Juneteenth and Pride Month offer ‘BlaQueer’ blueprint for reproductive justice

As a Black, queer person working for reproductive justice in the South, I see these attacks for what they are: a threat to our very survival.

These are Black queer leaders worth learning about

Credit: Amplify Georgia Collaborative

Credit: Amplify Georgia Collaborative

Here are some Black queer leaders who laid the foundations for more inclusive justice movements.

Scholar T. Anansi Wilson coined the term “BlaQueer” to name the specificity of living at the intersection of Blackness and queerness. BlaQueer people have shaped every major movement for freedom in this country.

Bayard Rustin brought a global strategy to civil rights organizing.

Pauli Murray fought race and sex discrimination in courtrooms and seminaries.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy has championed trans liberation and prison abolition for decades.

We celebrate Marsha P. Johnson’s power at Stonewall, Audre Lorde’s critical feminist visioning and the BlaQueer women who founded the Movement for Black Lives. We have always been the blueprint, shaping the movements that others build on.

But we are erased from public narratives around reproductive health.

Abortion is wrongly framed as a ‘women’s issue’

The reproductive justice framework we dedicate ourselves to was developed by Black women like Loretta Ross and the women of SisterSong in 1995 to center bodily autonomy, the right to have children, not have children, and raise families in safe, sustainable communities.

While those women didn’t identify as queer, they intentionally centered people at the intersections, including LGBTQIA+ people. BlaQueer people have carried this lineage as birth workers, healers, organizers and visionaries.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, over 1 in 6 abortion patients identify as LGBTQ+, and nearly 23% of cis lesbian, bisexual and queer women have had an abortion, almost matching heterosexual women at 17%. Still, many clinics use gendered language, fail to offer inclusive care or ignore the diversity of people they serve. This neglect is unacceptable.

Abortion is often framed as a “women’s issue,” using language that erases trans men, nonbinary and intersex people and queer women. Family is discussed in narrow, heteronormative ideals. Abortion conversations often center cis-hetero white women until it’s time to cite statistics. Black and queer-led reproductive care is sidelined in favor of people who speak for us.

Centering narratives on Black queer lives is not a distraction

The truth is that queer people have abortions. We give birth. We parent. We are midwives, doulas, clinic workers and movement leaders. We are not special cases in reproductive care; we are central to it. In the face of erasure, BlaQueer folks continue to meet the needs of our chosen family when systems fail.

We bring clarity and compassion to this work, protecting our kin when the state will not. Survival has always required reimagining family, safety and freedom because those things have never been freely given to us.

Some argue that centering BlaQueer lives distracts from broader fights for abortion access or Black liberation. The opposite is true. A movement that neglects those facing the greatest risks cannot win. Our collective freedom depends on centering the most impacted. That means embodying reproductive justice, naming abortion as essential to queer family-building and rejecting the myth that abortion is only for cis, childless women.

Transphobia, racism and reproductive oppression are not separate. They are interconnected, and our resistance must be, too.

As we honor Pride Month and Juneteenth, let us remember the lives and labor that have made this movement possible. BlaQueer people are not guests here. We are architects, descendants, builders.

And we are still building.

Crystal E. Monds is a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation, as well as the communications and digital media coordinator at Amplify Georgia Collaborative.