TEAR GAS IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.

It is an abortifacient and a hormone disrupter that devastates the normal reproductive functioning of uterus-havers.

TEAR GAS IS A RACIAL JUSTICE ISSUE.

Police saturated many Black neighborhoods with it this past summer.

TEAR GAS IS A CLASS ISSUE.

The impact is long term and profound, and only some can afford to get treated.

My husband and I were gassed just a few months after my IUD came out and we started trying to conceive, and I'm beyond furious and hurt and sad experiencing what it's done to my body in the aftermath.

Immediately after the gassing on 676 back at the start of June, I started bleeding incredibly heavily.

We only found out later about the abortifacient effects of tear gas. We still don't know if it was a lost pregnancy.

My periods after that were incredibly painful and heavy.

I was literally bedridden by it last month.

This month, I had a 12-day menstrual cycle.

This shit wrecked me.

I'm worried and scared and sad about what happens next.

How long is this going to last and impact my fertility? There are scientific studies approaching publication on the subject documenting the reproductive impact, but little information on duration.

I'm 35. Time matters.

The neighborhood we were first gassed in is a Black neighborhood.

Blocks and blocks were just flooded with the stuff.

Far more Black women were exposed to this reproductive disrupter here than white folks.

My experience is unjust.

Think about this experience of reproductive interference layered onto a Black population, though, and what you have is a government using an agent known to decrease birthrate on an unconsenting racial minority.

In other words: you have genocide.

Feminists and folks who believe in justice in general need to be talking more about the implications of tear gas use than we have been.

It is ABSOLUTELY an issue of violated reproductive autonomy, and police have shown an eager willingness to use it in Black residential areas.

It's another example of how police wage fullscale, genocidal war on Black community, and it demonstrates that police abolition absolutely is and should be a feminist issue.

This is a point that many mainstream feminists missed entirely during the uprisings, and the fact that tear gas deployment is not just racist but misogynistic and genocidal needs to be lifted up and explored in a very public way.

We're a month away from an election that Trump is trying to steal.

He has all but declared his intention to stage a coup if that attempted theft fails.

There *must* be militant, sustained protest.

There *will* be massive police repression of that protest.

They *are* going to gas tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, and our country and the world need to understand what mass gassings mean, and who the police tends to target with these chemical weapons.

People need to understand the degree of the brutality.