True Equality Means Lifting up ALL Women • La verdadera igualdad significa elevar a TODAS las mujeres
By Kristen Pajkowski
Database & Office Manager
BPFNA-Bautistas por la Paz
As many of you know, International Women’s Day was on March 8, and March is Women’s History Month in the US. That said, I think it is appropriate, as womenshistorymonth.gov puts it, to “celebrate the contributions women have made to the United States and recognize the specific achievements women have made over the course of American history in a variety of fields.” Throughout history, women in every part of the world have made great strides, sometimes in spite of a significant lack of equality. With the help of women such as Lucretia Mott, Rosa Parks, and Marsha P. Johnson, the gap in equality in areas such as gender, race, and sexual orientation has become more and more narrow. Currently, we are very fortunate that these women and so many more have made these strides, but we still have a long way to go - and part of it comes from the way we approach feminism even among each other as women.
All across North America, for example, there is still a pay gap according to gender. In the US, women make 80 cents on a man’s dollar; in Canada, this number is about 75 cents, and in Mexico, 81. However, what most people don’t know is these statistics are not the whole truth. In reality, it is only white women in the US that make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Black women, on the other hand, make 66 cents on the man’s dollar, and Hispanic women, 58. In Canada, white women still earn more than their BIPOC siblings, with black women making about 80 cents for every dollar a white woman makes, and Hispanic women, about 68. It is even worse when you consider disabled women, as in the United States, employers are still allowed to pay disabled people less than the federal minimum wage, and in Canada, disabled women make 54 cents to the able-bodied man’s dollar. To me, the pay gap conversation is the perfect illustration of a common problem in feminist movments today: the conversation, more often than not, centers around white, cisgender, able-bodied women.
As another example, trans women are more likely to experience discrimination in the workplace, even being fired for their gender identity. As a result, many of them turn to sex work, which opens the door for a whole new set of discrimination, such as being unable to find a traditional job later on, street harassment, loss of housing, and even being turned away from homeless shelters; and these are, unfortunately, the transgender people who live. In Puerto Rico, the violence against trans women and women in general was so frequent that a state of emergency was declared in 2020. The mere existence of terms such as TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) and SWERF (Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminist) shows how many feminists view our trans sisters, as well as our sisters who are in sex work - even those who do it because they have nowhere else to turn.
Turning to sex work for survival is something so looked down upon that in Mexico, the deaths of indigenous women are most often not investigated under the assumption that they are involved with drugs or sex work. Many of them are, but not by their own choice, because 70% of human trafficking victims in Mexico are indigenous women. Mexico is by no means the only country that overlooks indigenous women, either. In Canada, First Nations are the most targeted group for violence, 12 times more likely to experience it than white women. This is no different in the United States, where over 4 in 5 Native women experience assault in their lifetime, with the perpetrators more often than not being non-Native men.
All of this is disheartening to say the least, when it is trans women and women of color who have made important strides in the fight for equality. My LGBTQ siblings especially, let us not forget that the reason why we have so much freedom today is because of two trans women of color at Stonewall. My non-white siblings, let us not forget that in 1920, only white women were allowed to vote, or how First Nation women in Canada could not vote until the 1950s. I urge my sisters to listen to one another - not just those who look like you. We cannot gain true equality unless we listen to everyone - trans and cis, disabled and able-bodied, white, black, asian, and indigenous. True equality means lifting each other up, and allowing everyone a voice.
