But lesbians also have another family–the family of what Simone de Beauvoir called the “second sex”–the gender underclass, women.
 It’s not easier to be a member of this family than it is of the families we were born into. But this family cannot be ignored because this family is us.  

 In her poem “From and Old House in America,”Adrienne Rich transposed John Donne’s famous line to read: “Any woman’s death diminishes me.” [1]

 That line has reverberated for me again and again throughout the years since I first read it and spoke it aloud as a college student. It is a line I believe all women must give real thought to and take to their hearts.

  In 2010 it’s impolitic to speak to the pre-feminist realities of our allegedly post-feminist world. Yet it is definitely neither anachronistic nor shrill to say that the gender class of women must stand in solidarity over their shared oppression/repression. We have to fight the isolation that patriarchy uses to separate us from each other. When one woman dies due to gender bias, we are all less. Truly. Rich was so right.

 Imagine the impact from the loss of 60 million women. That is the number that Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn estimate have been lost to the genocide of women worldwide in recent years. Sixty million members of the family of women. Gone. [2]

 Kristof and WuDunn aren’t hardcore rabid feminist ideologues. But they are crusading journalists and political scientists. Kristof was credited with bringing the genocide in Darfur to light through his columns in the New York Times for which he won a Pulitzer. He is also credited with detailing the horror of the rape crisis in the DRC–Democratic Republic of Congo–and how incalculably brutal gang rape has become the primary tool in the war there.

 In their book “Half the Sky,” Kristof and WuDunn are adamant: Women and girls are being “disappeared” as surely as if there were a worldwide junta stalking them.  

 But it isn’t just in war-torn nations that this genocide against women is unfolding. In China and India, where sex-selection abortion has become de rigeur [3], the ratio of female to male births has diminished to almost 800 females to every 1,000 males. In China, where there is still a fairly strict one-child population control policy, it is almost always a female fetus that is aborted. [4]            

 How is this not genocide?

 Cultural, social and religious elements add to the annihilation of women and girls. Quite simply, girls are being discriminated against to death. As Kristof and WuDunn delineate in their research, the global pattern of putting boys first and girls last has had an obliterating effect on the female gender.

 Girls are given less food, they are deprived of vaccinations, medical care, education. They are subject to female genital mutilation. They are married off as children and forced into early childbirth, which kills a phenomenal number of women. (Kristof and WuDunn note that childbirth is still the most dangerous thing a woman can do. They note, for example, that more women died in childbirth during World War I than men died fighting the war itself. When one considers that millions were killed during that war, the comparison becomes yet more harrowing.)

 Women and girls are also subject to gender bias murder. Honor killing is rampant in over 50 countries, primarily in the Middle East and Africa where Islam is both the religion and the law.[5] Thousands of women and girls are killed each year by male family members for “crimes” ranging from being seen with a man who was not a family member to being out in public without a male family escort to being a lesbian. Sharia law, which even the U.K. is considering allowing for Muslims, dictates Draconian restrictions on women. Women who disobey these rules can be killed as a matter of that law. And there is no punishment for their murders.

 Sex trafficking and domestic slavery are also killing women and girls at frightening rates. In India, Anti-Slavery International estimates that ten percent of girls are sold into domestic slavery by the age of five. Sex trafficking has become pandemic throughout Asia, Russia, the Eastern bloc and Central and South America.             

 Domestic and sex slaves have even been sold to families in the U.S. It takes only five hours to travel from New York City to Haiti to “buy” a young girl for domestic and/or sex slavery and bring her back to the U.S. It takes even less time to go from Brownsville, Texas and buy a girl from Mexico for the same purposes.

 All these horrors mean one thing: Women have to be our own family. We have to protect each other and save each other. We have to help girls survive their childhoods so that they have the opportunity to become adults and make their own choices. We have to campaign against the so-called “cultural” practices of honor killing and acid burnings and female genital mutilation and call them what they are: genocide against women.

 As we in the U.S. contemplate issues like marriage equality and, as lesbians, being able to have and keep our own children, we must remember that not very far away–a few hours by plane from almost anywhere–girls are being sold. We must remember that there are an estimated ten times as many slaves today as there were at the height of the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries and that the majority of those slaves are women and girls.[7]

 As we build our lesbian families, irrespective of our families of origin or of oppressive straight society, we cannot forget our other family, the family of women. We can change and save lives so easily–as easily as going online and contributing to micro-loans for women to give them independence or mentoring a girl recovering from sex slavery or simply telling other women about this genocide.
 We *are* family. And as such, we must hold each other tight against those who would do us ineffable harm.
 
To make a difference:  
 globalgiving.org
the girl effect.org (be sure to pass on the amazing two minute video)
www.care.org/getinvolved/girleffect/