No one mentioned anything about offensiveness. We’re talking about exclusion. And using the term “women” excludes trans men. You were told why this was a problem (trans men might not think that the organization would help them), and did not disagree.
It seems to me that you are just being pulled by a leash, getting upset at what your media tells you to get upset about. You already gave the reason why there is nothing to be offended about here: the new name is more accurate.
There’s your specific being more important than the general.
People, you are all missing the real story! Abortion Liberation Front= Alf= They are secretly a bunch of hairy aliens from Melmac who want to eat our cats!
On the one hand, I have a hard time believing that a pregnant transman would think that this group’s services wouldn’t be available to them because of their gender.
On the other hand, though, I can very easily believe that someone (of any gender, genital configuration or pregnancy status) might not realize that “The Women’s Medical Fund” is an abortion group, and instead think that they’re focused on pap smears, mammograms, HPV vaccines, and the like.
So the name change does definitely clarify matters.
It just sounds like a charity or something to me, so I’m fine with the name change. I think we need to stop pussyfooting around the word abortion anyway.
“We worry that if somebody is trans or gender-nonconforming and they get pregnant, they won’t even know that there is financial support out there for them to get an abortion,” Elicia Gonzales, executive director of ALF-PA, told Billy Penn.
Sounds a bit like they are saying tans and gender-nonconforming are morons.
Considering that their original name read like something you would see outside of a fake “pro-life” clinic, I could easily see how a transgender or gender-nonconforming person would overlook this fund’s services.
And as a cisgender woman, I don’t feel ‘erased’ or otherwise ‘triggered’ by their explanation for the name change. Considering the state of abortion rights in this country, doing something that clarifies their purpose is good.
Nonsense. The point is not that transgender men, and other people with uteruses who don’t identify as women, don’t know that they can get pregnant. The point is that pregnant non-women don’t necessarily have a way of knowing whether a particular provider of abortion services (and/or prenatal care, for that matter) will be open to serving them.
I’m surprised you don’t seem to have noticed that a lot of self-proclaimed supporters of women’s rights these days, including reproductive rights, are quite hostile to inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people. A pregnant transgender man or nonbinary person probably doesn’t want to go to some militantly TERFy “women’s clinic” where they have to declare that they’re a woman and be referred to with feminine pronouns in order to access the services, and may even be outed or doxxed by hostile staffers.
It’s precisely because transgender and nonbinary etc. people aren’t morons that they may be hesitant about seeking services for their female body parts from a self-proclaimed “women’s” organization, if they don’t identify as women. They tend to know better than you do the sort of hostility they can face from many so-called “feminists” for daring to have female biology while not identifying as female.
And that’s leaving aside the separate issue that the name “Women’s Medical Fund” is a highly vague and ambiguous term for an abortion services provider anyway, as many other posters have pointed out.
Well, @Kimstu makes a good point, that it might be risky for a transman to use a “women’s clinic”, but I wholeheartedly agree that “women’s medical fund” does not say “we support abortion rights” to me, or probably to anyone else. This seems like a good name change.
