Now More Than Ever, I'm Proud to Be a Texas Woman
I was working a shift at my coffee shop job in Austin on the night of the filibuster. While my coworkers - who, that Monday night, were two other women - and I wiped up coffee grounds and sticky cake crumbs, we listened to a livestream from the Texas Capitol, where Wendy Davis was standing alone in pink tennis shoes on the Senate floor, fighting against a bill that would shutter most of the state’s abortion clinics over the next two years.
The Senate gallery, Capitol rotunda, and even the lawn outside were full of people in orange T-shirts, supporting Davis and protesting the bill. At a quarter to midnight, the crowd in the Senate gallery started screaming for more than 10 minutes - a last resort to keep the senators from being physically able to conduct a vote in a room full of hollering women. People in the Capitol that night later said the limestone building was shaking, that’s how loud it was. To repurpose what Todd Akin said about legitimate rape and abortion, “the female body has ways to try and shut the whole thing down.” Three miles away in the coffee shop, it sounded, almost impossibly, like Texas women had finally shut down the GOP’s decades-long attack on abortion.
The joy of that victory lasted two minutes. At 12:02 a.m., House Bill 2 was upheld by a Senate vote that somehow took place in the deafening chamber, and the governor signed it into law during a special session later that summer. I left the coffee shop around 1 a.m., my clothes reeking of coffee and sugar, and drove by the Capitol building, where a few people in orange shirts were still standing on the darkened lawn in the sticky Texas heat. I rolled my car windows down with the phantom thought that if I listened hard, I might be able to hear the voices of women that almost defeated the abortion bill.
I grew accustomed to the bitter feeling of losing a fight you knew you deserved to win.
For the next three years that H.B. 2 stood, before portions of it were struck down by the Supreme Court last year in a major victory for abortion rights, Texas women became champions at fighting impossible fights. Every new shot at a win was an inevitable loss. The Fifth Circuit court let H.B. 2 stand. Wendy Davis ran for governor and lost horribly. Clinics that tried to stay open couldn’t stay open any longer. As a woman living in Texas during a time when the state took away most of our access to abortion, I grew accustomed to the bitter feeling of losing a fight you knew you deserved to win.
On election night last November, around 10:30 p.m. on the East Coast where I live now, I felt that same pang of dread I was conditioned to sense from all those years as a Texan. I texted a friend, another Texas woman who now lives in in New York, “He’s going to win, isn’t he? He was always going to win.” In the weeks that followed, we found comfort in talking with each other about how the pain of the loss of a competent woman against a misogynistic man was familiar to us. This was a hurt we could deal with because it was a hurt we knew. Or to put it another way, this wasn’t our first rodeo.
I cried only once over the election, then moved quickly onto action. I couldn’t understand it when women who grew up in blue states expressed to me that they didn’t know how something like this could happen. I didn’t know how to delicately tell them it’s the only thing that ever happens.
Anger in solitude makes a person feel helpless, but in a crowd, it feels powerful.
The Saturday morning after a man who wants to defund Planned Parenthood (something Texas has already done) and roll back abortion access (something Texas has already done) took the oath of office, women the entire world over woke up and fought. At the Women’s March on Washington, women I spoke with told me that this was the only thing that made them feel a smidge of sanity over the past two months. They held signs, they shouted, they filled the streets. Anger in solitude makes a person feel helpless, but in a crowd, it feels powerful.
And that's good - feeling powerful is going to make it possible to keep fighting. But here's the thing that everyone knows and no one wants to say right now, so fresh off a protest high: As empowering as it was, the Women's March is not going to stop what's already in motion against women's health and rights. Congress is already making moves to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. The new president’s administration is stacked with men who will make health care an impossibility for many women. Experts warn we are only two Supreme Court Justices from Roe v. Wade being overturned. The march was important - it called people to action and showed lawmakers that millions of women all over the world are paying attention and are ready to fight - but it was the easiest part.
When you live in a place that takes away your rights, you don’t mock it. You work to make it better.
The next several years will be much harder. The Texas instinct in me can feel the losses coming, and I am scared for what that will mean on a national level. But the Texan instinct in me also knows that women, despite all odds against them even now, are resilient. What I can tell you is that the losses will hurt but you will not have time to mourn them. You will have to find ways to take care of other women, because the government is going to fail to do so. You will have to learn to do this caretaking while fighting at the same time. Luckily, because little girls are raised to be both strong and tender, fighting and caretaking will come naturally.
I used to feel shame in being from Texas, a state that’s so commonly mocked by people I know in my new city, and by people who didn’t grow up there. And I really do understand the mocking - from the outside, Texas is terrible to so many of the people who live in it. But what is harder to see from the outside looking down is that it’s also full of fighters. When you live in a place that constantly takes away your rights, you don’t mock it. You work to make it better. On my forearm is a small tattoo in the shape of the state where I grew up and learned to fight like hell. It used to be a reminder of home. Now it’s a reminder that I come from a place that, in its cruelty, conditioned me to be strong. There is no shame in that.
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