Some memories of less violent times (and a women’s space) in Chiapas

It’s sad for me to hear about the violence that has overcome Chiapas. Already back in 2018, the last time I was there, my friend Pilar told me grisly stories about what women there – women that she personally knows – had experienced and witnessed. Now there are increasingly more articles about the cartel violence that has made its way to the land of the Zapatistas. I found this one informative. I have been thinking about this because of a recent article about the assassination, in San Cristobal, of a priest who was an advocate for indigenous rights.

I started this blog at the beginning of a 6-week stay in San Cristobal in 2016*, but that was not my first time there. I spent about 3 months in Chiapas in the early 2000s and also went back for a few days in 2018 for the first women’s encounter convened by Zapatista women.

The first time around I spent about a month in a small Zapatista community – it was so different from what I saw in 2018! We had no electricity or running water. I would cook beans after making a fire with leña. I would use the onion and garlic we had brought from San Cristobal, but I would feel a pang of guilt when I’d share my beans with the villagers (all hermanos and hermanas) who always stopped by our place, as they would say things like “muy sabrosa su comida”… because they didn’t have much access to onions, garlic or anything else. I’d also use chili peppers but learned to tone it down as the people in that community did not eat spicy food and I didn’t want my beans to be too spicy to share.

On the subject of leña, my friend Patrick and I would always admire the muscular arms of the hermanas, because every day they chopped leña. Their arms were like tree trunks. I had met Patrick back in Switzerland during our preparatory workshops to go to Chiapas as human rights observers, and we ended up getting sent to this particular village together. Patrick’s Spanish was better than mine at the time, and he was much better read on Zapatismo and everything else, so he would spend a lot of time talking with people, including one of the two pairs of unmarried sisters of the village. He got some indication that marriage was of interest to one of them and he would muse about staying in Mexico and growing a little milpa. As a Swiss, he was seen as less macho and potentially a better husband than the local men. Those two sisters were feminists and unmarried, but Patrick was maybe the kind of man with whom marriage could be possible.

Indeed, the Zapatistas might have embraced feminism but that doesn’t mean that attitudes completely changed overnight. I was also the object of some interest: some of the young men asked Patrick if I was a virgin, presumably to see if I was marriage material. Patrick told them that he didn’t know and they should ask me directly. They never did, thankfully!

There was another pair of older unmarried sisters who grew tobacco and rolled puros. They’d come give us a taste, “like any good dealer” as Patrick would joke, and we spent a lot of our time sitting around and smoking those homegrown puros.  I might still have some in my old boxes. We also rolled our own but mine were pretty bad and I kept having to relight them, so I was happy to purchase theirs. My theory was these two were also shamans or some sort of healers, but I would not have been privy to that.

I do know however that shamanism was part of the local social fabric. One of the women who led the workshops we attended before going to Chiapas was an anthropologist by training, and she initially went to Mexico in that capacity. She shared how her sister had suffered severe, debilitating depression and had been cured of it by a shaman in Chiapas. She warned us however against prying.

For bathing, we had to walk a ways to get to the river. There was a different spot for men and women, and self-conscious as I am, I just had to deal with it and take my shirt off in front of the other women. One time an hermana pinched my boob and said “que hueros tus chichis!” Getting to and from the bathing spot always made me anxious because there were cows grazing and they were very aggressive, they would sometimes run after you and stare you down. The villagers would say to be careful of the vaca loca. I would skirt around the field as much as I could, and luckily, nothing ever happened (aside from being scared out of my mind). To this day I am still afraid when I pass cows and especially bulls while hiking.

The annoyances are fond memories now, because I am glad I got to know a little bit of that world. Like the last night I spent in our shack, lying there worried that scorpions would fall on me. Our walls were just wooden planks with gaps between them. There was a strong storm so the wind was blowing inside, and we had given up on trying to light candles. Scorpions and tarantulas were a common feature in that area, and I had seen a couple scorpions that evening on our walls or ceiling. I lay there worried that as the whole structure shook, any scorpions that might be above me would be shaken loose. Thank the Goddess, that was not so, and the next day we made our way back to San Cristobal unscathed, wading through deep mud.

My trip in 2018 was shorter but powerful. Zapatista women convened an women’s encounter – for “mujeres que luchan” – and while they expected about 1500 women, about 6000 showed up. We absolutely made do. We had enough food, the bathrooms weren’t great but we survived, we made connections and we got to be in a wonderful male-free environment for several days, with Zapatista women patrolling with their uniforms and weapons to make sure there were no men (they are soldiers after all).  There were talks, activities and art and photography exhibitions (many of which would have been deemed “white feminism” by wokesters in the US). I attended a talk that featured a recorded message to our gathering from a Kurdish fighter in Rojava, during which she stressed that women’s oppression is the first colonization. A good message, and one that American wokesters would again dismiss as white feminism if they heard it from a “white” woman.**

The ignorance and mind-addling ID politics of Americans are what they are–at least some American women got to hear these ideas and experience this sort of space in a way that they could actually hear and experience them (if not entirely accept them). It didn’t escape me that this was just a few years after Mitchfest shut down. As someone both of American and Iranian origin, I can say in no uncertain terms that just as whitewashing is a thing, brownwashing is also a thing.  But again, it is what it is. While some will have the need to see this space as something that only indigenous women have ever built, it does not take away from the fact that the space and experience were truly very special.

The last night we got treated to a party and a show, with theater (one skit on the harms of prostitution coming to indigenous communities) and music (ski-masked Zapatista women with electric guitars felt like a world away from my little Tojolabal village of yore, where to have a party meant that we danced some sort of awkward two-step to a rythmless marimba). At the end of the program, everything went completely dark. We stood there waiting. Then, hundreds of candles were lit, held by the Zapatista women who were standing around us. They gave a powerful and moving speech that stayed with me for days.

Well, I don’t know exactly what it is that stayed with me; it could have been the words that were spoken, it could have been the impressive spectacle effect, maybe some sort of ritual power had been raised, or maybe it was the whole experience of my days spent there… I don’t know. What I can say is that for days afterwards, I felt an opening in my chest, unlike anything I had experienced before or since. I believe something happened to my heart chakra, an opening, a healing, something. While I don’t know exactly what I was feeling and what caused it, I believe that healing and accessing other experiences can happen when women take time to be away from men.

Holding their candles, the Zapatista women asked that as we go back into the world, we always carry the light that they were giving us, that we remember that we are not alone but in sisterhood, that we continue our lucha.

I have been wondering whether I should restart Seed the Commons, and how best to go about it. I think that the decolonial perspective that Chema and I brought to the table can still be useful. I’ve been a bit taken aback recently by the lack of sensitivity (and integrity) around racism, sexism and colonization from the white Canadians I’ve come in contact with. (I apologize for being so specific, but this is the truth.) It think it is showing me possible directions for future projects. I will see.

I still carry the lucecita you gave me, hermanas.

* So many belated thanks to Pilar for helping me access indigenous communities for my research and for taking me on hiking outings! You helped make my trip a success.

** I use quotes sometimes when using these words not to imply criticism but to indicate that I am referring to the way Americans use these words, which might not be my own default way of using them or the default way of other people. The way Americans use terms like white, brown, black, POC… tends to be US-centric (and tautological), which is fine, but not universal (this is not evident for Americans as US-centrism leads them to take as given that their language, premises and ways of categorizing the world are universal).

Finding our Footing in the Animal Liberation Project

When Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) started its activism in the 2010s, it was one of the most inspiring things that I had seen. It still gives me hope, even though I also saw how blocked they got–internally, externally, both through their own fault and the fault of others…

Many vegans reacted negatively to DxE from the get go – before their bigger controversies – because of the discomfort that vegans often have with the strong “speak out” type of behavior that DxE was known for (like marching into a Chipotle to loudly decry the animal cruelty behind the “humane meat” branding). Vegans would often rather be nice and bake cookies. That also has its place, but it’s not enough.

I heard of DxE early on. We hosted one of their first meetings at our anarchist space in the Mission in San Francisco. There were only a handful of people. I don’t know what they discussed, but I was happy to offer some support (as we did for other liberatory organizations; that was one of the goals of that space).

I had been vegan for almost two decades and in that time, I had gone through some changes in my own views and approach. I had come to see animal liberation as something that would need go deep into the “how” of changing social norms. My views had come, in part, from being around ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians (and being an ex-ex-vegan myself), as well some study on the dynamics around minorities and change (and some reflection on my own experiences as various flavors of minority).

So for example, I was no longer interested in making some great case about how veganism would save the world, or to strengthen my case by adding to an ever-growing number of “reasons to go vegan”. The vegan’s usual speech of “animals + health + planet” is deemed more effective the more they tack onto the list: social justice! racial justice! capitalism! the oceans! the obesity crisis! etc. The goal is to build up to a glorious checkmate.

It appeared to me that no matter how convincing a case one made, first of all, many people won’t prioritize it. I know that flying is harmful, yet I fly. Likewise, one can know about the harms of bacon for the climate, and still eat some bacon. Secondly and more importantly, there was always the potential that someone would come up with a counter-case that, rightly or wrongly, would be convincing to many. Immediately after the movie Cowspiracy came out, Kiss the Ground was made as a response. So my question was, how do we get off this treadmill? How do we get people to see eating cows as no different than eating dogs?

If we weren’t truly internalizing that cows aren’t food, there would always be the potential for them to be turned into food in the future. When vegans or vegetarians went back to “eating meat” or “eating animals”, they never started to eat all animals. The norms they grew up with stayed with them; they deemed “meat” only the animals that our culture designated as such. Clearly, even when these people were vegan, they had still categorized the cows, pigs and chickens as separate from the non-food animals.

My work with Seed the Commons (STC), the organization I co-founded, was based on these ideas. Around the time that DxE was gaining steam, STC was starting to build awareness and a social movement around veganic farming. On the surface, the work of the two organizations may have seemed very different, but in my mind we had the same fundamental approach, which could be characterized as, “What would it look like if veganism were normative? If vegans were the majority?”

My primary strategy was not to put forth veganics as a great solution (though in some contexts, such as climate talks, it is appropriate to do this too). Rather, as we worked to wrest food systems from corporate control and to promote alternatives that were sustainable and just, we took our vegan ethic to be normative. At our yearly forum, our speakers covered a wide range of issues, and many of them were not vegan. However, when it came time to speak of the agricultural foundation of a better food system, all the speakers were vegan.

Our first forum featured a panel of veganic growers and was the effective launch of a huge amount of organizing around veganics – but the main point was that this was a panel on agroecology whose speakers happened to be vegan. I had spent a decade regularly traveling as an interpreter for La Via Campesina–I was well aware that agroecology is not usually conceived of as vegan. But how about we decide that in our space, veganism is our ethic, and see if we can find agroecologists who work within that framework? How about we position ourselves not in a vegan silo, preaching to the choir about all the ways that veganism is beneficial, but instead at the helm of a comprehensive movement for food system transformation? Back in 2015 it took some effort, but we did find speakers who practiced agroecology without farmed animals or their inputs, and we put together a panel on agroecology working within the framework of tomorrow’s norms.

This had the benefit of putting forth a vision for what agriculture could look like after animal liberation. The animal rights movement was not doing this at the time (in fact they were quite resistant to it), and the void was being filled by folks whose agricultural models not only included animal exploitation as a default, but who fought against animal liberation by claiming that closed-loop farming could not be done in a vegan way. Not only were we undoing this false narrative, we were putting ourselves and veganic farmers in leadership positions in this movement for food system transformation, flipping the whole thing.

Going back to the Cowspiracy v Kiss the Ground face off–what if we rejected that paradigm? What if we made space for the arguments and vision of regenerative grazing proponents, but with our ethics? Could it be done? It seemed like it could.

If we want to liberate cows, pigs and chickens from the shackles of the “farm animal” construct, it helps to look into how we, as vegans and as activists, still carry the distinctions that set those animals apart. Going vegan is one important step, but even as vegans, as people in a minority position, we often bow to dominant norms in other ways. For example, we might openly condemn cruelty towards dogs or other humans, but as much as we empathize with cows, we might assure our friends that we “respect their choice” to eat hamburgers, lest we be branded as judgmental. Judgment is rarely seen as a bad thing when it aligns with the majority (or a strong-enough minority). Another example is the need to make veganism about something other than what it really is about for most of us: our empathy for animals.

Seed the Commons used to offer veganic gardening workshops that were taught by a young veganic farmer, Matt Loisel. He had become vegan right after completing his training to be an organic farmer. At the time, there was precious little information about veganics online, so he and his wife had to painstakingly figure things out on their own. He initially went vegan because he watched Cowspiracy, i.e. for the climate, but his empathy for animals increased once he eschewed the ways he had been taught to exploit and kill them. He used to say “if I were to find out now that being vegan was bad for the climate, I would still be vegan”.

Likewise, DxE put animals front and center. Their analysis was usually spot-on, their campaigns and actions were incredibly well-crafted. They raised their voice as we do for dogs, as we do for humans, as we do when we have not been taught to censor the movement of our empathy. DxE was forcing the conversation on what is always the crux of the issue, that is: what right do we have to own and abuse these animals? By what criteria is it said that their suffering doesn’t matter? Why these animals in particular? These are the questions that are always avoided through a dizzying array of deflections. Most vegans chase the deflections; they would spend days defending themselves against accusations that vegans are all privileged, white, judgmental or that they don’t care about humans. It’s more rare for vegans to name the deflection (in these examples the ad-hominem) and bring the conversation back to the topic that the carnist is avoiding. DxE did this through their activism and helped activists gain the courage and clarity to do this in their personal conversations.

Some will say things like “nobody was ever convinced by being shouted at” and “you win more people with honey than vinegar”. To that I have to say that these people really don’t know what drives change, including in themselves. We all have stories of the book or the person who changed our mind, and we all have stories of the person who was so off-putting that we immediately rejected what they said. But there is more to changing minds than that. When vegans choose to shout or protest or clearly tell someone that eating animals is wrong, they are not being obtuse. They are taking into consideration other factors that change minds and social norms, with an awareness that this takes time. You might be initially repulsed by a bunch of folks shouting in a Whole Foods, or by that obnoxious co-worker who won’t sit at the table when others are eating meat. But the repulsion itself also happens as part of a given social and cultural context, and that context is slowly transformed by the cumulative effects of actions such as those mentioned above.

I think that DxE has done a lot of good, but the obstacles they faced limited how much of an impact they could have. I never joined them because, as much as I admired their activism, I saw in their internal culture and functioning things that I knew would be a problem for me. Later on, I was also the recipient of some unsavory behavior from them. So I don’t idealize them–far from it. But for the sake of animals, let’s stop letting personal dislikes or conflicts cloud our analysis. It’s important that we be able to discuss the merits of their activism without getting sidetracked by the things they have been accused of. I’m not saying that these accusations should be ignored. I am saying that they should not be used as an excuse to not discuss, in an unbiased manner, DxE’s tactics in their own right. It seems like this should be obvious, but when I was active in the movement, a real frenzy and taboo had been built up around DxE. While I believe that some of the accusations have merit, it was also glaringly obvious that they were victims of a smear campaign (at least one).

One of the weaknesses of the vegan and animal rights movements is that most of its members had no experience in other progressive or leftist movements and, as a result, were unprepared for the challenges that activists commonly face. I believe that this was one of the reasons that some became so easily galvanized in trying to take down DxE.

At Seed the Commons, we avoided getting involved in movement politics. While we never worked with DxE, we also didn’t exclude them or reject their invitations. For this, we received quite a bit of backlash. Wayne Hsiung (one of DxE’s founders), spoke at our 2016 forum, and years later the ED of another organization secretly tried to get Seed the Commons excluded from conferences under the pretext that we had once invited Wayne to speak. This also points to issues that go beyond the animal rights movement, including the territoriality that can emerge when social change becomes an industry and the authoritarianism and cancel culture that came to define “social justice” in the 2010s. When STC invited other organizations to endorse one of our campaigns, one authoritarian made her endorsement contingent on DxE not endorsing the campaign. Imagine if every time you signed a petition you first made sure that none of your enemies had signed it. DxE had not been invited to sign because that campaign was not relevant to them, but looking back I should have been less gracious in my response to such an irrational demand.

One of the interesting dynamics I witnessed was when an organizer told me that she had canceled Wayne’s talk at her conference – against her own judgment and desire – because she had been pressured into doing so. Then, in the most circular manner, the people who pressured her to exclude DxE used the fact that DxE had been excluded from this conference to bolster their case against DxE, as if the organizer had taken this measure of her own volition.

Getting into all of this would take a whole essay, or more likely a book, and I probably don’t know half of it. What I see though is that we can learn from DxE’s strategies. Researching the obstacles DxE faced would also produce an enriching resource for those of us who work towards animal liberation and any other progressive cause in a time of social movements and non-profits. Why were so many vegans averse to DxE’s tactics? Why were some keen to gatekeep? How did DxE’s own dynamics hold them back and hold back others? Who was behind the smear campaigns and why were these so effective? And so on. I hope that someone will take on this project. In the meantime, there are many ways that all of us can start shifting norms from where we are.

I’ll be speaking at the 3rd Convention of the Women’s Declaration International USA

Below is an email I sent to my list today; I thought I might share it here. This evening, I also realized that Hope Bohanec had removed from Youtube the videos of my talks that were on her channel.  This is a woman who, despite organizing a panel on the “herstory” of the animal rights movement (see below), has no qualms about erasing the work of other women from that herstory, even when she has directly benefited from that work (those talks were unpaid contributions to her conferences). At least I won’t want for things to speak about at the WDI Convention!

Dear friends,

I am excited to announce that I will speak at the 3rd National Women’s Convention of the Women’s Declaration International USA, next month in Atlanta. My talk will be about sexism and gender identity ideology in progressive movements (including the factors that led to gender identity ideology being so thoroughly adopted, and the impacts this has on the women in these movements and beyond).

This is an all-female event. If you are a woman, please consider joining me! Registration is open until tomorrow. And for everyone, please help spread the word and share the videos when they are out. There are also a lot of great videos on the WDI channel you can already check out.

In her recent book, Oppressive Liberation: Sexism in Animal Activism, Lisa Kemmerer presents data on the experiences of sexism in the vegan and animal rights movements. I had the honor of contributing a chapter, Meet the New Vegan World. I’ve been meaning to send out an email about this book, so I won’t speak much about it here. But one thing to note is that sexism in the animal rights movement is widespread, and its victims are not only individual women–but also the movement itself. Women are by and large the founders, the backbone, the boots on the ground. When women are pushed out, the movement suffers. And beyond the quantitative, what about the qualitative? There is much to say about the effects of a culture that de-prioritizes the oppression of women.

I have always been interested in understanding how ideas are marketed, what factors make people believe and/or go along with certain things… be it a new war or the beliefs that kids need milk or that grazing cows will solve climate change… Those familiar with Seed the Commons know that unpacking the psychological underpinnings of any phenomenon was always a priority. Indeed, Seed the Commons was in part a continuation of my PhD project in social psychology on how milk is made to be adopted as normative and necessary in populations that until recently were not milk drinkers.

In the early 2010s I was not yet much of a feminist, but the psychologist in me became increasingly intrigued, and then alarmed, at the advance of gender identity ideology. How had lockstep conformity around new mantras and ideas been so quickly achieved? How was it that in San Francisco, a supposed bastion of progressive values, the same people who, less than a decade sooner, had passionately advocated for marriage equality, were now cheering on a movement that vilified (and worse) lesbians for their sex-same orientation? It was a complete 180, and I was morbidly fascinated. As the misogyny and homophobia of the gender identity movement came into focus and I began to understand that we were backsliding on important advances, I gained much greater awareness on societal sexism and the feminist movement. For example, in the past, I was the last person to have any interest in female-only spaces. But in educating myself on the conflict between transactivists and feminists, I learned why and how female-only spaces, such as rape shelters, had come to be, why they are still needed, and I had to reflect on why their importance was at best overlooked, if not outright dismissed, by leftists and liberals.

In the animal rights movement, I witnessed how the adoption of gender identity ideology created a culture in which women felt they could speak up for women or for animals, but not both. One’s commitment to animal liberation meant shutting up about how gender identity ideology was impacting women. Both male and female activists confided that they they felt they had to keep their views secret. People who were founders and directors of their organizations told me that they shared my views but would not speak publicly for fear of losing their funding. The first person to reach out to me was a gay man. Animal rights activism held such an important place in his life that he felt he had to keep silent about the resurgence of homophobia he was witnessing, lest he lose his community and opportunities to make a change. Sharing this with me was like opening the floodgates.

While disappointing, the choice of those who stayed silent was understandable, because the experiences of women who were openly gender critical was systematically one of being pushed out; in the case of one feminist I know, violently so. My personal experiences include being dropped by Hope Bohanec as an author of an anthology, and having my writing plagiarized by A Well-fed World (AWFW), because they didn’t want to give me visibility by crediting me (but still wanted the woke points that came with using my words). Hope Bohanec and Dawn Montcrief (the ED of AWFW) are not just any women in the animal rights movement–they are leaders, and they purport to bring feminist ideals to the movement. This raises some questions on the culture of the animal rights movement.

As part of AR movement’s reckoning with its #metoo moment in 2018, the male organizers of the National Animal Rights Conference were replaced by two women, one of whom was Dawn Montcrief. The conference did not subsequently become one that centered women’s issues or feminist perspectives, and when radical feminists would later apply to speak, their applications would be denied. Hope was the organizer of the Conscious Eating Conference. Shortly after dropping me from her book because of the feminist perspectives I shared on my blog, the focus of that year’s conference was “to explore overlapping oppressions”, with a panel on “the Herstory of Animal Rights”. Pax Ahimsa, a well-known transactivist in the vegan community, was the conference host and moderator. One attendee wrote that, “as Pax stood at the podium to introduce Carol J. Adams, [she] found it relevant to loudly assert that “Trans women *ARE* women”… and the room erupted in wild applause.” Why was Pax, whose writings reveal no grasp of basic feminist analysis and indeed ideas that are in opposition to basic feminism, chosen for this role? Why did Carol J Adams, a renowned second-wave feminist who had previously come under fire from transactivists, go along with this?

For my masters thesis in psychology, almost 20 years ago, I conducted research on the social representations of meat. One line of inquiry was to look into the motivations behind the choice of women to stop eating animals. I could hypothesize it in opposite directions: when women stop eating animals, are they rejecting patriarchal systems, or are they abiding by their assigned roles within patriarchy? (In today’s lingo: Do women stop eating meat because they are feminists or because they are handmaidens?) My research revealed some differences between vegans and vegetarians, with the dietary choices of vegans more often ideologically driven and inscribed in a pattern of social engagement. I leaned toward my first hypothesis, the feminist interpretation, especially in the case of vegan women. This question would circle back to me a decade later when I became involved in the American animal rights movement, and a different picture started to emerge.

There are key differences between the animal rights/vegan movements and other progressive movements, and it is possible that vegan women were especially prone to going along with gender identity ideology. Nonetheless, I believe that there are also lessons that can be applied to American progressive movements at large. When Chema and I confronted the AWFW folks on their plagiarism, their responses were so egregious that I was more shocked by the responses than by the plagiarism. Delving into the reasons for their zealotry is relevant, but that’s not all there is to it. These events didn’t happen in a vacuum. The adoption of gender identity ideology merely reinforced patterns that were already prevalent in today’s non-profit world and social movements. After all, Seed the Commons had encountered territoriality, bullying and exploitative behavior in the animal rights movement well before my feminist politics became an issue. Other grassroots activists, whose views were opposite mine, experienced the same things. Ultimately the dynamics around gender identity were simply more of the same: whatever the impetus, women and grassroots activists repeatedly found themselves pushed out or otherwise screwed over.

At the WDI conference, I will present what I believe to have been key factors in the adoption of gender ideology in social movements, inscribing this in a larger discussion on “social movements” and “social justice” in the last decade, and so I will touch upon factors that range from the psychological and cultural to the economic and institutional. This will include a critique of ID politics and wokeness, from a left perspective. I don’t agree with the traditional leftists who view everything through a class lens and dismiss all ID politics as a distraction. ID politics is a broad term, and I think it has its good, bad and ugly. Unfortunately, in the animal rights movement, I witnessed a lot of the bad and ugly. Many times, and many ways, I saw ID politics both enable harmful internal dynamics, and steer the AR/vegan movements away from effectively working toward liberation for animals and for humans. I hope to help us move beyond the binary thinking that has all but buried leftist and feminist perspectives in our social and political landscapes.

Just as I am upset by the sexism of leftists, I am also alienated by the racism I encounter in feminist circles. At a time when the genocide of Palestinians is being justified with rhetoric around women’s rights, I think it is all the more important that I participate in these spaces. It is likely that I will be the only woman of Middle Eastern and Muslim descent at next month’s convention. It is also possible that my support for Palestinians will put me in the minority. The temptation to avoid discomfort is always there, but cutting ourselves off from those we disagree with and ghettoizing ourselves down to ever smaller activist units is less powerful than building bridges and bringing different perspectives to activist spaces. After all, a decade ago it seemed quasi impossible to cross-pollinate the small farming and animal liberation movements; it seemed like some seriously wishful thinking to get leaders in food sovereignty, food justice and similar causes to speak at a vegan event–yet we did exactly that. And from that barebones, pennies-for-funding, first conference in 2015, grew a veganic movement.

I hope you will join me in Atlanta, and/or share the invitation in your networks, to continue to build bridges. Registration closes tomorrow, Saturday August 31, at 11:59 GMT.

I also invite you to read Oppressive Liberation: Sexism in Animal Activism and my chapter, Meet the New Vegan World. You can read the book for free by requesting that your library order it, and this will have the added benefit of making it accessible to others.

Wishing you a happy September,

Nassim

Shabe Yalda, or why I paid $12 for Nancy Pelosi to read about women’s rights

–  San Francisco, Shabe Yalda, Dec. 2023 

It’s that time of the year again. Shabe Yalda is the Persian celebration for winter solstice, when families gather and stay up through the longest night of the year eating fruit and reading poetry. In its Zoroastrian roots, Shabe Yalda is about celebrating the return of the light, the victory of light over darkness. Like many Iranians, I only grew up celebrating the spring equinox (Norooz or Persian New Year), but Shabe Yalda has been somewhat rediscovered recently. I, too, have been putting together small celebrations or rituals to mark the return of the light for some years now. 

A couple years ago, I was given the opportunity for a perfect ritual and real-world action. In November 2021, I received an email from Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA) titled Deck the Halls of Congress with Feminism. They aimed to raise enough money to mail a copy of the book, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, to each US Senator and Representative. They asked that people sponsor their respective representatives with a twelve-dollar gift that covered the purchase, packing and postage of one book. From their email:

‘Dear U.S. Signatories, As the winter solstice approaches, many cultures celebrate the return of the light after the darkest season. For feminists, the last several years have felt bleak indeed, as most of the media has pursued a blackout policy on covering our objections to “gender identity” in law and society. As a result, many legislators remain entirely unaware of the depth, breadth, and strength of our commitment to the rights of women and girls as a sex class. WHRC USA thinks it’s time to shed some light!

This winter, we will deck the halls of Congress with a feminist critique of “gender identity.” Our volunteers will send one copy of Board President Kara Dansky’s important new book, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, to each United States Senator and Representative, along with a personalized cover letter quoting their constituents and other supporters who understand that recognition and protection of biological sex in law is crucial.’

I liked that they linked their campaign to the winter solstice and to the idea of bringing light into darkness, because the majority of Americans have been completely in the dark as to what’s going on. Even those who are staunch supporters of “trans rights” – maybe especially those who are staunch supporters – very often have no idea of what they’re supporting. So I donated, and I threw in an extra $24 to get copies to Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla as well. To Pelosi, Feinstein and Padilla, I wrote:

“By replacing sex with gender identity in law and policy, California is stripping away the human rights of its most vulnerable women, like those who are homeless or in prison. In San Francisco, our public library hosted an exposition calling for violence against feminists and lesbians, the tech companies we host are censuring feminists worldwide, and I can no longer enjoy an evening out and expect that my local restaurants will have a female-only bathroom I can use. As a woman, California native and San Francisco resident, it greatly saddens me to see the erosion of women’s rights and the increased normalization of misogyny and lesbophobia in a city that was once a global leader in progressive causes. It is time for California political leaders to put women’s rights above woke points.”

WDI USA reached their funding goal, and most of the donations came from first-time donors. Women are sick of the erosion of our rights, the sidelining and censorship of our voices, the vilification of anyone who states basic facts and wants to protect the rights that were won these past decades. People in power have made it clear that they don’t care about women, but it helps to show that some of the public does care and is watching.

We certainly haven’t won yet. Notably of course, in the past two years Roe v. Wade was overturned (which, in my opinion, was not the sole doing of the right). But feminists have been pushing forward. Our concerns and our arguments are making their way into public consciousness. We don’t have a fraction of the funding of the astroturfed gender identity movement, but we are showing that grassroots activism is still possible, that in the face of heavy propaganda, censorship and deeply ingrained bias, speaking the truth can still make a difference.

While I am not personally very active, my inbox is full of calls to action, meet-ups, and local and global news of campaigns, lawsuits and even some wins (I did participate in an action for incarcerated women – and against Scott Wiener’s SB 132 – that I wrote about here). Since my little ritual in 2021, Kara Dansky has written a new book, and WDI USA has held two annual conventions: Reigniting the Women’s Liberation Movement and Accelerating the Women’s Liberation Movement, the latter in San Francisco.

San Francisco has been coasting on its gay-friendly reputation, but the only gays to which it is friendly now are of the male variety. A few years ago, a group of actual lesbians (i.e., of the female and exclusively same-sex attracted variety) was gay-bashed at the San Francisco Dyke March by other marchers. At some point in the 2010s, SF stopped being the city it is reputed to be. 

But activism is still in our DNA, and to bring a convention aimed at reviving the women’s liberation movement to a city once progressive and now so captured, is powerful. I couldn’t attend, but it seems to have gone… very well? As expected, the convention drew protests from the anti-feminist pink and blue crew (one delightful protester calling for mass femicide). But unlike other venues reserved by feminists in the past, the hotel did not bow to pressure to cancel the event, and it seems that more than anything, the protesters helped bring visibility to the true nature of our conflict with them (watch Kara Dansky’s account). The women concluded the weekend in front of San Francisco City Hall with a non-violent action for lesbian rights. The same crew arrived to hurl insults at them. We keep ending up back at square 1, having to fight the same fights, but women will simply show up as long as necessary.

It’s going to take a while for the liberals and leftists who are self-righteously entrenched in gender ideology to recognize that theirs is a regressive position, and many will never take personal responsibility. But most of the public – even those who go along with pronouns and mixed-sex bathrooms without a complaint – is not entrenched at all. If we continue to speak up on the harms of gender ideology, and continue to show that there is a resistance, including one that is not rooted in conservatism, and we continue to provide opportunities to transactivists to bring public awareness to their politics and misogyny, we will get through.  

Feminists are fighting back in SF: Our protest against SB 132, the bill that allows male inmates to “self identify” into women’s prisons

I am one of the women who protested against SB 132 at the Golden Gate Bridge in early February.

My time got monopolized by two idiotic and antagonistic men.

I’m not going to make a list of every non-sequitur, strawman and ignorant take, but I’ll note a few things:

– These guys wanted to talk AT us. They had no interest in listening to our responses, even when they asked us questions.

– One of them has a TIF (trans-identified female, or “transman”) daughter, yet he thinks that there is no problem with men in women’s spaces, and that TIFs should be in men’s spaces. It is scary how little men acknowledge male violence against women. (Of course, if the notion of male violence is ridiculous pearl-clutching, why are they clutching their pearls about violence against TIMs, or transwomen? From what are TIMs escaping by using female prisons, bathrooms and other spaces?)

– To that point, the other dude said that he owns a homeless shelter in SF(!!!). And yet he compared us – women defending what tiny amount of protection and dignity female inmates have – to people 50 years ago “fighting against people dancing” and said that the world “would advance regardless”. I feel terrible for the homeless women who end up in his shelter. Homeless women are horribly vulnerable and have a dire need for their own spaces.

Of course, the world doesn’t just “advance”, all linear and effortless. I wish it did. The reason that women stood out in the cold that day, some of them risking their incomes, to re-demand the sex-based rights and protections that were fought for by feminists before us, is because progress and liberation, especially women’s, are usually met with a conservative backlash. Scott Wiener, California senator and author of SB 132, is that backlash.

These men at Golden Gate Bridge, ranting and sneering at women speaking up for the women being assaulted and raped in prison, shouting at an elderly woman that she has no compassion, telling me that I am the reason trans youth are killing themselves…. are no different than the men who intimidated, mocked and called manhaters the previous generations of protesting feminists. Because while those women made incredible strides, not enough awareness was raised and maintained in broader society about the extent of the sexism we face every day. Likewise, little has changed in the attitudes of men towards women. And so, as I’ve said before, we are back at square 1, having to argue for our rights all over again. It’s sad, it’s scary, it’s depressing.

– In discussing the hypothetical situation of a transwoman being housed in a female prison, the father of the TIF twice used the pronoun “he”. I had to remind him that he should be using the pronoun “she” if he believes that this person is a woman. One of them also commented that it “wasn’t fair” to punish all transwomen for the doings of a few, in the sense that if a few of them raped female inmates after being transferred, the others should not be “punished” by being excluded from female prisons. The assumption is that, by default, men have a right to women’s spaces. That only the proven rapist can, perhaps, justifiably be excluded. In other words, the assumption is that women do not have an inherent right to our own spaces. A space in which we don’t have to shower, sleep, or use the toilet in front of any man. If I am forced to shower in front of a man, nothing more needs to happen for it to be a violation.

My exchanges with these white knights highlighted what has been made obvious these past years: This was always about men’s rights–or rather, men’s privileges. They can say “transwomen are women” until they’re blue, but there is not a single category of woman for whom they agitate this much and in this way.

In the past three years, every time that I have read about a woman in prison being raped, assaulted or harassed by a male inmate, and every time that I have read about a convicted rapist or other violent male being housed in a woman’s prison, I have thought about Hope, the editor who dropped me from her book at the request of her publisher because of my gender critical writing. Hope didn’t care about female inmates and others harmed by gender ideology; she only cared about doing what was convenient for her.

When Hope questioned me about my views, she scoffed and laughed, acted incredulous and as though I were ridiculously uninformed. This was in 2020. I had been following the “gender wars” for about 4 years, but Hope was convinced that she knew more than I did, and she would not give me even the benefit of doubt. Hope is a California resident who did not believe that Self ID (which is the basis of SB 132, introduced a year earlier, and a number of local policies) is real. She was “sure” that there were “protocols” to determine who is trans. Feminists have spent years writing and talking about Self ID, yet most people still believe that “transwomen” are all men who have had surgery and take hormones. Our claims can be verified with minimal research, but instead we get dismissed as crackpots.

Hope and I were both active in the animal rights movement, and long before our conversation on gender identity, I had mused that she had the sort of overconfidence and entitlement that, in the US, is associated with white men. And now, attending my very first feminist protest, I ended up the captive audience of two such men.

To be a woman in the world is to suffer fools, to be a female activist is to suffer them doubly.

White guy #1, father of the TIF, kept snickering, walking away, and coming back when he thought he had a good “gotcha”. He said he was an “expert” in “sexual orientation”. I asked him what sexual orientation had to do with it, since trans identity is about gender identity, and trans people can be of any orientation. He didn’t answer. He asked us with a smirk ‘so you think that a transman in a men’s prison would be in “mortal danger?”’ Silly women, thinking men are dangerous! But somehow it’s not silly to pass a bill based on that very premise (Scott Wiener has repeatedly framed it as protecting transwomen from rape) if the bill is about protecting males from male violence. (Of course, the same hypothetical male inmate who would rape transwomen can now also identify his way into a female prison…)

The vast majority of the public does not want this. If women were not systematically ignored, silenced and dismissed, we would not be where we are today.

Women’s concerns about male violence have long been dismissed as hysteria, bigotry, or prudishness, and proponents of Self ID laws and policies followed the playbook from day 1. SB 132 grants inmates the right to be recognized as the “gender” that they identify as at that point in time (indeed, they can identify differently later), which entails being referred to with the pronouns of their choice and being searched by a prison guard of their “same gender” (the rights of female prison guards are of course completely overlooked, and they can now be forced to perform these procedures on male inmates). In regards to where they are to be housed, trans-identified inmates can choose men’s or women’s facilities based on where they feel “safest”.

After SB 132 was passed in the California Senate in May 2019, the co-sponsors “converted it to a two-year bill so that the co-sponsors and Senator Wiener could meaningfully integrate feedback collected from a survey of the ~1,200 trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people currently in CDCR custody.”

Not only did Wiener not consult with incarcerated women, WOLF reported that during a virtual town hall, “in his four-and-half minute response on SB 132, Wiener did not once address the concerns of these women. Instead, the state senator resorted to smearing the women bravely speaking up on this issue.” He handwaved women’s concerns with vague and lazy misrepresentations: “Unfortunately there’s been a right-wing backlash against this law and we have right-wing publications that are publishing a lot of just inaccurate information, frankly fake news, about this law and trying to demonize and scapegoat trans people including, unfortunately, there’s a term called ‘TERF,’ trans-exclusive radical feminist people who believe that trans women are not actually women and advocate in that way.” “These are the same arguments we heard in North Carolina restroom law, that trans women are just trying to scam their way into a women’s restroom to victimize cisgender women.”

In other words, and I am going to use words to which we can all agree, when a person who was born with a penis says that they are in danger, they are to be believed, no questions asked, and they are to decide which facilities they will live in, no questions asked. But when a person who was born with a vagina says that they are in danger, they are to be dismissed as bigots, liars and connivers.

Amie Ichikawa, ED of Woman II Woman, said “The terror, abuse, and cruelty incarcerated women are experiencing because of Scott Wiener’s bill is not ‘fake news.’ I speak to these women every single day. They are devastated. They don’t understand how their elected officials, especially those who claim to care about justice reform and protecting women of color, could turn a blind eye to what is happening here.” Amie and others also point out, in this discussion about a trans-identified female inmate who was retaliated against for speaking out against sexual harrassment committed by a male inmate, that those behind SB 132 have zero concern for trans-identified females; their efforts are solely for the benefit of trans-identified males.

This is basic, age-old sexism. And it’s infuriating.

But– Amie sent photos of our protest to incarcerated women who were “shocked” and “very moved that anyone would do this for them”. They asked, “Who are these women? Why would they stand up for us?” And Amie replied, “They are women who give a shit and are doing something about it.”

So, the action was very much worth it, but we need to find ways to reach larger audiences with more effective messaging. We should try to ask questions of those who think they are on the other side: Let the Socratic method reveal to them how little they know and how illogical and sexist their thought process is. In our communications overall, it’s important to undo the notion that removing women’s spaces is in any way a progressive development. Women’s human rights are being violated. It is not more complicated than that. We, as women and as advocates, have been harmed by the narrative pushed by both transactivists and the traditional conservatives (I explained here how these are simply two flavors of conservative) that the only people opposing this are conservatives. They both benefit from this framing and from distorting or making invisible the work and arguments of feminists.

It is noteworthy that most of the people who expressed support for us that day were women, but they didn’t engage much, and the very first people to approach us were an enthusiastic family visiting from the UK – or “Terf Island” as they said. These actions build community and give people comfort and strength in knowing they are not alone. There need to be more.

It’s ironic that white guy #2 compared us to the stuffy adults in Footloose, because I am partly from a country that imprisons people for dancing–now, in 2023. It is precisely this fact, and the killing of women who refuse to cover their hair, and the killing of youth who protest the tyranny, that strengthens my resolve to face my minor discomforts and put myself out there. Defending the human rights of female prisoners in California is part of the struggle for women everywhere. Here like in Iran, women are oppressed on the basis of being born in a female body. The woke love to masquerade as allies to “women of color”, but by denying the reality of sex-based oppression, and by systematically opposing women’s efforts to have a social movement focused on the dismantlement of that oppression, they support societal and institutional sexism everywhere.

For women who aren’t incarcerated, who aren’t homeless, who aren’t lesbian, who aren’t hedging our careers on a female-only scholarship, it’s easy to ignore the whole thing (while secretly trusting that other women will – as always – do the thankless work of defending the rights you enjoy) so that you can keep your good standing. If solidarity is too much to ask for, at least know that at some point, it will cost you too.

It’s time for more courage, and a lot more protests.

 

Learn more about the impacts of SB 132 on women: