From Chicago to DC to Boston to St. Louis to Malawi to South Africa to New Zealand to Antarctica to Paris. Over 3 million people marching around the world.
I’m loving everyone’s photos of the women’s marches today. It’s particularly awesome to see that so many older women are there – it speaks both to how widespread the sentiment is, and to everyone’s confidence that the protests are and will remain peaceful. (There will likely be a small patch or two of broken windows, as there were yesterday. Some people love to make trouble for its own sake. Ignore them.) The protests are officially happening on all seven continents. (Though sadly I have yet to see photos from Antarctica.) I wish I could be there with y’all.
I predict – with 100% confidence – that the orange muppet will do or say something outrageous in an attempt to get the headlines back on himself. It’ll probably happen as soon as the march is done, maaaybe as late as tomorrow, but I doubt it.
Don’t be scared. Expect it, know that it’s deliberately as dramatic and extreme as possible. He’s had a while to plan it, it’ll be the first major thing he does in office. It’ll also set the tone for everything that comes afterwards, both in terms of what he does and how people will react to him.
The wise choice in his shoes would be to do something showy, but
entirely positive – announce that he’s saved more jobs or some such.
Make it look like he’s already doing good things and the protestors are
all fools to not be supportive of him. But I have money that says that
he doesn’t.
It’s a great example of how easily he’s manipulated – he can’t stand not being praised, or barring that at least being the center of attention, so one protest will make him start his administration by being vitriolic instead of unifying.
I am proud of the work I’ve done as part of theWomen’s March policy table – a collection of women and folk engaged in crucial feminist, racial and social justice work across various intersections in our country. I helped draft the vision and I wrote the line “…and we stand in solidarity with sex workers’ rights movements.” It is not a statement that is controversial to me because as a trans woman of color who grew up in low-income communities and who advocates, resists, dreams and writes alongside these communities, I know that underground economies are essential parts of the lived realities of women and folk. I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact. My work and my feminism rejects respectability politics, whorephobia, slut-shaming and the misconception that sex workers, or folks engaged in the sex trades by choice or circumstance, need to be saved, that they are colluding with the patriarchy by “selling their bodies.” I reject the continual erasure of sex workers from our feminisms because we continue to conflate sex work with the brutal reality of coercion and trafficking. I reject the policing within and outside women’s movements that shames, scapegoats, rejects, erases and shuns sex workers. I cannot speak to the internal conflicts at the Women’s March that have led to the erasure of the line I wrote for our collective vision but I have been assured that the line will remain in OUR document. The conflicts that may have led to its temporary editing will not leave until we, as feminists, respect THE rights of every woman and person to do what they want with their body and their lives. We will not be free until those most marginalized, most policed, most ridiculed, pushed out and judged are centered. There are no throwaway people, and I hope every sex worker who has felt shamed by this momentarily erasure shows up to their local March and holds the collective accountable to our vast, diverse, complicated realities.
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