The average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgendered people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores.

We also live in a culture of reproductive violence against women, and against trans people with uteruses. We live in a culture of reproductive violence against anyone who can get pregnant. And so, so much of the violence is invisible, even to the people who experience it, because it’s normalized. When my boyfriends tried to pressure and coerce me not to use birth control, it was a form of violence. When I was raised, as a devout Catholic, without any reliable or scientifically accurate information about abortion and birth control — when I was encouraged throughout my own life to value my health less than I valued fetuses — it was a form of violence. When condoms broke, or guys “accidentally” had sex with me without condoms, and I was treated with hostility and shamed for being upset about it, it was a form of violence. When I wasn’t given information about how Plan B worked, when I was told it was “a form of abortion,” when information proving that wrong wasn’t widely accessible to me, it was a form of violence. Having to go 45 minutes away to get it? Violence. Not being taught, as an essential part of self-care, where to access it? Violence. I should have been told “it is a normal part of self-care to brush your teeth, shower frequently, use tampons or pads, always use birth control and to know that Planned Parenthood will give you emergency contraception for $15,” ALL of those messages should have been TOTALLY NORMAL AND WIDESPREAD throughout my adult life, but they weren’t. Very probably being given the wrong medication, and experiencing intense, unnecessary physical discomfort? DEFINITELY violence. Yeah, obviously, being slut-shamed and thrown out of a clinic was violence. But everything that occurred along the road, everything that got me there, was a totally normalized form of reproductive violence, and I didn’t see it, because no-one ever told me to identify it as violence when it happened.

I’ve needed the Morning After Pill four times, since 2000. Actually, I’ve needed it way more than that, but I’ve only tried to take it four times. Once I officially Lost My Virginity, a lot of my early sexual experiences were abusive: I would classify them as consensual, but they weren’t pleasurable, they often involved a certain degree of coercion or silencing of my needs, and the men had a totally dismissive attitude toward my body, my pleasure, my health, and my needs that I absorbed as a natural and acceptable part of sex. My first boyfriend told me that it “worked better if I didn’t move,” if that tells you anything. And when condoms broke, I was told that it wasn’t a big deal and I shouldn’t talk about it and everything would be fine and the big deal! Stop making it! So I shut up about it.

I didn’t get home until dinnertime. My mother was standing in front of our house. There was no color in her face. Her eyes were blind terror. She swept me into her arms and hugged all the breath out of me. Then she slapped me across the face.

It stung.

…Because of the actions of two completely unknown males in the year 1948, I was slapped across the face and grounded to my room for a week in 1974.

A different way of looking at this is:

I was raised by a woman who was held down in a park and raped when she was a little girl. While the consequences of this event became, for Liz and me, a Grand Duchess Overtone in our upbringing, the two men who raped our mother have no idea either of us exist on the planet to have been raised under the shadow of their action.

A further perspective might be:

A man could, feasibly, sacrifice his coffee break raping a woman.

That woman would then spend her entire life dealing with it.

So would her daughters.

So would theirs.

This distribution of power is unacceptable.

The early 90s were packed with events that riveted and shocked young people, like the Rodney King trial and decision, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court’s decision on Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which upheld mandatory 24-hour waiting periods and other restrictions to abortion. What did all of these events have in common? They were about pressing issues that affect young women: sexual harassment, rape, race in America, reproductive health, economics, and class.

And yet, when you turned on the television, read the news, or listened to the radio, no one was talking or listening to young women. The pundits and experts were almost always white men discussing the ramifications of various legal arguments, not the reality of these issues, not the impact they would have on young women’s lives.

So I write this as a plea to all women, especially women of my generation: Let Thomas’ confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives. I am not a post-feminist feminist. I am the Third Wave.