YAY ACTIVISM AND STUFF.

I attend the walks for choice that started as a response to the right wing war on women. It's really really easy to be in support of free birth control, free STD testing,accessible abortion, and other reproductive health care in the liberal city I call home. We've never been counterdemonstrated (which would be hilarious, but I'm kind of strange..) and we've had exactly one invective yelled at us. People here are overwhelmingly in support of keeping Planned Parenthood funded, keeping abortion legal, making sure that the definition of rape doesn't get so stringent that most women aren't able to deal with the already stressful reporting process, basic stuff like that. They may not be willing to walk through town chanting about free testing for everyone, but they're all for it on the inside.

The thing is, though, that there are big intersectionality issues with anything feminist. Women are not all the same. There are women of all races, women of all sizes, cis women, trans women, rich women, poor women, neuroprivileged women, neurodivergent women, women with visible disabilities, women with no discernible disability.

That is a LOT of diversity to cover. And while I doubt we have it perfect, the organizers are doing their damnedest. And I approve. Many feminist kind of things, even those that try to be inclusive, engage in some kind of erasure, be it that of trans women, or of women of color, or mothers, or disabled women.

I'm sure there's a group no one thought of yet in our area because of the privilege that comes with not being in any given minority, but I don't know who that is, and that's kind of cool. I dread so much feminist activism because of the erasure, and I am not erased. I may be the only disabled person there (more likely I am not), but the existence of people like me, and the fact that people like me also need sexual health services, is acknowledged.

They even asked me to talk about the ableism that occurs in reproductive health services. That's kind of cool. So many people think that autistic people, disabled people, are asexual perpetual children, that my experiences being acknowledged by a mainstream feminist movement makes me warm and fuzzy inside.

Inclusiveness: because all of us matter. Go (my town's) walk for choice!

(yes I realize some people reading aren't pro choice. Some may even be anti contraception, which is a mindset that makes no sense to me for reasons I assume are obvious. I'd rather not have a bigass OMG BABYKILLER argument here, since the main idea of the post is YAY NOT BEING ERASED AND YAY EMBRACING DIVERSITY, not YAY ABORTIONS).