Emily Crockett | Vox

International Women’s Day, explained

2018-03-08T13:41:05-05:00

Today’s Google Doodle honors half of the world’s population — by celebrating International Women’s Day.

But what is International Women’s Day? Where did it come from, and why is it necessary?

The day actually has fairly radical origins, involving the Socialist Party of America. Over the past few years, however, it has become a corporate-backed, global rallying day for women’s issues with a key goal: to finally bring about gender parity around the world.

What is International Women’s Day?

In short, it’s a day to work toward gender parity.

The Socialist Party of America organized the first National Women’s Day in New York in 1909 to commemorate the 1908 strike of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. (Women garment workers in early-20th-century America had plenty of reasons to walk off the job, as the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would tragically prove.)

A year later, National Women’s Day became International Women’s Day at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, where more than 100 women from 17 countries decided to establish a worldwide day of celebration to press for working women’s demands.

In fact, the Russian Revolution has International Women’s Day to thank. The 1917 demonstrations by women demanding “bread and peace” sparked other strikes and protests, which led to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II four days later and granted women the right to vote.

International Women’s Day became a more popularized holiday after 1977, when the United Nations invited member states to celebrate it on March 8.

Since 2001, the holiday has had a sponsored website and an annual theme. This year’s theme, #PressForProgress, encourages “motivating and uniting friends, colleagues and whole communities to think, act and be gender inclusive.” In 2016, the World Economic Forum predicted “the gender gap won’t close entirely until 2186. This is too long to wait. Around the world, IWD can be an important catalyst and vehicle for driving greater change for women and moving closer to gender parity.”

The world is far from equal for men and women

All of this gets to a big problem the world still very clearly sees today: Women are still far from equal in just about any place in the world.

The World Economic Forum ranks 145 countries on women’s equality on a scale of 0 (no equality) to 1 (full equality). The highest score of all is Iceland, clocking in at 0.881 — not bad, but not fully equal. The US is 28th, with a score of 0.740. Last is Yemen at 0.484.

The score is based on many factors: how many women participate in the workforce, how well women are paid compared with men, health and educational outcomes, and political empowerment and representation in government. Some countries fare better than others, but none is deemed fully equal under these metrics.

Other reports tell a similar story. According to the United Nations’ 2015 report on the progress of the world’s women, the gap between women and men remains particularly stubborn on issues of work. Women do more unpaid household work than men, and get paid less when they do work in the formal economy alongside men.

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The US, for its part, doesn’t face the same abysmal maternal mortality rates, rampant human rights abuses, and other challenges that impoverished or developing countries do. But there are still big problems: For example, on average, women still earn about 79 cents for every dollar that men make for the same work. And women make up only about one in five legislators in Congress.

Changing all of this comes down to money, power, and will.

Spending more on international aid directed at women and girls can help them rise out of poverty and bring their families and communities up with them. Spending more on social safety net programs such as paid family leave and universal child care helps women participate more equally in the workforce, sparing them the choice between making a living and caring for their family. Helping women gain political power can help empower other women and girls, ensuring that women’s issues get priority in policymaking.

But to accomplish any of this, there needs to be awareness of the issues that women uniquely face in the world today. With International Women’s Day and A Day Without a Woman, organizers hope to raise that awareness — and make it clear that this really is a cause worth protesting and fighting for.

Why Donald Trump keeps calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas”

2016-05-16T17:05:43-04:00

President Donald Trump (R) speaks during an event honoring members of the Native American code talkers in the Oval Office of the White House, on November 27, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images) | Pool/Getty Images

President Trump repeatedly called Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “Pocahontas” as an insult on the campaign trail, and he shows no signs of stopping.

During a White House event Monday honoring Native American code talkers — who helped the US in its communication strategy during World War II — President Trump used the event to take another jab at Warren without directly referring to her.

“I want to thank you because you’re very, very special people,” he said to the veterans. “You were here long before any of us were. Although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her ‘Pocahontas.'”

“Pocahontas” has apparently become Trump’s favorite nickname for Warren, who has said that she had Cherokee ancestors. Trump used the insult numerous times on the campaign trail, including at a chaotic rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a meeting with a group of senators in early 2017, and more than once on Twitter.

Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 10, 2016

Trump’s use of this particular nickname combines several of his worst habits: his inability to let perceived insults slide, his bullying mockery of opponents — and most of all, his general cluelessness on race issues.

This is just the latest example of Trump saying something blatantly racist

Trump has decades of racist statements and behavior under his belt. He has a particularly bad habit of essentializing people based on their heritage or ethnicity. Just look at his repeated comments alleging that federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, who presided over two class action suits against Trump University, is biased against Trump because of his Mexican heritage. (Curiel is American, born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants.)

Or look at Trump’s “birther” conspiracy theories about President Obama, which helped Trump rise to political prominence in the first place. Or his seeming inability to talk about black people without also mentioning the “inner city.”

Conflating all Native Americans with “Pocahontas” is another example of Trump’s racist habits.

“Trump’s inability to discern the difference between Sen. Warren and Pocahontas is no accident,” Cherokee Nation citizen Mary Kathryn Nagle told MSNBC’s Adam Howard. “Instead, his attack on her native identity reflects a dominant American culture that has made every effort to diminish native women to nothing other than a fantastical, oversexualized, Disney character.”

Debra Haaland, the first Native American State Democratic Party Chair of New Mexico, writes:

Trump’s very use of Pocahontas’ name is disrespectful. The story of Pocahontas is heart-wrenching. Toward the end of her life she left her people, went to England, contracted a disease and died at a very young age. When I think of that story — and the hundreds of sad and disturbing stories of how Native people have suffered throughout history, I can’t imagine making a mockery of their names or their lives. In my culture, we have deep respect for our relatives who have gone before us. It would be an utter disgrace to carry on as Donald Trump has about a Native woman whose life was cut short in a terrible way.

Why is Trump using this nickname for Warren?

Trump’s comments may be racist against Native Americans, but he’s using it here to sarcastically suggest that Warren really isn’t Native American. (Which, oddly enough, proves that Trump can also be racist while trying to insult someone for being white.)

Trump is referring to a controversy Warren faced over her ancestry during her 2012 Senate campaign.

Warren says she grew up being told that she had Cherokee heritage. “Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” she wrote in her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance. “My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”

This became an issue during her campaign when reports emerged that Harvard had once touted her Native American heritage as proof of its faculty’s diversity. Warren, however, couldn’t produce definitive proof of her Cherokee ancestry, and neither could genealogists.

This led to speculation that Warren had been a fake “diversity hire,” or that she had abused the affirmative-action system to gain an advantage over other candidates.

However, as Garance Franke-Ruta reported for the Atlantic in 2012, there’s no evidence that Warren ever used claims of Native American ancestry to help her get a job.

While Warren was listed as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty, she had declined to apply as a minority to Rutgers Law School, and had listed herself as “white” while teaching at the University of Texas. The head of the committee that recruited Warren to Harvard also said he had no memory of her Native American heritage ever coming up, and the 1995 Harvard Crimson article reporting on her tenure made no mention of it.

It’s true, Franke-Ruta learned, that Warren wouldn’t meet the criteria to officially qualify as Cherokee. She only claimed to be 1/32 Cherokee, which is too little to qualify for citizenship in two of the three major Cherokee tribes. She also doesn’t have a known direct ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, which is a strict requirement for membership in the Cherokee Nation, or on the Baker Rolls, a requirement of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

But just because Warren can’t find hard evidence of Native American heritage doesn’t mean she doesn’t have any, Franke-Ruta said — and even if she doesn’t, that wouldn’t make her a liar. Hazy oral histories about Native heritage are especially common in Oklahoma, where Warren grew up, and she would have no particular reason to disbelieve the stories she was told growing up.

Franke-Ruta notes that the shaky reliability of oral history has confounded other public figures — like Madeleine Albright, who didn’t know until reporters discovered it that her own parents had escaped the Holocaust, or Marco Rubio, who mistakenly believed that he was the “son of exiles” from Castro’s Cuba when his parents actually came over before Castro took power.

Trump sometimes uses racist attacks to distract from substantive critiques against him

Trump ultimately settled the Trump University lawsuits for $25 million. They were a major public relations problem for Trump, given damning evidence from documents and testimony from former students that the university was a fraudulent scam that deliberately preyed upon financially vulnerable victims.

That may have played into Trump’s attacks on Curiel — and on Warren, who drew plenty of attention to the scandal during the campaign.

During one September CNBC interview in which Trump called Warren “Pocahontas,” he also made some baffling statements about financial issues — casually lying about whether he personally invests in the stock market, and demonstrating that he knows nothing about how monetary policy works.

But Trump also launches personal attacks like this as a matter of course — and while he gives plenty of nicknames like “Little Marco” to his male opponents, he seems especially eager to insult women who he feels have wronged him.

Warren has been one of the Democratic party’s most vocal critics of Trump, and she recently got a lot of media attention for being silenced on the Senate floor while criticizing Trump’s attorney general nominee. So it’s not surprising to see Trump try yet again to take her down a peg.

The bill making it easier for states to defund Planned Parenthood, explained

2017-03-30T16:37:28-04:00

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) | Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Before former President Obama left office, he made a last-ditch effort to protect Planned Parenthood’s state funding from conservative governors and state legislatures that might seek to take it away.

But on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to send a bill to President Trump’s desk that would block that effort. The bill makes use of an obscure law called the Congressional Review Act, which lets Congress fast-track a resolution to disapprove of new federal agency rules within 60 days of their passage.

The rule, which Obama signed in December, would prohibit discriminating against family planning providers for reasons other than the quality of care they offer.

To be clear, this vote wasn’t about the big federal “defund Planned Parenthood” bill that Republicans have promised to pass at the same time as they repeal the Affordable Care Act. That proposal, which went down along with the failed Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, would block Planned Parenthood from accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicaid reimbursements.

This action is less sweeping, but it also affects more than just Planned Parenthood. It deals with how states can spend federal grant money on other low-income family planning providers, too. Rather than eliminating all federal Planned Parenthood funding nationwide, this is more about giving states the option to deny public funds to Planned Parenthood, and to other family planning clinics like it.

It’s also not about protecting states from being “forced” to fund Planned Parenthood, as some reporting has suggested. The rule Obama signed in December, and that Republicans are now poised to overturn, was about reinforcing existing law and about protecting the integrity of the nation’s safety net for family planning services.

This is the key thing to understand about what Republicans are doing by overturning Obama’s rule. Yes, they’re empowering some states to defund Planned Parenthood and similar providers, partially, if they choose. But that’s only part of the story. “Defunding” Planned Parenthood in this particular way can cause a devastating domino effect on the larger health care network that low-income women rely on for birth control.

Obama’s rule deals with Title X, one of Planned Parenthood’s two major sources of public funding

The Republican Party has been waging war against Planned Parenthood’s public funding for years now, because they object to the fact that Planned Parenthood provides abortions. Even though federal tax dollars don’t pay for Planned Parenthood’s abortion services, Republicans claim that funding other health care services at the organization indirectly helps fund abortion.

In practice, however, defunding Planned Parenthood takes funding away from its mostly low-income patients — who might be forced to seek care elsewhere if the government stopped subsidizing their visits to Planned Parenthood, and who might face delays and worse care elsewhere if other clinics get overbooked from trying to take on Planned Parenthood’s former patients.

Planned Parenthood receives more than $500 million annually from the federal government. That money pays for specific health services — things like birth control, cervical cancer screening, or STI prevention, but not abortion — for people who couldn’t afford them otherwise.

Most of the funds (75 percent) are actually reimbursements from Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program for the poor. Just like with any other insurance, Medicaid patients go to their health care appointment first and then have Medicaid pay all or most of the bill later.

The rest of Planned Parenthood’s federal funds come from Title X, the nation’s only federal family planning program. It serves 4 million low-income people every year, about a third through Planned Parenthood. Many Title X patients can’t qualify for Medicaid but still make so little money that they need subsidies for birth control and other family planning services. About half of Title X patients are women of color, and many young women rely on Title X because it protects their privacy.

Title X funds are competitive grants; they are awarded to the best-qualified health providers that are best suited to meet a community’s specific needs.

Every state awards the grants differently. The grants might go to state and local health departments, hospitals, family planning councils, or nonprofits like Planned Parenthood. Then those grantees choose a network of health care providers to work with and help them provide services.

When Planned Parenthood affiliates and clinics earn Title X grants, it’s because they have proven they can administer better care than other local providers.

But 13 states have decided to “defund” Planned Parenthood by finding creative ways to bar the organization from receiving Title X funds — no matter how much more qualified it is to make use of those funds than other providers in the area.

Obama’s rule told states they can’t deny family planning grants to Planned Parenthood just because it provides abortions

At the time Obama signed the new rule, the Health and Human Services Department said that 13 states kicked Planned Parenthood out of their Title X network just because it offers abortions — not for any reason related to its ability to provide Title X health services.

These state restrictions worked in different ways. Some states banned Planned Parenthood, specifically, from getting any grant money. Some of them gave priority to public entities, which was a more indirect way of excluding Planned Parenthood since it’s a private nonprofit.

Either way, according to HHS, the result was a decrease in health services overall, and especially in geographic areas where adequate health care options were more limited.

None of this was actually supposed to happen under federal law. Title X grants were only supposed to be awarded based on how well a provider could offer Title X services. If Planned Parenthood didn’t offer a full range of birth control options, that might be a reason to deny it a Title X grant. Whether or not it uses separate funds, not supported in any way by Title X, to provide abortions should be irrelevant.

But some states still used the Title X program to discriminate against Planned Parenthood anyway. And those efforts even sometimes withstood court challenges.

That’s why Obama signed the new rule in the first place — to make absolutely clear, to both states and courts, that Title X grants are not to be used as proxies in the abortion wars.

It’s not totally clear what would happen if Congress didn’t overturn the rule. Would all of those 13 states have had to change their laws? Maybe, maybe not. But HHS expected the rule to potentially “reverse” the service reductions and deteriorated outcomes that had resulted from those states’ actions.

Title X is much bigger than Planned Parenthood — but it also needs Planned Parenthood in order to function well

Title X is a network. The grant program supports a wide array of health care providers — not just Planned Parenthood and other nonprofit family planning clinics, but also hospitals, community health centers, and local health departments — that provide family planning services to low-income people at reduced or no cost.

Together, Title X and Medicaid combine to form our nation’s family planning safety net. That safety net helped prevent 1.9 million unintended pregnancies in 2014, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and without it the rates of unplanned birth and abortion would have each been 68 percent higher.

Research from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that studies reproductive health issues, shows Planned Parenthood plays a pivotal role in the family planning safety net that can’t easily be replaced.

For instance, because it specializes in reproductive health care, Planned Parenthood is usually much better at providing birth control than other clinics that focus on primary care:

And in many areas of the country, Planned Parenthood is the only nearby place where low-income women can get subsidized birth control:

When they argue to defund Planned Parenthood, Republicans usually insist that women’s health care would not suffer as a result. They say that Planned Parenthood’s public funding can simply be diverted somewhere else — to the nation’s many community health centers, for instance, which vastly outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide.

But while many community health centers offer high-quality care, there is just no way that most of them could take on Planned Parenthood’s patients if the organization shut down. They don’t have the capacity; they often struggle just to accommodate the patients they already have, and it would take years of capacity building for more money to actually solve that problem.

And that’s if Republicans actually keep their promises to divert Planned Parenthood’s funding elsewhere. That often doesn’t happen. And when it does, it often doesn’t work.

After Republican lawmakers in Kansas kicked Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Title X program by restricting the grants to public entities in 2011, the number of patients seen in Title X–funded health centers in Kansas dropped dramatically, from 38,461 patients in 2011 to just 24,047 in 2015.

When Republican lawmakers in Texas kicked Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Women’s Health Program in 2013, other providers didn’t step up to fill in the gaps. Women just got less health care. In areas that had been served by Planned Parenthood before defunding, prescriptions for the most effective forms of birth control plummeted by a third, and women on Medicaid had 27 percent more births than normal.

The success of the Title X program as a whole depends significantly on Planned Parenthood’s ability to participate in it. Think of the Title X network as a sweater with pink stripes, where the stripes are Planned Parenthood. If you hate pink and try to yank the stripes out of the sweater, you risk unraveling the whole thing. And in the best-case scenario, you just get a sweater that’s full of holes and doesn’t keep you nearly as warm anymore.

Republicans tell women they can “go somewhere else” if Planned Parenthood is defunded. But they keep trying to defund the “somewhere elses,” too.

The Title X program is woefully underfunded as it is, and for six years the Republican-dominated Congress has refused to increase its budget for delivering services — even as the need for subsidized birth control went up.

And that’s after Republicans have been forced to compromise by Democrats in the Senate. In every budget House Republicans have proposed over the past seven years, they have called for the total elimination of Title X funding.

There’s a cruel irony in this. Again, because many Republicans don’t want to be seen as actively hostile to women’s health, they often claim that women could just “go somewhere else” for reproductive health care if their local Planned Parenthood shut down due to defunding.

Usually, the “somewhere else” Republicans praise the most is our nation’s vast network of thousands of federally qualified health centers and other publicly funded health care providers.

But that network is funded by Title X, the program that Republicans keep trying to weaken by kicking Planned Parenthood out of it — or eliminate entirely.

Anti-abortion Republicans sometimes act like abortion is so morally toxic that any money flowing anywhere near it becomes tainted. Title X’s family planning services, it seems, are tainted by Planned Parenthood, because Planned Parenthood is tainted by its abortion care — never mind that this care isn’t paid for by tax dollars.

This obsession with financial “purity” means that contraception and other family planning services get thrown under the bus.

Some Republicans may think that contraception itself is a moral evil; others may just think it’s acceptable collateral damage in the war on abortion. A few Republicans want no part in a messy funding fight. Still others may really believe their own unlikely story about how if Planned Parenthood went out of business, women could just go somewhere else for care.

But in today’s Republican Party, the moral imperative to stamp out public funding for Planned Parenthood has completely trumped the moral imperative to make sure low-income women, and men, can get comprehensive reproductive health care.

Poll: 80% say women should be able to have sex for pleasure, not pregnancy

2017-03-22T16:20:09-04:00

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After President Trump was elected despite his famously misogynistic words and actions, many Americans worried that the country was going backward on gender issues. And since Trump has promised to appoint Supreme Court judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, reproductive health specifically seems under attack.

But according to a new poll conducted by PerryUndem, a nonpartisan public opinion research firm in Washington, DC, the American public still holds remarkably progressive views on gender and health policy. (The poll was fielded March 2 through 6 and surveyed a representative sample of 1,094 registered voters nationwide.)

Eighty percent of voters believe that a woman should be able to have sex for pleasure without worrying about pregnancy. That’s about the same proportion of voters, 76 percent, who said men should be able to have sex for pleasure without worrying about pregnancy.

Strong majorities of voters say that access to affordable birth control is important for women’s rights, equality, and economic stability.

And majorities also oppose some of the Republican Party’s biggest priorities on women’s health — including defunding Planned Parenthood, restricting access to abortion, and banning federal tax dollars from paying for abortion.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has refused to promise that he wouldn’t roll back women’s health gains like the no-cost birth control benefit. But two-thirds of Americans want to keep that benefit in place.

This point is worth pausing on. One of America’s two major political parties is ideologically committed to policies on women’s health that most Americans don’t agree with at all.

And the effect of these policies will be to reduce access to women’s health care by making it either more expensive or less widely available.

Most voters say affordable birth control is important to women’s rights, and to the economy as a whole

Hormonal birth control has unquestionably had huge impacts on society since it was first marketed in 1960. It allowed women to delay marriage and childbearing and enter the workforce in larger numbers. That meant women had more choices about what to do with their lives, and it boosted the nation’s GDP in the process.

But the key word for the current debate on birth control is “affordable.”

Many Republicans and conservatives staunchly opposed the birth control benefit, which covers all 18 FDA-approved methods of birth control at no additional cost to women who have insurance.

Some had moral objections to birth control, or balked at the idea that they should have to ”pay for” a woman’s choice to have sex. Others worried about the effects of such a government mandate on the private market. And others — including Price — rejected the idea that women really need the benefit at all.

According to the new poll, however, most Americans see a wide range of benefits to women’s ability to access affordable birth control — for women, for their families, and for the economy as a whole.

Black and Latino voters were somewhat more likely than non-Hispanic whites to make these connections: 71 percent of Latino voters and 67 percent of black voters, compared with 59 percent of white voters, said that birth control affects women’s opportunities to be financially stable. And while 65 percent of voters overall and 61 percent of white voters said birth control affects “women’s rights and freedoms as individuals,” 79 percent of Latino voters and 76 percent of black voters said the same.

However, only 37 percent of men said they had personally benefited from a partner’s access to affordable birth control.

One in three women say they can’t afford to pay more than $10 a month for birth control

This is the other reason “affordable” is the key word in the birth control debate: Theoretical “access” to contraception doesn’t mean much if women can’t actually afford it.

One-third of women of reproductive age told pollsters that if they or a loved one needed birth control today, they could pay no more than $10 for it out of pocket. Fourteen percent said they couldn’t afford to pay anything at all.

This is a similar result to a 2010 survey conducted by Planned Parenthood, which found that a third of women struggled to afford their copays for birth control. Those copays ranged from $15 to $50.

This suggests that even more women would have trouble affording an IUD or implant, which can cost up to $1,000 upfront. But these longer-term methods are the most effective at preventing pregnancy — and drastically reduce teen pregnancy rates when they’re made affordable.

Price, then a representative, said in 2012 that “not one” woman actually had trouble affording birth control. The evidence suggests he’s very wrong about this — yet he’s the public official with the most power over what happens to the birth control mandate in the future.

Large majorities of voters oppose policies that restrict access to women’s health care or make it more expensive

One of America’s two major political parties is ideologically committed to policies like defunding Planned Parenthood, banning abortion entirely, slashing Medicaid benefits, and repealing a health care law that has significantly expanded health benefits for women.

Most voters don’t agree with any of these priorities.

Three-quarters of Americans oppose defunding Planned Parenthood. Two-thirds want to keep the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit in place. Well over 80 percent want to keep the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, no-cost women’s preventive care, and the ban on charging women more for insurance.

What’s more, voters seem to associate these policy priorities with gender discrimination. When asked a hypothetical question about what would happen if men were the sex that could get pregnant instead of women, 75 percent of voters said they thought men in the new administration and in Congress would want to keep the birth control benefit instead of eliminate it.

Even the supposedly controversial issue of “taxpayer-funded abortions,” which Republicans have used to justify defunding Planned Parenthood, isn’t actually that controversial. A majority of voters (55 percent) oppose banning Medicaid from covering abortions at all — even though Medicaid has been banned from covering most abortions for 40 years due to the Hyde Amendment.

These findings from the PerryUndem poll track pretty closely with a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll on public attitudes toward women’s health care and Planned Parenthood.

It seems clear that the American public has much more progressive views on women’s health issues than does the Republican Party — or at least the policies that the party has chosen to make a priority these days.

Neil Gorsuch is denying former students’ claims that he made sexist remarks in class

2017-03-21T15:51:40-04:00

During his confirmation hearing Tuesday, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch denied allegations by two of his former law students that he made sexist remarks about women in the workplace.

A former student said Gorsuch said in a legal ethics class that “many” women lawyers lie about whether they plan to have children to abuse maternity benefits — and that their companies should ask about such plans to protect themselves. The remarks have become an attack for Democrats opposed to the Tenth Circuit Court judge’s nomination, particularly because Gorsuch, like many would-be justices, doesn’t have a long track record of public opinions on controversial issues.

But at the hearing Tuesday, Gorsuch denied those remarks, and said that instead he was asking for a show of hands to make the opposite point: that many women are often asked “inappropriate” questions about their family planning in a professional context.

A former student says Gorsuch made a sexist remark about women and maternity benefits

The former student, Jennifer R. Sisk, signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee describing a discussion in an April 2016 legal ethics class at the University of Colorado. Gorsuch, according to Sisk, said during a class discussion that “many” women lawyers manipulate their companies’ maternity benefits by lying about their plans to get pregnant, and then leaving soon after the baby is born:

[H]e asked the class to raise their hands if they knew of a female who had used a company to get maternity benefits and then left right after having a baby. Judge Gorsuch specifically targeted females and maternity leave. This question was not about parents or men shifting priorities after having children. It was solely focused on women using their companies.

I do not remember if any students raised their hands, but it was no more than a small handful of students. At that point Judge Gorsuch became more animated saying “C’mon guys.” He then announced that all our hands should be raised because “many” women use their companies for maternity benefits and then leave the company after the baby is born.

When one student objected that employers can’t ask about family plans during a job interview, Sisk said Gorsuch denied that this was true: “Instead Judge Gorsuch told the class that not only could a future employer ask female interviewees about their pregnancy and family plans, companies must ask females about their family and pregnancy plans to protect the company.”

The university later confirmed to the committee that Sisk had raised these objections with them shortly after the class discussion.

Gorsuch argued the question was “inappropriate” — but dodged a question about whether it was illegal

When Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) confronted Gorsuch, however, Gorsuch flatly denied Sisk’s claims. He said he had never asked his students to raise their hands if they knew any women who had used their company for maternity benefits.

Instead, Gorsuch said, he asked for a show of hands of how many students had been asked “an inappropriate question about your family planning” in an employment context.

“I am shocked every year how many young women raise their hand,” Gorsuch said.

Gorsuch also dodged questions from Durbin about whether he thinks it’s legally inappropriate to ask questions like these, and whether a company should be able to take a woman’s family choices into consideration during the hiring process.

Nor did Gorsuch address Sisk’s claims that he had told his law class companies must ask women these questions out of protection.

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Durbin pointed out that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) generally considers asking a woman about family planning during a job interview to be evidence of pregnancy discrimination.

Did Gorsuch find the EEOC’s guidance to be “persuasive,” Durbin asked?

“Senator, there’s a lot of words there,” Gorsuch replied, adding that he’d have to study the question further in the context of a judicial case to offer a legal opinion.

Why women wore Handmaid’s Tale robes in the Texas Senate

2017-03-21T13:57:29-04:00

On the Texas Senate floor Monday, about a dozen women protested an abortion ban by dressing up as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel in which women have no rights and are routinely forced to give birth against their will.

The bill that the women were protesting passed the Texas state Senate on Monday, and now moves to the state House. If the bill becomes law, it will effectively ban second-trimester abortions in Texas — or force doctors to use riskier methods to perform them.

The bill would do this by banning the safest and most common method of performing an abortion in the second trimester, dilation and evacuation (D&E). This procedure is used in about 95 percent of second-trimester abortions in the US. Texas doctors who violate the ban would face felony charges.

A Handmaid's Tale comes to life in the Senate Gallery. #FightBackTX pic.twitter.com/aLAOLRKH2j
— Whole Woman's Health (@WholeWomans) March 20, 2017

Women dressed as handmaids are protesting anti-abortion bills at the Capitol. #FightBackTX #txlege pic.twitter.com/w5EQfBqNtG
— Planned Parenthood Texas Votes (@PPTXVotes) March 20, 2017

The law does have an exception for risks to the woman’s health. But, like most “exceptions” in abortion bans like these, it’s much too narrow to cover all possible medical complications for either the woman or the fetus.

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, women’s bodies are quite literally owned by men. Women who break society’s sexual purity laws are forced to become indentured breeders, called Handmaids, who wear thick red capes. At one point in the novel, a woman who sought an abortion because she was raped is punished with public shame, surrounded by a group of women chanting that the rape was her fault.

Sales of the book have gone up significantly since Donald Trump’s election, and a new TV series based on the novel is coming out in April on Hulu.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a fitting cautionary tale for our times, reproductive rights advocates argue, given the Trump-Pence’s administration’s stated commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade and outlawing abortion. That move would inevitably “punish” many women, as Trump put it once — either by forcing women to give birth against their will or subjecting them to both medical risk and criminal prosecution for seeking an illegal abortion.

Bans like these are becoming increasingly common — even though they’re almost certainly unconstitutional

D&E bans have become the latest popular tactic to chip away at reproductive rights at the state level. But unlike other kinds of abortion restrictions, such as parental notification requirements or waiting periods, D&E bans haven’t held up well in court so far.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a D&E abortion ban in February, and the American Civil Liberties Union plans to go to court over it. Similar laws in Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama have not taken effect due to court challenges. In two other states where D&E bans have passed, Mississippi and West Virginia, court challenges simply haven’t been brought because abortion providers in those states only offer earlier abortions anyway.

Courts have struck down D&E bans in every legal challenge so far because judges find that they violate Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. It’s not permissible under Roe to ban abortion before a fetus is viable, and most second-trimester abortions don’t involve a viable fetus.

But even though they end up costing states time and money in legal challenges, D&E bans are quickly becoming the latest trend in anti-abortion lawmaking at the state level.

A D&E ban makes abortion less safe for women, with no clear medical benefit to either the woman or the fetus

To comply with the ban, Texas doctors would basically have two choices. They could put a woman at greater risk by taking medically unnecessary extra steps in order to perform a second-trimester abortion. Or they can stop offering women abortions after about 14 weeks of pregnancy entirely.

Proponents of D&E bans have given D&E a colorful new name: “dismemberment abortion.” They say banning the procedure is necessary because it’s inhumane to remove a living fetus from the uterus in “pieces.”

But there is no good medical evidence that fetuses can experience pain before well into the third trimester of pregnancy — and no evidence at all that this could happen early in the second trimester, when most D&Es are performed.

“I think we should focus more on the suffering of women,” Kristyn Brandi, an OB-GYN at Boston Medical Center who specializes in contraception and abortion care, told Vox. “My job is to take care of the patient in front of me, in the way that is safest for her and causes the least pain for her.”

Some proponents of the D&E ban suggest that it’s easy to comply with the ban; all the doctor has to do is make sure the fetus is dead before the abortion starts.

But it’s not that simple. D&E is by far the safest method for performing a second-trimester abortion, Brandi explained. Without the option of D&E, providers only have a few options for performing second-trimester abortion — all of which present unnecessary risk to the patient.

Doctors could give a woman medicine to ensure the fetus is no longer living before the abortion starts — but that medicine carries extra risks for the woman. “If I can not give medication to my patient that causes risk to her, I would prefer to do that,” Brandi said.

The other option is to induce labor, which is much more risky and expensive for the woman.

“Inducing labor involves a hospital stay, and possibly multiple days of medication, to induce labor that early in a pregnancy, without any added benefit,” Brandi said. “I would argue that actually causes more suffering for women, and for a fetus that wouldn’t survive [labor and delivery].”

Anti-abortion advocates are trying to make D&E the new "partial-birth abortion"

During the Bush administration, there was a huge fight over so-called “partial-birth abortions.” That’s not a medical term for intact dilation and extraction (known as D&X, or “intact D&E”) — a rare procedure that Congress banned in 2003, but that was once used in miscarriage removals and later abortions. Doctors said that D&X was sometimes the best option to preserve a pregnant woman’s health, and so they opposed efforts to ban it.

But anti-abortion advocates rebranded the procedure as “partial-birth” abortion and focused on the unpleasant details of the procedure. This helped sway the public against it — and even sway more people against abortion in general for a time.

“Everything changed when our side started talking about partial-birth abortion,” Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, told Emily Bazelon of the New York Times in 2012.

Bazelon noted that this strategy took off in the mid-1990s, shortly thereafter leading to a rise in the percentage of Americans who identified as “pro-life” and said they were morally opposed to abortion. “Anti-abortion advocates had apparently succeeded by conflating one kind of late-term abortion with all abortion,” Bazelon wrote. (The vast majority of abortions take place in the first trimester.)

It would be no surprise, then, if abortion opponents wanted to build on that success and use it to try to ban abortion much more broadly. And so it comes as no surprise that anti-abortion advocates have rebranded the D&E procedure as a “dismemberment abortion,” which is also not a medical term.

In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld a challenge to the ban, ruling in a 5-4 opinion that women seeking abortion through a D&X would still have the ability to instead obtain an abortion through a D&E.

That presents yet another constitutional problem for D&E bans, in addition to the fact that they are at odds with Roe v. Wade.

These bans are catching on, even though they keep getting struck down in court

Why are these bans getting so popular, even in the face of expensive legal challenges? Part of it is to appeal to pro-life moral values, and moral revulsion. But there’s more to it than that.

Anti-abortion laws tend to come in waves. One state passes a 20-week ban, say, and in a few years you’ve got a dozen or more similar laws on the books. Some laws — like parental notification requirements, waiting periods, or restrictions on insurance coverage — are already pretty widespread, and most of the states that are likely to pass them have already done so.

But lawmakers in heavily anti-abortion states rarely stop at these now-common restrictions. Anti-abortion lobbyists keep helping them come up with new ways to restrict abortion, or to expand existing restrictions.

This steady lobbying and legislating effort has led to an explosion in anti-abortion lawmaking in just the past five years.

It’s also led to a proliferation of some truly bizarre ideas — like Indiana’s “bury your miscarriage” law that was later overturned, or Utah’s new “fetal anesthesia” law that doctors say is pure medical gibberish that they can’t possibly implement in practice.

Really, though, a lot of anti-abortion laws (and I’ve read a lot of them) include some pure medical gibberish of one kind or another — whether they’re fudging the numbers on how to measure the gestation of a pregnancy, or using medically inaccurate terms for medical procedures, or even inventing brand new medical procedures out of whole cloth.

That’s probably because most of these bills are written by people who aren’t doctors, and who seem to have no clue how pregnancy or abortion actually works.

In these 105 counties, Planned Parenthood is the only full-service birth control clinic

2017-03-17T17:22:57-04:00

During a CNN Health Care Town Hall on Wednesday, co-host Dana Bash asked Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price about what would happen to the women who rely on Planned Parenthood for health care if the organization were to be defunded.

Specifically, she asked about those who live in the 105 counties where Planned Parenthood is the only clinic that offers women the full range of contraceptive services.

“Well, I’d be interested in the list you have,” Price replied.

The list, it turns out, comes from data compiled by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which did extensive research on so-called contraceptive deserts — areas where women in need have relatively limited access to publicly funded clinics that offer birth control. (Here’s a map of these areas, broken down by county.)

Their research found that 3.1 million US women who need publicly funded contraception live in counties with zero publicly funded clinics that offer the full range of contraceptive methods, including longer-acting methods like IUDs that are the most effective at preventing pregnancy.

The National Campaign shared with Vox the full list of 105 counties where Planned Parenthood is the only full-service reproductive health clinic:

California:

Imperial County
Madera County
Placer County
San Mateo County
Shasta County
Solano County
Sutter County

Colorado:

Chaffee County
Grand County
Montezuma County
Weld County

Connecticut:

Windham County

Illinois:

Champaign County
LaSalle County
McLean County
Peoria County
St. Clair County
Sangamon County

Indiana:

Bartholomew County

Iowa:

Black Hawk County
Des Moines County
Johnson County
Lee County
Pottawattamie County
Story County
Woodbury County

Maine:

Sagadahoc County
York County

Maryland:

Frederick County
Talbot County
Wicomico County

Michigan:

Berrien County
Jackson County
Livingston County
Macomb County
Marquette County

Minnesota:

Beltrami County
Benton County
Dakota County
Douglas County
Kandiyohi County
Olmsted County
Washington County

Missouri:

Greene County
Jasper County
St. Charles County

Montana:

Yellowstone County

New Hampshire:

Sullivan County

New Jersey:

Burlington County
Monmouth County
Passaic County
Union County

New York:

Dutchess County
Fulton County
Genesee County
Jefferson County
Lewis County
Madison County
Montgomery County
Oneida County
Orange County
Richmond County
Rockland County
St. Lawrence County
Schenectady County
Schoharie County
Schuyler County
Sullivan County
Warren County

Ohio:

Clark County
Delaware County
Lucas County
Mahoning County
Medina County
Portage County
Richland County
Wayne County

Pennsylvania:

Cambria County
Somerset County

Utah:

Wasatch County
Washington County
Weber County

Vermont:

Bennington County
Franklin County
Lamoille County
Orleans County
Washington County
Windham County
Windsor County

Virginia:

Albemarle County

Washington:

Chelan County
Clallam County
Kittitas County
Okanogan County
San Juan County
Skagit County
Whitman County

Wisconsin:

Columbia County
Manitowoc County
Outagamie County
Racine County
Sheboygan County
Walworth County
Washington County
Wood County

Other community health centers simply can’t fill in the coverage gaps without Planned Parenthood

Price repeated a common Republican talking point: that since the nation has more than 13,000 community health centers, women don’t need Planned Parenthood’s 650 or so clinics. They can just go somewhere else for birth control.

Price also suggested that other community health centers would somehow “spring up” to fill the gaps in areas where Planned Parenthood was the major provider.

But that’s just not realistic. And if Price thinks otherwise, that means he doesn’t really understand how the nation’s safety-net family planning network works at all.

First, not every community health center is a safety-net family planning provider. In 2010, 8,409 (not 13,000) safety-net health centers offered subsidized family planning, according to research from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that studies reproductive health.

More to the point, though, Planned Parenthood offers a hugely disproportionate amount of services for the number of clinics it operates. In 2010, Planned Parenthood clinics made up just 10 percent of safety-net providers, but served 36 percent of women who got contraceptive care from safety-net centers.

In 2010, Planned Parenthood cared for at least half of all women who needed publicly funded family planning services in 332 of the 491 counties where it operates.

And because it specializes in reproductive health care, Planned Parenthood is usually much better at providing birth control than other clinics that focus on primary care:

While many community health centers offer high-quality care, there is just no way that most of them could take on Planned Parenthood’s patients if the organization shut down. They don’t have the capacity; they often struggle just to accommodate the patients they already have.

More government grant money alone would not solve that problem; health centers would need capital to build more clinics and hire more staff, and they would need time to build capacity.

And that’s if Republicans actually keep their promises to divert Planned Parenthood’s funding elsewhere. That often doesn’t happen. And when it does, it often doesn’t work.

In practice, defunding Planned Parenthood takes money away from its mostly low-income patients, who will no longer be able to use their Medicaid coverage at their preferred health care provider. Low-income women will be hit especially hard, but all Planned Parenthood patients may be affected if clinics are forced to close as a result of budget cuts.

Correction: Chelan County, Washington was mistakenly omitted when this article was first published.

The controversy over Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and trans women, explained

2017-03-15T12:20:04-04:00

By 2013, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was already a literary sensation known the world over for her beautiful prose and complex, lively characters. Her star rose even higher after Beyoncé sampled her well-known TED talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.” Adichie’s simple challenge — that for all of our sakes, men and women alike must actively work to change a gender-unequal culture — resonated deeply with many.

Now, though, some feminists are sharply criticizing Adichie for comments she made about transgender women. In an interview on Britain’s Channel 4 News, Adichie said: “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.”

Adichie’s critics say these remarks implied that trans women aren’t “real women” — a stereotype that transgender people constantly struggle against and find deeply offensive.

Adichie, who is also an LGBTQ-rights advocate in Nigeria, has since apologized and tried to clarify what she meant. She said that while trans women face tremendous oppression and must be supported, we should also be able to acknowledge real differences between transgender women and women who are not transgender, without suggesting that one experience is more important or valid than the other.

While some transgender people appreciated Adichie’s apology, the controversy still hasn’t gone away. That’s because Adichie’s comments touched on a long-running, often deeply divisive debate within feminism over what womanhood really means. And in an age of anti-trans bathroom laws and unprecedented public visibility of transgender people in society, that debate has taken on new urgency and relevance.

What Adichie said about trans women

In the Channel 4 interview, Adichie was asked whether it matters “how you arrived” at being a woman — whether a trans woman is “any less of a real woman” if she also grew up “enjoying the privileges of being a man.” (The question of whether transgender women are “real women” has been a hot topic in British media lately, following a controversial op-ed on the subject by BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour broadcaster Jenni Murray.)

This was Adichie’s response:

When people talk about, “Are trans women women?” my feeling is trans women are trans women. I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis.

It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.

…I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don’t think that’s true.

After her initial comments were criticized as transphobic, Adichie responded with a lengthy Facebook post. She said the concerns of her critics were “valid,” and attempted to clarify what she meant — that gender is a problem “not because of how we look or how we identify or how we feel but because of how the world treats us”:

I see how my saying that we should not conflate the gender experiences of trans women with that of women born female could appear as if I was suggesting that one experience is more important than the other. Or that the experiences of trans women are less valid than those of women born female. I do not think so at all — I know that trans women can be vulnerable in ways that women born female are not. This, again, is a reason to not deny the differences.

Why does this even matter?

Because at issue is gender.

Gender is a problem not because of how we look or how we identify or how we feel but because of how the world treats us.

Girls are socialized in ways that are harmful to their sense of self – to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.

A trans woman is a person born male and a person who, before transitioning, was treated as male by the world. Which means that they experienced the privileges that the world accords men. This does not dismiss the pain of gender confusion or the difficult complexities of how they felt living in bodies not their own.

Because the truth about societal privilege is that it isn’t about how you feel. (Anti-racist white people still benefit from race privilege in the United States). It is about how the world treats you, about the subtle and not so subtle things that you internalize and absorb.

Why Adichie’s initial remarks were criticized as transphobic

When Adichie was asked directly asked whether trans women are “real women,” her response was that “trans women are trans women.” That, critics said, suggests that Adichie sees trans women as a separate category from “real women” — which is dangerous because of the types of discrimination that transgender people face.

“[Adichie’s] mistake is to try to silo out trans women,” Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan, Trans/Gender Nonconforming Justice Project Director at the National LGBTQ Task Force, told Vox. “It sends the message: ‘It’s okay not to think about trans women, they’re not the same as us.’”

Adichie probably didn’t mean to hurt trans women, Rodriguez-Roldan said, and was “very much correct” when she called gender a social construct in her apology. But if gender is largely about how people treat us in society, Rodriguez-Roldan said, then you also can’t ignore the way society treats trans people specifically.

Transgender people face discrimination in bathrooms, in housing, and on the job. They have alarmingly high rates of poverty and suicide, and often fall victim to violent hate crimes. All of this, when you get down to it, is because some think that transgender people aren’t “really” the gender they claim to be, and that they should be forced to conform to what the sex on their birth certificate says.

Transgender people also don’t just “sort of change gender” on a whim, as Adichie’s comments seemed to suggest. They often live in existential agony, feeling that who they fundamentally are as a person doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth, and that they can’t do anything about it unless they’re prepared to lose everything.

Some transgender people live this way for decades before transitioning, while others are able to express their gender as they see fit from a young age.

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There’s also a dark history in the feminist movement itself when it comes to remarks that are similar to Adichie’s.

So-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, believe that trans women should be considered men for all practical purposes. Like many social conservatives, TERFs tend to push harmful myths about trans women preying on “real” women in bathrooms and other gender-segregated spaces. While they are relatively small in number, Evan Urquhart and Parker Marie Molloy point out at Slate, TERFs are visible and noisy, foster mistrust between trans women and lesbian cis women, and have even been known to maliciously “out” trans women to families and employers.

Not all radical feminists are “TERFs” by any means. Indeed, while some radical feminists consider the term TERF to be a slur that demonizes their views, the term was popularized by radical feminists who wanted to separate themselves from their anti-trans peers.

But the history of this kind of bigotry has taken a toll, Rodriguez-Roldan said. Even if Adichie didn’t mean any harm, she said, many transgender people couldn’t help but hear her comments as just another way of telling trans women that they don’t belong. And trans women are pretty tired of hearing new versions of that same old story.

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Why some feminists are taking Adichie’s side

Many feminists agree that gender is a social construct — that women are expected to “act feminine” and are punished if they don’t, and that men are punished for acting feminine because they’re not supposed to. And on top of that, women are punished for being too feminine, since femininity is considered less “serious” or important in society than masculinity.

To some radical feminists, though, gender is entirely a social construct. We only act in “masculine” or “feminine” ways because that’s what we’re expected to do. So the idea of “living as a woman” when you’ve been “born male” doesn’t make much sense. If dismantling patriarchy is all about rejecting gender stereotypes, then what does it mean if someone starts “living as a woman” by wearing dresses and makeup?

If a trans woman was assigned male at birth, the thinking goes, she may have been treated like a man her entire life before her transition — and that can have real advantages, even if she was also mocked for seeming effeminate. Men, and those assumed to be male, may get called on more often in class, promoted more often at work, have fewer child care burdens, or be able to take medicines that are more tailored to their physiology. They have never had to worry about getting pregnant. And so on.

For these feminists, the only meaningful separation between men and women is their biology, and the way society treats them as a result. For thousands of years, women have been oppressed specifically because of their reproductive biology. Radical feminists worry that we might lose sight of this if gender-specific terms like “pregnant women” fall out of favor because they exclude trans people.

This is the basic point that Adichie seemed to be making — that the experience of being “women born female,” as she put it, and the experience of transitioning to a woman just aren’t the same, and that it’s foolish to pretend they are.

But when trans advocates and allies say that “trans women are women,” they’re not actually trying to say that transgender women are the same as cisgender women (women who aren’t transgender). They’re trying to say that these differences shouldn’t disqualify trans women from the broader category of “womanhood.”

After all, it’s possible to find an exception for just about every conventional idea of what it means to be “born female” or to be “biologically female.” Is it having two X chromosomes, or having a vagina or a uterus, or not having a penis? Plenty of intersex people who are assigned female at birth, and continue to be considered female later in life, don’t fit one or more of these categories.

Neither gender nor biological sex is quite as simple as what’s on your birth certificate, trans advocates argue. And even if we don’t know what causes gender dysphoria, that doesn’t make it any less real for the people who experience it.

The idea of “male privilege” gets complicated when it comes to trans women

Many trans women reject Adichie’s notion that they really “experience the privileges that the world accords to men” before transitioning. For one thing, some trans women say, being treated like a man while feeling like a woman causes sustained psychological distress — not the self-confidence boost that men who feel themselves to be men might get from the same preferential treatment.

And once trans people come out (or even before they come out, if they’re perceived as effeminate), forget about any preferential treatment at all.

That’s why transgender people encourage cisgender people to recognize that it’s a privilege to be born with the biological sex characteristics that match how you feel inside.

It’s a complicated subject, though, and every trans woman is different. Laverne Cox summed this up with a thoughtful series of tweets about her own life:

1.I was talking to my twin brother today about whether he believes I had male privilege growing up. I was a very feminine child though I was
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

2. Assigned male at birth. My gender was constantly policed. I was told I acted like a girl and was bullied and shamed for that. My
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

3. Femininity did not make me feel privileged. I was a good student and was very much encouraged because of that but I saw cis girls who
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

Showed academic promise being nurtured in the black community I grew up in in Mobile, Ala. Gender exists on a spectrum & the binary
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

Narrative which suggests that all trans women transition from male privilege erases a lot of experiences and isn't intersectional. Gender
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

Essentialist & again not intersectional. Many of our feminist foremothers cautioned against such essentialism & not having an intersectional
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

Approach to feminism. Class, race, sexuality, ability, immigration status, education all influence the ways in which we experience privilege
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 11, 2017

So though I was assigned male at birth I would contend that I did not enjoy male privilege prior to my transition. Patriarchy and cissexism
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) March 12, 2017

This idea of intersectionality is supposed to help modern feminists recognize differences, without dividing people into silos based on those differences.

Black women can have very different experiences of being a woman than white women do, and straight women can have very different experiences of womanhood than lesbians do. Black lesbian women can have different experiences still. But you’d never hear any modern feminist say that black women aren’t really women, or that they should be excluded from women’s events.

“I think that for people who have been wounded by gendering, it’s quite accurate and understandable to say, ‘You don’t share the same wound that I share,’” said Susan Stryker, associate professor of gender and women’s issues at the University of Arizona. “Where I start to have a problem with that argument is when it gets used to challenge trans people’s access to gendered public space.”

When you get down to it, transgender women are making pretty basic requests of feminism. They want to be heard and included. They want the freedom to be who they are in public and in society, with no exceptions or qualifiers. And they want to stop being forced to defend their womanhood, their basic sense of self, and their humanity, against people who consider those things to be up for debate.

The GOP Obamacare replacement defunds Planned Parenthood and restricts abortion coverage

2017-03-13T17:59:32-04:00

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The bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act will effectively defund Planned Parenthood for one year by cutting the organization from Medicaid reimbursements, according to the highly anticipated Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the bill, released Monday.

While the bill doesn’t mention Planned Parenthood by name, the CBO report anticipates that only Planned Parenthood, its affiliates, and clinics would be affected through the guidelines put forward under the Republican-backed American Health Care Act.

That could actually spell trouble for the bill in the Senate. Singling out Planned Parenthood, and not other family planning providers, could be considered an “extraneous matter” that isn’t relevant to the federal budget. If so, that would be a violation of the Byrd Rule, and would make the bill ineligible to pass with a simple majority through the budget reconciliation process.

If the defunding provision passed, though, the CBO found that it would reduce access to “services that help women avert pregnancies” — especially for people who are low-income or live in rural areas. The report concludes that about 15 percent of people who “reside in areas without other health care clinics or medical practitioners who serve low-income populations” will experience reduced health care access.

The CBO also estimates that the one-year defunding will reduce direct federal spending by $234 million by 2026 — but that the government will have to spend an additional $77 million on Medicaid over that time period, due to an increase in unplanned births and the fact that some of the resulting children will qualify for Medicaid.

The bill can actually go further than this, though. It also threatens to dismantle the entire private insurance market for abortion coverage, not just public funding for abortion providers.

Under the Republican plan, if a woman wants a health insurance plan that will cover abortion, she (and possibly her employer) won’t be able to use tax credits to buy it.

And if this bill passes, there’s no guarantee that women will have any good options for private insurance coverage of abortion — a procedure that, out of pocket, can cost from $500, for an earlier abortion, to tens of thousands of dollars, for a later one.

The bill could effectively eliminate private insurance coverage of abortion

Under the new Republican plan, any insurance plans that cover abortion — unless the woman became pregnant through rape or incest, or if the abortion is needed to save her life — won’t be eligible for tax credits.

Tax credits help make insurance more affordable for some consumers. That means insurance coverage for abortion, specifically, will be more expensive. These restrictions also apply to the tax credits that some small businesses use to purchase health care plans — but those tax credits will be gone anyway by 2020.

To be clear, the bill doesn’t ban abortion coverage directly. Nor does it prohibit anyone from buying abortion coverage, or a separate insurance “rider” for that coverage. It just doesn’t allow that coverage to be subsidized by the government.

That means many consumers would have to go out of their way to find a plan that covers abortion — and once they did, it would be more expensive. And if abortion insurance coverage is both expensive and a logistical hassle, many consumers simply won’t buy it.

That wouldn’t leave insurance companies much incentive to offer abortion coverage at all, even if it’s technically not prohibited by law. Indeed, it gives insurers almost no other choice but to stop covering abortion in many, or even most, of their plans.

“It’s clear the goal is to try to eliminate private coverage of abortion entirely,” Megan Donovan, senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, told Vox in an earlier interview.

There are also serious limitations to the “exceptions” under which a woman can get abortion coverage in this bill. For instance, if a woman has an abortion because she discovered late in her pregnancy that her baby wouldn’t survive birth, or because she has other health complications that make pregnancy risky but wouldn’t present an immediate threat to her life, that’s still considered an “elective” abortion that can’t be covered by federal funds.

Thanks to the Hyde Amendment, these restrictions already apply to most federal funds — including Medicaid. That’s why federal funds don’t pay for abortion at Planned Parenthood; they only fund other medical procedures.

What does it actually mean to “defund Planned Parenthood” at the federal level?

In practice, defunding Planned Parenthood takes money away from its mostly low-income patients, who might be forced to seek care elsewhere if the government stopped subsidizing their visits to Planned Parenthood. Low-income women will be hit especially hard, but all Planned Parenthood patients may be affected if clinics are forced to close as a result of budget cuts.

The more than $500 million Planned Parenthood receives annually from the federal government — the funding that Republicans in Congress now want to take away — pays for specific health services, like birth control or cervical cancer screening, for people who couldn’t afford them otherwise.

The rest of Planned Parenthood’s federal funds come in the form of grants from Title X, the nation’s only federal program for family planning. Title X grants are awarded on a competitive basis to clinics that meet the program’s standards for family planning coverage and services.

Title X subsidizes free or low-cost contraception and other preventive services, and it’s especially helpful for low-income or uninsured people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid.

The ACA repeal bill targets Medicaid. Another proposal that just passed the House targets Title X, by making it easier for states to block Planned Parenthood from receiving federal Title X grants.

Again, Title X grants are competitive. When Planned Parenthood affiliates and clinics earn Title X grants, it’s because they have proven they can administer better care than other local providers.

Planned Parenthood could technically save their funding if they stopped offering abortions. But that’s never going to happen.

If the government stopped paying for Planned Parenthood to accept Medicaid patients or Title X grants, it would be a huge financial blow to the organization.

Federal funding makes up about 40 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget. Most of its patients are low-income and rely on Medicaid coverage or Title X subsidies for health care.

In 2015, a whopping 78 percent of Planned Parenthood’s patients had incomes of 150 percent or less of the federal poverty level. Losing even a significant fraction of these low-income patients would be devastating to Planned Parenthood; it would probably have to close clinics or reduce capacity, which would affect all of its patients, regardless of income.

President Trump recently suggested that Planned Parenthood might be able to keep its funding if it stopped offering abortions, The New York Times reported Monday. Technically, under the wording of the bill, this is true.

But there’s just no way Planned Parenthood would stop performing abortions. It would go against everything the organization stands for. Offering women across the country the full spectrum of reproductive health care, including pregnancy termination, is just too central to its mission.

“The White House proposal that Planned Parenthood stop providing abortion is the same demand opponents of women’s health have been pushing for decades, as a part of their long-standing effort to end women’s access to safe, legal abortion,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards said in a statement. “Planned Parenthood has always stood strong against these attacks on our patients and their ability to access the full range of reproductive health care.”

Richards added: “We are glad that the White House understands that taking away the preventive care Planned Parenthood provides is deeply unpopular and would be a disaster for women’s health care.”

Lumping in Planned Parenthood with Obamacare repeal could threaten the success of the entire bill

While targeting Planned Parenthood’s funding is popular among Republicans, most Americans don’t consider it a priority. Polling suggests most Americans, including nearly half of Trump voters, oppose defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest family planning provider. One in five US women have visited a Planned Parenthood clinic for services like birth control, cancer screenings, STD tests, or pregnancy termination.

Republicans have threatened a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding before, in 2011 and 2015, but they were ultimately forced to back down — mostly because Democrats in the Senate and President Obama were a firewall.

That’s why many GOP members of Congress have expressed reservations about lumping Planned Parenthood defunding and ACA repeal together.

Republicans need at least 50 of their 52 senators to pass the ACA repeal through the budget reconciliation process — and two pro-choice Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they oppose linking ACA repeal to Planned Parenthood defunding.

Trump is appointing 3 men for every woman. Here’s where he’s hiring them.

2017-03-13T15:58:30-04:00

President Donald Trump has appointed about three times more men than women to fill jobs in his administration that don’t require Senate confirmation.

According to a Bloomberg analysis of ProPublica data, about 73 percent of the more than 400 appointments Trump made in the first few weeks of his presidency were men. So while women make up about 47 percent of the workforce overall, just 27 percent of Trump’s appointees were women.

Vox also analyzed the gender breakdown by individual department. The numbers here are subject to a small margin of error; gender was determined by name analysis, cross-referenced with publicly available data like LinkedIn profiles.

The gender disparities, it turns out, were especially wide in departments that work in more stereotypically “masculine” fields, like Commerce and Defense. (And in a year when Hidden Figures was nominated for Best Picture, there was just one woman among eight new hires for NASA.)

Meanwhile, departments where the work is more stereotypically feminine, like Education or Housing and Urban Development, were at least closer to gender parity. Only the departments of Health and Human Services, State, and Personnel Management had more new female than male hires.

This disparity matters. Women are more than half the population, but often make up just a fraction of the decision-makers at high levels of government. And if the Trump administration doesn’t put a high priority on hiring women, it could suggest that women’s issues will be a lower priority in general.

“Key departments that really work to benefit the lives of all Americans on a day-to-day basis are just not representing women,” said Kate Black, vice president of research at EMILY’s List, which supports Democratic women running for office. “As we’ve seen, this administration continues to roll out policy after policy that doesn’t benefit or acknowledge or uplift women in any way, and in fact hurts women and families.”

This bodes poorly for working women in the Trump era

For comparison, most of Obama’s departments didn’t quite achieve gender parity either. And again, these are early hires, so the overall gender parity in Trump’s administration could easily change.

But so far at least, the gender gap is drastically larger under Trump than it was under Obama.

Obama’s departments ranged from 59 percent women in Health and Human Services to 32 percent women in Justice. In Trump’s hires so far, the range goes from 60 percent women in Personnel Management to just 10 percent women in Environmental Protection — and most of his new department hires are less than 30 percent women.

Obama’s administration also had fewer women in more stereotypically “masculine” departments, like Defense. But again, with Trump the difference is at a whole other scale.

There were a few exceptions to this gendered department trend — most notably the Department of Labor, where Trump hired just two women out of 19 new employees. Compare the portion of new women hired in the Labor department — about 11 percent — to the portion of women working in the overall labor market, about 47 percent.

And yet the workers’ protections that the Labor department enforces are especially important for women — those who face sexual harassment, for instance, or who work in jobs that have few benefits and little job security. After all, women hold about two-thirds of low-wage jobs that pay less than $10.50 an hour, like child care workers, restaurant servers, maids, and cashiers.

On top of that, Trump’s first choice to lead the Labor department allegedly abused his ex-wife (though she has since walked back these allegations), approved sexist ad campaigns as CEO of CKE Restaurants (the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.), and oversaw scores of allegations of labor violations and sexual harassment at his restaurants.

So these new hiring numbers are just the latest bad sign of how the Trump administration might represent working women.

These particular hires may have an unusual amount of influence

The administration has been fairly tight-lipped about identifying these particular appointees, ProPublica’s Justin Elliott, Derek Kravitz, and Al Shaw reported.

The new hires are members of Trump’s “beachhead teams” — temporary (but likely to become permanent) employees who serve as Trump’s eyes and ears in every department. It’s a new transition model, based on plans proposed by Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful presidential campaign.

Sources told ProPublica that they believe these employees may wield an unusual amount of influence for their station, since it’s taken so long for many of Trump’s higher-level appointees to get confirmed.

Has Trump gotten a boost in expertise or competence by hiring more men? It seems unlikely.

ProPublica notes that Trump’s new hires include “obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart and others who have embraced conspiracy theories, as well as dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the ‘swamp’ Trump pledged to drain.”

Equal gender representation matters — for practical reasons as well as symbolic ones

If these hires are really that influential in the administration, it makes the gender disparity even more troubling. And Trump’s higher-level appointees are no model of parity either; his Cabinet so far is more white and male than that of any president since Ronald Reagan.

Yet, research shows that having more women in government actually changes how government operates. It’s easy to see why: Women’s life experiences could make certain issues, like paid family leave, appear more urgent for them than for men.

For instance, Ivanka Trump’s proposals for paid leave and child care may fall short of actually helping most working mothers — but it’s unlikely that Donald Trump would be focusing on these issues nearly as much, or at all, without Ivanka’s influence.

“When women are at the table, we get better policies and better working and living conditions for American women and families,” Black said.

People from different backgrounds and identity groups tend to bring different experiences to the table. More diverse groups tend to inspire more diverse ideas and outcomes. This may be why corporations with more women on their boards tend to be more profitable.

That’s an argument that a business mogul like Trump ought to appreciate, but it doesn’t seem to be one he’s taken to heart.