This section is currently an edited version of the first two sections of our Doulas For Palestine Extended Statement. We will continue to update this section.
Language and Gender and Non-Gender Inclusion
Doulas Decolonising is a grassroots collective of united doulas who believe in and use gender-neutral language within our space, resources and outreach. We do this with intentionality, to ensure that whilst we are trying to offer support to a marginalised group of people, that we are not then excluding or further harming anyone within our support.
Cisgender women are only one identity within many that may have the ability to give birth – a group of people that includes some non-binary/ agender/ non-gendered people, some transgender men, some traditional/ indigenous genders, some intersex people and more. Some cisgender women, as well as other groups also do not have the ability to give birth. People is an umbrella term that includes rather than excludes – we should be using terms like this more rather than prioritising one group eg cisgender women and excluding everyone else – or on the flip side, going so far to separate and other cisgender women by acting as if they are not also people.
Where we are speaking about birthing people, this is an umbrella term to include all who have the capacity to, are currently or have previously been birthing. We will also use inclusive and non-gendered terms such as parents and parental instead of mothers and maternal and perinatal instead of maternity.
Where we are speaking about people we are talking about all people, regardless of their reproductive capacity. Not all people have the ability to or wish to reproduce, and this is valid and they are still people worthy of support and care. As this genocide continues, and within the aftermath, we may see that fertility and reproductive health worsens due to trauma, chemical and possible nuclear exposure or other factors. This paper analyzes the fertility effects of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
As doulas we also need to be mindful of our participation in the erasure or downplaying of harm caused to men (cisgender and all those who identify as and/or are read as men). We can speak on the harm caused to birthing people, and outline and speak on the ways Israel and other colonial and oppressive forces are causing specific harm, which is important. But it’s also important that we do not leave others behind in our advocacy. Please take a moment to read this post by Shareefa Energy, ‘[Men] deserve to not be bombed to death. Do not dehumanise and leave out the men, they are equally precious and valuable.’
Family structures, relationships and partnerships take all different forms, and so we must not assume nor discriminate, and instead be inclusive to all traditional and non-traditional family dynamics. What may start as traditional may also evolve within the genocide, as parents lose children, children lose parents and people take care of each other in less conventional ways. Medical professionals in Gaza, Doctors without Borders (MSF), have shared that the number of children without surviving family members arriving for medical care is so high that a new acronym has been coined to identify them – “WCNSF” (Wounded Child No Surviving Family).
We should be mindful to not place our assumptions of gender, sexuality or family dynamic on people who currently may not be able to tell us what specific terms they prefer. So using neutral language unless we are told otherwise is how we intentionally include, not exclude. Within already marginalised groups – so here both as Palestinians and birthing people – those who face multiple marginalised identities, such as also being LGBTQIA+, will be subjected to a multi-layered oppression which we can understand through the lens of intersectionality.
I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sexes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression. I have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source as racism…. I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you. – Audre Lorde from Homophobia and Education Bulletin.
We also are clear that we stand with all the people of Palestine, Congo, Ayiti and elsewhere. This includes directly affected people both in those countries as well as displaced peoples and diaspora peoples. And this is inclusive of all without discrimination or prioritisation based on race or religion. This also includes all people, no matter what their background is, from people seen as ‘acceptable’ by society, such as doctors and nurses, to those seen as the other end of this oppressive binary such as sex workers etc. We do not participate in respectability politics, and the demand that people need to be seen as worthy, by white supremacist colonial Western standard, to be kept alive or mourned. Within this however, we can also recognise the specific or targeted oppression that certain groups are subjected to, and speak about it appropriately.
Reproductive Justice
As Doulas Decolonising we use the term reproductive justice to guide our theory and praxis. Reproductive justice, created by Black and Brown people from marginalised genders, focuses on the intersections of reproductive health access and understands that it is not equal for all. By opening up to a fuller conversation on reproductive rights, reproductive justice forces these more difficult conversations to happen about access to safety, services, support, autonomy and freedom for all.
SisterSong defines Reproductive Justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Indigenous women, women of color, and trans* people have always fought for Reproductive Justice, but the term was invented in 1994. Right before attending the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where the entire world agreed that the individual right to plan your own family must be central to global development, a group of black women gathered in Chicago in June of 1994. They recognized that the women’s rights movement, led by and representing middle class and wealthy white women, could not defend the needs of women of color and other marginalized women and trans* people. We needed to lead our own national movement to uplift the needs of the most marginalized women, families, and communities. – Sister Song
Reproductive justice for marginalised people looks like a world where marginalised people are able to have autonomy and safety in their reproductive choices, journeys and access to services and support. As doulas we meant to be dedicated to supporting reproductive justice for all, and actively fighting for that freedom for both the people we support and marginalised people worldwide.
Being a “doula” is a political act. It facilitates a reclaiming of power and the right to be human. If your doula work isn’t rooted in activism, you are muddling “doulaing” with “accomplice”. – @birthworkersforhumanrights
Whilst as doulas a lot of our work is focused on birthing people, babies and children, it is really important that we do not forget that reproductive justice, activism, allyship and support must also extend to those who cannot or choose not to birth, those who are without children or families, to the men, the non-birthing parents, to everyone who is trying to survive worldwide. As a collective we all cover different areas of support, some are full spectrum, we have everything from conceiving and fertility, to pregnancy and birth, postnatal and lactation, family and emergency support. We also have some non-perinatal doulas within our group, including grief, trauma and death doulas and youth doulas.
We can share information and support birthing people, babies and children as doulas without excluding others through language that prioritises ‘women and children first’, a term which has roots in America and Britain seen from the 1800s, and was used as a ‘chivalric ideal’, a way to prove masculinity and additionally often used to uphold white supremacy and colonialism. Chivalry has been upheld as an ideal that has ‘helped keep England free from political rancour and war between the classes and and resulted, in the main part, in a brave, honest, honourable and self-controlled’ ruling class.’ This class divide is also clear when we look at how the ‘women and children first’ narrative is the same as ‘ladies first’, meaning that this would only have been extended to white and upper class women. Graham Dawson has described the ‘women and children first’ narrative in situations such as ship-wrecks where the term supposedly originated from, as the ‘energizing myth of English imperialism’, which allowed for the imaginary construction of new forms of masculinity (whether of the British colonial male or the ‘native’ subjects) appropriate to empire.
It can be too easy to dismiss this history of the term or actions of putting women and children first, and to claim that through feminism prioritising women and children is essential. And this brings its own concerns. This carries an assumed heterosexual-cisgender normativity which we challenge, as not only heterosexual cisgender women have the ability to get pregnant, and not all heterosexual cisgender women can get pregnant. And additionally that reproductive justice is rooted in decolonial practice, in challenging and dismantling white supremacy. And as thus, we need to dismantle ‘chivalry’ and the – outdated – promises that come with it. We can identify these as outdated as the West, Britain in this context, still adheres to the protection of white cisgender heterosexual middle class women and children over all others, even within ‘feminism’, read: white feminism.
Black, Asian, lesbian, queer, and disabled women have long critiqued the excluding and exclusive category of “womanhood” as practiced by mainstream feminism, or what is now more recently termed “white feminism.” Under this framework, gender is the foundation of social inequality and the only category of inequality that can unite all women in a struggle against it. It is presumed that the subject in mainstream feminism is a straight, white, middle-class, and nondisabled woman, and that this particular subject and her experiences can be universalized as the standard bearer for all women across time and space. As such, feminist political strategies are pursued on this basis of “exclusive universalism” (Bassel and Emejulu 2017a)—from abortion rights to anti-violence against women’s work to the gender pay gap. Because these struggles have, for the most part, excluded different kinds of women and their experiences of inequality at other intersections of race, class, sexuality, disability, and legal status, English and Scottish feminisms have been fractured over these constitutive politics. For example, the struggle for abortion rights in the 1970s and 1980s had to be expanded by the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), the Brixton Black Women’s Group, and other radical Black and Asian activists to include a wider conception of bodily autonomy, encompassing resistance against virginity tests and forced sterilization of women of color in Britain and across the former British colonies (Brixton Black Women’s Group 1984; Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe 2018). Women’s bodily autonomy was not only about the fate of individual women’s bodies in terms of accessing contraception and abortion services but about how collectives of racialized bodies are captured and controlled by the bordering practices of the British state. OWAAD and other radical women of color demonstrated how sexism could not be separated from racism and the colonial relations of the British state. Imbricated in this struggle to expand the boundaries of who is included in womanhood is the longstanding lesbian and queer critique of mainstream feminism and the heteronormative assumptions embedded in much of feminist politics—particularly in relation to the sexual division of labor (Butler 1999; Federici 2004). Lesbian, queer, and trans women expanded feminist struggles beyond the gender binary and seeking rights beyond simple equality with (white) men. Lesbian, queer, and trans feminisms expand the terrain of feminist politics by insisting on survival, visibility, desire, and transgression as foundational feminist concerns which can only be addressed when the power relations mobilized through sexuality, gender, class, and race are taken seriously (Cohen 1997; Phelan 1997) – “Diversity Within”: The Problems with “Intersectional” White Feminism in Practice Ashlee Christoffersen, Akwugo Emejulu
Reproductive justice can only work when we are not still excluding people and their rights to reproductive autonomy, support and care. It is our responsibility to be intentional with language and what we put out into the world whilst campaigning. We can keep a focus on reproductive justice within supporting the liberation of all oppressed people, whilst not also engaging with trying to humanise or gain empathy only for certain people, here women and children, but dehumanising and removing the rights to empathy from other, here men. Men also do not deserve to die, to be bombed, to have their reproductive autonomy taken away, to lose their families and their children. Let us speak only on the reproductive rights, survival and complete liberation for all people worldwide. And we can explain the differences between the specific torturing and suffering that different groups of people have, without trying to gain empathy through tactics of trying to humanise one group over another, in the hopes that that will make them politically ‘white’ enough to be cared about.