This exchange between Senator Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) and Berkley Law professor Khiara Bridges from earlier in the week has sparked interesting but predictable responses:
Those who are staunch supporters of trans rights think Bridges put Hawley in his place. Most, however, thought the whole thing bizarre and yet another example of wokeness run amok in academia.
For those who can’t or would prefer not to watch the video, here’s a quick summary from CNN (“Josh Hawley accused of transphobic line of questioning during sharp exchange with law professor“):
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was accused by a law professor of engaging in a line of transphobic questioning during a hearing Tuesday on the legal consequences of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling last month, some progressives have increasingly used the term “pregnant people” — as opposed to “women” — to refer to those whose right to abortion they seek to protect, in an effort to recognize that transgender men and non-binary people are also affected by the court’s decision, which overturned the 1973 landmark ruling that had made access to abortion a federal constitutional right.
“You refer to ‘people with a capacity for pregnancy.’ Would that be women?” Hawley asked Khiara Bridges, a law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, during the sharp exchange at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy, many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy,” Bridges replied. “There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
Pressed by Hawley about what Bridges’ view of “the core of this right, then, is about,” the professor asserted that Hawley’s questioning was transphobic because he was effectively denying the existence of trans men and non-binary people.
“I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them,” Bridges said, to which the senator responded incredulously.
Hawley’s focus on the inclusive language comes as both abortion rights and trans rights have become political flashpoints around the country, with Republican state lawmakers passing a slew of restrictive measures on both fronts in recent months and years.Bridges went on to note that trans people suffer from high rates of attempted suicide, adding: “Denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous.”
She asked the senator directly if he believes that men can get pregnant.“No, I don’t think men can get pregnant,” Hawley said, to which the professor replied: “So you’re denying that trans people exist.”
“Is this how you run your classroom? Are students allowed to question you or are they also treated like this?” Hawley asked.
“We have a good time in my class,” Bridges shot back. “You should join. You might learn a lot.”
The exchange, naturally, went viral on social media and both sides are taking victory laps. There’s essentially zero actual conversation happening as a result.
As loathe as I am to defend Hawley, who’s a genuine villain in American politics, he got the better of this exchange. While Bridges is of course correct that transmen and those who identify as nonbinary can get pregnant—and, whatever his personal beliefs on the matter, a man with Hawley’s education and experience goddamn well knows that—her approach here will not win over a single person not already in her camp and will strike most Americans as insulting and alien.
Five years ago, 99 percent of us would have found the notion that anyone other than a woman could get pregnant absurd. Thirty years ago, the idea was, quite literally, the stuff of comedy.
There’s growing acceptance that sex is more complicated than biology. That, just because a person has male parts doesn’t mean that they view themselves as men and just because they have female parts doesn’t mean they view themselves as women. And, indeed, there are people who don’t identify as a man or a woman.
That’s a lot for most people to wrap their heads around. It doesn’t help that people who should know better and are in positions of leadership, like Hawley, are exploiting that for political gain. But, given how alien the who concept is to most folks, calling the idea that pregnancy is the sole province of women “phobic” and accusing those who question the assertion that transwomen and nonbinary people can get pregnant of fomenting violence is decidedly unhelpful helping to get people to understand.
WaPo’s Monica Hesse (“What Josh Hawley doesn’t get in the discussion about ‘pregnant people’“) at least acknowledges that it’s not just the lunatic fringe on Hawley’s side.
Reproductive rights and transgender rights are currently two of the country’s most hot-button issues, and the intersection of these topics has grown flammable. “Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore,” New York Times columnist Pamela Paul wrote last week. “This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.”
The same day, Bette Midler tweeted, “WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people.’ “
Their arguments, in a nutshell: Women have been assaulted, dismissed and otherwise victimized by gender-based discrimination for millennia. Women’s identities have been shaped and strengthened by these experiences. At the very least, they should get to claim the word that has been the source of their pride and pain.
We could pick at these arguments, of course, as some of them are hollow. Nobody is saying that women can’t call themselves women anymore. The examples Paul cited (wording from the websites of Planned Parenthood or NARAL) are organizations choosing to use more-inclusive language for their own work or their own branding. These organizations are not dictating what women personally are allowed to do. As for Midler: She did not clarify who “they” was, but truly there is no quicker way to look unhinged in a public forum than to rant in all-caps about an unspecified “they.”
But I have a measure of sympathy for people like Midler because the debate over the terminology of pregnancy is, frankly, a mess. It’s marred by scaremongering and subtraction, focusing on what the transgender community is allegedly taking away from women.
Middler, who is pretty far left for a 76-year-old, is playing the role of an everywoman here. I can’t imagine she doesn’t know some trans and nonbinary folks after half a century in show business.
Paul, who I would characterize is center-right, isn’t a very good columnist. And the headline of the piece in question, “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count,” is enough to induce eye rolls. But the crux of her argument, while alarmist, isn’t absurd:
The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.
As with the gay marriage debate, the notion that recognizing that people different than you nonetheless have a lot of the same needs doesn’t really cost you anything. The notion that we needed to “defend” marriage by reserving it for “one man and one woman” is absurd in hindsight but seemed unassailable to a lot of people for a long time.
And I think Hesse gets it right here:
In many ways it is impossible to separate the experience of being pregnant with the experience of being a woman. Historically when the medical community has treated women, it has treated them as hysterics and hypochondriacs. It has underestimated their pain and underfunded the research that could address it. None of this history changes when a woman walks into a clinic pregnant.
And yet, people who aren’t women walk into clinics pregnant, too. They walk in with their own histories of medical discrimination and dismissal, with their own bodies in need of care and tending. That’s not an affront to womanhood, or a subtraction. It’s just a fact.
[…]
Legislation impacting pregnancies might have been written intending to regulate women. But these laws end up regulating anyone who has a uterus, whether that person is a woman or not. After all, a state that has prohibited abortions doesn’t care what kind of pronouns are employed by the person who wants to end a pregnancy.
Our language when discussing reproduction needs to be precise in describing what is happening and who it’s happening to. It also needs to be factual, and it ought to be caring.
And one more thing: It should be a language of addition, not subtraction. It should acknowledge the fundamental experiences that have shaped women and pregnancy since the beginning of time, and it should acknowledge the universal experiences of pregnancy that transcend beyond gender.
Or, as Khiara Bridges phrased it in her response to Sen. Hawley on Tuesday: “We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it also impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive.”
If you know you’re talking about a pregnant woman, by all means, call her that. If you know you’re talking about someone who is pregnant and not a woman, then address them how they want to be addressed.
Realistically, that’s going to take a while. It took decades to get people to become comfortable with the idea of same-sex marriage. The trans rights agenda has only very recently come front and center. It will be resolved much faster, precisely because the gay rights (and women’s rights and civil rights) fights have already been fought.
I recognize that, as a cis white guy, it’s easy to call for patience. But it seems clear to me that name-calling is hurting, not helping the cause. And likely to alienate a lot of people who are better fits under Joe Biden’s tent than Josh Hawley’s.
