My argument for pro-choice is just if it's your uterus and it's your opinion,
you should do whatever you have to do in this life to protect your mental and physical health.
And if having a baby is something that you don't want
or you don't have the mental or physical capacity for,
or the financial capacity for, then you just don't have to do it.
There's a lot of misinformation out there about how developed a fetus is very early on in pregnancy.
I would look to doctors for proper information, do not look on social media.
And you should just do whatever is best for you.
Don't feel guilty. Don't feel shame.
People get told that there are terrible side effects from abortion,
like depression and anxiety.
That doesn't come from the abortion itself.
It comes from our society and how we shame people around it.
The number one side effect from abortion for the people who've had it is relief.
And I can tell you that as somebody who had one.
The best thing I've ever heard in therapy is
a doormat is already lying down before people wipe their feet all over it.
That's something that my therapist said to me when she was kind of victim shaming me
about the fact everyone kept on taking me for
well taking advantage of me.
But it was also an amazing way of waking me up to the fact that I sometimes allow people to do that.
And I project some sort of energy that means that people feel like they can just continue to take and take and take from me.
They can continue to withdraw without ever depositing.
And so that definitely flicked a switch on in my mind,
where I was like, okay, I need to stop putting out too much generosity into this world
and start creating boundaries.
So, yes, it was victim-shamey,
but it was also highly effective.
I do get angry at pro-lifers and misogynists,
especially when they are very active in trying to push their narrative forward.
But I don't get so angry to the point where I can't cope because I
I understand that people are just sometimes products of their environment.
I am certainly a product of mine.
And I've grown up in very multicultural cities
that are sort of melting pots full of people from all kinds of different walks of life.
And therefore, I've been exposed to so many different experiences that I have more empathy and tolerance for them than other people do
who haven't grown up around those sorts of people.
I believe in education.
I myself am someone who has progressed as a human being and still has work to do.
So I've seen what can happen when you do educate yourself
and you do listen to other people and you do correct your own behavior
and therefore that gives me faith in other people to do the same.
I don't think I am a political corrector, which I think means someone who is overly politically correct.
I really think that I just want everyone to be treated with basic humanity and respect.
And I think it shouldn't be called political correctness, just correctness.
And as someone, by the way, who
grew up in a time where there was not very much political correctness,
I got racially bullied and bullied for being disabled as a kid
and was just openly the victim of constant misogyny and sexual harassment.
And if it weren't for political correctness,
I would still be in that situation.
And the reason that the world around me has evolved
is because others have fought for the rights of others to be treated just fairly like human beings.
I grew up as a young, chubby kid
with acne who was one of the only Indian and Pakistani kids in my whole school full of like beautiful, thin white girls.
And I used to hate myself for that.
And the way I was able to break out of that was to register that I had to stop looking at the exterior,
not only of myself, but also of other people and putting so much
placing so much value in that and exploring why we place so much value
and what it is that people look like.
And who started that narrative of why that's important.
It's consumerism.
It's setting an ideal that we are supposed to want to look like.
That is almost impossible to achieve for most people.
And doing that so that we will think that we are broken and therefore buy their products
to fix what they deem as broken.
And so once I started to look at the system, that made me believe that
that one type of beauty is important or even necessary.
It made me unpack what is inside and how much more important that is.
You should be looking at the inside of your friends
and the inside of yourself and thinking about who you are as a whole human,
not about the outside,
because the outside really just only gets you so far in this life.
And when you're on your death bed, you're not gonna look back and think about the way that you looked.
I fucking hope.
I think being a good trans or non-binary ally is like being any kind of ally.
You just have to listen and you have to learn
and you have to make sure that you spend your time educating those around you who are,
have similar privileges to you about their privilege and how they, too, can support people who are from groups that they don't belong to.
It's, activism doesn't always have to involve a big signpost and going to a riot or,
you know, being as lairy as I am on social media.
You don't have to be a famous person or good at public speaking to be an activist.
Sometimes being an activist can just be educating those around you about important subjects in the world because that pays forward.
Then they will go and educate others like themselves.
And soon we can all become allies.
So it's just about spreading the word, being supportive and shutting up and listening.