You undoubtedly are playing in to this huge trope that just because a woman is trans that her health needs are automatically akin to cis men’s – which is transmisogynistic and essentialist as hell.

Trans women come in all shapes, sizes and configurations. Some trans women have penises, some have vaginas, etc. And let’s be clear – the majority of trans women’s bodies (no matter their gentialia) operate significantly dissimilar to cis men – particularly if they are on hormone replacement therapy.

I can tell by your dismissal of the use of “cis” that you are nothing more than a transmisogynistic trying to pit your cis worries against those of trans women who routinely experience violence and lack of access to basic needs because of the mindsets that a lot of our “supposed sisters” should be dismantling.

It’s sad that you can’t understand the plight of the trans community and you would insist that trans women actually have access to the same healthcare that cis men do. Newsflash: You’re wrong and often the “doctors” that we are told understand our problems – greatly do not.

So next time you want to pit your personal experience of abortion and having ovaries and a menstruation cycle as the be all and end all of oppression, please don’t.

No one is denying the plight of cis women, but your struggles do not supercede the plight of trans women or any other women or people, period. We’re all struggling and when someone wants to make a case for more visibility, respect and access for their group – either stand in solidarity or stand in silence. You and no one else is in any place to say someone else doesn’t deserve proper healthcare and access to their livelihood.

And “let’s be real,” your cis tears (with a side of invalidation and devaluation) are unnecessary.

You should be angry for needing to travel over one hundred miles for repro health care. No one should have to do that. I’m angry that women like myself must also travel over one hundred miles for basic health and repro health care. Or, as the case has been, over eight hundred miles.

To be precise, it was two states. It was the necessity to take a train to a Planned Parenthood clinic in California, some 850 miles from her home in the Pacific Northwest. That’s because no doctor in the Pacific Northwest would see a woman of colour without health insurance.

Her fault? She was trans. This next point shouldn’t matter, but to dispel whatever strawman your sordid imagination spun up, she transitioned during her early teens, well over two decades ago. She didn’t mean to, but she was the vanguard of what’s becoming a permanent fixture of our social fabric.

There was also the woman who couldn’t access basic health care to even have her blood pressure checked anywhere in Western New York state, because the one clinic she was referred to (by another patient of that clinic, a lesbian cis woman) pre-cancelled her appointment when intake staff learnt she was trans. She had to wait until she could move to a state in the Midwest before she could locate a doctor who would see her.

One woman suffered massive bone density loss and bone microfractures before a doctor finally tended to her; the other went into premature menopause and experienced nearly every symptom suffered during menopause before she could obtain care. She was 24 years old. Both paid out of pocket.

Each woman withstood nearly a year of medical neglect by a medical philosophy (an unethical pathologizing, more accurately) which rejected the legitimacy and urgency of their basic health needs on what amounts to an original social sin propped up in 1973, the day after 25 million Americans were cured instantly of another dubious pathology: homosexuality. That rejection became normalized, and it’s mixed in the foundation of your argument.

Allison, your conjecture is reducible to one idea: the presence of certain reproductive organs at time of medical need must be the basis to apportion medical resources at a women’s clinic — to the exclusion of all other women. It’s cruel. It’s unusual. It’s punitive. It harms women.

To redress your grievances, it would require reorganizing every women’s clinic as “uterine and ovarian clinics”, lest we forget how several thousand women in the U.S. alone, assigned female at birth, lack the privilege of being equipped with the organs your argument prizes as a golden ticket for health access. Then there are several thousand more women like myself who lack the same golden ticket. Should we set that bar to facilitate harm, neglect, and to slam the door on women in need?

I say no. You may say otherwise.

Rather than deign yourself to grab for the same tools which cis men (the ones with mighty reach-around inside legislatures and boardrooms, and often as white as spring lilies) rely on to slash health welfare funding, shutting down clinics for women of colour, poor women, trans women, teenage girls (both cis and trans), and all women save the most economically (st)able, there’s a choice you can make at these crossroads.

You can take the high road: strive to assure that no woman, no matter her particular and unique health needs, is ever shut out from clinics intended to serve women. That takes a lot of political and social work.

Or you can go low: grab those tools and commit your energy, money, and rage toward the chartering of clinics geared solely for uteruses and ovaries. Divide and exclude. Knowing what you do, this road demands your bile and spite in its paving. (For all I know, maybe you have enough of both stored up). These clinics will solely serve women like yourself and seahorse papas (trans men who have babies) — doing so to the unapologetic exclusion of all other women and girls. May you never endure an oophorectomy or hysterectomy, or you too will be shut out from these clinics.

What should matter less to you or me, Allison, is the nature of health care being served to women behind the clinician’s door and more that every woman is being served equitably behind that door. Being trans isn’t elective, and neither is being cis (what you prefer to call as “normal”, but it isn’t). No woman should be forced to forgo repro health care, and no woman should have to travel to a different area code, county, or state to obtain it.

These are our lives. Stop trying to bargain with them.

I’m about to undergo an elective abortion at FWHC in a couple of weeks. I’m going to be driving over a hundred miles to do it, but unfortunately it’s the closest clinic to my home. And I’m going to be paying basically 100% out of pocket for the procedure, because my insurance doesn’t cover abortions, and Georgia Medicaid doesn’t either.

We women don’t have a lot of resources in Georgia. I personally thank GOD for the wonderful people at places like FWHC, because without them I would have absolutely no where else to turn.

The bottom line, for me anyway, is that although it’s great that you’ve decided to embrace your need to be a women, you do not have female reproductive organs. You’ve never had to live with the curse of getting pregnant, so that makes it a little difficult for me to empathize with you.
And before you make the case that by my logic, I also can’t empathize with women who are infertile– they are still tragically burdened with 40+ years of menstruation, so they too hold a special place in my heart. I’m sorry for your struggles, but let’s get real.

You have other places to turn, but places like these are the ONLY option for “cis” girls and women (as you call them) like me, so your post makes me a little angry.

- Allison

“Other services: We are currently working to expand our services and other services may become available before this list is updated. We are working towards providing HRT for trans women and post-meopausal women.”

There are other providers in the Atlanta area for Trans folks & they have great referral relationships to help ALL folks. It just kills me that one of the few organizations fighting for equality in the South is not getting a fair assessment. This blog has influenced many people and as you state, you are not a journalist and there was no fact checking.

I’m not a journalist, nor was this a journalistic piece.

In light of my piece and the subsequent comments from 2012, it is now incumbent upon the clinic to show they are now operating in good faith toward all women — and this includes women who are trans as well as women who are cis. If you believe it’s bad enough for cis women to find access to health care in a “red state”, then try to imagine how inordinately more difficult it is for a trans woman in the same state to do the same. Or imagine if that trans woman wasn’t white. I can speak to trying to find health care in a red state as a trans woman, and it makes trying to find a clinic equipped for delivering abortion services seem easy by comparison.

That’s what we’re talking about here. FWHC are welcome provide a good rebuttal to Feministing or wherever, or FWHC may continue to have people like yourself defend a questionable policy and practice which was brought to light in this essay piece (and by first-hand experiences by trans women who’ve, in confidence, shared with me that they’ve dealt with resistance to their being trans when going to the FWHC).

That’s all which really needs to be said for now.