Women’s March Doesn’t Speak for Me
It Shouldn’t be called “Women’s March”
The Women’s March at Washington on January 21, 2017 was an event that began with a Facebook page in the hours after Donald Trump was elected, which quickly grew into a movement. The purpose of the Women’s March was to protect legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues, including women’s rights, immigration reform, healthcare reform, the natural environment, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights. However, I think we call all agree that the women’s march was an anti-trump march. I think the fact that the people chose to label it a feminist or women’s base movement is what bothered me the most. The people in this movement could have just gone to protest his policies and what they didn’t like about him, and I wouldn’t have cared so much. But for some reason, they had to attach a label of being a woman. They made the women’s march about women in general, and I don’t think everything is a gendered issue. I would understand if they don’t approve the new administration that is coming in. If people don’t support Donald Trump, it’s totally fine because you have the right to do so. But I think it’s weird that everything you don’t like as a woman all of a sudden becomes a women’s issue. There was a tweet from Kamala Harris that said “If you’re a woman who is an immigrant and you don’t want your family torn apart, you know immigration reform is a women’s issue”. Men have families too! They could’ve called it anti-trump women’s march. But they believed that if you’re a woman, it automatically means you hate trump. In an article called Female Trump Supporters: Women’s March Doesn’t Make Sense by Ellie Todd, she said “They can protest, it’s their right, but don’t call it the ‘Women’s March.’ That makes it sounds like it’s a big unified thing, when really they’re picking very divisive issues and protesting against Trump”. I don’t think trump is trying to take away women’s rights or equality.
I don’t think people can accuse someone just because they have different political ideologies than you do. Donald Trump never said anything about taking away women’s rights to vote, the right to own property, none of those things. However, he did mention about the gender wage gap that women would have to work harder to earn as much as men, which sounds fine and reasonable to me. So I don’t understand why people are freaking out over it.
The only right you could argue that Donald Trump wants to take away from women is the right to an abortion that currently exists because of Roe vs. Wade, which is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. It stated that woman’s decision to have an abortion must be balanced against the state’s interests in regulating abortions: protecting women’s health and protecting the potentiality of human life. This is what Donald Trump said he wants to do. It does not mean that as soon as Trump becomes the president there wouldn’t be anymore abortion. Feminists believe that “If women do not have the right to choose what happens to our bodies we risk relinquishing rights in all other areas of our lives.” ( Hooks, pg. 29). If abortion is the issue that so many women are concerned about, then they should have named it a Pro-Choice march. Not every political stance is a women’s issue just because you’re a woman. If you watch some of the participants’ interview about the march, so many of them can’t articulate the thing they are protesting against. I thought this was concerning as well because that means women are ready to get their voices heard rather than sitting down and thinking about their positions. So many of the things people were saying or the messages/pictures seen on signs, especially the things celebrities said were random none sense about “being a woman” and “I have periods”. According to an article called Who Didn’t Go to the Women’s March Matters More Than Who Did by Jenna Wortham, “There were also many signs equating gender justice with racial justice. Vagina plushies abounded, as did drawings of vulva and birth canals, and legs spread exuberantly wide.” Some of the women even just dressed up as a giant vaginas, which I don’t get at all. I don’t understand what people want to accomplish by this.
Something else that I thought was equally ridiculous was the fact that there was international protests. So people are protesting Donald Trump when Donald Trump isn’t even their president. If women want to protest, why don’t they protest human rights violations in Saudi Arabia? Or what’s happening in Syria? Or in North Korea? Why are people spending so much time on issues that are poorly articulated when there are actual serious problems? These woman care about protecting their entitlements and against patriarchal violence . I believe that these women were upset that their candidate lost and they don’t like the new administration that is coming in. The reason why this bothers me so much is because these people are claiming to speak for me, and they are claiming to speak for the entire gender. These women wearing vaginas and screaming about vagina certainty doesn’t represent me or the gender.
