Hearing Witness Claims Hawley Inciting Anti-Trans ‘Violence’ by Asking if Women Get Pregnant
A law professor accused Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) of being “transphobic” during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Tuesday when he questioned her use of the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy” as a substitution for “women.” But in a 2020 law review article related to pregnancy, the same academic used the word “woman” 45 times and “women” 349 times.
Khiara M. Bridges, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings dedicated to exploring legal concerns regarding the formal overturn of Roe v. Wade.
In her testimony, Bridges almost entirely refrained from using the word “woman,” and instead resorted to gender-neutral language such as “people” and “people with the capacity for pregnancy.”
Senator Hawley questioned Bridges’ choice of rhetoric. Their exchange was as follows:
Senator Hawley: “Professor Bridges … you’ve referred to ‘people with the capacity for pregnancy.’ Would that be women?”
Bridges: “Many women, cis-women have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis-women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
Hawley: “So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue…”
Bridges: “We can recognize that this impacts women while all recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.”
Hawley: “Your view is … is that the core of this right, then, is about what?”
Bridges: “I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.”
Hawley: “Wow, you’re saying I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?”
Bridges: “I want to note that one out of five transgender persons have attempted suicide.”
Hawley: “Because of my line of questioning? So we can’t talk about it?”
Bridges: “Because denying that trans people exist, and pretending that not to know that they exist…”
Hawley: “I’m denying that trans people exist by asking you if you’re talking about women having pregnancies?”
Bridges: “Do you believe that men can get pregnant?”
Hawley: “No, I don’t think men can get pregnant.”
Bridges: “So you are denying that trans people exist.”
But Bridges’ views on the subject presumably evolved recently, since in a 2020 law review article about pregnancy, the same professor used the word “woman” 45 times and “women” 349 times.
Bridges’ testimony on Tuesday argues that failure to recognize the gender spectrum, even in sex-specific contexts, is “transphobic” and incites “violence” against transgender people, yet her own scholarship attributes pregnancy to women and fails to recognize “transgender” and “non-binary” people. Bridges graduated in three years as the valedictorian from Spelman College with a degree in Sociology, then earned a law degree at Columbia University School of Law and a Ph.D. with distinction in Anthropology at Columbia University.
In January 2020, Harvard Law Review published Bridges’ article “Race, Pregnancy, and the Opioid Epidemic: White Privilege and the Criminalization of Opioid Use During Pregnancy.” The article used the word “woman” 45 times and “women” 349 times. There are three mentions of “transgender” individuals. There is no use of the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy.”
During her testimony, Bridges argues that “During the crack cocaine scare, states began to use creative interpretations of the criminal law to prosecute black people who used the drug during their pregnancies.”
In her 2020 Harvard Law Review article, Bridges articulates a similar argument, although she attributes pregnancy exclusively to women. Bridges wrote that “prosecuting women for substance use during pregnancy began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack cocaine scare gripped the nation. During this time, those who were prosecuted were largely black women.”
In 2012, Bridges published “Poor Women and the Protective State.” The article uses the word “woman” 13 times and “women” 46 times. There is no mention of transgender or non-binary individuals. “Gender” is mentioned once, in a footnote, citing Annette R. Appell’s essay “Protecting Children or Punishing Mothers: Gender, Race, and Class in the Child Protection System.”
This is not the first instance in which the definition of “woman” has been a contentious topic during hearings. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) once asked then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word “woman.” Brown Jackson responded, “I can’t…I’m not a biologist.”
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