Reproductive Rights and Transgender Rights: We're In This Together

Reproductive health and rights and the health and rights of transgender individuals are issues that are both rooted in bodily autonomy and are both under attack. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, conservative lawmakers have been going out of their way to continue attacks on transgender and reproductive health and rights. Jessica Mason Pieklo, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor at Rewire.News and Katelyn Burns, political writer at Vox.com, talk about how these intersectional attacks are ultimately rooted in anti-science and bad-faith arguments.  

When you look at arguments against reproductive rights and trans rights you see that those who are attacking transgender rights are often using the exact same playbook as those opposing reproductive rights. Attacks on abortion and transgender rights are often based in anti-science rhetoric. Whether in reference to heartbeats occurring at 6 weeks of gestation, or that gender is purely biological, the religiously conservative fingers that are reaching into human rights pies are stained with faulty logic.

It should be noted that religious conservatives are not the only ones who are attacking transgender rights. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, often oppose trans rights based on radical feminist beliefs. To learn more about this, check out Katelyn’s explainer article here as well as her article on J.K. Rowling here.

Links from this episode

Rewire.News and Facebook and Twitter
Katelyn Burns’ pieces on Vox
Jessica Mason Pieklo on Twitter
Katelyn Burns on Twitter
The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained – Katelyn Burns
J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture – Katelyn Burns
Republicans are using the pandemic to push anti-abortion and anti-trans agendas – Katelyn Burns

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to RePROs Fight Back, a podcast where we explore all things reproductive health, rights and justice. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and I'll be helping you stay informed around issues like birth control, abortion, sex education and LGBTQ issues and much, much more-- giving you the tools you need to take action and fight back. Okay, let's dive in.

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Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of RePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my preferred pronouns are she/her. At the top of this episode, I wanted to give a really quick shout out to Ellie and Dakota at the ACLU of New Mexico. Thank you so much for having me on your Zoom discussion around June Medical Services. It was so much fun. I really enjoyed having a conversation with you all about what happened in the June Medical case in front of the Supreme Court and talking about the podcast. It was a wonderful time. So thank you so much for having me, but it made me think about the podcast more because at the beginning of the discussion, we played an episode of the podcast on June Medical Services. So I had to listen to it and it's something I really try not to do. I think I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I really deal with a lot of imposter syndrome and perfectionism. And I have a really hard time listening back to episodes because all I hear are the things I wish I would have said better, or, you said this wrong. And I just have that little voice in the back of my head that just heckles the whole time. I'm listening to these things, and I really hate her, and she's such an annoying bitch, and I just wish she would shut up. And I've talked about that. I'm working on it, but one of my solutions to working on it was to not go back and listen to the episodes. So I wouldn't hear, so she wouldn't have the space to do it. So last week I gave her the space to do it. And so she was just heckling the whole time. And I hate that bitch. I hate that. She steals my confidence and I hate it. I hate it, but that's okay. It's okay. Sometimes you just have to deal with it and I can deal with it, but it also makes me really thankful. So like I said, I do not go back and listen to episodes because I can't give her the space. I can't let her shake my confidence and make me question everything while I'm recording. I can't do that because I will just get immobilized and not be able to speak. And so I just don't give her the room, but that means I have to lean on some people really bad. So I just wanted to take this time to give a great big thank you to Rachel.

Jennie: So I will go back and listen to the interviews. If I know there's some editing that needs to be done, because I know what I'm looking for, but I always make Rachel listen to my intros when that little voice in the back of my head is going, you sound stupid. What were you thinking? Why did you share that? Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear it. You said that wrong. You sounded stupid. Like nobody's going to want to listen. So I always make Rachel go back and listen. And Rachel is our amazing digital person who does all of the podcast stuff with the website and the transcripts and the show notes and does all of our digital presence. So everything you see that looks beautiful on social media, that is her. She also does the social media for the Population Institute. And so she does an amazing job. I just want to give her a great big thank you for being there for me and talking me off the ledge when I am really convinced I sounded like an idiot in the introductions. You always need that one friend who can talk you off the ledge when you are sure you sounded foolish. And so I always really appreciate that. She is there for me as I am questioning all the things that I said, that's okay, we all need that person.

Jennie: So with that, I am very excited for today's episode, we have two amazing journalists on, we have Jessica Mason Pieklo at Rewire.News and Katelyn Burns at Vox.com, and I am really excited for this because this all started with an interaction I saw on Twitter, where they were talking about how they really wanted to have the specific conversation sometime when they had a panel. And I was like, I have a platform let's make this happen. Let's have this conversation on the podcast and then it'll be out there. So today we are finally doing it. We had a wonderful conversation talking about how the people who are fighting against trans rights are really running the anti-choice playbook and how these two are really linked. And you're seeing a lot of the same tactics being used to fight against transgender rights using the anti-abortion playbook with that. I'm going to turn it to the amazing interview we had. So enjoy.

Jennie: Hi, Kate and Jess. Thank you so much for being here.

Jessica: Thank you so much for having us.

Katelyn: Thanks for having us.

Jennie: So before we get started, do you two, want to take a second and introduce yourselves and along with that include your preferred pronouns? So let's go with Jess.

Jessica: Sure. Thank you. I'm Jessica Pieklo. I use she, her and hers and I am Senior Vice President and Executive Editor over at Rewire.News.

Katelyn: And I'm Katelyn Burns. And I also use she, her hers, and I am a political writer at Vox.com.

Jennie: I am so excited for today's conversation because we're talking about two things that aren't always talked about together. We often talk about abortion or reproductive rights in a bucket and transgender rights in another bucket, but it's really important that we talk about them together and at the same time, because they have connections, right?

Jessica: Oh, absolutely.

Katelyn: Yeah, definitely.

Jennie: They face a lot of the same type of arguments from people who are against them.

Jessica: Absolutely. And you know, your point about needing to talk about attacks on reproductive health and rights and attacks on transgender people and their existence in the same breath is not only just important, but it's the only way that we will be able to, in my opinion, actually, successfully push back against these attacks because they share not just a common purpose, which is to roll back civil rights generally, but they share a lot of the same groundings in an anti-science rhetoric and manipulation of emotion to make a political point.

Katelyn: Yeah, I'd also add that, I mean, fundamentally, at least to me as a trans person, both issues are based in bodily autonomy. So, I find myself running into the same arguments as somebody who's covered trans rights and reproductive rights from the quote unquote pro side, a lot of the same arguments are being applied to both populations. So, I think it is important that at the very least there is ally ship between trans people and repro folks. But to me they're fundamentally the same issue.

Jennie: Yeah. And I think one of the things we saw during COVID was there were a lot of fights around these issues. So as we were dealing with the pandemic, two things that were currently being attacked during it were reproductive rights and transgender rights.

Katelyn: Yeah. I actually wrote about this for Vox, how Republicans and conservatives in general still had time to go after abortion access or access to birth control and also trans people in the middle of a pandemic when, you know, the economy was about to collapse. So certainly both of these issues are high priorities on the other side of things, even when the world seems to be collapsing.

Jessica: The attacks are always so grounded in such bad faith, but when you have a pandemic going on and you have state lawmakers going out of their ways to either carve out abortion care as part of comprehensive healthcare, generally that is available or to spend time legislating attacks on trans students like we saw in states like Idaho and whatnot, as Katelyn said, I think it just shows that the priority isn't about health at all. It is just really about sort of attacking folks where they can.

Katelyn: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Jennie: You've both already started to talk about kind of some of the buckets of arguments we see. And I think one of the ones, and as someone who has a science background, one that really gets under my skin is the anti-science-ness of all of them. Both of you want to dig in on how both anti-abortion rhetoric and anti-transgender rights are rooted in anti-science?

Katelyn: One of the interesting things that I've seen with this is on the anti-side, there's a similar model for undermining the science. So, if you look at both of these issues, I mean the vast majority of legitimate medical associations will tell you that these are safe. Both transition care and abortion care are safe and necessary medical practices. But when you look on the other side, the anti-side, that's a lot of funding into trying to refute that science or trying to come up with their own quote unquote science. And you see that with Charlotte Lozier Institute and you see it on the anti-trans side with places like Transgender Trend. And when you look underneath, these are all really funded and driven by religious conservatives. And it's often the same religious conservatives putting money and effort into promoting both.

Jessica: Just to build on what Katelyn is saying, it's a real sort of cradle to grave in terms of policy for the religious rights, so that they have the same folks really working on cooking up the science, either in their own institutes, as she mentioned, and spending a lot of lobbying dollars behind that, to the same folks who are litigating religious refusal cases and attacking trans rights. So, we've got the same sort of litigation shops who handle that, and groups who are funding lawmakers, so that movement wise, we need to be talking about these attacks in the same spaces, because the opposition thinks of themselves in the same space.

Jennie: It's really wild when you see it, the basicness of how they just attack basic things that are true. So, whether it's arguing that there's a heartbeat at six weeks or the “biologicalness” of gender, the arguments are in just such bad faith.

Katelyn: Yeah. I'll give you an example to actually out of the UK, if we can sort of leave the United States for a second, because I think a lot of anti-trans activism is sort of originating from the UK right now because they have sort of this feminist respectability front, but there's actually a lawsuit over there currently against, I believe it's, England's only youth gender clinic. And the lawsuit essentially is trying to have the courts ban transition care for trans minors by claiming that minors are not competent to consent to that care. Even if a parent says they are, or even if a parent gives approval, but the legal principle over there that they're attacking the underpins it is called Gillick competence, which is actually, uh, rooted from abortion access. So, the suit that established this was a minor who was trying to obtain abortion care without approval of their parent. And that's been a longstanding legal principle in the UK. And if this trans case gets thrown out or wins, then Gillick competence for abortion care is also at risk. And then if you look even deeper, probably won't be surprised by this, but it's actually an anti-abortion attorney who's affiliated with one of the big conservative groups in the United States who is actually litigating this case. Like this person is a UK-based attorney who has a long history of challenging abortion care in the UK. And now all of a sudden they are arguing a trans case. And I think we're going to see the same things happen over here in the U.S. in the not too distant future, but I just worry that it's a Trojan horse to try to get the larger sort of pie of reproductive rights.

Jessica: First of all, you can't see my face, but I am wearing my shocked face that hearing that news, because of course it's the same, right? Of course, it's the same. And absolutely the, your point about this as a Trojan horse, Katelyn is so on the money because that's exactly what it is. And we even saw that in the Title VII arguments, when there was trans folks were just being used as a way to whip up fear, to really make broad attacks on cis folks. The degree to which the anti-choice movement has no problem finding folks to wedge and demagogue to advance their interests is… there's no bottom. There's no bottom.

Jennie: Building off of the anti-choice movement and anti-choice rhetoric like the conversation we have in the U.S. around minors, not being able to consent to getting an abortion, but are able to consent to parenting. And this should be the same, right? If you are able to consent to be a parent, you need to be able to consent to have an abortion.

Jessica: Well, and again, in that example, a decision that says a minor does not have the capacity to consent in those contexts, it is not difficult then for a court or an advocacy organization to take that argument and say, well, sure, this applies to minors, but it should also apply to patients who have diminished mental capability, or it should also apply to this particular group of people who we want to further restrict their rights. So, this is Katelyn’s Trojan horse point. That each time there is a, oh no, we're really just focused in on the subgroup, you should listen because it's never just one subgroup.

Katelyn: Yeah. And we see it on the trans side too, with attacks on autistic trans people it is pretty much the same thing. Anybody with a mental comorbidity, there's a very broad movement to remove their right to consent, to transition care. I think you see the same thing on the repo side.

Jennie: I feel like one of the other things you really see is treating this as “other”, whether it's treating abortion as something other than health care or treating transgender rights as something other than basic human rights, you see a lot of, kind of this separation. When you look at both of them together.

Jessica: without a doubt, the COVID crisis has really exacerbated and crystallized that too, when we saw states passing these orders, that said, “we will be expanding telehealth services as often as we can, except for abortion, can't do it for abortion.” And that is just sort of building off of that trend, which has been to segregate out abortion care from comprehensive healthcare generally.

Katelyn: Yeah, totally. And you saw it again with the Affordable Care Act rule over the summer, which most people understand the rule to have rolled back, just not discrimination protections for trans people, but it also rolled back sex-based protections for people who have had abortion care in the past, or are seeking abortion care currently. And I think that did hit some of the coverage, but very obviously the rule itself, the rollback was directed at trans people, but cis women got hit with that as well,

Jessica: I think that actually a really great example, section 1557 of the ACA and just the Women's Health Amendment, generally, it's sort of a binary language, notwithstanding, that these attacks are really one in the same. I mean, what the ACA is, is a nondiscrimination provision, right? It says you can't withhold; you can't discriminate in the delivery of healthcare services on the basis of gender, that's it, it's really straight forward. And so if that's being sliced and diced to both attack trans folks’ ability to access care and also abortion access by the same group of people that tells us everything we need to know about how they see it

Katelyn: As a trans woman, I hate using that phrase. But as a trans woman, to me, it's about punishing the “wrong” kind of women, right? It's about codifying, what is “the right kind of woman” under law. So according to them, the right kind of woman cannot be trans for various reasons. Most of all, because we cannot be taken advantage of for our reproductive labor, but also women who choose abortions are also not the right kind of women for them. And I think that at the end of the day, this is sort of the baseline objection to both. And unfortunately, trans men get hit with that twice. It works double for them. They're the wrong kind of woman in both ways because they are literally not women.

Jessica: And this is again, I mean, Katelyn, we saw this in the oral arguments in Bostock vs. Harris Funeral Homes…The idea of who's the right kind of woman is exactly it because in the repo context, in the ACA context, that is reinforcing this idea that the “right kind of woman” is the kind of woman who only uses contraception under very narrow circumstances. And that's certainly not to have individual autonomy over their own self and determining when they enter into and out of the workplace, just like in Bostock, we were seeing and hearing in Harris Funeral Homes about arguments over dress codes and the fact that nobody was really trying to discriminate against Aimee Stephens, they were just trying to enforce the dress code.

Jennie: Well, in talking about both of these things really makes me think of, okay, so we have this great ruling of protecting LGBTQ people from being fired-- so great. But there were also rulings at the court that really expanded religious exemptions and being able to have objections. We saw that in the birth control case. And so, all I could think of was, so that was a great ruling, fuck, they're coming for it.

Jessica: I think that's basically it. I think even Gorsuch's opinion in the Title VI cases was very good, but he left a good, big opening for RFRA and we have already on the court's calendar for next term, we have a case attacking the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. So that is an absolute attack on the issues that we have been talking about. But we also have Polton vs the city of Philadelphia, which is a case about refusing to place foster care kids for adoption in LGBTQ families. So that is about refusing to serve folks based on them not being the right kind of person, to pick up on Katelyn’s stance.

Katelyn: I don't have much to add to that. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, just as the SCOTUS whisper. So…

[All laugh]

Jennie: Yeah, I do. I worry about these religious refusals. We see I'm not just going through the courts, but we've also seen them with repro stuff with birth control or Catholic groups getting funding to do anti-trafficking work and then refusing to provide services that the victims may need, whether that's abortion or whatever.

Jessica: This has been a long game for religious conservatives. I mean, they've been really at this for a while. And even this idea of wanting their cake and eating it too, we can look at how Catholic social services was handling the placement of unaccompanied minors in their care. And as soon as they had the opportunity without anybody threatening enforcement action, made it impossible for minors in their care to have access to abortion and other reproductive healthcare services, but still willing to take a lot of that good government money for those beds and contracts wanting it both ways as sort of the evangelical way.

Katelyn: I love pointing to examples from outside the United States, because a lot of American based religious groups have perfected their arguments overseas. And now they're trying to bring them back in use here. And one of the ways we see that is through attacking quote unquote, gender ideology. Now, to your average American, when you say gender ideology, they're immediately going to jump to trans rights because that's sort of how it's been weaponized here. But if you look in other countries, Eastern Europe and Central and South America, especially, the Catholic church has branded gender ideology to mean, not just trans rights, but LGBT rights and reproductive rights. So, when Orban in Hungary is thundering away at gender ideology, he's not attacking trans people. He's attacking basically everybody who’s not a cis man, not a cis straight man. And I don't think people here understand that that's the root of that sort of concept, but there's a real danger there that if one of these pillars falls in the United States, it opens the door to attacking the rest of us. So, I've always approached my own work because of that, from a standpoint of, we need to work together against quote unquote common enemies, I guess you could say, because really the most powerful forces, the evangelicals and the Catholic church do not make a distinction between all of us. They don't look at it as separate siloed issues. It's all one thing.

Jessica: And what you mentioned, folks in Hungary, they have the support of our State Department. People don't realize that either you hear reports about the extremism happening in Hungary and Poland, and then the follow-up sentence isn't with the tacit endorsement of the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Jennie: Well, even explicit with some of the religious high-level meetings they've had.

Jessica: Yeah. Fair. It's not even implicit in many ways. It's explicit, you're right.

Katelyn: Yeah. Actually, back in my Rewire.News days, I reported on this. There was actually an event that was attended by several Republican Congress members and White House members that was hosted by the Hungarian Envoy to the U.S. and it was basically a, how can we encourage white women to get pregnant type event? It was attended by all of the usual evangelical suspects.

Jennie: Well, and all this also has me thinking of the Unalienable Rights Commission and their paper that they just put out with, well-couched in lots of academic language. And a lot of the coverage got overtaken by Pompeo’s attacks on the 1619 Project… but [there was] an attack on LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights with them coming out and saying, we need to really reevaluate these rights. There's too many rights. We really need to focus and get back to the fundamentals. And what they were saying is, okay, we might not say there's a hierarchy, but there's a hierarchy. And there's ones that are more important and that is property rights and religious rights and everything else is kind of under that. And so that does not bode well for our issues.

Jessica: And if I could just take that in terms of legal jurisprudence in this country that translates into natural law theory and ideology of which we have at least one Supreme Court appointee, who feels very strongly for that-- Neil Gorsuch-- and is really gaining steam in conservative legal circles. Generally, this idea of a hierarchy of rights at which property rights, religious rights are the most inalienable from God. And so again, these issues definitely are stitched together, not just in terms of actors, but in terms of strategy.

Katelyn: The other thing I'd like to point out too, is it's not just, I guess this is sort of my theme for the day is it's not just abortion rights and trans rights or related, but really women's rights and trans rights. It's often in the media, it's portrayed as opposites, but then you look and again, it's the same people opposing both, and they often… the biggest example I have of this is the Violence Against Women's act that Republicans in Congress, opposed to quote, protect women because the bill actually had some provisions that would help trans women. It's just so patronizing. It's like, this is how the patriarchy works. Everything can be justified if you're protecting women and you see the same thing happen with abortion laws. If you look at the Louisiana law, that got thrown out at the Supreme Court, the justification was we're protecting women by requiring abortion providers to have admitting rights. They claimed it's to protect women. They can literally justify any sort of oppression or just bad faith law by just claiming that they're really just doing it to protect people, to protect women, especially.

Jennie: So you're right. There's a huge overlap of who is attacking both, but it's not a complete overlap. There are some people that maybe are pro-choice that are also hopping on this anti-trans bandwagon. And I think that's a group that has gotten a little more attention recently, but isn't necessarily as familiar to a lot of people when you saw like the big surprise the summer when there was the she who shall not be named controversy shocking so many people, but it's something that has definitely been talked about if you've been following trans rights for a while, for a couple of years.

Katelyn: You're talking about TERFS.

[All laugh]

Jennie: And Katelyn has a great explainer on Vox that we'll make sure to link to. So people have a better understanding, but yes,

Katelyn: I also have a piece about J.K. Rowling. And somehow, I became the J.K. Rowling expert, which is really not something I ever asked for. Yes, there are quote unquote radical feminists who oppose trans rights on the basis of feminist belief. And they have every right to their beliefs. None of this is to say that they can't think this way because then you get into accusations of wrong-think. But I do question when these groups and these people willingly jump into the loving arms of the religious right, to try to push this agenda because to me, it's divide and conquer. If they could sort of break apart the repro slash LGBT slash trans rights, sort of social justice alliance, they could make hay in other places. And I would just caution them to just think twice about that. And that's sort of always been my position on this. It doesn't make sense to me, but again, people have their beliefs and maybe Jessica can speak to this also.

Jessica: And there's something too, it's not generational, but there is a particular subset of second wave feminists where this is a really thorny issue and a hill that they are willing to die on. And I'm frankly, boggled by it. I do not understand it because if there's anything that the second wavers should understand, it is this idea of divide and conquer, because that's what was going on with racial politics at the time. It's a mystery to me. I don't understand why people insist on just being hateful jerks is really what it comes down to. I mean, I appreciate that they can feel how they want to feel, but also when we're talking about saying, I don't believe in who you are, that's wrong.

Katelyn: And also question who you're jumping into bed with. Honestly, you mentioned my explainer. I mean, there's a whole section on that about a very prominent, radical feminist American group that hired a man who leaked doxxing information about abortion clinic workers to the right wing press. So some of the worst people, and they hired that person to help them fundraise. And it's like, why would you do that? Like, is there no solidarity there, if you really do support repro rights, how can we never see you talking about it? And also, why are you so willing to partner with these people? That's the part that I don't get. And again, to bring it to an out of the U.S. example with Ireland's repeal of the eighth amendment to legalize abortion, there hold as a group of British TERFS who refuse to help Irish feminists with that bill, unless they revoked their support for trans women. And it actually caused this big kerfuffle over there. And it was just wild to demand that, where do you get off? I don't understand that.

Jennie: I totally forgot about that.

Katelyn: Oh, my brain never forgets.

Jennie: This was like a billion scandals ago.

Katelyn: Yeah. There was a whole Irish, Travis wrote a letter, reaffirming their support for trans women. It is actually quite remarkable.

Jennie: So both the repro movement has had a lot of lessons to learn and the trans movement. So what can they learn from each other?

Jessica: Mostly how to work together. And I will speak for repro spaces here. There is enthusiasm, and that's good at recognizing a shared battle and a shared enemy. And I applaud that. I think there is also a reckoning that needs to happen in the movement that it is not historically been an inviting and welcoming space that lifts up all people, nor is it really one right now, even. And so when we talk about the ways in which the movement can do better, I think it's just by listening to the people who are affected by these issues and putting their voices front and center in the advocacy, as opposed to rushing in with a statement of support or a moment of solidarity. That won't change the way that we in the movement approach thing that is just further keeping a bad broken system in play, but making us feel a little bit better in the short term.

Katelyn: Yeah. I'll try to tackle this from the trans side. I think to me, the biggest lesson that I've learned just from covering repro issues and just being in some of these spaces is these are all very personal issues you saw recently. There's been a couple of blowups about trans-inclusive repro language. And I think that what I wish I could tell the trans people who follow me and read me is these are all very personal issues just as we feel it's important that trans men are included in these conversations, these people who we’re screaming at also have very strong feelings. I wish there was less vitriol coming from both sides, but really the trans side, because that's the one that I think I can listen to. And you have to realize that some of these people have very, very personal and painful experiences with a lot of this advocacy. So, I think everybody could benefit from maybe being a little kinder and listening. If that makes sense. I don’t know if I made any sense there, but…

Jennie: I feel like being kinder and listening is like what everybody needs to do right now. Just, yeah…

Katelyn: Repro advocates can be some of our biggest allies, but we can't go screaming at them every time they say pregnant woman, instead of pregnant person. It's important to have gender inclusive language and trans men absolutely 100% already get shut out of these spaces and these services. But at the same time, we don't necessarily have to go and quote unquote, verbal guns loaded. We should seek some conversation.

Jennie: So you both know that I like to end the show, focus on actions. So, what are things that listeners can do right now to be involved in both of these fights?

Jessica: To be more involved in both of these fights, I want to, first of all, say thank you because we're living through a pandemic and if you have the emotional capacity to becoming more involved, then I congratulate you. And thank you for that, because that is wild right now. I don't mean that to sound flip. It's just, there are so many, so much happening right now, and we're all navigating so much in our own lives that sometimes just living your values as authentically as you can-- not to lean into core corny, corporate speak-- is really very, very effective. One of the things that is, I think helpful and to build off of Katelyn's point about listening is also to continue to not be afraid to engage in these hard conversations. I mean, yes, we can lobby our lawmakers. Yes, you can support independent media that covers these issues. You can read journalists like Katelyn. All of that is very important. And I continued to do that also, but I think really, we are at a point where we need to be working on the people in our circle and really keeping up that drum beat. So, there's a joke that I made. It's also very true that if you give me five minutes in a conversation, I will turn it back to abortion. That is just what I do. And so that is a way for me to be constantly reminding people that, yeah, this is something that some people don't have the luxury to come in and out of some people don't have the luxury and the privilege to not have to advocate on the regular because these are their own lives that we're talking about. So, think in this moment, really being willing to listen and talk is important.

Katelyn: Yeah. I would echo that and also add that once we hopefully someday go back to normal and we start doing rallies again, I would say, keep showing up. I would love to see more trans people showing up and getting involved in the repro movement. And I think one of the best ways that trans women specifically can get involved is as clinic escorts, because in general, and this isn't universal because we don't just have one type of body, but in general, trans women have larger frames than cis women, but we can still offer a welcoming presence at some of these clinics, especially when there's a lot of protestors yelling. And then for repro folks, I would ask show up for trans people show up for rallies… one of the things that I was shocked at when I moved to DC is you go to repro rally and there are trans people there. And then you go to a trans rally and the repo where people aren't necessarily there. And I think that's one sort of very simple, visible way to show ally ship between the two groups. And I would also say trans people should show up, but more repro rallies as well. That's not to put it all on one side here, but just showing up for each other, I think is a really, really good way to build bridges.

Jennie: Jess, Kate, thank you so much for being here.

Katelyn: We've wanted to do this forever.

Jennie: Thank you all for listening. I hope you really enjoy my conversation with Jess and Kate. It was a lot of fun and I think it was really informative.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of RePROS Fight Back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at RePROS Fight Back, or on Instagram at reprosfb. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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