The Blatant Transphobia In How We Talk About Abortion

Writers need to start adopting gender-neutral terms because not everyone who terminates a pregnancy is a woman.

Photo by Kyle on Unsplash

Women aren’t the only people who need access to abortions. Women are not the only ones who get pregnant. Abortion is already an under-discussed topic, and when it is mentioned, it erases the existence of trans and non binary people, of all people with uteruses who don’t identify themselves under the term woman.

I myself am guilty of this. It’s a question that has long been playing on the edge of my mind when writing about abortion and issues concerning the cis-female body, but I set it aside, with the ease of my cis-privilege, procrastinating to a later date the day when I would write in a more inclusive way. I justified it to myself by saying that Trans-men surely face even more extensive issues in accessing abortion, that it was a question I knew little about and should therefore not let myself talk about. There is no excuse for this: it is clearly the result of my cis-privilege, that I could set aside this dimension of the issue. It reveals that deep down, I wasn’t giving enough importance to it, I was not caring enough.

I’m not writing this to self-flagellate nor attract sympathy, I am writing it to be open about how easy it is when in a position of privilege to dismiss those that don’t…