From the villainization of Drag to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the LGBTQ+ community, BIPOC individuals, and Women/AFAB people are being attacked.
June 2022 was my first time being in my hometown of Houston to truly experience Pride as a bisexual queer woman. I was excited, but over the past six years, since Trump began his presidential run, I have learned to not get my hopes up. The night Trump won the presidential election in 2016, I was in shambles. A senior in high school, not 18 yet and unable to vote, I felt powerless and I knew, I just knew in my soul something important was going to be taken away on a legislative level. That time has come.
Since the 7-2 Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that gave women and AFAB people the right to obtain an abortion in this country, and that states could not pose an “undue burden” on women, Conservatives have been gunning and plotting to have this overturned. There are people who cried tears of joy about all the “innocent lives that are going to be saved” that they will never have to personally take responsibility for. None are crying over the real loss of life which will occur due to this decision. Not all anti-abortion people are a monolith, however, I have seen many people try to pose an anti-abortion argument to me of which I could make logical sense. I have gone on Tik Tok live streams and been a part of politically charged organizations and student groups with people who have varying opinions on the right to abortion/ right to choose; I have tried to see the other side.
I am pro-abortion. I am pro-you-do-not-have-to-give-me-a-reason because I am not a doctor who specializes in OB/GYN medicine. No one through discourse or through my reading has been able to present an argument to ban abortions that would not require an entire restructuring of how women are treated in society, the foster system, federal child support, the housing market and urban development, and the healthcare system broadly. I’m not writing this because I am looking for my mind to be changed or to even explain the ins and outs of why abortion should NOT be a felony and should be legal, accessible to all, and not require further intervention beyond the patient and their doctor. The pro-abortion and pro-life position has gotten to a place where nearly 80% of Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, but SCOTUS decided states should decide, knowing full well States already made their decisions to not care about the lives of women, transmen, disabled people, BIPOC and other marginalized AFAB people, because what group of individuals is the easiest and requires the least amount of empathy and resources: an unborn fetus.
RESOURCES FOR THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE
- Delete period cycle and any other menstraul-related tracking apps.
- Use cash when buying any medications or paying for any reproductive health services. Third-party retailers like Amazon are not known for their privacy when it comes to purchase data.
- When purchasing retroactive birth control, if possible, leave your phone at home.
- Do not hoard contraceptives. They have a shelf life, it looks suspicious, and honestly, too many people need them.
- Be cautious of what you are communicating over text, social media, or any other direct messaging. Signal is an encrypted phone messaging app and Proton Mail for email. Do not store data locally on phone or the cloud, enable disappearing messages or regularly delete the data/cache.
- When doing research for your reproductive health, use a VPN and TOR, not the incognito mode.
- If you need to take an out-of-state trip, do not tell anyone the real state/destination of your trip.
- Phones are easily trackable even when turned off. Enable Airplane mode and disable any Bluetooth.
- Do not tell anyone where you are going and why. Even doctors or nurses as HIPAA is not an absolute defense as state and federal courts can subpoena this information in a criminal case (also HIPAA was based on the privacy laws put in place by Roe so take that into consideration.)
- Be careful. This is now an illegal medical procedure.
If you are a person who suddenly finds yourself with a need to go to another state, a state that can provide the medical procedure you need or want, there are organizations equipped to do this. As much as a benevolent friend is great to have in these scary times, precautions need to be taken as abortion is becoming a first and second-degree felony and people who aid others in receiving an abortion will be charged with crimes as well.
Some people might say this is being extra or overly cautious, but this really is the reality we are facing. People have been imprisoned on murder charges in certain states– some for literal miscarriages.
Report: Pregnancy Panopticon Abortion Surveillance After Roe
The Drag Queens Too?
As an AFAB drag queen and performer, a long-time lover of drag as performance art, and an intersectional LGBTQIA+ activist, seeing drag become a scapegoat for “what is wrong with America” and be framed as “the real threat to our children” is nauseating.
Texas State Representative Brian Slaton announced not even a week into June 2022 that he was proposing legislation “to protect kids from being subjected to drag shows” where “perverted adults are obsessed with sexualizing young children.” After a video of a Drag Show went viral with children handing drag performers dollar bills with a large, neon sign reading “It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself!” I can understand how this particular instance could easily be manipulated to fill the role of how drag and even the LGBTQ+ community is ‘exposing’ children to sexual content. As a drag queen and performer myself who was born and raised in this state, I can see how Rep. Slaton and others have come to this conclusion. While not well-informed, I see how they got there.
My first question when I heard about this proposal was, respectfully, “wasn’t there a mass school shooting less than a week ago in south Texas.” On May 24th, Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School experienced what hundreds of other schools in the United States have experienced for over a decade: a school shooting, with an AR-15, and an incompetent, negligent police force.
Out of all the things a government representative could be doing after a tragedy, Rep. Slaton went out of his way to name a group of people, i.e. drag queens, as a viable threat against Texas children.
Conservatives, i.e. Republicans, Trumpers, Big-Lie-Supporters, or WHATEVER y’all want to be called when you don’t want LGBTQ+ people to be out and about, or AFAB people to choose what they want inside their bodies, or to even increase education funds, fix healthcare, or to be required by anyone to wear a goddamn mask during the highest points of the pandemic over the last couple years… I don’t care where you see yourself on the political spectrum.
But if you cannot see that Drag Queens are not the greatest threat to children, or that overturning Roe will result in deaths of ALREADY BREATHING HUMAN BEINGS, or that the LGBTQIA+ is not inherently filled with “groomers” looking to “indoctrinate children” into the community, or that may be an increase in background checks and requiring more licensing and continuous evaluation of gun owners… If you cannot bring yourself to find empathy for those who have been impacted by recent legislative moves and decisions, I hope you can at least find it in yourself to recognize that everyone involved is a human being the same as you.
With that I leave you with words from my Activist Sage, Valarie Kaur from her book See No Stranger which has guided me the last couple of years in my journey with Revolutionary Love.
Divine rage is fierce, disciplined, and visionary… The aim of divine rage is not vengeance but to reorder the world… Perhaps our task as human beings is to find safe containers for our raw reactionary rage and then choose to harness that energy in a way that creates a new world for all of us…
Stay with your sensations of your rage. You might notive tension, clenching, springing, heat. Notice the shape of your rage in your body, wherever it’s living— in your heart, your belly, your throat, your legs… Place your hand there. Breathe into it… Your rage is loaded with information and energy (Audre Lorde).
America’s greatest social movements were rooted in the solidarity that came from shared grieving. First people grieved together. Then they organized together… When people who have no obvious reason to love eachother come together to grieve, they can give birth to new relationships, even revolutions.
Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger
BRIT LAVERGNE 