Today, it is often self-described feminists who publish transphobic articles in the world’s biggest publications. From Newsweek to the New York Times to the New York Post, they condemn the scourge of “gender ideology” in the name of women’s rights. The world’s richest author, J.K. Rowling, is an obsessive advocate for protecting cis women from trans ones by keeping spaces like bathrooms and sports lockers cissexual at all costs. The British-imported crusade to make gender-segregated spaces cissexual encompasses American prisons, reproductive health centers, sports, bathrooms, schools, beauty parlors, locker rooms, and dyke nights. We know these feminists as TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, though they reject the term, considering it a misogynistic slur. Rowling crows that “the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.” This camp’s preferred term is “gender-
critical feminism.”
An “anti-gender” alliance unites these feminists with the international far right, the Vatican, and conservative evangelicals. Leading gender-critical feminists have enjoyed fawning receptions from media personalities like Tucker Carlson, received funding from conservative organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation, and even protested trans health care shoulder to shoulder with open white supremacists like the Proud Boys — all the while collaborating with MAGA nationalists in picketing trans-affirming institutions including spas and LGBTQ-friendly public libraries. While this coalition is strange, it’s not unprecedented — we can see its roots in the collaboration between white feminists and right-wing Christians in the 1970s and 1980s who tried to criminalize pornography and sex work. Lots of people on the left dismiss these women as fake feminists. Can they really be feminists in any meaningful sense if they organize against trans women? Can’t feminism just drum them out of its ranks?
I’d like to suggest that there are strands of thought that are both authentically feminist and irredeemable — even fascist. Anti-trans feminism first rose as the counter-insurgent retort to utopian feminism in the early 1970s, responding to a sex-radical, gender-abolitionist efflorescence that was generally welcoming to trans women. The retort came at a moment when women’s liberationism was still optimistic but beginning to confront the rising tide of conservatism in both the U.K. and the U.S. While anti-trans ideas sprouted at the margins of feminism as early as the 1960s, they gained greater traction around 1973, as many radical feminists became more defensive, resorting to calls for protection from the state (against pornography and sexual assault) and falling back on “scientific” proof of women’s vulnerable state, a gender essentialism of suffering that placed painful experiences like rape and childbirth at the heart of the female experience. 1973 was, in fact, the year — according to Alice Echols in her history of the U.S. feminist movement, published a decade later — when revolutionary feminism gave way to female cultural nationalism. As feminist scholar Emma Heaney theorizes today, “Cisness is feminism’s counterrevolution.” The radical feminists who became TERFs chose a restrictive pessimism about what it is to be female, excluding trans women with the argument that only a “natal” female could understand the pain that lay at the heart of being a woman — anyone else was an infiltrator.
The appearance of transphobic feminism in the U.S. in the 2020s offers us a valuable opportunity to understand, once and for all, that a woman’s cry for women’s power is sometimes part of a matrix of domination. Uncovering the history of trans-exclusionary radical feminism may make it harder to dismiss today’s “pro-female” transphobes as non-feminist grifters. At the same time, doing so can only strengthen our ability as feminists to fight them — without worrying about negotiating their feminist credentials first. Perhaps we should break up the house of feminism, that battered and beloved fortress where so many of us have not lived well, and name some feminisms our enemies. It is incumbent on feminist radicals today to learn from our forebears, how — in the wake of riotous mobilizations like 1968 and 2020 — the reactionary wing of feminism rears up its head in a bid to eat up and neutralize the revolutionary wing of gender liberation.
there are strands of thought that are both authentically feminist and irredeemable — even fascist.
Follow me back now half a century. The year is 1973, and the right to quit being pregnant has just been (sort of) legally enshrined in the United States. But the utopian-radical left — including the women’s liberation movement — is slowly and painfully imploding. The capitalist counterrevolution that will become the Reagan era is lapping at everybody’s knees. Some feminists have already begun to disavow the movement’s most ambitious visions, like abolition of the family and dissolution of the sex distinction itself, in favor of a maternalist vision of non-violent sisterhood, universally bound together by the sexed capacity to give life. Feminists favoring this biological picture of sisterhood tend to exclude trans women from the feminist fold.
The growing differences broke open at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, a massive gathering in Los Angeles. Robin Morgan, the Florida-born New Yorker, poet, author, celebrity radical, and editor of the classic anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was a keynote speaker despite being married to a man. Perhaps it was because of guilt about this less-than-lesbian marital situation that Morgan spent the whole weekend going to bizarre lengths to justify her own inclusion while seeking to get Beth Elliott — a trans woman who had organized the conference — thrown out by force. Again and again, Morgan demanded the exclusion of Elliott and all trans women at WCLC by any means necessary. A separatist group, the Gutter Dykes, tried to drag Elliott from the stage but were beaten back by a surge of pro-trans solidarity.
Morgan’s keynote included a long attack on Beth Elliott that shocked the 1,000-odd attendees. “He dares, he dares to think he understands our pain?” Robin bellowed, cruelly misgendering the musician in front of the angry, confused crowd. “I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer — with the mentality of a rapist. And you women at this conference know who he is. Now. You can let him into your workshops — or you can deal with him.” But it was Morgan who got dealt with. The Gutter Dykes once again shoved the organizers from the mic in an attempt to make one-and-a-half thousand people re-hash the conference’s failures vis-à-vis transsexualism. Participants started “screaming that they don’t want to hear about that anymore.” And then, out of the blue, a trans woman stepped in. Conference attendee Nancy MacLean’s diary reports:
There’s a blind woman who wants to come up on the stage.… I help her up.… She pounds on the podium, insists on speaking. I plead with the audience, with the Gutter Dykes.… Finally they let her speak. She’s a TRANSSEXUAL! So emotional, trembling so bad she can hardly stand up, clutching the mike she cries out that these women are crucifying Beth and all transsexuals: “How much pain must she bear? Why do you torment her? You are more oppressive than our oppressors.”
The Gutter Dykes relinquished the microphone.
For the twenty-first-century feminist who has never heard of this schismatic moment and has perhaps swallowed the narrative that transphobia and biological essentialism were intrinsic to feminism’s Second Wave, reading the movement magazine the Lesbian Tide is an education. Morgan’s keynote was reprinted in the May-June 1973 issue but placed at the back in small type, sandwiched between contributions that all criticize Morgan and oppose her sabotage of the gathering. MacLean’s diary conveys participants reactions to the conflict on stage: “This can’t be happening. This woman is insisting that Beth Elliott not be permitted to perform because Beth is a transsexual.” “That’s bullshit! Anatomy is NOT destiny!” In her own contribution, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Elliott testifies that the solidarity she experienced “kept alive my faith in womankind.” Concerning Morgan herself, however, she states with dignity that “I personally distrust those who hate men more than they love or do anything positive for women.”
For her part, in her memoir Going Too Far (1977), Morgan rewrote the events in Los Angeles to paint herself as a courageous star who merely said what everyone was thinking about “one smug male in granny glasses and an earth-mother gown.” Beth was “the only person there wearing a skirt,” Morgan spits, pointing out the femme’s departure from what she saw as the proper “androgynous” uniform in the lesbian scene. Beth’s “gate-crashing presence,” disgracefully pandered to by her fellow conference organizers, supposedly caused conference-goers to return “to their home states in disgust.” Going Too Far even contends that feminine attire, when donned by a “male,” is the direct analog of blackface minstrelsy — a mockery of “our mothers, and their mothers, who had no other choice, who wore hobbling dresses and torture stiletto heels to survive, to keep jobs, or to keep husbands because they themselves could get no jobs.”
In her apocalyptic insistence that cis women’s suffering cannot be known or shared by others, Morgan takes a grim view of what constitutes female identity. Apparently, a real woman is in pain from birth to death, a pain that will define her identity as female. Sharing womanhood with people who choose to claim female identity instead of surviving it feels like a threat. “You are treating me just like men treat women,” Elliott wrote. “The idea that I might be the same as you threatens you, so you hold me down.” In her battle to ensure the sanctity of women’s oppression, Morgan thereby dismisses the possibility that trans and cis feminists might face the same enemy and unite in the same fight. Preserving her identity requires trampling theirs.
In her post-mortem, Elliott recalls a nightmare in which she speaks to Morgan: “You make a damned good fascist.”
A woman’s cry for women’s power is sometimes part of a matrix of domination.
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Hop forward with me now to 2013. It’s 40 years after the West Coast Lesbian Conference, and the same controversy, more or less, is unfolding within Deep Green Resistance (DGR), another self-described radical feminist group on the West Coast. The anti-trans ideas that would emerge from this tiny group would become influential among British feminists casting about nostalgically for contrarian “certainties” amid a lull in radical organizing in the West.
Self-described ecofeminists Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen started organizing DGR in California around 2011 and published their jointly authored movement manual of the same name in 2011, which spends many pages on the life-destroying force that is “male sexual sadism on a mass scale,” as manifest in everything from porn and rape to deforestation. The group operated “aboveground” — i.e., they professed to be nonviolent and law-abiding — and as such, it is hard to say which bioterrorism plans, if any, DGR was actually responsible for. They advocated, however, for others to adopt an underground strategy of “decisive ecological warfare,” wherein small direct-action cells target fossil energy infrastructures or even assassinate ecocide perpetrators. Tailed by the FBI from the jump, DGR was also hotly criticized by other feminists and environmentalists over what many called their “ecofascist” tendencies (a characterization the group denies). Over the period 2011–14, the group imploded as Keith and Jensen promoted virulent transphobia, targeting trans women in their midst. The duo’s behavior was chronicled gruesomely on the internet for years, fascinating and appalling ecologists around the world. “Genderists,” as the deep-greeners called trans feminists and their allies, were nature-defiling sickos, hulking glitter-covered bullies, woman-hating eugenicists, and body mutilators, chemically sterilizing “the unfit” just like the Nazis did. I followed the events of DGR’s disgrace myself from within the climate justice milieu in the U.K.
DGR was influenced, in part, by one of Robin Morgan’s preferred writers: the Schenectady-born ex-Catholic radical lesbian feminist theologian Mary Daly, who taught philosophy at Boston College for 33 years, beginning in 1966. Daly is not well-known today but often of interest to ecclesiastical scholars due to her pioneering ecofeminist critiques of religious patriarchy as “gynocidal” and “necrophilic,” especially The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father (1973). In the 1970s, she became obsessed with the notion of trans women — who related to ecology by virtue of being affronts to Mother Nature — “invading our private spaces” and “playing upon the sympathies of women” by using the “more oppressed than thou mentality.” In a 1979 interview, she proclaimed, “These men have no penises, but their whole body, their whole mind is still a penis. Their eyes are penises, their hands are penises.” Similarly, in Daly’s book of feminist “meta-ethics,” Gyn/Ecology (1978), feminine women appear as lobotomized, moronized “puppets of Papa.” She fantasizes about a lesbian assembly presided over by a magnificent “Chaircrone” but interrupted by “infernal infiltrators” and “demons.” Trans women described as “eunuchs” appear, and “one is carrying a placard which reads: ‘I am a lesbian-feminist male-to-female transsexual. Take me in.’” The “Hags begin hooting.” Daly punningly riffs for over 400 pages about “malfunctions (Male-Functions),” footbinding, “mindbinding,” “gynocide,” “male sirens,” and the omnipresent repugnance of “phallo-technic society,” of which trans women are a key part.
I had already noticed, circa 2013, the gradual rise of a “völkisch environmentalism,” in which care for nature is tied to nativism, sexual traditionalism, and the muscular defense of territory. Even David Foreman, the founder of the anti-capitalist direct action network Earth First!, was cozying up with anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization. Op-eds were cropping up everywhere, pushing a romantic, anti-industrial vision of natural living and a tacitly xenophobic aesthetic of sustainable localism in which foreign and genderqueer lifestyles alike are cast outside the country’s desired state of reproductive harmony. On the margins of the reactionary right, vegans explicitly nostalgic for Nazi conservationism were invoking ecological crises to justify actions of extreme violence, such as racial cleansing or forced sterilization. By 2017, the talking points of the English self-identified “green nationalist” Paul Kingsnorth, who founded the Dark Mountain Project, were in wide circulation, lamenting the “breaking down [of] everything from gender identities to national borders” in the pages of The Guardian.
Apparently, a real woman is in pain from birth to death.
These nostalgic politics facilitated the startling rise of one former Deep Green Resistance activist in North America: the hardline anti-pornography ecofeminist and antisemitic conspiracist Jennifer Bilek. Her origins are in anarcho-primitivist forest defense, and her ecofeminist, anti-industrial origins remain visible. “Women have become occupied territory,” she blogged in 2021, “like the Americas in the 1500s. Women are fighting to hold on to their sex-segregated spaces, just as the indigenous sought to hold on to their land.” But the website Bilek runs nowadays — apocalyptically entitled “The 11th Hour” — is largely devoted to exposing a putative Jewish cabal of billionaires funding global “transgenderism.”
According to the scholar Naomi Alizah Cohen, modern antisemitism and transmisogyny overlap in profound ways. It is no coincidence, Cohen suggests, that TERFs are so frequently to be found in the vicinity of podcasts touting Jewish “transhumanism” conspiracies. For National Socialists, she writes, the figure of the trans woman represented “the Jew’s most abhorrent creation.” Superficially, of course, all things Semitic were aligned within Nazism with Weimar-era Berlin’s demimonde of mollies, dolls, feminine faggotry, transsexuality, and transvestism.
But transfeminine people, specifically, were the figures that German fascism regarded as Jew-like because they are formed against nature — unholy mutants, like Frankenstein’s monster — and Cohen argues that the foundations of transmisogyny and antisemitism were constructed together in this era: On the one hand, there is the “natural” body of the organic, autochthonous Aryan (good), and on the other, there is the “artificial” specter of the wandering, dissimulating “alien” (bad). Trans women and Jews alike, here, belong to the domain of trickery, usury, dysgenics, placelessness, amorphousness, degeneracy, and the demonic. Aryans and cissexuals, conversely, belong to the domain of truth, earth, primal purpose, clean outlines, and palpable borders.
Why should we care about one more peddler of rank antisemitism, though? It’s easy to object that Bilek and her DGR comrades are the definition of marginal. But Jennifer Bilek’s voice permeates mainstream “gender-critical” feminism. An unbelievably long list of established TERF and “LGB” charities and personalities have promoted Bilek’s theories about the “bio-phobic” “genderist” plots advanced by “transhumanist” transgender Jewish moguls Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker. Mary Harrington, author of the 2023 manifesto against gender ideology, Feminism Against Progress, and darling of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is one of them. Bilek’s articles were tweeted out by a former editor at The Economist, Helen Joyce, though Joyce has since disavowed her. A report by the watchdog Health Liberation Now! notes that Bilek has boosters in anti-trans groups like Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) that receives funding from the Alliance Defending Freedom and has collaborated with the Heritage Foundation.
As one might have predicted, Bilek’s brand has thus far thrived best in England, or as some call it these days, “TERF Island.” Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the general decline of left-revolutionary feminism and corresponding growth of “female cultural nationalism” accompanied a gradual rise, by certain former radicals, to echelons of institutional and media privilege with seemingly endless column inches to spare for these women’s newfound anti-utopian cynicism and bitterness. The ex-radical British Australian feminist Germaine Greer set the tone for much of the nasty anti-trans realpolitik that would come to earn England its TERFish reputation via books like Sex and Destiny (1984) and The Whole Woman (1999). Beginning in the early 2000s, feminist Guardian columnists such as Julie Burchill, Julie Bindel, and Suzanne Moore joined Greer in snarling their best jokes about trans women in a steady rotation, referencing lopped cocks, postmodern PhDs, and suppurating holes. During this time, anti-trans feminists captured an astonishingly broad swath of the United Kingdom’s media ecosystem.
Today, self-styled U.K. “sex-based rights” activists such as Harrington, J.K. Rowling, the YouTuber “Posie Parker” (Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull), and renegade academics like Kathleen Stock lead the charge against “transgenderism” in publications such as UnHerd, Quillette, Compact, the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times, The Critic, The Spectator, and Tablet, but also The Guardian and the New Statesman. A national culture of no-nonsense anti-utopianism enables this: As writer Asa Seresin has put it, “the commitment to misery, to being a ‘bloody difficult woman’” (notably by mocking and blocking others’ attempts at self-actualization) supports stubborn anti-trans prejudice. To reinvent one’s gender identity is, for TERFs, a form of greedy individualism that holds so-called ordinary women in contempt.
It still shocks me how comfortably the openly reactionary feminist newcomers to the anti-trans bandwagon sit alongside a left-feminist old guard in that tiny media ecosystem. The liberal-feminist creator of Hogwarts acted as the bridge that made this possible when, in 2020, she started saying things like “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class.” On April Fool’s Day 2024, Rowling mockingly tweeted out a list of trans women’s names and photographs (some of them U.N. Women delegates, others convicted sex offenders) before calling them all men, dangerous to women, and daring the U.K. authorities to arrest her for a hate crime. She now even engages in a form of Holocaust denial when it comes to the well-documented facts that the Third Reich targeted trans women and burned trans sexological research. Long-time women’s liberationist Julie Bindel got an anti-trans book deal in this atmosphere (Feminism for Women) as did Victoria Smith (Hags), and everyone seems to blurb everyone else quite happily; certainly, The Guardian obligingly bestows the same warm review on all. Without irony, the whole crew uses some of the most prestigious media in existence, year after year, to complain of being silenced.
When it comes to America, well: Five years ago, TERFism was sufficiently fringe to warrant an “explainer” in the New York Times (“How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans”). Now, in contrast, no one bats an eye when someone like the feminist Helen Lewis, famous for her convoluted politics around trans rights (yes, trans women are women, she’s said, but no they shouldn’t be allowed in women’s locker rooms), offers a long review to reactionary feminist works and their “heretical ideas” in The Atlantic, worrying that American feminists are afraid to “engage with any reactionary feminist arguments” lest they be “tarred as fascists and bigots.” But really, she need not worry. The American legal scholar Erika Bachiochi promotes “sex-realist feminism,” which argues that there is an essential biological femaleness that cannot be adopted by trans women, and she gathered anti-abortion women’s rights advocates together to help strike down Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, at the New Yorker, journalist Michelle Goldberg covered fringe anti-trans feminist ideas at length, like the “autogynephilia” theory of trans womanhood (a pathologizing framework according to which many trans women are simply men aroused by the idea of themselves as women). The former Wall Street Journal columnist Abigail Shrier made a splash in 2020 with Irreversible Damage, a sensationalist, self-styled exposé on gender clinics that help trans teenagers, whose cover shows a white child with a hole where her uterus should be. American feminists are definitely engaging with gender-critical discourse.
And why not? While America doesn’t boast the same breadth and depth of TERF culture, there are plenty of transphobic feminists working in a related tradition. Over 20 longstanding American radical feminists, many at work since the 1970s or 1980s, are included in a recent anthology, Female Erasure (2016), among them the attorney Elizabeth Hungerford, the veteran lesbian separatist Alix Dobkin, blogger Cathy Brennan, and myriad Wiccan witches and priestesses (alongside Bilek, Keith, and many of the British usual suspects too). The editor is Los Angeles-born self-identified “elder Dianic priestess” Ruth Barrett. The tome in question contains several incoherent trans-exterminationist contributions. While plenty of transfeminist and trans-affirming Wiccans no doubt exist, I am reminded of the comment — in Daring to Be Bad (1984), Echols’ aforementioned history of the collapse of radical feminism into “cultural feminism” — that one can see the shift reflected in the changing titles of zines: “Whereas early women’s liberation papers had titles such as off our backs, Ain’t I a Woman, No More Fun and Games, It Ain’t Me, Babe, Tooth ‘n’ Nail, ’70s periodicals carried names like Amazon Quarterly, The Full Moon, 13th Moon, Womanspirit, and Chrysalis.”
America’s most influential transphobic radical feminist is arguably Janice Raymond, once a grad student of Mary Daly and author of the TERF classic The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979), as well as the more recent, barely cited, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (2021). The former makes the case that (male-to-female) transsexuality is a nefarious, organized misogynist plot perpetrated by the medical establishment and was blurbed by Andrea Dworkin and Robin Morgan, as well as Morgan’s friend Gloria Steinem, who also supported the book with positive coverage in Ms. magazine. Raymond played an important role in getting trans medical care excluded from American public insurance policies by providing research and language for a National Center for Health Care Technology report in 1981 that allowed the Office of Health Technology Assessment to assert that trans medical care was ethically “controversial.” Doublethink adds nothing to the conspiratorial theories of Transsexual Empire except for a creative attempt to account for the small matter of trans men (the book has been duly accorded a rave review at UnHerd). For Raymond, it’s always been quite simple: “Transsexuals are not women. They are deviant males.”
Raymond’s intellectual work leans shambolic, lurid, and conspiracist: She frames transness as “the beginning of a world where men not only dominate women but become women” — she also calls this patriarchy’s “final solution” — and falsely asserts that trans surgery comes to us from medical experimentation in the Nazi death camps. The rather American fantasia of conspiratorial figures evokes Daly’s gothic stylings and should be familiar to anyone watching politics degenerate into conspiracy today. Raymond has carried the ideas of her transphobic faction of the Second Wave into our new era of crisis. TERF ideas now have a special appeal for a group with more power than second-wave feminists: social conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.
In April 2023, the former Fox host Megyn Kelly, hailed in the New Yorker as an “unlikely feminist warrior,” posted a photo of herself on social media in a baseball hat emblazoned with the slogan “Make Women Female Again.” The merch was from Adult Human Female, a British web store. Starting in 2018, the YouTuber Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull plastered these bills all over Britain. They’re plain black and simply say “woman / wʊmən / noun / adult human female.” The first one was erected in Liverpool, where the 2018 Labour Party’s annual conference was taking place. It was removed following complaints, but not before Keen-Minshull, already camera-ready in a T-shirt that matched the handbills, got the publicity she wanted. As the BBC reported, Keen-Minshull stated that the idea that trans women were women was “preposterous.” Her message “was in response to the city’s mayor…who recently voiced his support for the trans community.”
To reinvent one’s gender identity is, for TERFs, a form of greedy individualism that holds so-called ordinary women in contempt.
Keen-Minshull has long since moved on from billboards. Nowadays, she calls for “men with guns” to start using ladies’ bathrooms — to deter trans women who might otherwise disturb the “dignity” of the cis denizens of those public sanctuaries. The aforementioned Mary Harrington, who is a huge fan, called her the “Nigel Farage of TERFs, and I mean that as a compliment” in 2023 before going on to fantasize, in 2024, about going “back to the Victorian era” and to “the greatest empire the world had ever seen.” Isn’t this wistfulness for an imperial Golden Era, reigned over by a mother-empress — when women were women and men were men — precisely what gives TERFism its appeal to the MAGA sensibility?
Keen-Minshull’s position has flowered into a full-fledged fascistic feminism. To be sure, she no longer considers herself a feminist — preferring “sex-based rights activist” — but that’s only because, she says, “most women are not feminists,” and therefore, “to protect women’s rights, we must abandon feminism.” Nonetheless, Keen-Minshull’s followers have overwhelmingly been self-described twenty-first-century feminists.
People like Megyn Kelly are now tagging her in social media posts, and her traveling open-mic “Let Women Speak” rally has darkened the doorstep of cities all over the globe. In Melbourne, Let Women Speak was attended and supported by white supremacist groups who marched the streets repeatedly performing the Nazi salute. The author of Harry Potter, by the way, responded to these headlines by focusing her ire on the anti-fascist counterprotesters, one of whom had poured tomato juice on Keen-Minshull at a stop in Auckland. Many have disavowed Keen-Minshull for her associations with outright white nationalists such as the Sieg-Heiling goons blockading Drag Queen Story Hours all over the world. Yet it was on the radical feminist podcast Feminist Current that Keen-Minshull first praised the former leader of the white-nationalist English Defense League, Tommy Robinson, in 2019. Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak used Keen-Minshull’s core phrases, “adult human female” and “sex matters,” in the lead-up to a parliamentary debate on changes to the U.K.’s equality law, which would make it easier to exclude trans people from single-sex spaces. In 2024, the anti-feminist right prefers to at least claim to have women’s equality at heart. By allying with transphobic feminists, they can have their cake and eat it too: avow support for women and still police them.
A mere five years after Keen-Minshull’s first billboard, the franchise had gone viral. Keen-Minshull announced that money was flooding in. The Australian leg of her tour, so popular with fascists, was funded by the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Coalition. Keen-Minshull’s slogan, “Let women speak,” has, astonishingly, become synonymous with the right of a billionaire famous for a fictional wizard school to publicly attack the sexed identity of the Algerian boxer and Olympic champion Imane Khelif. J.K. Rowling’s contributions to women’s rights this year also include support for a Scotland-based Let Women Speak rally, where the butt of feminists’ ire was a more expansive hate crime law that they feared might force them to face consequences for…something or other.
All of this paints a disturbing picture insofar as it tells us that feminist radicals have to fight other feminists and capitalism at the same time. But the recognition of what I propose we call “enemy feminism” is also liberating, because it means we can skip the stage of “calling in” people who are plainly more interested in upholding a version of patriarchy that includes them in its upper ranks than destroying it. To use Emma Heaney’s term, only a “feminism against cisness” — based on anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-colonial solidarity — can defeat this oppressive femopessimism. Time and again, when feminists react to experiences of radical defeat by shrinking their utopian visions and colluding with power, they only entrench that defeat further. By joining the fascists that Beth Elliott knew they had the potential to become, they ensured feminism would be playing defense for a long time to come.
It is perhaps appropriate that some of the people whipping up trans panic today lay claim to the suffragette colors of white, violet, and green. Look — they are flying the white for their biological purity, green for their ecofascism, and purple for the imperial nostalgia that leads so many of them to mourn that Anglo-Saxon mother-empress and girlboss par excellence of yesteryear, Queen Victoria. We do not need to say that all of this is “not feminism” in order to fight it. Contra the aggrieved cries from certain quarters that patriarchy benefits when feminists fight, I propose we draw lines of affinity, not identity. Let us get better at describing feminist enmity when necessary: The feminism of cisness, for sure, is the enemy of my feminism.
Some feminisms are obstacles to gender freedom, and asking, “Which side are you on?” is the most elemental level of political physics. “The side of women” doesn’t exist. It never existed. But feminized people exist, of all sexes, who insist on the possibility that gender can be pleasurable for all, even as it is abolished from below.
Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family. Her new book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen and Girlbosses Against Liberation is out in February from Haymarket Books.