As I stood among the crowd in the city of Binghamton’s second annual Women’s March last Saturday, through all the excitement, creative signs and pink hats, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of uneasiness rush over me. While the Women’s March has historical significance in the era of the Trump administration, there are areas in which the march severely fell short.
A lot of my issues with the Women’s March are represented by those pink pussy hats that became so trendy a year ago. They were obviously born from President Trump’s “Grab ‘em by the pussy” comment, and at the surface level, I get it. Many women attended the march with their pussy hats as a big “screw you” to Trump. But let me tell you why I have a problem with that.
To me, the Women’s March should be about uplifting the most marginalized women out there.
Centering your signs, clothing and chants around genitalia at the march excludes one of the most marginalized groups of women: transgender women. According to a November 2017 report by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and the Trans People of Color Coalition, at least 25 transgender people were killed in 2017 at the time of publication. Eighty-four percent of them were transgender people of color, and 80 percent were transgender women.
And recently, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would protect health workers who refuse treatment to people on religious grounds — meaning that not only can they refuse to perform abortions, but they can also refuse to treat a transgender person.
Equating womanhood with having a vagina is a slap in the face to women who do not have one, and immediately voids any message of female empowerment. Women who already have a high rate of violence against them and who are having their rights taken away are made to feel unwelcome at a march for women’s rights. Why are we empowering only some women?
Another problem was how the crowd interacted with police. During the planning stages of the Women’s March in Binghamton, organizers from Citizen Action of New York put out a statement asking that “March attendants refrain from engaging or fraternizing with State and local law enforcement stationed at the event. Communities of color continue to face disproportionate and often fatal abuse at the hands of police.”
This statement should not be controversial. It is a known fact that relations in this country between police and people of color aren’t good, and it shouldn’t be a deal breaker to listen to your black and brown sisters say they feel unsafe around law enforcement. Many people who were previously going to attend the event — mostly white women — stated that they would not anymore since the march was supposedly anti-police.
Many who objected to leaving their pussy hats at home maintained that they weren’t anti-transgender women, but that they were anti-Trump. The women who refused to refrain from interacting with police weren’t keeping their marginalized sisters’ concerns in mind; to them, the march wasn’t about uplifting marginalized women. To them, the march was purely anti-Trump.
The Women’s March, in my eyes, should not just exist as a protest against Trump.
It should be anti-violence against women, which includes standing against police violence against women. It shouldn’t just be anti-sexist, because there are women who have many other identities that are integral to their womanhood. It must also be against racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and all the other types of oppression that women everywhere face. We can’t call the Women’s March a win for women until all women — black, LGBTQ, disabled, immigrant, indigenous and the like — are recognized and uplifted.
Sarah Molano is a junior double-majoring in English and philosophy, politics and law.