![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/6.jpg\")
Our classic gender subversion poster. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nWe’ve reprinted our classic gender subversion poster, “For Every Girl/For Every Boy.” To mark the occasion, we’ve also printed a new poster in homage to the original, celebrating collective resistance to the forms of gender fascism threatening us today. Here, we offer a deep dive into the legacy of the original poster, exploring the tension between gender abolition and gender self-determination.
\n\n Our classic gender subversion poster. Click on the image to order the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/5.jpg\")
Our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nTwenty years ago, we published the gender subversion poster, drawing on the creative work of Nancy R. Smith, Jacinta Bunnell, Laura Ann Newburn, Irit Reinheimer, and others. Over the following decades, we distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of the poster.
\n\n\n\n\nThese posters have made their way around the world, into classrooms, libraries, clinics, guidance counselor’s offices, pride marches, dorm rooms, shelters, punk houses, teenage bedrooms, and colleges… I regularly receive texts from friends who spot this poster in all manner of places, sometimes even on a wall in a TV show. Recently, my friend Neko Case sent me a photo of the poster from the green room of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
\n\n \n
Comrades printed the poster in Spanish, German, Ukrainian, and various other languages.
\n\nIn September 2021, we let the poster go out of print. At the time, it seemed that our society was progressing towards more expansive ways of understanding gender. Since then, unfortunately, a reactionary offensive led by bigots and far-right politicians has gained ground, using the state to intensify the subjugation of women and to impose new forms of violence on trans, queer, and nonbinary people and those who support them. At the same time, we continued to receive requests for us to reprint the original poster. In the end, we decided to put another run of them in circulation, while also producing a new version that speaks to the terrain of struggles over gender that we face in 2023.
\n\nAs before, we are distributing both versions for the costs of printing and postage alone. We have never sought to make money off this project, only to do our part to create a world in which all of us can make the most of our potential on our own terms, however that looks for each of us—a more welcoming and supportive world, without imposed gender norms or bigotry.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/2.jpg\")
The artwork from the Portuguese version of our gender poster sighted at the Vaca Louca Café in Maringá, Brazil.
\nTwenty years ago, our poster had the audacity to ask: “What would the world look like without gender?” Since then, this question has become even more urgent—and even more challenging to answer.
\n\nOn the one hand, we’ve witnessed major shifts in cultural understandings of gender. As Jacinta Bunnell explains, when the original poster appeared,
\n\n\n\n\n“There was not a culturally unified language for talking about gender fluidity at this point; so much of how we spoke of gender was still either/or.”
\n
Today, nonbinary identities and gender-neutral pronouns have emerged from trans/queer subcultures and online communities into workplaces, schools, and public debates. Trans communities have received unprecedented visibility.
\n\nOn the other hand, what had been a rising wave of conservative backlash has grown into a tsunami. It is no exaggeration to describe the reactionary program as gender fascism. As the popular saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The struggle for gender self-determination has reached the “then they fight you” stage. Today, access to abortion care has been severely restricted in large regions of the US, while hundreds of proposed laws target trans people, especially youth, with restrictions on medical care, participation in sports, bathroom access, legal documentation, entertainment and culture, and more. At the same time, heads of state are citing the preservation of gender roles among their chief justifications for full-scale wars.
\n\nYet at the same time that reactionaries are attempting to use state power to crush gender non-conformity and eliminate reproductive autonomy, the identity politics that emerged from 20th century liberation struggles are experiencing a crisis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/3.jpg\")
An illustration from the back of our classic gender poster.
\nWe saw evidence of this on the second day of Donald Trump’s administration in 2017. The Women’s March protests in Washington, DC and around the US were among the most widely attended protests in a decade or more. But anarchists and other radicals largely focused on other priorities, and the massive energy of the mobilization dissipated quickly—in part because the category of “woman” does not suffice to describe all those who suffer as a consequence of gender oppression.
\n\nThe right-wing culture war offensive on the terrain of gender seeks to take advantage of this crisis. While the breadth of support for abortion rights worries Republican strategists who are concerned with their electoral prospects, the right is gambling that it can target trans people with impunity, seeing them as a small and politically less powerful demographic ripe for scapegoating. By framing their attacks as defenses against existential threats to children, the family, and the gender order itself, they have inflamed their base with a sense of mission that identity-based coalitions have not been able to overcome.
\n\nThe same social changes that have uprooted fixed notions of gender and enabled more expansive ways of being have also destabilized models of organizing that relied on coherent notions of identity. We need new ways of understanding ourselves to fight the forces that divide and oppress us, new ways to conceptualize who we are and what we can become. As a Brazilian comrade put it,
\n\n\n\n\nIt is no longer possible to organize a collective action that still holds on to any fiction about “being a woman”; it is not possible to ignore the complicities of white/bourgeois feminism with colonial/racial power. The crisis of feminism is the vanguard of the revolutionary political crisis: there is no longer a subject of history; the demand for recognition/representativeness was swallowed up by neoliberal devices; there is no identity politics that can unite us; really, we don’t want to be part of the same story, we no longer want to organize our desires for a good and dignified life into a state grammar that can govern our lives. The beauty of feminism’s implosion is that it lets us see the hundreds of sharp shards we still have left. Feminism becomes a shattered place, but a place of investigation into what political action can be within life, with life and not outside it; what can make us dangerous again; how are we going to escape all these gender and identity traps?”
\n\n \n
These “gender and identity traps” loom all around us, and the stakes are urgent. How do we resist the rising tide of gender fascism without reverting to models of identity that no longer serve us?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/1.jpg\")
The poster in German, hanging on a classroom wall.
\nOne way to imagine our way towards the original poster’s provocation—“What would the world look like without gender?”—is to propose gender abolition. Inspired by the movements against the prison industrial complex that propose not more comfortable cages but an end to caging altogether, we could propose that gender itself is an oppressive system that cannot be reformed. This is not the same as saying that “gender isn’t real”—if it weren’t, there would be no need to abolish it!—but rather to insist that just as it has been constructed, it can be deconstructed.
\n\nWhat is gender, after all? As we know it, gender divides a wide range of human qualities and capabilities into mutually exclusive categories, such as “masculine” and “feminine.” This artificial division requires a wide range of forces—social pressures, policing, assorted mythologies, and a variety of technologies from laser hair removal to steroids and Viagra—to uphold the illusion that people come in two standard models rather than a wide spectrum of possibilities. To abolish gender would mean dismantling these varied systems of coercion that force us into one of two narrow boxes while hierarchically ranking them and punishing anyone who pushes their limits.
\n\nUnfortunately, some trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” have attempted to appropriate the language of “gender abolition” to describe their own hateful project. As contradictory as this may seem—given their efforts to gatekeep who counts as a woman and their alliances with the anti-feminist extreme right—they insist that gender, as a system of patriarchal social norms, perpetuates harm against people of the female sex. By itself, this assertion sounds reasonable—until they continue that, therefore, trans people are somehow uniquely responsible for upholding gender and thus causing harm to “women.” This cruel argument pits some victims of gender oppression against others, blaming trans people for their efforts to survive in a system they didn’t create. The supposed “abolition” that these transphobic activists pay lip service to only reinforces the rigid essentialism of sex, further stigmatizing efforts to shape our bodies and lives on our own terms. In fact, it can only perpetuate gender as we know it, not abolish it.
\n\nConfronting this context, we need to be clear about precisely what gender abolition in the service of liberation could mean today.
\n\nAs an alternate framework, we propose gender self-determination, insisting on our autonomy to shape our bodies, presentations, and identities according to our own needs and desires. As we argued last year,
\n\n\n\n\nBy shifting the discussion from the limits of rights to the horizon of self-determination, we propose a radically different world, in which no authorities—neither governments, religions, nuclear families, nor anything else—can confine us within their narrow visions of who we should be and who we can become.
\n
What could this look like in practice? We’ve seen an explosion of creative new forms of gender identification in recent years, with new language and pronouns expanding far beyond binaries of male/female and cis/trans. These are encouraging, but they may not suffice to dislodge the power of imposed gender norms to shape the material circumstances of our everyday lives. Self-determination must mean more than choice in a consumer framework, a maximum of individual options for constructing our online profiles and Amazon wish-lists. In an alienated consumer society in which we are constantly being appraised and compelled to sell ourselves, defining ourselves with ever more precise categories and hashtags will not be enough to get us free.
\n\nOthers have argued that we can appropriate pharmaceutical and surgical technologies to experiment with producing gender according to our own preferences. That’s an important start—and necessary, even life-saving, for some—and furious right-wing efforts to restrict our access to these methods indicates the threat they pose to guardians of the gender order. Nonetheless, so long as some gendered qualities and categories are valued while others are not, seizing the biomedical means of production to give us more latitude to construct our bodies and identities still will not serve undermine all the different ways that the prevailing gender roles constrain and oppress people.
\n\nHow might we approach the task of undoing gender, combining the best elements of gender abolition and gender self-determination? By identifying which aspects of gender need abolishing, we can propose some points of departure:
\n\nAbolish gender segregation—ensure that people of all genders have access to the same opportunities, resources, social spaces, and forms of agency.
\nAbolish fixed gender roles—break the association between certain traits and certain genders, demonstrating new constellations of the qualities and capabilities that are currently associated with one gender or another. As the original poster suggests, you can be strong without being a boy and sensitive without being a girl; while this sentiment is increasingly accepted today, how much further can we go towards breaking free of the fixed roles and binaries that organize our thinking about human beings?
\nAbolish gender hierarchies—End practices that privilege one gender over another, and those that value some qualities and capabilities over others because of the gender they are associated with. Hillary Clinton becoming president would not have served to qualify our society as feminist—if a person of any gender has to outdo all other contenders in demonstrating traditionally masculine characteristics in order to get a foothold in politics, and if all political institutions continue functioning according to patriarchal priorities and protocols, gender oppression remains in effect even if not everyone in a position of power is a man.
\nAbolish gender gatekeeping—Do away with the boundaries that control who can identify with any gender. Defending trans identity, gender nonconformity, and other departures from fixed binary gender represents a step towards this goal.
\nAbolishing these dimensions of gender can create the space for the free flourishing of all people outside of oppressive roles and identities. We can affirm both the creative impulses that lead millions of people today to define themselves in gendered terms outside of birth assignments and binaries, while also taking aim at the structural conditions that constrain our lives regardless of how we identify.
\n\nAs anarchists, we believe that we can only be free when all of us are free, and that everything that expands the horizons of freedom for others will benefit us, too. Nowhere is this plainer than on the terrain of gender.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/4.jpg\")
The classic poster.
\nThis is why we have prepared a remix of our classic gender poster. The front of the new version reads,
\n\n\n\n\nFor every fascist who plans to attack drag queen story hour, there are three anti-fascists ready to defend it. For every boss who harasses you, there are ten workers who will back you up. For every judge who seeks to ban abortion, there are twenty collectives stockpiling Mifepristone and Misoprostol. For every cop who is paid to enforce transphobic legislation, there are a hundred gender outlaws determined to defy them. For every politician who tries to prohibit talking about gender in school, there are a thousand students charting their own paths beyond the binary. For every bigot who wants to etch their biases in stone, there is a movement that is already changing the world. For every person that takes one step towards freedom, there is another who finds the road to liberation a little easier.
\n
The back of the poster presents a revised excerpt from our text, “The Fight for Gender Self-Determination.”
\n\nWe hope that both of these posters of ours—both the classic one and the new remix—can play a part in new efforts towards getting free of gender norms. May they continue to hang in grade-school classrooms and collective houses, breaking up old models and assumptions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/7.jpg\")
The back of our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nIt is becoming widely understood that the shot callers in the Democratic Party have no intention to stick their necks out to preserve abortion access. For the most cynical of the Democratic politicians, the overturning of Roe v. Wade represents an opportunity to improve their job security by the changing the subject back to electoral politics once again. Yet a coherent grassroots strategy for resisting the criminalization of abortion has yet to emerge. Let’s talk about what such a strategy might entail.
\n\nThis is especially pressing as today’s Supreme Court is not finished reshaping the legal landscape. They may continue to hand down decisions like the overturning of Roe v. Wade for years or even decades to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/27/1.jpg\")
\nIntentionally or unintentionally, the leak of the Supreme Court ruling may have functioned to defuse resistance rather than to catalyze it. It gave the general public a chance to get used to the bad news before it was confirmed, ensuring that people who might otherwise have been shocked into action behaved in more predictable ways. Liberal organizations took advantage of the advance warning to organize rallies channeling people’s rage and heartbreak into largely symbolic actions, but there was no comparable effort to coordinate an offensive participatory strategy based in direct action.
\n\nWhat follows is a tentative effort to talk strategy as we embark on the next chapter of a centuries-long struggle. What can direct action offer the fight for reproductive freedom?
\n\nFirst, there are some things that you can accomplish by acting on your own without waiting for anyone else. If you want the wall down the street to express support for people who need abortion access, grab some spray-paint and go out tonight. Likewise, you can stockpile abortion pills and get them to those who need them along with information about how to use them.
\n\nSecond, there are many ways to extend support to those who will be most impacted by the criminalization of abortion. One of the most fundamental effects of the banning of abortion in half of the United States will be that millions of people who did not previously consider themselves radicals will experience the courts, the laws, and the police as their enemies in an immediate, visceral way. While this may legitimize illegal activity for some who previously had a superstitious faith in the rule of law, it will also have consequences similar to the impact of the laws criminalizing marijuana: in anti-choice states, the wealthy and privileged will be able to access abortion easily enough, while poor people from targeted demographics will suffer egregiously. Drawing on the examples of No More Deaths and similar solidarity projects, we should not underestimate the tremendous amount of effort this kind of organizing will require, nor how difficult it will be to get support to those who need it most. This work is crucial, but is essentially defensive in character.
\n\nFinally, movements can use direct action to exert leverage within society, including on those who aim to criminalize abortion. This is what we mean by an offensive strategy: in addition to responding to the negative consequences of the Supreme Court verdict, taking steps to push back against it.
\n\nIn order to use direct action to exert leverage in this way, you have to:
\n\nThe person or group you focus on could be the ones responsible for the injustice you seek to address, or they might have no direct connection to the injustice but be positioned in such a way that they could do something to stop it. The action you take need not be adversarial—it could be as simple as serving delicious food at a demonstration to ensure that people show up who might not otherwise attend.
\n\nTo offer another example: if opponents of abortion access sincerely wished to diminish the total number of abortions in the United States, they would focus on providing resources and community support to everyone who might become pregnant, so that no one would feel that they are too poor or too isolated to be able to raise a child. That would be the only surefire way to diminish the number of both legal and illegal abortions. The fact that, instead, the anti-choice movement has focused almost exclusively on legislation shows that in fact, their actual goal is to impose patriarchal control over people’s bodies by means of state violence.
\n\nIt’s important to spell this out: if your goal is to exert leverage, you have to identify a group you can actually exert leverage on—a group that is likely to change course as a consequence of your intervention. If there are no circumstances under which those you are seeking to influence would make a different decision, or if they have already made their decision, it might make sense to focus your efforts elsewhere. You have to make sure that the target of your efforts has a choice—then make them an offer they can’t refuse.
\n\nRight now, the basic strategic problem is that no one has fleshed out a proposal to make suppressing abortion access the least desirable choice for the Republicans or their centrist accomplices. The Republicans are getting what they want: the more that their efforts to criminalize abortion outrage and harm people, the better, as wielding power over others’ lives is precisely what energizes their base. But Democratic politicians also have no great incentive to take risks to defend abortion access. Though Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others have proposed a strategy to codify abortion rights into law, most Democrats are determined to sit on their hands, hoping that this issue will help them in the midterm elections—regardless of the risks that those who are being criminalized face today.
\n\nThis is consistent with Democrats’ efforts to re-legitimize the police and other institutions of the state in the wake of the 2020 uprising—and to do so even as Republicans are poised to gain control of those institutions and keep control of them by coup if necessary. These are the workings of the political ratchet, in which Republicans continuously push state institutions towards more oppressive agendas while Democrats continuously give ground, keeping those who are suffering invested in the state itself in hopes that it might one day be reformed. If the same pattern plays out in regards to abortion access, there really is no hope other than direct action.
\n\nThe good news is that if someone can demonstrate a strategy to effectively exert leverage on those who are responsible for suppressing abortion access, countless people will want to participate in it. People may come out to march in circles and listen to speakers a couple times a year, but if they see that there is something meaningful that they can do to effect change directly, they will show up with vigor and enthusiasm. We saw this most recently in summer 2020.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/27/2.jpg\")
Graffiti in Portland, Oregon.
\nWhat strategies have demonstrators experimented with thus far that might offer meaningful leverage on those who are complicit in suppressing abortion access?
\n\nIt is a classic historical pattern that, after the cooptation and repression of a movement like the George Floyd uprising of 2020, some participants revert to staid, legalistic marches while others attempt to continue escalating on their own, shifting to invite-only night actions for the sake of security. This perfectly describes the dichotomy between this past weekend’s sign-holding rallies and the vandalism that various anonymous groups have carried out under the umbrella of the Jane’s Revenge model. The public rallies are eminently accessible, but offer little meaningful engagement; the invite-only night actions may inspire people to take action on their own, but do not offer a participatory space in which to build collective momentum. Something is needed to fill in the space between these two poles.
\n\nLikewise, whatever their other virtues, both of these models fall short when we evaluate them as means of exerting leverage. The target of the public rallies is vague: in addressing society at large by means of a largely symbolic event, they might even reassure those who are criminalizing abortion that there will be no real consequences for doing so. Their chief value is probably in bolstering the morale of the participants. By contrast, the targets of the Jane’s Revenge actions are very specific—but in targeting anti-abortion centers, they are taking on the most intransigent opponents of abortion, people who have dedicated their lives to fighting against abortion access, many of whom consider themselves to be carrying out the will of God. In attempting to exert leverage on such people, one could end up locked in a private grudge match, missing the opportunity to open up expansive spaces of struggle that can draw in more participants while escalating.
\n\nSomewhere between the public rallies and the invite-only night actions, we find the most promising events of this past weekend—breakaway marches that blocked highways in Los Angeles and other cities, on the one hand, and demonstrations outside the homes of the Supreme Court justices, on the other. These have the virtue of being both participatory and confrontational. Again, however, when it comes to exerting leverage, the target of the street marches and freeway blockades is a little bit abstract, whereas the Supreme Court justices are unlikely to change their minds, even if they have to get a bigger security detail.
\n\nIf it is possible to exert leverage on anyone who is complicit in criminalizing abortion, it is probably not far-right religious cult members, but their centrist accomplices. Presented with the choice between risking their careers and sacrificing the abortion access of millions of the desperately poor, centrist politicians will usually choose the latter—but it might be possible to revise those options in such a way that they would be compelled to think twice.
\n\nAt the high point of the George Floyd uprising, when millions of people had ceased to accept the legitimacy of the police and were acting accordingly, we saw terrified liberals like the mayor of Minneapolis suddenly take the demands of the movement very seriously, promising to take steps towards police abolition (which the movement had already made a reality to some extent). Later, when the politicians had reestablished control, they betrayed those promises—showing that our effectiveness hinges on keeping our social movements lively and strong, not on winning concessions. If demonstrators could find an effective and infectious way to express a total rejection of the court system, that might bring about a similar situation.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TaylorKinnerup/status/1540542346332217344/photo/1\n\n\n
In the past, pressure campaigns have targeted the American Legislative Exchange Council and similar organizations to some effect. In liberal urban centers in the states that are criminalizing abortion, there is another potential point of intervention: some district attorneys are already declaring that they won’t prosecute abortion cases. This could represent a precedent that other prosecutors could be pressed to adopt, widening fault lines within the legal system in those states.
\n\nThe movement against racist police murders that eventually led to the George Floyd uprising got off the ground in the first place because, starting with the protests against the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009, the participants were able to connect the following crucial elements:
\n\nOther movements—the environmental movement, for example—have not been establish this connection between analysis, action, and context, and have subsequently remained stunted (with exceptions, thankfully). If we want to mobilize an effective resistance to the criminalization of abortion, we have to learn from the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nYes, there are fundamental differences between the movement for reproductive freedom and the movement for Black lives—but those who will be most impacted by the criminalization of abortion overlap considerably with those who are most impacted by racist policing. Although the politics of the movement for reproductive freedom are currently more liberal and reformist, correlating with the higher profile that middle-class organizers have in its ranks, that could change as the situation intensifies. We should remember that in the years between the 2001 uprising in Cincinnati and the rebellion mourning Oscar Grant, movements against police violence often seemed easily co-opted, as well.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1540518402975997952\n\n\n
As anarchists, we don’t look to the Supreme Court to defend our freedoms from other courts and state institutions. We don’t believe that any court or state institution possesses inherent legitimacy. That being said, in a struggle for our freedom and well-being that pits us against courts, cops, and other state institutions, compelling one such institution to limit the power of another can be strategic, provided it does not contribute to legitimizing any of the institutions involved. It must be clear to everyone that the power that drives social change derives from grassroots organizing, not from state institutions—that it is the needs and desires and autonomy of the human beings involved that are legitimate, not the structures that purport to represent them.
\n\nThe fact that some US courts recognize abortion rights at all is itself the result of decades of grassroots struggle. Today, a majority of residents of the United States support some kind of abortion access, but this was not always the case.
\n\nSupport for abortion access has slowly risen since the 1970s, even as the number of abortions people seek has declined since 1980. In 1978, only a third of those polled in the United States supported abortion access unconditionally; by 2018, that had risen to slightly over half. As Moxie Marlinspike argues in “We Should All Have Something to Hide,” it is difficult for most people to grasp the value of something that is illegal and therefore unfamiliar; the first step towards social change is for a powerful movement to persistently demonstrate its value in defiance of the law.
\n\nThe Roe v. Wade decision did not take place because a majority of the US population supported abortion access in 1973. Rather, in view of organizing efforts such as the Jane collective, which provided an estimated 11,000 illegal abortions, we can conclude that the ruling was a response to the intensity with which a particular segment of the population was fighting for abortion access, and to their success in calling the state’s monopoly on power into question by continuing to make abortion available despite the efforts of police and judges.
\n\nSmall groups that win concessions as a consequence of their intensity and successful defiance can enable the rest of society to discover the advantages of something that is currently illegal. Such groups are responsible for the better part of social progress; they initiated the process that ultimately led to the legalization of marijuana in parts of the United States, for example. Of all of the struggles that reached a high point in 2020, some of the most unambiguous victories were the statue topplings: governments that never would have taken action to remove racist statues were also not prepared to reinstall them once autonomous crowds illegally toppled them.
\n\nArguably, two of the most common justifications for the power of the Supreme Court and other state institutions are, first, that they represent the will of the majority, and, second, that they maintain historical legal precedents. As anarchists, we don’t believe that either of these justifications is as important as people’s own judgments about what contributes to their personal well-being. But it is noteworthy that, in striking down Roe v. Wade, the majority of the Supreme Court is neither enforcing the will of the majority nor maintaining historical legal precedents—certainly not precedents that have prevailed for the vast majority of our lives. Rather, the Supreme Court is implementing a decades-old program propelled by the intensity and defiance of far-right anti-choice activists—who used assassinations and bombings, among other tactics, to build a pressure campaign comprised of many interlocking fronts.
\n\nThe far right are also advocates of social change—but towards a more repressive, authoritarian, sexist, racist, and homophobic society. Where anarchist direct action generally targets the most powerful and privileged, the far right pursue policies that generally target the desperate and downtrodden. Where anarchists seek to decentralize power and access to resources, the far right seeks to use the state to preserve disparities. It remains to be seen how well doubling down on state violence as the chief means of enacting their program will work out for them in an era when faith in the state itself is eroding across the entire political spectrum.
\n\nThis struggle is not really about the Constitution or the number of judges on Supreme Court. No cabal of nine people deserves to wield sovereignty over the most intimate aspects of our lives, and adding two Democrats to the court wouldn’t change that. Likewise, we shouldn’t tie the hands of future rebels by focusing too much on the fact that the Supreme Court is not implementing the will of the majority in this case—the issue, rather, is that they are not entitled to rule us in the first place.
\n\nThe Supreme Court decision is not a matter of interpreting law; it is an act of war. Most of the players on all sides understand this as a power struggle over the bodily autonomy of those who can give birth, and are using whatever tools and reasoning are available to advance their respective agendas. Politicians are generally more cynical in the ways they relate to the state than those who explicitly reject the state itself.
\n\nAll the more reason for us to come up with strategies that we can enact together, without depending on any politician or party.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/27/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators participating in International Women’s Day in Mexico City on March 8, 2022.
\nWe’ve prepared a poster and a selection of other resources in response to the news that the Supreme Court is poised to give a green light to government agencies to take away the reproductive freedoms of tens of millions of people.
\n\nYou can find an array of useful information about how to gain or support access to abortion in each state here.
\nYou can find information about self-managed abortion using abortion pills here and information about how to access abortion pills online here.
\nSister Song is an organization that focuses on reproductive freedom for Indigenous people and people of color. Statistics suggest that these demographics account for two-thirds of those who seek legal abortion. Thanks to structural white supremacy in the distribution of resources in the United States, these demographics will be the hardest hit by restrictions.
\nAbortion Care Network offers a support network for independent community-based abortion providers.
\n“Bodily Autonomy in the Streets“—A handout to distribute at demonstrations demanding abortion access, opposing top-down control of street actions.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/03/hands-off_digital.jpg\")
\nThis catastrophe compels us to confront the law itself as something hostile to us. If you are a person who might ever need an abortion—or if you care about a person who might—or if you believe that people deserve bodily self-determination, the state is your enemy. This system has given a handful of individuals, including at least two unrepentant sexual predators, the power to block abortion access to millions of people across the country. This is consistent with the explicitly misogynist and anti-trans agenda of the Republican Party and the systematic complicity of the Democratic Party.
\n\n\n\n\nAs anarchists, we reject the idea that judges or politicians deserve the authority to determine the course of our lives. Rather than only trying to pressure leaders to vote one way or the other in a winner-take-all system that reduces us to spectators in the decisions that affect us, we propose solutions based in direct action: taking power back into our hands by enacting our needs and solving our problems ourselves, without representatives.
\n\nAs long as legislators and judges can determine the scope of our reproductive options, our bodies and lives will be subject to the shifting winds of politics rather than our own immediate needs and values. Instead of validating their authority by limiting ourselves to calling for better legislators and judges, we should organize to secure and defend the means to make decisions regarding what we do with our bodies regardless of what courts or legislators decree.
\n\nIn practice, this could mean networking with health workers who have the necessary skills, and sharing them widely; stockpiling and manufacturing the supplies we need for all sorts of health care; defending spaces where we can operate our own clinics; fundraising resources to secure access to health care and birth control options for all, regardless of ability to pay; and developing models for reproductive autonomy that draw on past precedents but address our current problems. We can do our best to render the decisions of would-be patriarchs like Kavanaugh irrelevant.
\n\nAll this has already happened before. For example, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the Jane network, a vast clandestine effort centered in Chicago, provided illegal abortions to thousands of women. The fact that abortion was already accessible to so many women was a major factor in compelling the US court system to finally legalize abortion access in order to be able to regulate it. The most effective way to pressure the authorities to permit us access to the resources and care that we need is to present them with a fait accompli. Unfortunately, when it comes to standing up to elites like the Supreme Court and the police who enforce its decisions, there are no shortcuts.
\n\n-Kavanaugh Shouldn’t Be on the Supreme Court—Neither Should Anyone Else
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/03/hands-off_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to access the poster PDF.
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