Of course our bodies are political
The moment you step out of cis manhood you body becomes inherently politicised. Women, regardless of gender identity, have been controlled, corralled, and coerced throughout history. Trans men and non-binary folk face lesser bio politics, yet are still scrutinised and rendered outside of cis male privilege by society at large and the law. Coming out is an act of political wilfulness, simply wishing to exist as a person in a society built for and controlled by cis men requires energy and labour that cis men simply do not need to expend.
Yes, if you are a cis man of colour in a white cis mans world you face burdens, and this is not meant as an oppression Olympics. Rather, the power to control bodies, control space, is inherently in the hands of those who have no lived experiences as those they seek to control. Abortion, sexual assault and rape laws, dress codes, education remits, maternity leave, pre-school education, drag shows, gun laws, drug laws, I could go on. Systems of power designed to oppress and segregate, to control who gets to talk, who gets to vote, who gets to earn enough for those restrictions to matter a little less.
At the moment of birth your future is mapped out by your gender marker, skin colour, parental background, religious community, and law of the land. Our right to exist as equitable members of society is moulded by those forces far beyond our control, yet we are expected to implicitly accept and understand those processes. If you want to exist outside those boundaries you get called political, trouble maker, marked with not so inviable red letters. You are a challenge, a thread, your body an iconoclastic tearing down of that power. And that’s just simply if you want to be a woman in this cis man’s world.
If you fall pregnant and want an abortion, if you want a hysterectomy at 21 because you are certain you do not want children, if you marry a sugar an octogenarian sugar daddy, if you marry at 18 to your high school sweetheart, if you are a 45 year old asexual, if you married the girl next door, if you… No matter what you do as a woman or non-binary person or queer folk you will always, always be judged. Your body is not yours alone, it is a political instrument for others to read and query. Yours in never yours alone.
You may escape for a while, but the world has a habit of pulling us all back in. Your body becomes political in unexpected ways. Going to the GP to ask for HRT to combat your hot flushes, asking for pain relief in hospital, fighting to get your child statemented on the autistic spectrum, earning the same rate of pay as your male colleague, getting stop and searched because the police noticed your skin colour, and so on and so on. Power is exercised in many forms of control, each designed to make us a little less willing to engage, a little less willing to fight back or be ourselves. Behave and act appropriately, or risk losing access to so much more.
This is not some 1960s throwback retrospect, this is 2020s fierceness. Abortion and trans rights are the tip of a nasty iceberg. Rights, especially womens rights, were fought on many battleground, so literally, some in the courtroom, some in the maternity ward. Trans rights were birthed through suicide, executions, and heavy-handed cis male dominated medicalisation of trans identities. Our bodies were beaten, bruised, medicated, locked up, called insane, marked as hysterics. Yet here we are, standing up for what is necessary for us and our children’s children. This is as much for us as it is for them.
Our biopolitics is not some abstract theory written in books and research papers. It is the real living flesh on our bones. Rights are hard fought because those who resist refuse to share. Rights are not a cake, with a finite amount to go around. No, they are like the ocean, sifted and purified over time for us to drink deeply from. Women, trans folk, queer people, anyone outside of the cis male world have tasted the bitter fruits of injustice, stigma, and being children of some lesser god. To be the first to the barricade is always to invite the first bullet, yet in solidarity one voice becomes legion. That is the first lesson of biopolitics in that alone we can be snuffed or placed under bushel; together we walk and pick up those who stumble.
My body is political because the State, the press, politicians, pundits, and social media make it so. Yet, it is the wider community who fight with me to keep the rights I have obtained, and strive with me to ensure there is both no backsliding and forward movement towards full equity before the law. The same goes for everyone, for it is only together united that one day our bodies will no longer be political, simply our own. Of course our bodies are political, but that does not mean they always will be.
