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Who is Khiara Bridges? Law prof's BIZARRE 'pregnancy' debate with Sen Josh Hawley goes viral

'I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic, and it opens up trans people to violence,' the Berkeley professor said

Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges, in a heated exchange during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion rights on Tuesday, July 12 accused Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley of "opening up trans people to violence" after he said only women could get pregnant.

Hawley, an anti-LGBTQ+, antichoice Republican from Missouri — which outlawed abortion minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade — asked Bridges why she was using the phrase “people with a capacity for pregnancy” instead of saying “women” when discussing the effects of abortion restrictions. “Would that be women?” he asked Bridges, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

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"Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy,'' Bridges replied to the senator. “So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue,” Hawley said. Bridges replied, “We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups,” Bridges explained. “Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

“So your view is that the core of this right is about what?” the senator again questioned. ''I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic. And it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them,'' Bridges said. ''Wow, you're saying that I'm opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who are gonna have pregnancies?'' Hawley asked again.

Bridges went on to say that one in every five transgender people attempts suicide at some point in their lives. "Because of my line of questioning? So we can't talk about it?" Hawley inquired. "Because we can't talk about it because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist--'' Bridges said. ''--So I'm denying that trans people exist?'' Hawley asked.

''Are you? Are you?'' Bridges asked, growing more visibly irritated. ''So you believe that men can get pregnant?" she then asked. ''No, I don't think that,'' Hawley said. Bridges chuckled, ''So you are denying that trans people exist.'' He went on to ask how she runs her class. “Are students allowed to question you, or are they also treated like this?” he said as if she was treating him badly. Bridges said students are definitely allowed to question her. “We have a good time in my class,” she said. “You should join. You might learn something.”

Who is Khiara Bridges?

Khiara M Bridges is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She has authored numerous articles on race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. She is also the author of three books: 'Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization' (2011), 'The Poverty of Privacy Rights' (2017), and 'Critical Race Theory: A Primer' (2019). Bridges graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College and received her JD from Columbia Law School and her PhD, with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. Bridges testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on July 12 about the fallout from the United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health, which overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade decision.

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The heated-up exchange between Bridges and Hawley went viral on TikTok and as well as Twitter with more than 3 million views on both. Meanwhile Bridges, in her opening statement, also claimed that overturning Roe would lead to ''racial injury.'' ''I am here today to explain how the US Supreme Court's radical decision ... to take away constitutional protections for reproductive freedom inflicts a racial injury,'' she said.