by Lauren Gutierrez
With consistent attacks to dominate our bodies, control our lives and degrade out worth, the U.S. government and many other countries around the world still fail to acknowledge women or femmes as whole and autonomous human beings. Instead, we are left to persistently fight for our human rights along with the day-to-day struggle of living in this over-burdening capitalist world.
Women or femmes are disposable property within their own homes. According to a new study, one in three women murdered worldwide are killed by an intimate partner, which may actually be a higher number due to lack of data or missing information. From the pathetic criminal justice response to reported rapes and domestic violence to a broken healthcare system, society, and government continue to fail women and femmes, leaving us to depend on our partners support, even if they are toxic and abusive. Meanwhile, hundreds of women are in jail for defending themselves.
The U.S. has taken it upon itself to remove women’s body parts. Doctors have been removing the uteruses of migrant women in ICE concentration camps built under the Obama administration and utilized in Trump’s America. Some of the most vulnerable women are those from a foreign country caged and dependent on their captors to provide food and healthcare. Our government has seen this as an opportunity to mutilate and torture mostly black and brown migrant women.
There is an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. and Canada where 4 in 5 Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime, which includes human trafficking. In many cases, missing Indigenous femmes are misclassified as Hispanic, and missing adults don’t show up in the law enforcement database. These crimes aren’t even reported on or resolved within the public eye, so they basically remain invisible to society.
Since 2015, police have murdered 48 Black women. How many of them can you name? The most noted young woman of them all, Breonna Taylor, has yet to see any justice after police took her innocent life.
The life expectancy of a Black transgender woman is 35 years. At least 350 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed globally in 2020. 98 percent were trans women or trans feminine. 79 percent were people of color. This doesn’t include those deaths that were unreported or misreported, either by deadnaming or misgendering the victims.
The majority of Louisiana voters have chosen to add oppressive language to the Louisiana Declaration of Rights, weakening the protection of and funding for abortion access. The addition begins with the words, “To protect human life” as it utterly disregards the human life of the woman herself. But just as has been done in Argentina, Ireland, and Poland, we will turn this around in Louisiana. Massive, women-led struggles around the world demand abortion rights, an end to violence against women, and rights to food, wages, and housing. We need to get busier here.
In a capitalist patriarchal society, it is okay to oppress or dominate women or femmes. We are still seen as property within our homes and the government still fights to control our bodies and decisions on family planning. Our lives are valued less than a masculine person and even seen as a commodity for sex or slavery. Women and femmes are treated as less than human – as an object. In my opinion, people and the government seek to control what they fear. If dominance over femmes is a badge of honor, then being a femme in control of oneself must be the “holy grail.” Onward.