What do an Embryo and Nex Benedict Have in Common?

Shitty Policies on Women and Gender

When I can’t decide what to write about, I often choose the thing I’m angriest about at that moment. Today I’m picking two topics because they are part and parcel of the same growing cancer in this country —policies that police women and gender leading to nightmarish outcomes.

Embryos are “children”

I want to talk about Alabama’s newest use of “fetal personhood.” But first, a quick primer on personhood laws. While abortion bans restrict the practice of abortion, personhood laws govern pregnancy with a much broader brush stroke. If a zygote or a fetus have the same legal rights as a person, then child endangerment laws can apply. Personhood has been used to jail women suspected of using drugs to protect the fetus. There are notorious cases of those women then being treated with such sickening, callous indifference that they and their babies nearly died.

Currently there are a handful of states with personhood laws. But if it continues to gain traction, the state could, for example, decide what’s appropriate for pregnant people to eat; it could demand a woman delay chemotherapy until she gives birth (which has routinely happened in Poland), you could be arrested for telling someone about an out-of-state abortion clinic. These are not unrealistic scenarios given the direction this country has taken. On the upside, a pregnant woman could potentially drive alone (uh, not alone?) legally in the carpool lane.

Last week, Alabama’s state Supreme Court took personhood a step further, ruling that embryos are “children.” Before you tune out if you’re not going through IVF, you should know that Justice Jay Mitchell said the quiet part out loud, basically conflating women and embryo freezers, and referring to women as “ancillary characteristics”:

“Unborn children are ‘children’…without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.”

WATF?

This is devastating news for people going through an already devastating process like IVF, and raises questions for their doctors who, like abortion providers, may be forced to stop offering fertility treatment or move out of state. But, this decision goes way beyond IVF. As Jessica Valenti of

Abortion, Every Day

states, “…by further enshrining fetal personhood, Alabama is setting the stage for even more policies that punish pregnant people and strip away their rights.” In other words, even an embryo outside the womb could feasibly hold more constitutional rights than women. This fits neatly with the United States’ shameful past of forced sterilization when government could decide someone was unfit to procreate, and with a Handmaid’s Tale future forcing women to become embryo incubators.

Alabama is just one state, but the court’s ruling will likely establish a precedent for other conservative states that endorse personhood before birth, and make it even more challenging to pursue IVF across large regions of the country. As embryos and fetuses gain rights across states, this fuels the case made by abortion opponents that personhood should become federal constitutional law. As the legal historian Mary Ziegler writes about the alt-right’s motive on CNN, “The goal is to slowly build the case that a fetus or even an embryo is a person for every purpose and circumstance. For the antiabortion movement, that would mean that no state could allow legal abortion.” Meaning, even if abortion were legal, killing a “person” is not.

To recap, a 12-year-old can be forced to have a child, while a 30-year-old who desperately wants one may never be able to.

Nex Benedict’s death

Nex Benedict was a 16-year-old nonbinary student who died on February 8th, the day after defending themself from ongoing bullying and then being beaten in a school bathroom by three older girls. They’d gone to the hospital, dizzy and nauseous and, according to a text they sent afterward, were told to come back the next day if those symptoms continued. Preliminary information from an autopsy report indicates that Nex did not die as a result of trauma, but police are waiting on other test results to determine the cause of death and the family is conducting their own investigation.

While the details surrounding their death are murky, what we do know is that Oklahoma has some of the most dehumanizing rhetoric and policies surrounding trans youth. A post by

Popular Information

outlines these policies well and points out that Oklahoma’s top education official, Superintendent Ryan Walters (R) “…announced an emergency rule prohibiting ‘school districts and local schools from altering sex or gender designations in past student records,’ even with parental consent, without prior approval from the state.” (Italics mine). What ever happened to hating “big government”?

Even if you have questions or misgivings about the explosion of varying gender identities in recent years, no person deserves to be bullied for who they are or who they believe themselves to be. If the Oklahoma Legislature, the State Department of Education, and the Governor’s office are making a concerted effort to vilify trans and nonbinary youth—kids who don’t fit easily into the stereotyped boxes of the sex they were assigned at birth— this trickles down to the people of that state, maybe most especially teenagers who often use others’ differences to feel better about themselves.

As kids everywhere blow up the idea of a binary gender, researchers are scrambling to better understand what besides socialization contributes to gender identity, such as genes, hormones, trauma, etc. Whatever the reasons, it seems clear that the embrace of diverse gender identities by kids today is a sign that our hypergendered world has been a hindrance to youths doing the developmentally important work of figuring out who they are. There's great freedom and relief in not being required to makes choices about your identity, your likes and dislikes, and your presentation to the world before you really get to experience who you are. For girls, it can be a respite from the sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized femininity that provides little appreciation for other ways to be a girl.

Nex was 16, figuring out who they were, and bullied relentlessly for it in a state that all but advocates for beating the “woke” out of people. Astoundingly, Oklahoma even appointed anti-trans social media influencer Chaya Raichik—a New York real estate agent— who runs the Twitter account, Libs of TikTok, to the Department of Education's Library Media Advisory Committee (i.e., to ban books and oversee school safety.) A teacher who Nex admired at their school resigned in 2022 after they were featured in one of Raichik’s posts. Her posts have been linked to nearly three dozen bomb and other threats made towards schools, libraries, hospitals and businesses across 16 states, according to a recent NBC News investigation.

Hate has long arms and our governments has a responsibility to limit its reach, not extend it. But because large swaths of the country equate female empowerment with male emasculation, fear drives hateful, harmful policies to regulate women and gender, in hopes of restricting change and the sharing of power.