Pro-Life Feminists Rear Their Transphobic Heads

At this June's Pro-Life Women's Conference, anti-abortion activists claimed to have feminist ideals while demeaning gender-nonconforming children.

The three-day event, which took place in St. Charles, Mo., sought to market pro-life values to millennials and Generation Z, selling posters with floral-patterned uteruses and spunky statements like "Keep your philosophy off my biology" and "Freedom from violence, no matter where you live, is reproductive justice," reports Buzzfeed News.

Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee turned anti-abortion activist, founded the conference to "reclaim the narrative of women's empowerment,"according to the event's website. She seeks to "increase our inclusivity" in the anti-abortion movement by taking a page from "mainstream feminism," she told Buzzfeed.

Along with peddling girly "Make Unborn Babies Great Again" hats and posters reading "Feminism is inclusive, or it is worthless," conference participants also were selling transphobic ideologies.

"When you have a little boy that really loves ballet or pink ... because those things happen so strongly stereotyped as female, he becomes confused about who he is. So he says I must be a girl. But that doesn't make him a girl," Leah Jacobson, who leads the anti-abortion organization Guiding Star Project, told Buzzfeed. "The loss of biological norm as reality has created a lot of gender confusion."

She says she's currently writing a book called Wholeistic Feminism and is against birth control pills and abortion. Jacobson believes that second- and third-wave feminism is misogynistic.

"If you accept a culture that is based on the natural biological norm of women," a norm that she says defines women as people who can have periods, get pregnant, and breastfeed, Jacobson continued, "you can see how misogynistic it is to expect that women ... suppress your fertility, that you have to abort pregnancy or lose your career."

Jacobson's trans-exclusive brand of "feminism" was accompanied by statements from advocates who felt it was wrong to exclude men from conversations on women's reproductive health.

"In our modern society we have pushed men away and demasculinized our men," Bethany Mistretta said on a panel. She's the national program manager for Sidewalk Advocates for Life. "We should not allow that feminazi language to shut them up, but instead preach love."

Mistretta is against "this whole idea that men don't have a place in the pro-life movement because they don't have the female parts to be able to carry a baby." After the panel, she told Buzzfeed, "Bickering or arguing over that type of issue is just the enemy trying to give us something to fight about to distract us from what our real goal, because Satan wants nothing more than to see Planned Parenthood succeed."