OUR BODIES, OURSELVES
FOR JACK QU’EMI GUTIÉRREZ, HAVING AN ABORTION didn’t come down to just paying $500 and finding a way to get to the clinic. Like many of their doctors’ office visits, it meant hiding their gender identity to avoid difficult conversations with medical providers. As an Afro-Latinx nonbinary person, the ultrasound (required by Florida law) before the medical abortion and the subsequent “gory” induced miscarriage left them not only bedridden, but heightened their discomfort with their body.
“It was awful,” Gutiérrez says of the days following the 2011 ordeal. “A lot of my dysphoria comes from having a uterus and how people perceive how I look. I was like, ‘I want to pretend I don’t have a vagina.’” There’s a misconception that queer and trans people, like Gutiérrez, don’t need abortion access
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