“I remember when I was doing Rent and I was too thin, and I was doing that on purpose because I’m dying, I’m a HIV+ drug addict. I remember having to eat raw food and doing all this work to make sure I could stay thin… And I remember everyone asking me when I was doing press for the movie, “what did you do to get so thin? You looked great!” and I’m like, “I looked emaciated.”
It’s a form of violence in the way that we look at women and how we expect them to look and be, for… what’s sake? Not health, not survival, not enjoyment of life, but just so that you can look ‘pretty’.
I’m constantly telling girls all the time, “everything’s airbrushed, everything’s retouched, to the point of just that it’s never even asked, and none of us look like that.”
- Rosario Dawson
“Sanctioned Cruelty: Reproductive Rights Violations as Torture”
[*pregnant people]
A woman living with HIV in Chile is forcibly sterilized while unconscious and undergoing a cesarean delivery.
A Kenyan woman, along with her newborn child, is detained for weeks by hospital staff in miserable conditions. Her crime is poverty; she has no money to pay her medical bill.
In Peru, a young girl lives in a tragically diminished physical capacity because doctors valued her pregnancy—which resulted from rape—more than they did her life and health.
This kind of treatment, and its consequences, is horrifying and unconscionable. For too long, such acts have not been treated with the gravity they deserve. But the Center for Reproductive Rights is leading the movement in asserting that such egregious abuses amount to nothing less than torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. And we demand that it stop today.
International human rights bodies have clearly defined torture. It’s the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering—physical or mental—with the specific purpose of obtaining information, intimidating, punishing, or discriminating. And someone, or some entity, acting in an official capacity must be involved, have instigated it, or acquiesced to the treatment.
The threshold for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as distinguished from torture, can be crossed even more readily. The abusive treatment need not be intentional—negligence, with or without a specific purpose, is enough. And an act can be degrading simply because of the humiliation it causes.
Why do these definitions, these standards, matter in the fight to stop violations of reproductive rights? Because torture and ill treatment are universally condemned as grave offenses in violation of international law. All countries, whether bound by official treaty or not, are held to a global understanding that torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are wrong and prohibited.
But the common perception of these offenses is narrower than their actual reach. Torture and ill treatment are not confined to prisons and theaters of war. The Center for Reproductive Rights has just released the video “Sanctioned Cruelty: Reproductive Rights Violations as Torture” which identifies a far more common setting in which women find themselves subject to the mistreatment and discriminatory whims of government officials, where they suffer severe physical and/or mental pain simply because of who they are. These places? Hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices.
The Center, in partnership with the Campaign to Stop Torture in Health Care, documented these stories to illustrate the severity of the harm inflicted by certain reproductive rights violations. These violations of fundamental human rights, because of their tragic consequences, and the circumstances and conditions under which they are committed, absolutely rise to the level of torture and ill treatment.
Calling these atrocities by a different name won’t help a girl walk again, allow a woman to build the family she’d dreamed of, or restore the dignity of a mother wrongly detained, but our urgent efforts will signal to the world the gravity of these kinds of crimes against women. And that like all forms of torture and cruelty, they cannot be tolerated.
Cases and resources:
Amy Dentata: skankassqueer:thambos: I honestly don’t understand these kinds of...
thambos:I honestly don’t understand these kinds of arguments.
1. Why can’t there be women-identifed spaces AND woman-and/or-FAAB spaces (someone help me phrase this, I mean no-cis-men, yes everyone else). Existing separately, so that there are safe spaces away from men (trans and cis) AND away from just cis men. OR, hey, let’s look at the problem of crisis centers not really having ways to address same/similar-sex violence? A women-identified space still might not be safe to someone who was abused by another woman.
2. Arguments like this are born out of the idea that we are only our identities, but many people don’t experience their gender as a role, but rather as a body, and to deny them the ability to identify in that way is damaging and harmful to them.
3. I don’t understand being proud of being trans but not being proud of another oppressed class. FAAB folks are oppressed. Until recently when someone might be born into a family who accepts them and allows them to transition before being socialized as a girl, being FAAB meant being socialized as a girl and then having to transition out of that. And even now, you have to be born into certain circumstances to be allowed to transition and thus not conditioned in the way the girls and women are. So to be FAAB is to still be on the receiving end of a good deal of misogyny, and anyone who can actively fight against that has a right to be proud of being resistant to the oppression they face.
4. This is completely oxymoronic. How can someone who is proud of being FAAB not be proud of being FAAB? Why does that automatically translate into being “proud” of not facing transmisogyny (I can’t even type this out correctly it makes so little sense)? Yes, to be FAAB and transitioning means that you are privileged instead of oppressed in the realm of transmisogyny. But to be unashamed of being FAAB and unashamed of breaking the prescribed roles is just not as related as you’re making it sound.
- the idea of “women and trans spaces” is bullshit because cis privilege and male privilege are separate entities. cis women have cis privilege and trans men have male privilege. trans men do not belong in women’s spaces and cis women do not belong in trans spaces. i agree about the heterosexism of gendered crisis centers and i think that gendered crisis centers are in theory quite busted but in practice i’m more concerned about making sure that trans women who are raped get services than any other issue.
- no, genders are not bodies. the gendering of bodies is oppressive and cissexist. bodies exist, yes, and nobody is denying that. bodies do not have gender, any more than they have political views. if my breasts are female, then my fists are anarchist. my toes are socialist. my elbows are kinky. my knees are queer. it makes no sense to use a social construct like gender, politics, sexual orientation, etc. to describe a body part, and every attempt to gender bodies is inherently cissexist.
- “CAFAB” is not an oppressed group. “women” is an oppressed group - by misogyny. “trans people” is an oppressed group - by cissexism. “CAMAB trans people” is an oppressed group - by transmisogyny. claiming that all CAFAB people have a shared oppression is cissexist and transmisogynist and erasive of the struggles that CAMAB women and non-binary people face. if you really believe this shit, go back to michfest and never come back, please.
- As I said, there is a difference between being proud of being a survivor and being proud of a specific abuse. I am proud that I survived sexual assault. I am not proud that I was assaulted. Plus, CAFAB people are a privileged group within transmisogyny. my partner says that seeing a CAFAB person taking pride in being CAFAB feels like seeing a white person celebrating white pride.
What is this mystical truth arriving on my dash <3
The sanctity of marriage MUST be protected as the bible depicts!
Cinque Terre, Italy.
I’m going to Cinque Terre next time I’m in Italy. Do I know when that is? No. Do I have the money to go back any time soon? No. Does that matter? No.
I wanna walk these streets near these colorful homes with Pooh & my friends…
Prolonged Eye Contact: It saddens me that people still think in this way.
I am currently having a debate with a classmate of mine.
His initial statement: “I believe that above energy conservation and pollution human population is our biggest issue. We should focus all money and resources on limiting how many people we have on this earth. We honestly have way too many people here. Nobody is getting educated anymore, just having children and not caring for them.”
My response: “While I completely agree with your thoughts about people having children and not properly raising them, I require a certain amount of clarification regarding your sentence about education. Do you mean that people are not educated in proper birth control methods, or not educated in general?”
His clarification: “I don’t think we should be spending money on sex ed programs. Our schools are going broke as is, why are we bringing in people to teach our kids how to have sex? Those very same people are telling our kids it’s okay to kill babies.”
Here I actually had to re-read this bit again and again. Am I the ONLY one that sees a complete contradiction in this guy’s thought process?
My response: “I see. Tell me then how we are going to control the population without educating people on proper prevention methods? Without keeping abortion legal?”
His genius response: “People should stop having sex. All kids care about is sex these days. If you don’t have sex, you don’t get pregnant, so you don’t need to worry about birth control or abortion.”
O.o Let me tell you that the prompt was asking what we would do as researchers if we were given the means to work towards a solution for the most important environmental problem we face in this country.
I cannot walk away: “Does the complete failure of abstinence only education to prevent pregnancy and STI transmission not hint at the idiocy of that plan?”
His apparent solution: “That’s because the abstinence only education was not given the same funds that other programs were. If we had the money, we could work on our system.”
What the fuck: “Please elaborate on how more funds would give you better results.”
Him: “Well, if places like Planned Parenthood weren’t giving our kids condoms, they wouldn’t have sex. We could use the funds to come up with cooler ways to get kids on board with no sex.”
Me: “In what universe is pretending that teens won’t have sex an effective way of controlling the population? That’s like letting a murderer go free because you’re too afraid to admit that he murdered someone.”
Him: “Murder and sex are quite different, young miss. Abstinence is the only way that our population problem will be solved. Only stable, married men and women should be able to have sex and get pregnant. Then the only children in this country would be educated and grow up well.”
Me: “Okay, let me entertain your insanely, proven to be ineffective plan to save the world. Let’s say that you passed a law stating that nobody who isn’t married or “stable” cannot have sex. Do you think that people will abide? When prohibition was in effect, did people stop drinking? And hold the press, just because two people are married does not mean they can produce a responsible child. That has to do with parenting, which does not require marriage but dedicated parents who value the quality of their child’s life.”
Him: “We are getting off track here. I am simply stating that if teens were not educated about ways to have sex, they wouldn’t do it.”
Me: “False. Teens will experiment regardless of education surrounding their interests. Would it not make sense to educate anyway, knowing that teens will have sex at some point in their lives?”
Him: “They won’t if we teach them that it is wrong.”
Me: “You are stuck in the wrong generation to be thinking in that way, Mr. _____. Sex will happen, whether you pretend it doesn’t or not. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood prepare youth and adults alike to they can make responsible decisions regarding their sexuality. If we eliminate sex ed, we will eliminate the only thing keeping our population controlled as is. What we need to pay for ismore education, in more places, for more people. What we need to pay for is a health care system that gives people (poor, middle class, upper class or anything in between) the same access to reproductive health care. THAT is what Planned Parenthood does.”
Him: “I see we have reached a disagreement.”
Me: “You sit in your corner and pretend that the world is only filled with so many people because of ‘irresponsible teenagers’. If you need me, I’ll be working towards a society that is educated and responsible for themselves because they have access to resources like Planned Parenthood that get them there.”
I commend you on your ability to remain calm in response to this foolishness. One thing I do want to comment on is the bolded part: “That’s because the abstinence only education was not given the same funds that other programs were. If we had the money, we could work on our system.”
That is an absolute LIE. Abstinence-only sex education programs are given millions of dollars in federal funding every year while comprehensive sex education programs are given…wait for it…ZERO! [Until 2010].
See:
- The History of Federal Abstinence-Only Funding
- A History of Federal Funding for Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs
They also like to try to compare Title X funding to abstinence-only funding, but that is apples and oranges.
Abstinence-only sex education does not work! This has been proven in study after study, yet they keep trotting out the same old lies. And when you lie to children about condoms’ effectiveness or say that no sex can ever be safe (have sex and you will die is essentially the message), you’re not teaching kids not to have sex—you’re teaching them to have…wait for it…unprotected sex! Not to mention most people support the teaching of comprehensive sex education in schools.
Seriously people, if your theory is: contraception increases the incidence of abortion or tell children sex is deadly (or tell them nothing at all about sex) and they just won’t try it, go sit in a corner.
Still don’t believe me? Guttmacher just put out a news release examining the new CDC report National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and guess what? Teen pregnancy is going down because of increased rates of contraception use! And funding family planning prevents more than 800,000 abortions a year by providing people with contraception!
————————
» Along with all the other stupid things about the arguments of people like this, too, is the fact that “stable, married” people can and do still have unwanted pregnancies and abortions. In fact, I don’t have the statistics before me right now, so I can’t be absolutely certain of this (although I could try to verify it), but aren’t a moderately significant portion of abortions from married, older women?
Marriage is not a safeguard against unwanted pregnancy. Unwanted pregnancies can obviously happen in marriages, and unwanted pregnancies can obviously happen to people who are older than their teens. The idea that all abortions are unmarried teens is a total myth, in the first place.
sexxxisbeautiful: ea31LoveAffair_12 (by truecolorvince)
(PLEASE REBLOG AGAIN - I AM NOW SENDING OUT THE CODE X)
It’s here! A script was made for the new dash allowing you to access more features on Tumblr than ever before :D
If you want your dash to look like this:
Simply reblog & Click the image + follow
Anyone who follows & reblogs will get the script sent in their ask :)
Feel free to ask any questions you may have about it!
Enjoy!
Amy Dentata: Train Thoughts
I get a pleased and happy feeling in my heart when a black woman can tell someone to kiss her entire black ass.
When a Latina can rip apart the entire concept of citizenship and point out being in America longer than the dipshit she is responding to.
My heart sings.
A…
