Please sign our Solidarity Statement
for Organizations here
JUSTICE FOR ANN MENASCHE
Statement of Solidarity from Organizations
We, the undersigned organizations, express our solidarity with the campaign for justice for Ann Menasche, a lesbian and feminist who was fired in May of 2022 without warning from her job of 20 years as a Civil Rights Attorney at Disability Rights California (DRC) following her assertion that abortion bans harm women as a sex, and her complaint about sex and sexual orientation-based harassment. Ms. Menasche was also investigated and targeted for her outside feminist political activity.
DRC is wrong in insisting that asserting the existence of biological sex constitutes bigotry against people who identify as transgender, non-binary, or gender non-conforming. These views have nothing to do with hate. Moreover, employers do not have a right to control the thoughts, political beliefs, and outside political activities of their employees.
This ideologically motivated termination is reminiscent of the repression and blacklisting of the darkest periods of U.S. history, including the “red scare” of the 1950’s. In the words Senator Joseph Welch directed at Joseph McCarthy in 1954, we must ask DRC, “Have you no sense of decency?”
Please sign our Solidarity Statement
for Organizations here
The email which got Ann fired. No, really.
So glad DRC came up with a statement in defense of Roe! Thank you! Access to safe, legal abortion is a life and death necessity for women as a biological sex across the board, regardless of race, economic class, gender identity, sexual orientation (even lesbians can be raped) or anything else, and an absolute prerequisite for equal female participation in our society.
Of course, the most vulnerable females, especially poor women, women of color, women with disabilities, young girls, unhoused women and girls, women and girls in prison, etc. will suffer the most under draconian anti-abortion laws. Wealthy white women have often managed to get abortions, even before Roe.
As a veteran of the feminist struggle for abortion rights that preceded Roe, I never thought it would come to this. Yet, it is good to remember that women won this right primarily through grassroots organizing and peaceful mass protests in the streets, and that is the way we are going to protect it.
Thanks again, DRC, for taking a stand!
s/ Ann Menasche