A Crime-Spree of Judicial Activism, Part Two

With Guns Ablazin’ & Separation of Church & State Eroding, Rogue Supreme Court is Destroying Women’s Rights, Sending Doctors & Patients Scrambling, & Disfiguring The Nation’s Identity At Home & Abroad

Now — for most of my life, I always thought it was nothing short of a miracle that in my sex life, I was never faced with an unwanted pregnancy with any of my female partners. Growing up in the age of AIDS, losing my virginity at age 14 in 1984, my first girlfriend and I used spermicidal gel inserted in her vagina with a “needle-less” syringe, (and I was pleased to do it for her.) By 1985 the message was loud and clear that everyone interested in a sex life of any kind should be carrying condoms with them in case opportunities arose for exploring pleasurable sexual hi-jinks.

Back then, we didn’t want to contract HIV — pregnancy was an afterthought to why condom usage was so heavily promoted from the 1980s onward, as AIDS groups like Act-Up & Queer Nation handed them out at rallies while publications as readily available as Time and Newsweek had stories about condom usage, and advertisements about condoms were everywhere.

Why does anyone ever need an abortion?

To deal with unwanted pregnancy, and at this juncture, it is now clear that men who are interested in sex with a woman, and who wish to be allies with women in avoiding unwanted pregnancies that may prove impossible to safely terminate as a result of this decision, must begin looking into the issues of getting micro-surgical reversible vasectomy, a topic I hope to be writing about sometime soon myself. {Caveat: vasectomies are easy, reversible is much trickier.)

But at age 47 I discovered it wasn’t entirely a miracle that I’d never gotten someone pregnant. It was the fact that I had been born sterile. At that time, seven years into a journey self-identifying as a trans-woman, it was revealed to me that I was born with Klinefelter’s Syndrome, a not at all rare (1 in every 500 male births) genetic anomaly whereby I have 47 chromosomes rather than 46, that my gender is XXY intersex, and that I was a “male-presenting female hermaphrodite” with high levels of progesterone and estrogen, criminally low levels of testosterone, and naturally sterile which helped to explain why I’d “dodged a bullet” in getting anyone pregnant, because I was merely “shooting blanks.”

In a week that saw three Supreme Court decisions at odds with common understandings of American life handed down, it was made bitterly clear to many that with colloquial idioms such as “dodged a bullet,” and “shooting blanks” still in common usage, remnants from our 19th century violent Wild West past (like that ever ended.) Now, in all states, the right to conceal-carry a handgun is a protected Constitutional right, while a woman’s right to control her reproductive future is in immediate jeopardy in 26 states, leading many on social media to comment in one way or another, “In America, a gun has more rights than a woman.”

That the court’s so-called “strict interpretation” of the Constitution on the matter of guns is a far cry from the exact wording of the Second Amendment, which states that “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This amendment was written by a group of agrarian land-owners in 1789 when the common firearm available for use was a musket and a flint-lock pistol carrying only one shot, where a skilled shooter might be able to get off 3–4 rounds in a minute. This is nothing like the kinds of multiple round handguns and rifles we have available today, and certainly the Founders would have been agape by the multi-round magazines and velocity of a rifle like the AR-15 whose availability Congress so far has been unable to limit.

The week of June 19–24, 2022 in the Supreme Court’s docket of what appears to this “journalist-without-a-law-degree” as a crime-spree of Judicial Activism in the United States of America includes Carson v Makin, which eroded the separation of church and state by determining that the state of Maine had no right to refuse religious schools funding through its state voucher program, thereby now placing all states in a position of having to fund religious schools, (and to hell with issues of state’s rights); New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen which states that the State of New York’s laws on restricted concealed carry permits is a violation of the Second Amendment, resulting in instant dissolution of any need for a concealed carry permit in eight states including New York & California (and to hell with state’s rights); and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which used a strict Constitutional reading to determine that the US Constitution does not confer any right whatsoever to an abortion, and in this case the right to an abortion is to be a matter of state legislatures and state constitutions, thus upholding the state’s rights issues of the 10th Amendment originating from within the Federalist Papers.

It is clear to many who have flowed into the streets for demonstrations against the Supreme Court’s decision simply on the overturning of Roe v Wade alone that perhaps in our violent nation, violent to its neighbors worldwide and violent to its own citizens, with its draconian gun laws and an assault on a woman’s freedom to choose, that rather than projecting an image to ourselves and to the world at large that we are “a land of freedom” and “a shining city on a hill,” that we are now to be an armed camp where women are second-class citizens once they receive “a live round” from a penis and find “a bullet” of a fetus growing in their bellies.

But as the the Dobbs decision goes on to state that there are no explicit provisions for personal autonomy & personal freedom for anyone within the United States Constitution, not just pregnant women, should be cause for even the “winners” in this case to check the fine print on the decision and see exactly what it is that they are celebrating.

For those who reached the streets over this past weekend and plan to be there again, there is a growing understanding that the implications of this ruling and particularly Clarence Thomas’ opinion will affect far more than pregnant women seeking abortion. It has sent a chill up our collective spines as we reach out to grasp hold of an identity of a America that may now be lost, as it is clear that the majority on the Court and certainly Clarence Thomas now believes that personal autonomy & freedom as we’ve known it in America is to be an identity of the past.

That the Supreme Court has lost all restraints in regards to its authority and is engaged in calculated Judicial Activism on the part of a decidedly Conservative majority in this country is evident. And the America we once knew, was essentially over in no more in the blink of an eye, but many years in the planning.

As a Queer in what is known as early recovery, I was quietly hysterical by 6pm Friday before making my way to the 8pm meeting of my program to pick up a thirty-day chip, but by 10pm I was on the phone screeching at a fellow traveler in life, recovery, and the rights of women who happens to work at Planned Parenthood. And like any hysteric, particularly this #TransQueer, I was looking for a place to lay blame, as my mind roiled with the bare details I know about trimesters and late-term abortions, but within me feeling waves of self-recrimination for never having gone to law school (one of my greatest regrets) because “you need a fucking law degree to figure out which loopholes they’ve just used to fuck us and how to build a road map out of this shit,” then attacking Planned Parenthood for not offering tubal ligations and vasectomies rather than being known as abortion providers instead.

“The problem isn’t that anyone really WANTS an abortion, the problem is that we don’t want unplanned pregnancies! We all were taught by Act-Up & Queer Nation and even Time magazine to use fucking condoms, why aren’t there billboards everywhere for all men to get microsurgical reversible vasectomies at 18 along with their first tribal tattoo???”

Surprisingly she didn’t hang up the phone on me or get defensive, as a trained women’s health advocate at a place like Planned Parenthood, she held space for me, and forgave me as I ranted, as I would discover on Sunday when I called to issue an apology for my terrorized behavior.

Sit & drink PennyRoyal Tea, Distill the Life That’s Inside Me

• PennyRoyal Tea, by Nirvana, from the 1993 album In Utero

But who among us hasn’t held the hand of a teenage friend who has skipped a period in the aisles of a pharmacy, nervously asking if you wouldn’t mind to take a home pregnancy test to the counter and pay for it so the clerk doesn’t know it’s for her? Who among us hasn’t held a weeping friend who wants an abortion, escorted her to a clinic, and waited in the lobby for the procedure to be complete, or been invited to sit with her as it happens? Who among us in Generation X didn’t know precisely what Kurt Cobain was singing about in the song PennyRoyal Tea from the In Utero album of 1993?

Even before the Internet we knew about herbal abortifacients in punk rock enclaves from Olympia, Washington to the campus at UMass Amherst, as every hipster ‘zine out there had an article or two about those emergencies and what one might do on one’s own, many of which failed and ultimately sent people to the clinics they’d preferred to avoid entirely.

In the morning, I simply couldn’t go to Pride, and that seems counter-intuitive, perhaps, that a #TransQueer like me with a festive outfit planned for engaging my Pride community, marching alongside a social service organization of which I am a client, one that serves the substance abuse issues of lower-income persons and whose mission I supported long before I needed their services.

I couldn’t go because I couldn’t manage my own feelings, and I wasn’t prepared to deal with anyone else’s, not the anger, or the rage, or the fear, or the protest possibilities. My planned outfit was to be cowgirl boots, hot pink fishnets, a truly garish skirt in Leather Pride colors, a black bustier, and an elaborate makeup scheme that the friend I’d screeched at was supposed to come do for me before we went off together.

But in all the Prides I have been to in the past 37 years of my #TransQueer life, Pride is not so much about a protest or any kind of gripe with the dominant culture. Pride is a celebration of our identities and our right to walk the streets and to see and be seen by those in our LGBTQIAA Rainbow community. And while the LGBTQ community has for the most part (because no one can speak for everyone within it) been aligned with the Pro-Choice movement and likely will be in the future, I simply couldn’t walk down the street exercising my rights and proclaiming my identity, when so many had just lost their rights, and the identity of our nation had just changed so drastically.

And I was also informed by the strong words of the former-but-first-openly gay member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts Barney Frank, whom I had met as a child many times and once as a teenager where I was able to speak to him and thank him for the work he had engaged on behalf of our people. It is a quote that sits within a wonderful book I was given for my birthday, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care & Constraint by Maggie Nelson, an English professor at USC.

“If you care deeply about an issue and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.”

For the nation we have just lost and need to work hard to reassemble in new ways to minimize the suffering of others, there is much to do. And so I put my costume aside and slept, then spent most of the weekend researching and writing, with my Queer shoulder against the wheel, this time rolling over us, unless we do what we can to lend our hand.

Out-Take

By the time I discovered that I had Klinefelter’s and was Intersex and an XXY, I had long since determined that the name of the woman I have embraced as myself is Pearl Tiresias. And Pearl refers to many things, including the fact that Pearl is a slang term for a woman’s clitoris, and that cultivated colored pearls have been used in Thailand since at least the 7th century to derive the pigmentation of art works that told the visual stories of the Theravada Buddhist religion. And Tiresias refers to “the blind seer” of Ancient Greek mythology, who became the lover of Hera, then spurned her and whom Hera turned into a woman for seven years that he most enjoyed and refused to be turned back into a man when the punishment period came to an end.