Women's reproductive rights and transgender liberation are two of the greatest and most controversial political movements in the 21st century. In the last few years the conservative right has struck legislative attacks against women's access to abortion; meanwhile, the now-notorious anti-trans " bathroom bills " that have been proposed, and even made into law, in states across the country are just one example of how the civil rights of transgender people are also being stripped away. While these movements may not seem similar on the surface, they could actually be fighting for the same thing.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects people from discrimination on the basis of sex. Historically, Title IX has been used to protect cisgender women from discrimination—including measures that endanger their reproductive rights. But in 2016 it has also come to serve as a counter to anti-trans bathroom bills like North Carolina's HB2. On May 13, 2016, the Department of Justice released a letter on transgender students that made it clear the sex protections of Title IX include transgender people. "The Departments treat a student's gender identity as the student's sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations," the letter read. "This means that a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity."

But there is more than a conceptual link between reproductive and transgender rights. "In practical terms, the abortion-providing community has been in the forefront of incorporating reproductive health services for trans people, including abortion care in some instances but also a range of other services, such as hormonal treatment," Joffe said.

"During the half century leading up to Roe, the Supreme Court decided a series of significant cases in which it recognized a constitutional right to privacy that protects important and deeply personal decisions concerning 'bodily integrity, identity, and destiny' from undue government interference," the national pro-choice nonprofit NARAL said in a paper called "Roe v. Wade and the Right to Choose."

In other words, both movements are about the right to choose. The freedom to determine what happens to one's own body was fought for throughout the 20th century, culminating in the historic abortion case Roe v. Wade.

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. In an interview with Broadly, Joffe explained that there is a "a very strong conceptual link" between abortion rights and the transgender movement. In addition to being opposed by right-wing forces and stigmatized in wider culture, "both movements are about bodily integrity and autonomy."

While Joffe reiterated that there is an overlap between the trans and abortion rights movements, there is also a long-running tension between feminists and trans people. "Historically, cisgender feminists have not gotten along very well with trans women," Laurel Westbrook, a professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University who specializes in transgender studies, said in an interview with Broadly.

Particularly in the 1970s and 80s—though vestiges of this ideology linger today—some second-wave feminists maintained a binary view on gender, positioning men and women as true opposites at either end of a gender system that was rooted in biological sex. "In that moment, some second-wave feminists believed that women are inherently good and men are inherently bad," Westbrook said. "Thus, if you allow[ed] a woman who was labeled male at birth into those spaces, that person [was] an intruder. The narrative of the time was that trans women [would] rape feminist spaces."

Anti-trans feminists have come to be known as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), and they have often come up against inclusive feminists. In one of these instances of conflict, the transgender theorist and artist Sandy Stone became the target of hate-mongering, anti-trans author Janice Raymond, who wrote a garbage 1979 book called The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Shemale, a text that made ridiculous and objectively disgusting claims against trans women, arguing that they colonized and appropriated the female body. According to an interview Stone did with the watchdog media network TransAdvocate in 2014, an armed TERF group called the Gorgons once showed up to a performance put on by the feminist music collective Stone was member of; they threatened to kill her. Couple stories like these beside the long-held anti-trans policies of feminist projects like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and a scary history creates an unnecessary gap between the women's liberation movement and transgender rights movement.

Lost in these popular representations of radical feminism is its long and courageous trans inclusive history.

But that history may not be as fraught as some believe. Cristan Williams is a trans historian, activist, and the managing editor of TransAdvocate. In the Transgender Studies Quarterly, Williams recently wrote that although radical feminists did enact violence and hatred against trans women, and although the damage inflicted upon the transgender community by TERFs has been significant, the tension between feminists and trans people may not have been as broadly sweeping as is commonly thought today. "Lost in these popular representations of radical feminism is its long and courageous trans inclusive history," Williams writes.