No, you don't have to update your protest signs

Exhibit A: Demands for women to change the way we protest our disappearing rights

REPRO Rising Virginia @REPRORising_VA

It's time to update your protest signs. We know change isn't easy, but we're going to explain a few key messages that will make your signs more effective and inclusive for your next protest! 🧵

REPRO Rising Virginia @REPRORising_VA

1. Use gender inclusive language! It is exclusionary to only center cisgender women in pro-abortion messaging. Not all people who can get pregnant identify as women. It's an easy fix! Just put "people" instead of "women" when making your next sign

Exhibit B: More people support abortion rights when the poll language focuses on women

American women and girls lost a constitutional right last month. And some reproductive-rights organizations just can’t stop policing the way we talk about this loss and what it means.

Planned Parenthood wants us to talk about “bans off our bodies”—language that conveniently lumps abortion rights with Planned Parenthood’s new cash cow: sterilizing gender-nonconforming minors—not women’s rights.* REPRO Rising Virginia wants us to “update [our] protest signs” to be “more effective and inclusive.” But effectiveness and inclusivity are at odds here. Effective communication about abortion and women's health requires clarity about who is affected and on what basis. Inclusive language deals in obfuscation. Effective organizing requires clear constituencies, targets, and asks. Inclusive language muddles all of these things.

Effective organizing requires setting priorities—and setting priorities means putting some goals above others or leaving some causes to other organizations. Inclusivity says every cause must be about every other cause. Gridlock results. When we should be talking about abortion, we end up talking about 'genders.'

Notice how trans hamstrings every issue it touches? Trans makes every conversation about itself: The way we talk about abortion needs to be inclusive, even if nobody can get one in half of US states.

Effective organizations fall apart wherever gender ideology insinuates itself. Organizations that need to be able to analyze and act in the real world—like the Guttmacher Institute in the months leading up to the fall of Roe v. Wade—turn inward and spin instead.

I'm not going to apologize for using clear language and a clear political analysis to make a clear ask on behalf of a clear constituency. I resent being expected to do differently, at the expense of a cause that matters to me.

The constant refrain from orgs like Planned Parenthood and REPRO Rising Virginia is that activists don't have to choose between being effective and inclusive. Too bad that’s just not true. Public support for abortion goes up when we use clear language about women's rights. Public confusion goes up when we talk about how 'all genders need abortions.' Inclusivity sacrifices effectiveness by obscuring the issues and distracting from what really matters here: real-world abortion access, not identitarian language games.

*Curiously, and for no substantive reason, Planned Parenthood instructs protestors not to talk about “women” or “girls” in order to “help people of all races and genders in this movement feel embraced, not excluded!” But what does supporting racial and ethnic minorities have to do with suppressing sex-based language? :-/