and across the country.

I thought: what an opportunity for solidarity among cis women who are rightly fearing the lack of access to care and trans and nonbinary people for whom this type of experience is already a daily reality!

It is made plain to listeners of this episode of The Daily that this way of accessing care was indeed a serious barrier and should be nearly unthinkable. As is it equally absurd that trans people have to undergo the same process for accessing all kinds of essential care presently.

This is what we mean when we reference the fight for bodily autonomy. Because in very literal ways (not always this literal!) these systems are oppressing people of many different genders in exactly the same ways. 

At a time when many are trying to divide our communities and our movement, let’s keep saying “yes, and,” with each other. We are more powerful and better off together than apart. We can bring more people into this movement and work when we make these kinds of connections, when we continue to lift each other up, when we are together fighting against all of our oppression and for all of our liberation. 

Yes, it is a scary time. And as I’ve often said the only way through things is through things together.