Remember the beginning of the abortion fight?

Sorry. Stupid question. Anything older than two weeks is Not Memorable in the Mediacene.

The abortion fight geared up in the 1970s after the widespread use of birth control. Before that, even fully patriarchal white evangelicals didn’t have a big problem with it. Then the shocked realization descended. Women couldn’t be controlled by fear of pregnancy. This could not stand. At that rate who knew how much male control they might flip off next.

The next thing we knew fetuses had become “babies” and here we are. Women can be stopped from leaving Texas in a throwback to the days of escaping slaves. Totally appropriate, of course, for the current three fifths humans who might be trying to evade their primary function as incubators.

The things is, definitions are important. Vital. Critical. Essential. Do I need to put it in bold all caps?

That’s not a new thought. Socrates pointed it out a few years ago. So let’s start by defining who’s human, in the sense that matters to being a legal person, and who isn’t.

Corpses have rights. Organs cannot be removed from a corpse, even to save someone’s life, without prior permission. Compulsory organ donation is not a thing. People are not allowed to use other people’s bodies for their own benefit, even to save lives.

But wait, you say. Forcing women to carry pregnancies is compulsory life support on a grand scale. And it’s done all the time. It’s different.

Yes, it is different. Only women can do pregnancy. Corpses and organ donors might be male. That’s the only difference between whose body can be used by others and whose can’t. There’s no other difference in principle between forcing some people to provide life support but not others.

That train of reasoning shows it doesn’t matter whether you think a fetus is a legal person or not. It’s irrelevant to the question of why women, and only women, are forced to provide organ donation to save lives.

For the sake of completeness, though, let’s see whether fetuses are legally persons. Again, it doesn’t matter if they are. No legal person, except if they’re women, can be sacrificed for another. But, legally, fetal personhood does not extend to, for instance, counting as a second occupant of a car driven by a pregnant woman in an High Occupancy Vehicle commuter lane on a highway. Fetuses don’t inherit if their mothers die intestate, as children would. Birthdays don’t count from conception (except in Korea) but from, well, birth. I could go on.

The longer one goes on, the clearer it becomes that the only situation in which fetuses are persons — and not only persons but ones with more rights than anyone else: the right to take over someone else’s body — is when the body in question is female. That quiet part was even said out loud in an Alabama case.

Alabama’s new blanket ban on abortion “protects the sanctity of unborn life,” with one curious exception: The law deems only fertilized eggs inside a womb worthy of protection, not ones routinely destroyed in the process of fertility treatment.
“The egg in the lab doesn’t apply,” Clyde Chambliss, state senator and sponsor of the abortion bill, said during the Alabama legislative debate. “It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

If it’s all about the “babies,” this makes no sense.

So, in the abortion power grab we’ve seen what happens when we don’t bother to define which rights are involved or who is a legal person. Abortion is not about a right to privacy (although privacy is important). Nor is it about health care (although that’s important, too.) It’s about something more basic than that. It’s about the right to control your own body, the right not to be the property of the state or anyone else.

By not seeing that clearly — by still not seeing that clearly — we’ve fallen back into a situation where women are deprived of their most basic rights. And people barely notice. It’s about “health care,” isn’t it? Lots of people can’t get the health care they need. What’s the big deal?

Now we’re falling down the cliff of the same type of error in the fight over sex, gender, trans rights, and women’s rights.

The main defense, the only(?) defense that’s been consistently applied so far, is in the UK. Beliefs that womanhood is a sex-based category are as worthy of free speech protections as the belief that womanhood is gender-based according to one’s own sense of gender.

And that’s where I start screaming.

Hello? Have you all gone mad? This is not like being a flat-earther. Without any other knowledge, our eyes tell us we do live on a flat earth. This is worse.

Going by the evidence of your own everyday eyes, without any knowledge of math or science, the existence of female and male sexes is an absolute bedrock FACT. It is not a belief. The essence of facts is they go on being facts no matter what you think. You can believe babies are picked up in a cabbage patch. It doesn’t matter. In mammals like humans, they will still arise by a combination of egg and sperm and subsequent pregnancy ending in birth. That’s what a fact looks like.

In contrast, the statement that we have a gendered essence of masculinity or femininity is a belief. It’s a similar concept to the soul. There is no physical, material evidence anyone can point to of, say, a little nugget buried perhaps near the pineal gland which is the locus of a gendered essence.

That’s not to say the belief is wrong. Giordano Bruno believed there were thousands of peopled worlds. He was judged insane (and a heretic). Recently, the probabilities are turning toward his view, although we still have no proof. We have no factual proof of the existence of God, which just means we don’t _know_. A strong feeling that God does or does not exist is not proof. A strong feeling that a gendered essence exists is not proof. It’s meaningful to the believer; not necessarily to anyone else.

Pretending that a fact is somehow equivalent to a belief is nonsense. Facts remain, whether they’re believed or not. Facts will have consequences whether they’re believed or not. Facts must be accommodated so that their consequences aren’t damaging.

Beliefs, on the other hand, just have to be kept to oneself and one’s co-believers. Nobody is under an obligation to participate in someone’s beliefs. Pretending they’re facts to live by just ends in instant absurdity. Imagine a religion (I’m sure there are none like that) which considers nonbelievers subhuman, while the nonbelievers believe the same of the religionists. Since there are no verifiable facts involved, nothing exists to agree on even if they wanted to. The only way out of the absurdity is if one side can annihilate the other. Unless you want eternal war, beliefs can’t be forced on others.

Pretending they’re equivalent also implies facts are optional. We don’t have to live by someone else’s beliefs, so we also don’t have to live by any facts they point out. Except that facts go on having consequences no matter what we believe. Eventually, facts can be stubborn enough to kill people if we’re stupid enough to ignore them.

That’s the once and current disaster with the abortion issue. That’s the train we’re on with the trans issue.

Trans civil rights must be respected the same as everyone else’s. One of those rights is to believe what they like. That’s everyone’s right. The UK is making a start by pointing out that beliefs can’t be imposed on others.

The next step is to acknowledge the existence of facts. One of them is the existence of biological sexes.