Pro Choice Dresden again invites you to the Safe Abortion Day on September 28th. to a demonstration for reproductive justice and for physical, sexual and reproductive self-determination .
We support their call and are pleased that we can also contribute in terms of content.
Here is our speech for you to read:
Proud, perverse and provocative – a speech about resistant queerness, reproductive rights and biopolitics
Hello everyone! We from Queer Pride Dresden welcome you to this important rallye today. We would like to complement it with our – queer and angry – perspectives.
Because when we talk about reproductive rights, e.g. abortions as the most prominent example, we usually think about struggles of cisgender women. But capitalist patriarchy is not oriented toward anything like self-identification.
No, capitalist patriarchy is oriented toward subjugating groups of people according to their abilities or non-abilities. It engages in bio-politics to do so. That means, it wants to regulate our lives, seize our bodies, control our choices. Among other things, biologistic prejudices are put in place as ideological basis for this. In addition, it has come up with shit like the binary gender order. In its hierarchical system, everyone is categorized into two classes: Man and Woman. It gives dominance to the man, places the woman as inferior, and thereby legitimizes the oppression of anything considered non-male.
Being resistantly queer means breaking with this gender order!
We are fags, queens, kings and quings in suspenders and binders. We transition, we re-transition as we like. We don’t choose our gender any more than cis people do, or we actually do. Then we are still cheeky and have fun with disruptions. We no longer apologize for our lesbian labryses and high heels, for our purple rubber cocks, our nice haircuts and wacky neopronouns. We don’t want to hide, and we don’t want to be approved as normal and get assimilated into this system. Quite the opposite: we want to subvert the normality of the confining and simultaneously ostracising biopolitics – proudly, perversely and provocatively!
That’s why we have the beautiful demo slogan “Marriage, Kitchen, Fatherland – our answer: Resistance!” It not only rhymes, but also gets to the heart of our critique. For propagating marriage and the bourgeois nuclear family as “the normal” is a long-standing biopolitical instrument of domination. The two groups formed by gender assignment are supposed to relate to each other romantically. We are supposed to have babies. The number of children per woman still serves as a parameter in the chauvinistic competition between nation-states. Political strategies are then aligned towards this number of children, such as the promotion of heterosexual nuclear families. Thus, the patriarchal order is diligently reproduced.
Queers, on the other hand, relate to each other romantically and aromantically in all possible combinations, fuck wildly, totally messy. And when we have children, then with our communities, then there is consultation: who actually still has a womb and might one join in, raising the baby?
It’s clear: these queers pose a real danger for capitalist society! Because they challenge gender and desire as an instrument of dominance. That’s why states develop countless forms of legal regulation and repression. Laws that tell us what to wear, who to be, how to behave. Laws that tell us how and with whom we should have sex. Laws that describe how to hurt us when we deviate. Laws against self-determination and emancipation.
A current example is the headscarf law in Iran, which is to be brutally enforced – but we see the determined resistance against it and call for solidarity with the feminist uprising. Their call resounds across the globe: Jin, Jiyan, Azadî! Jina Mahsa Amini shall remain unforgotten!
In Germany, it is decrees like the Transsexual Law that have been deliberately making non-conforming lives difficult for decades, designed to humiliate and break us. Which are meant to break our will to live our lives freely according to our visions. Because depending on which side of the norm we are sorted into by the state, reproduction is either to be forced or nipped in the bud.
Some examples: Until 2011, sterilization was a prerequisite for transition in Germany. There is still no compensation for this. To this day, transgender fathers and mothers are denied to be listed correctly on their children’s birth certificates. Only in 2019 were intersexual children protected from routine genital mutilation. Compensation for this still does not exist. And deportations are still going on, regardless of whether there is a threat of violence and persecution in the destination countries.
This fight against women and queers is cheered on and driven by fundamentalists of all faiths – an amazing unity of mullahs and evangelicals, of gurus and popes.
In the U.S., the reactionary siege is now in full swing at all levels. From the Supreme Court in Washington, to the nation’s school libraries, to Texas’ “child protective services”, the patriarchy is fighting for power and human material.
In Britain, alliances are even being forged between anti-abortion activists and trans-hating “feminists”.
The anti-feminist alliance of the fundamentalist right has a clear strategy. The permanent attacks on reproductive rights aim as much at comprehensive biopolitical control as the escalating attacks on the rights of trans people and their relatives. All over the world, capitalist patriarchy is using this to gain power over people and their social relations – but all over the world, they are met by resistance. Feminist resistance – our resistance!
In order for this resistance to grow stronger than the attacks, in order for our queer utopia to shatter the reproduction-fixated sexual morality, in order for us to liberate our bodies from the biologistic incarecartion in a self-determined way, we have to connect our feminist struggles in solidarity.
We demand reproductive rights for all! For trans*, inter and nonbinary people!
We demand compensation for state-imposed forced sex-assignments!
We demand an immediate stop to all deportations!
Because one thing is clear: for real emancipation we need more than just the repeal of § 218 or a new self-determination law – we need an end to discrimination, exploitation and war!
We don’t just want to react and prevent the worst, but we want to stand up for a better life for all. Not only in Dresden, not only in Germany, not only in Europe, but all over the world.
For freedom, self-determination and solidarity!