The far-left governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, has once again rediscovered the term women. Though Whitmer recently used the term “menstruating people,” she has since returned to using the word women, now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade.
In a video denouncing the Dobbs decision, which returns the abortion issue to individual states, Whitmer asserts, “There’s no doubt that women across this country will suffer because of this decision.”
She also claims that “millions of Americans — including the 2.2 million Michigan women” are feeling a sense of “hopelessness and despair” right now because of the Dobbs ruling, which puts voters in the driver’s seat to determine the abortion laws and restrictions in their own states.
The state of Michigan has a ban on abortion still on the books from 1931, though as Whitmer notes in the video, a Michigan judge has issued a temporary injunction on that ban. In anticipation that SCOTUS would overturn Roe, Whitmer took to the state courts back in April to override the abortion ban in Michigan permanently and enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution — a step that she recently claimed is necessary to protect the “menstruating people” of Michigan.
“I have the constitutional ability to bring a lawsuit to protect constitutional rights of people of Michigan,” Whitmer said on a Zoom event hosted by the state Democratic Party. “So I brought a lawsuit on behalf of all the menstruating people in Michigan — 2.2 million. And another tool I have is to go straight to our state Supreme Court.”
Whitmer Calls Women “Menstruating People”
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Thus, when speaking to a largely Democrat audience, Whitmer adopts the language of the far-left, language which attempts to disrupt the biological sex binary and that demonstrates fealty to the powerful LGBTQ+ lobby.
However, when addressing a wider audience of Michigan voters — many of whom consider themselves politically moderate or even conservative and many of whom have ardent religious convictions — Whitmer reverts to using the word women.
In so doing, she seems to position women as a politically powerless group, charging in the Dobbs video that “we must trust women, not politicians, to make decisions about our own bodies.” Likewise, by using the phrase “our own bodies,” Whitmer affirms her womanly identity and seems to reify the gender binary that terms like “menstruating people” eschew.
With this code switching, Gov. Whitmer seems to position women and language as political tools to use and manipulate based on political expediency.