5/12 Queer Agenda: Multiverse Edition

On abortion, trans rights, ambiguous loss, and building futures

Hello! Queer Agenda is in spring mode 🌱—that is, A.L. is just beginning to push up out of the soil after a long hibernation underground, metaphorically. Happy reading, and more soon.

A moment of calm before I launch. (Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash)

On May 2, 2022, Politico leaked Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s sweeping and blunt draft majority opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights. (No, I have not been sleeping well.) Overturning Roe would make individual states responsible for establishing abortion laws. Some states, like New York and California, have passed laws to protect the right to abortion; others, like Kansas and North Carolina, have insurance, parental consent, and waiting period restrictions that make it difficult to access abortion. Still other states have laws like Trigger Bans that would effectively outlaw abortion as soon as Roe is overturned. (See this helpful but terrifying tool by Planned Parenthood.)

But it’s not possible to outlaw all abortions… only safe and accessible ones. Abortions will happen regardless of what rights we do or do not have. People who live in states where abortion will be outlawed will need to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to access the care they need—and we all know travel ain’t cheap. So the poor will be disproportionately affected—again—because we know the US is not tripping over itself to help lift people out of poverty.

Why should you care, as a queer designer, or as an ally, regardless of whether or not you can get pregnant or get someone else pregnant?

You can see the trees, but can you see the forest? (Photo by Arnaud Mesureur on Unsplash.)

First off, I hope you care because this is what the erosion of rights looks like, in real time! This is a pro-abortion newsletter, btw. If you can’t handle that, feel free to unsubscribe!

Second, let’s take a look at what overturning Roe means in legal(ish) terms. In Roe, the Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution provides a “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant person’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. Overturning Roe, then, puts other cases rooted in the constitutional protection for privacy at risk of being overturned as well—like Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the right to same-sex marriage; Loving v. Virginia (1967), the right to engage in interracial marriage; and Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the right to contraception.

(Does this feel alarmist to you? Remember when, back in 2016, after Tr*mp was elected, some people were like, “Oh it won’t get that bad, there’s always checks and balances!”? To them I say: lmao, look at where we are now. Erosion is slow but steady and overturning Roe has been a right-wing goal for years and years and if we don’t wake up and stand up now, when will we?)

Third, let’s zoom even further out so we can see the underlying systems that are in operation here. It’s giving misogyny, sexism, and classism. It’s giving unwavering deference to the inequality and poverty that capitalism requires. It’s giving no bodily autonomy or self-determination for people who can get pregnant.

And you know what else is about bodily autonomy and self-determination? Trans rights, which are also seeing massive erosion and bans in select states. At least 216 pieces of anti-trans legislation in 26 states were introduced or rolled out in 2022. See for yourself: Legislative Tracker (has a map!!!!) by Freedom for All Americans, or ACLU’s harrowing, long, seemingly never-ending list (though I think there are some non-anti-LGBTQ+ bills at the end??). We’ve got bills restricting healthcare for transgender youth. We’ve got single-sex facility restrictions. MANY states plan to exclude transgender youth from athletics, and still others are legislating school or curriculum restrictions.

Are you feeling the heat yet? (Photo by Jackie Tan on Unsplash)

Ultimately, overturning Roe and anti-LGBTQ+ bills are about the control of bodies. Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love that the “power to create laws also endows governments with the power to influence which bodies we accept as normal and which we do not, all through the validation of legality.” The white, Christian, heteropatriarchy is on a legislative crusade to define what is “normal” (e.g., binary gendered, straight, child-bearing) and what is deviant (e.g., transgender people, queers, and people who choose abortion). This is about maintaining power by limiting the opportunities that women, trans, and queer people (youth!) have in life, as well as the choices folks can make about their own bodies.

If there’s one thing we can’t separate ourselves from and thus should have sole ownership over, it’s our bodies! (And our identities—but that’s for a future edition of this newsletter.) People and their bodies occupy space in myriad ways. Designers’ decisions impact access to and experiences of space.

Breathing break. (Photo by Carolina on Unsplash)

At the time of this newsletter’s publication, Roe hasn’t been overturned yet, and there are protestors at Supreme Court Justices’ houses. Online (mostly on Twitter, because where else am I online?!), people have posted resources for abortion access, threads about different abortion types, and ways to donate to local abortion funds. But that leak has wreaked havoc. Pauline Boss, Ph.D, writes in her latest book, The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change, that ambiguous loss is a loss “that remains unclear and without official verification or immediate resolution, which may never be achieved.” The (potential) loss of abortion access protection on a national level may feel unclear because abortion will still be legal in some states, but not in others. In this way, the leak, as an announcement of a future decision that will further divide the country, is already an ambiguous loss. The overturning has not happened yet, but just reading Justice Alito’s scathing words is enough to throw me into a depressive state. For many, abortion access is a matter of life or death, and the loss will not be ambiguous, but extremely material and concrete.

A lil glitchy, fractal goodness. (Photo by Glitch Lab App on Unsplash)

I don’t have definitive answers beyond the resources I’ve posted above, but I have been thinking a lot about the concept of multiverses (and I haven’t yet seen Everything Everywhere All At Once!). As human beings, we tend to adopt polarizing ideas—we see this in the dichotomies of religion/atheism, Democrats/Republicans, good/bad, inside/outside, etc. I think we’re collectively coming to terms with the multiverses that already exist in our current realities—the boundless spectrums of thought, the intergenerational impacts, the infinite ways to be (that are not necessarily new, but are rooted in indigenous cultures)—and that’s coming through in the stories we tell ourselves. We’re processing. We’re collectively learning that our personal belief system and values are not the only way to live life.

Some of us (*cough* Supreme Court *cough*) are reacting in ways that protect their power, or attempt to return to a time and an order where their conservative beliefs were the norm. But there are enough of us who can see through the bullshit; can hold opposing or contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time; and can imagine multiverses of futures in which everyone can make decisions for themselves about their own bodies, spaces, and lives.

(Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash)

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I hope these words inspire you in some way, shape, or form.

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Thank you for reading.

Until next time 🌱,

A.L.