SS: The trans community is a very, very oppressed community, but it’s like, whoa, women only advance when men advance.

 

AR: You were arrested in ’82 for disrupting an anti-abortion congressional hearing. How did you get involved in reproductive rights?

 

SS: When I was sixteen I’d gone on a student exchange program to live with a family in France. In 1979, I dropped out of college, took the money that I had earned for my college tuition, and bought a ticket to visit them. One day, they got a call from another exchange student, a girl from Spain. This was just after the fascist period was ending. She called to say she was pregnant and that she needed to come to France for an abortion. She came with blisters all over her stomach because a Spanish doctor had said that pouring boiling oil on her stomach might work. When she got to France we took her to the doctor, but she was too pregnant under French law for an abortion.

 

So they sent her to a clinic in London, and it was decided that I would go with her because I spoke English. We get to this clinic way out in the country, and, as I started talking to them I realized it was a for-profit business. It felt like a really creepy situation. We wanted to figure out a better way to accommodate these women in France. So, I went with a friend of mine to Barcelona to try to find whoever was referring these women without knowing where they were sending them.

 

We went to every left wing meeting we could possibly find. We met one woman at a meeting who initially said she didn’t know anything about it. We saw her a few more times and then she finally said, “Okay, I do know something, here’s an address.”