The Modern Anthony Comstocks: Right, Left and Transgender

By Carol Hanisch & Kathy Scarbrough

What do current anti-abortion and transgender activists have in common with Anthony Comstock of the late 1800s? A lot, it turns out.

First, a reminder of who Anthony Comstock was since his activity was before the time of anyone reading this. A National Archives exhibit on the Comstock Act of 1873 describes him this way:

“Anthony Comstock, a self-appointed guardian of public morality, boasted that in his lifetime he seized 150 tons of books, made 4,000 arrests, and drove 15 people to suicide.

Anthony Comstock successfully lobbied Congress for stricter obscenity laws, and secured an appointment as a special agent to the United States Postal Service with broad powers to police the mails. The law did not define obscenity — Comstock did. He often barred jurors from seeing the item in question, saying that it was too vile to show them.”

What this exhibit on free speech doesn’t tell us is that Comstock was rabidly against any kind of a woman’s control of her reproduction. Although he is often thought of today mainly as opposing obscenity, his targets were often information and material on reproductive anatomy and contraceptives and the people who wrote and disseminated them. 

Many may know about birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger (a founder of Planned Parenthood) who Comstock had indicted for publishing a pamphlet in 1914 called “Family Limitation”, sometimes referred to as the first modern marriage manual. Two years later she opened a makeshift birth control clinic in Brooklyn and was jailed in 1917 for distributing a diaphragm. The public was largely sympathetic to her work, but that didn’t stop Comstock and his goons, in the form of the New York City Vice Squad, from raiding and closing down the clinic and otherwise arresting and harassing her and other birth control advocates. Though Comstock was the public face, behind him stood much of the political and monied establishment. 

Comstock’s clampdown on all information related to sexual reproduction as “obscenity” proved to be a big money-maker. Through the YMCA, he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) to enforce the Comstock laws. Though it was a private, religious organization, the State of New York deputized it with legal rights “to search, seize, and arrest and to keep for themselves 50% of any fines levied against those prosecuted.” Comstock’s 1915 obituary claimed “his crusade had resulted in 3,697 people brought to court; 2,740 found guilty; fines of $237,134.30 (over $6 million in modern currency); nearly 566 years of jail time; and, most repellent of all, 15 targets driven to suicide.” [Source here ]   

I was reminded of Comstock a few years ago while reading the suicide note of Ida Craddock included in Sally Roesch Wagner’s recent book, The Women’s Suffrage Movement. Craddock is likely one of the women Comstock proudly proclaimed he had driven to suicide with his hounding, arrests and long jail sentences. She committed suicide rather than face another barbaric prison term. Her public suicide note stated in part: 

“I am taking my life, because a judge, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, has decreed me guilty of a crime which I did not commit—the circulation of obscene literature—and has announced his intention of consigning me to prison for a long term. The book has been favorably reviewed by medical magazines of standing, and has been approved by physicians of reputation. The Rev. Dr. Rainsford of this city, in two letters to me, partially approved this book so far as to say that if all young people were to read it, a great deal of misery, suffering, and disappointment could be avoided, and that to have arrested me on account of it, as Mr. Comstock has done, was ridiculous.”

Others, both men and women, challenged Comstock by continuing to disseminate contraceptive information and often paying a high price. Some served jail time; others left the country to avoid imprisonment. Some took Comstock on with the kind of bravery, wit and humor reminiscent of the militant early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement that roused the country to support abortion rights. After Comstock had Dr. Sara Blakeslee Chase arrested for selling a vaginal syringe (used to douche after intercourse to lessen the chance of pregnancy) to a young woman at a lecture, she went right back to work, naming it the “‘Comstock’ Syringe”. She stated in an ad, “We trust that the sudden popularity brought to this valuable syringe by the benevolent agency of the enterprising Mr. Comstock, will prove to suffering womanhood the most beneficent act of his illustrious life.”

Modern Comstock Terrorists

Comstock’s policing and terrorizing didn’t die with him. Parts of the Comstock Act survive today and the same sexist, anti-woman views and activity have been carried forward most prominently by the religious Right, though they are hardly the only or most powerful ones. Modern Comstocks, some of them women, are busy making sure women can’t get abortions or birth control and with the same kinds of serious consequences. 

A number of Comstocks sit on the Supreme Court and in local, state and national governments attacking women’s reproductive rights, while women are terrorized, fined and jailed for having or seeking or aiding in obtaining an abortion or birth control. Bills have been introduced in at least two states so far, Texas and South Carolina, that make having an abortion a crime subject to the death penalty.

Not only do these modern Comstocks say disgusting sexist things about women, they seek punishment with the same kind of fervor. “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen,” declared Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock in 2012, adding his voice to the thunder of the patriarchal Right that has long spear-headed the drive against women’s rights. Other Comstocks have made it clear that an attack on contraception is waiting in the wings. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued in his concurring opinion on Dobbs that when the opportunity arises, the Court should reconsider previous decisions protecting the right to contraceptives. This has been echoed by a number of candidates for political office at all levels.

The ACLU explains:

“According to anti-abortion extremists, the [remaining parts of the] Comstock Act makes it a crime to send or receive drugs or articles that are used in abortion care by mail or common carriers like UPS and FedEx. That interpretation of the law is wrong; it flies in the face of how courts and the Department of Justice have long interpreted the law. But if anti-abortion judges buy into this unfounded theory, it would effectively amount to a nationwide abortion ban because the medication and equipment used in abortion care are transported by mail and common carrier.”

Legislation has been introduced in Congress to repeal the Comstock Act but its success is not assured.

As the loudest and most visible anti-woman activists, the patriotic, religious Right, gives cover to the owning class as it seeks to control the optimal number of workers and cannon fodder for sustaining their wars and maximizing their wealth and power. This can vary with particular economic sectors causing disagreements among themselves. Many are also concerned about the “browning” of the U.S. and have no qualms about forcing white women to procreate while doing nothing to eliminate the appalling U.S. maternal death rate, which is nearly three times as high for Black and Latino women.

The final overturning of Roe v. Wade ended the decades of complacency across much of the progressive political spectrum but came as no surprise to many women’s liberationists. Abortion law repeal feminists had been warning since Roe was originally decided that the Supreme Court ruling was based on a weak privacy right that would not hold up. Repeal pioneer Cindy Cisler prophesied in a 1973 article that settling for Roe instead of fighting onward for total repeal would lead to disaster. As predicted, the Supreme Court gradually narrowed reproductive rights even before Dobbs. After decades of mounting limitations under Roe, the restrictions suffered by many low-income women finally reached into the comfortable classes in urban areas. 

Roe was the bone tossed by the establishment to mollify a militant mass movement for women’s liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s. In demanding repeal of all laws prohibiting abortion, Cisler explained, “Proposals for ‘reform’ are based on the notion that abortion must be regulated, metered out to deserving women under an elaborate set of rules designed to provide ‘safeguards against abuse’…. Repeal is based on…the idea of justice: that abortion is a woman’s right and that no one can veto her decision and compel her to bear children against her will.” 

Meanwhile some women’s liberationists were taking abortion into their own hands—literally—in underground clinics where the women themselves learned how to perform abortions. Between 1969 and 1973, JANE in Chicago performed or referred 11,000 abortions and never lost a patient while feminist self-help clinics” taught menstrual extraction, which could serve as a form of abortion. Winning abortion rights for all women will take another broad and vigorous movement largely powered by those of child-bearing age who have the biggest stake in the outcome. 

The demand for repeal fought for by the early Women’s Liberation Movement may not work in today’s context and we may need a positive federal abortion law to protect those rights.  Such a law must cover every woman, including financially, no matter how she gets her healthcare, but current efforts won’t do that.

Just as Comstock could have been stopped and wasn’t, abortion rights could have been protected and advanced and weren’t — and aren’t. We need to hold not only the Republicans accountable for what they are doing, but also hold the Democrats accountable for what they have not been doing while claiming abortion as their issue in each election cycle. This raises the question of how to hold anyone’s feet to the fire when there is no fire, when there is very little organized and active Women’s Liberation Movement today. Even hard-working reproductive rights activists almost never make the case that reproductive rights are absolutely required for women’s independence and ability to participate in society on an equal footing with men. 

Transgender Demands Obstruct Women’s Liberation Organizing

While transgender activists don’t usually challenge women’s right to abortion directly — and, in fact, often claim to be supportive — their underlying ideology serves to obstruct it in several crucial ways. 

The transgender language police operate as a modern Comstock by making it extremely difficult for females to organize females as a class oppressed because of their reproductive capacity. As their male supremacist brothers on the Christian Right criminalize women who seek an abortion, transactivists (wittingly or unwittingly) threaten women, and any organizations and public entities who dare talk about female body parts and reproduction using pronouns and anatomical terms that reflect reality. 

Only one of the two sexes gets pregnant and gives birth and that biological fact is at the root of women’s oppression. In “trans think”, sex disappears into gender along with the language that allows females to be distinguished from males, even in the realm of reproduction. It’s become all about the language with adult human females whose bodies nourish and suffer the birth process being pushed aside. Emphasis is on the “text”, not the people, just as post-modernists have advocated.

Depriving women’s rights activists of the common language used in the history of this long struggle greatly hinders the ability to organize for further rights and protect those that still exist. Transactivist demands about how sex and women’s bodies can and can’t be talked about have swallowed up liberal and Left individuals, groups and institutions — including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and even the Le Leche League — who in the past at least claimed to be on the side of female reproductive rights.

Transgender activists have even sought to stop the spread of knowledge on how women can attain sexual pleasure during sex with men. In an interview a young French female journalist, Dora Moutot, tells how she originally got in trouble for discussing the importance of the clitoris to women’s pleasure on her popular social media site. Trans male supremacists insisted she “misgendered” them by mentioning “clitoris” in the same breath as “woman” because they too are women and they don’t have one! 

This created quite a stir. She was invited onto a TV talk show where she was ambushed by hostile transgender activists who demanded she retract her statements asserting that “transgender males are not women”. She refused. Nor did she apologize as so many have done when guilt-tripped and faced with their ire and threats. Like Comstock’s victims, she is being criminally sued — in her case for saying what her eyes and logic were telling her is true about sex. 

The work of feminist individuals and groups have not been the only ones disrupted by transgender ideology. Some Leftish organizations have split or have banished individuals for maintaining that humans are of only two sexes. Even much of the supposedly materialist and scientific socialists, communists and Marxist Left either support the anti-materialist transgender ideology or look away, perhaps in relief at getting those pesky feminists off their backs. 

Transgender disrupters serve as a shield for the owning class — a kind of “ground troops” sent out into the world to keep women and the Left from thinking rationally and doing the much needed organizing to liberate women and improve the living conditions of all. Comstock too was funded by some of the wealthiest men in his day, including mining millionaire William E. Dodge, Jr., financier J.P. Morgan and industrialist Samuel Colgate. 

The U.S. government, including such agencies the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department, have given a thumbs up with some spreading transgender ideology at home and abroad with their programs. 

UN Women, a project of the United Nations formed to advocate for the rights of women and girls recently put out a position that asserts “working for the human rights of LGBTIQ+ people is inseparable from working for women’s rights and gender equality” and implying that feminists who disagree are part of what they call an Anti-Rights movement. This was met with an “Open Letter to UN Women” endorsed by women’s organizations from South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, Canada and the U.S. telling UN Women that they “should support the work of women for women’s rights, not tell women that they need to place their concerns secondary to [other groups including those] whose main aim is to claim women’s rights for men.”

Women trying to organize against male supremacy, especially radical feminists, have borne the brunt of the transgender onslaught because they have been the primary opposition maintaining that being a woman is not an identity, that females are born into the social, economic and political conditions of their biological sex. They maintain that organizing to change the oppressive conditions of women is the only true way out, not trying to personally opt out of—or into—being a woman.

One can understand that many males may not be comfortable with the expectations and limitations that artificial sex roles put on them, but claiming to be a woman is no solution. The Women’s Liberation Movement has from its beginning offered a program that is better for everyone: abolish gender pressures on both sexes, establish equality, and let each be comfortable in his or her own natural biological body.

Left, Right, Center and Trans: Women Caught in a Vise

The power politics around abortion and other reproductive rights are in a complicated mess that is dangerous to women — and to society as a whole — on many levels. The equating/conflating of women’s abortion rights with transgender rights in laws advocated under the mantra of “controlling one’s own body” has caused great confusion and strange political bedfellows. 

For example, the Democratic Party has seized on abortion rights as one of its best issues against a Republican Party bearing down hard to accomplish the old shibboleth of putting women back into the “barefoot and pregnant” prison of yore. At the same time, the Democrats have been captured by transgender demands, even though they negate certain rights of woman. “Equity” legislation as put on many ballots makes it impossible to vote for abortion rights without also voting for transgender usurpation of other women’s rights. Likewise, this mushing together makes it impossible for women to support the human rights of transgender people, as most do, without going against their own interests.

One sector of modern Comstocks wants to prevent any reproductive control by women while another seeks to stop even the discussion of disabling or actual removal of healthy reproductive organs with the sly euphemism “gender-affirming care.” The Right, so well known for its anti-feminist opposition to abortion, is now also the standard bearer for protecting children from the extremes of such “care” and the accompanying educational propaganda in children’s literature, and “entertainment” in the form of drag shows. This is happening before children are even old enough to be provided sex education. It is a pernicious effort to separate sex from gender even though the entire concept of gender is derived from sex stereotypes. 

Anyone who agrees that it’s a bad idea to give cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies and “bottom surgery” to adolescents and teens who cannot possibly understand the longterm consequences of these procedures, is now labeled a Rightwing transphobe by both the Right and the liberal Left. What is not discussed publicly is that infertility and the inability to ever have an orgasm often results from this so-called “gender-affirming care.”

On the other hand, abortion is a safer procedure even than childbirth and it saves women from forced child-bearing and a lifetime of care-taking against their will. Abortion also saves women from the angst of giving up a child for adoption —something that is often taken too lightly. Besides emotional attachment that might grow during pregnancy, the crassness of telling a woman to “just” give the baby up for adoption also ignores the time and physical effort needed for gestation and all the small life compromises needed to accommodate a pregnancy. It is one thing when the child is wanted, quite another when not wanted.  

Medical professions are beginning to acknowledge that “gender-affirming care” options — from puberty blockers to hormones to body-destroying surgeries — are not all they are cracked up to be and carry lifelong repercussions. Some feminists have been contending this all along, despite being called TERFS (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists), transphobes and fascists and sometimes punished severely with being sued, fired, banned, ostracized, physically attacked, kicked off social media and out of organizations. 

When trans activists accuse “TERFS” of being in agreement with the Right on this issue they are refusing to see and acknowledge that the Right embraces gender stereotypes while feminists want to abolish them. The Right wants boys to be boys and girls to be girls while feminists assert that boys and girls are mostly the same with the one exception of their role in reproduction and bodies can’t be changed to erase that difference.

As Carol Dansereau wrote: “Fundamentally ‘gender identity’ is a cover for sexist stereotypes. After all, how can someone’s likes and dislikes “align” or “not align” with their sexual anatomy in the absence of a stereotype-poisoned mindset? The idea of one’s “gender” matching or not matching one’s sex only works if you think each sex has some assigned set of feelings, clothing, behaviors, and aptitudes that go with it. Gender Ideology is profoundly sexist.”

Feminists recognize that there is a problem around gender. However, body-altering drugs and surgery is no more an acceptable solution than sending someone in such angst that she indulges in cutting (a form of self-harm practiced mostly by pre-teen or teenage girls) to a clinic that affirms that behavior and may even supply the razor blades. Likewise, someone with an anorexia bent of starving herself is not sent to a weight-loss clinic. Feminists disparaged as TERFS advocate going to the root instead and changing what in society is causing such angst. Cutting off healthy body parts of children (or adults for that matter), sterilizing them, and putting opposite sex hormones into their bodies is not “healthcare”.

Not only do women have to be able to identify their sex class to organize it, men and women alike all need a firm grip on reality to deal with what is coming down the climate, economic, warfare and political pike. People must not be forced to lie about what they know to be true or face punishment from comrades or the government. Censorship and repression by others turns into self-censorship and silence. Our right to speak publicly and critique freely — and to hear such necessary critique — in the fight for liberation must be defended or the modern Anthony Comstocks and their masters win.

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Carol Hanisch is probably best known as the instigator of the 1968 Miss America Protest and for penning “The Personal Is Political.” Other writings appear on her website. Kathy Scarbrough became active in Women’s Liberation while a student in the 1970s. She has a PhD in reproductive physiology. Both also have been active in civil rights, anti-imperialist, environmental and working people’s movements. They currently co-edit Meeting Ground on Line.   

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