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