My mother brought us marching, mailing, and leafletting for civil rights when we were little. Moving forward with more global understanding, my peers and I, then a band of scruffy teens, protested the war in Viet Nam. The demand for reproductive rights was also growing fiercer. This fight was deeply and immediately personal.
It was exhilarating when abortion was legalized in New York State in 1970. The empowerment of a successful battle against patriarchal control swirled with the energy of youthful sexuality. And then Roe. One less risk factor to constrain the lives of girls and women. We believed we had/could still make a difference. Over decades we grew complacent.
Attacks on reproductive autonomy had accelerated even before Trump took the White House and gunned for the judiciary. We feared but couldn’t fully take in how endangered authentic expression of self for all kinds of bodies would soon be.
In my office and out, we anxiously asked each other, what can we do? Where do we turn? We didn’t get out in front of it. Could we have gotten out in front of it? The urgency of the socio-political crashing into the “blursday” of pandemic life. Unchecked Police brutality. Fights for justice and their backlash. A new kind of vigilance required. I debate the merits with my analytic superego when patients and I share resources for study and action. Who am I trying to keep from drowning?
Biden’s win could neither mitigate our terror nor create a sufficient backstop. SB 8 passed. The Dobbs draft was leaked. We took to the streets – enraged and mourning deaths past and future. Rape and incest aside (as if we could), the cascade of harm continues – crucial healthcare criminalized and medical education gutted. We watch a gluttonous competition as politicians climb over each other to enact hateful legislation. So glad we live here, someone says. I question the reliance on state lines for protective/projective work. A cherry-picked judge in Texas will soon rule on nation-wide access to mifepristone.
The whiplash of assaults on recently won gains continues. Possibilities for reaching across otherness are choked. They target History, Truth, Reality. The Big Lie is no longer a contained operation.
In my office and out – from our different positions – we contend with the ways we are privileged, enraged, helpless, implicated, and come for. Institute discussions take up whether and how to raise and respond to intersectional issues in clinical work. These can become surprisingly divisive – echoing the reactivity of the wider world. We try to unpack the function of keeping them out without attacking each other.
In this particular moment in my practice, those who identify as LGBTQ+ hold the more tender places. So much work done to find and speak self and desire, to unwind shame and self-hatred, is besieged by violence, banning, erasure, and calls for extermination. Some fight. Others struggle with retreat, seeking invisibility or numbing.
What previously had been double-takes in public spaces can flare into confrontations. We better hurry and get married … someone trails off, her broad delivery to manage the precarity of legal standing and family making. A voice drops to question a treatment referral: how homophobic will they be? I feel like I am living next to a burning, someone says. And more than just my (trans) identity but parts of myself that I need to feel whole are being used for the fire. My agency, my autonomy, my healing used to fuel the fire. If I didn’t have access to these, I would continue to fuel my own personal fire and destructiveness.
In New York care is still obtainable even as protection falters. We write gender affirmation letters, uneasy participants in gatekeeping. We try to support those navigating the maze of internal and external obstacles. We hold each other through the strain of our own vulnerabilities and the failures of our witnessing. Not so very far away, parents are persecuted for recognizing, loving, and responding to their children’s deeply felt gender. It is crazy-making that children might actually be removed from their homes while others are forced to carry pregnancies all in the name of protecting life and freedom. We must not hide in the dissociative plea/assertion that this is not who we are. The power to determine legitimate categories of being is foundational to our nation and to our theoretical and clinical practices as well. We must bear this knowledge without collapse. It will be a long fight and we must force ourselves to stay awake.