I moved to Switzerland from France in 1991, at the age of 12. The Swiss were obsessed at that time with the book Not Without My Daughter. People constantly brought it up to me. It didn’t help that I wasn’t just Iranian–my parents were divorced, my dad was Iranian, my mom was American. From the vantage point of a Swiss villager who had just read about the barbarian, bloodthirsty, knuckle-draggingly sexist Muslims half a world away, it probably seemed like I had jumped off the page. I lived with my Iranian dad and his Iranian wife, so I was like an alt-version of the little girl in which her mother had accepted to leave without her. (I’m not kidding about the bloodthirsty thing. A classmate asked me in all seriousness if it was true that Iranians had swimming pools filled with blood.)
I was a bit fired up about racism that year. I think it was the following year that saw the beginning of my consciousness in regards to sexism and how narratives around sexism can be intertwined with racism.
We had a civics class in which the teacher would open questions for discussion. I was the only girl who would participate; the discussions were otherwise entirely dominated by the boys. I might not have thought much of this if the teacher hadn’t been so frustrated with it (incidentally, she had also recently immigrated from France). She would urge the girls to participate, which would shut them down even more. This led, shortly after, to my first realization on the need to question established truths on sexism in the East and West. I was at my stepmother’s parents’ house and the adults were talking politics. My stepmother’s father had been the first president of Iran, and politics were a common topic. One of the women shared an opinion, and the men listened. There was nothing remarkable about this scene–except for the contrast I suddenly noticed with my experiences at school.
I realized that girls at school didn’t only avoid “serious” topics. When we spoke in any context, the boys would laugh at us and talk over us. Compare that to the Iranian men who were acting like a woman’s opinion had a place in the conversation. In retrospect, I realize that it’s not entirely fair to compare the behavior of teenage boys to those of adults (on the other hand, it is noteworthy that, as Islamic revolutionaries, these were the type of Iranians that Westerners might assume never let a woman speak). Regardless, I took from it a valuable lesson: to observe rather than to believe established truths, and more importantly, to observe outside the box.
By circulating narratives about various groups, media and popular discourse shape what we believe to be true about these groups. More insidious, they also select and narrow down what we even think to observe, what we hold up for comparison. Is it a given that women’s relative freedom of dress should be the litmus test of equality? I’m not one to defend the hijab as feminist, but the reflexive way in which it has often been pointed to as the end-all of oppression is largely the result of propagandizing. I moved to Switzerland only a year after full voting rights were extended to all Swiss women. In school, we were shown surveys with people who were still not on board. Why was my attention not driven to this as the barometer of women’s progress? Growing up with a conservative Middle Eastern father, I was undoubtedly more limited in some ways than my peers, but it is not black and white. For example, intellectually and career-wise, the Swiss put more limitations on girls, with a strong attachment to traditional norms that dictated that we were not suited to go into STEM or aim for leadership roles. Yet when Westerners drew comparisons between themselves and Iranians, the hijab eclipsed all else.
What gets honed in on is not random but rather based on social and political factors, including the geopolitical goals of those crafting the message. A look around the globe yields endless examples of systemic, egregious misogyny and institutional sexism. Which of these examples get our attention, whether or not we frame them in relation to the social identities of the perpetrators, and which of their social identities, is usually informed by and further validates our representations of certain groups.
From a young age, I’ve heard Westerners state as self-evident that Iranians/Middle Easterners/Muslims don’t see women as equal, don’t allow women any freedom, don’t allow women to work or have any independence, and more. I’m not saying that these ideas aren’t connected to some truths. I won’t argue that Saudi Arabia is just like Sweden. But. Common perceptions of Iranians/Middle Easterners/Muslims suffer from a serious lack of nuance. Religion is just one factor among several that determine how conservative a given population will be. The Swiss are a case in point. In my opinion, the rurality of the country contributes to maintaining a level of conservativism beyond what is expected for a wealthy, Western society. Furthermore, sexism manifests in different ways throughout regions and cultures. I’ve traveled widely as an interpreter, speaking and sharing rooms with women from mostly poor rural backgrounds from every corner of the world. I’ve carefully translated stories about what women and girls face as females in a patriarchal world, from Nicaragua to Uganda. The notion that the Muslim world is homogenous and that in every respect, it is “the worst” that this world has for women is simply wrong.
The stereotyping of the Muslim world carries with it the stereotyping of the West, too. In matters of sex-based rights and oppression, the Muslim world is constructed as the ultimate “other”. The West is seen as modern, enlightened, egalitarian, and Western women as liberated. Just as the nuances and diversity of the Muslim world are erased in an imagined homogenous extreme, so too are the nuances and differences within the West flattened into an equally homogenous, but opposite, extreme. While Western feminism has achieved important improvements for women’s lives, institutional sexism has not been stomped out and misogyny is still rampant. And things got worse in the last decade. While the Right has attacked women’s rights in the expected ways, the Left has arguably done as much to erode woman’s gains, including by undermining our ability to organize at all.
The project of feminism is to recognize, analyze, and remedy the fact that being born in a female body is to experience systemic oppression. A person born with a penis does not belong to the category of people that experience this oppression, regardless of whether said person has some “internal sense” of being a woman, and regardless of whether this person is oppressed or suffers for other reasons (plenty of men suffer for plenty of reasons–that is not in dispute). When sex is replaced with gender identity, we lose the protections for which feminists have fought. We even lose the foundation and raison d’être of feminism: the recognition that sex is a basis of oppression. The adoption of gender identity ideology in law and policy means denying the existence of, and the right to name and organize for, any definable female constituency or political category at all. The adoption of gender identity ideology in culture and society has shamed, gaslit and bullied women away from working on their own liberation. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was not the sole doing of the Right, notably because in the years leading up to it, American liberals had systematically worked at de-centering women from the focus of feminists and feminist organizations. The transformation of the Women’s March into the People’s March is but one example of this regressive trend.
Self-ID is one of the main points of contention for feminists, and the past decade saw it rammed through in many countries with virtually no public debate or awareness. “Self-ID” means that a person’s declaration is the only criteria that determines what “sex” or “gender” they are considered (sex and gender should not be, but commonly are, used interchangeably). Most of the public still has the notion that a “transwoman” is a man who has had his penis and testicles surgically removed, takes hormones and presents himself in a “feminine” way. In reality, self-ID policies allow any man or boy at any point to declare that he identifies as a woman or girl, and consequently, to access the spaces and resources that were once reserved for women or girls. All women and girls are harmed by this, and the most vulnerable and marginalized women, e.g. those in prisons and homeless shelters, are more so.
When Bret Baier interviewed Kamala Harris on Fox News, he asked about taxpayer funded surgeries for transgender prisoners. He neglected to ask about male prisoners who are transferred to female prisons without any surgery (not to imply that these transfers are ever acceptable). His focus was the burden on the taxpayer; he expressed no similar concern for the burden on female prisoners. In California, Gavin Newsom signed into law SB 132, a bill that allows male prisoners to choose to be housed in female prisons based solely on self-declared identification. Predictably, this resulted in cases of sexual assault; while feminist organization WOLF sued the state of California, the ACLU defended the bill. Today, after hearing about the trauma endured by female inmates, the California State Senate voted against a bill that would keep male sex offenders from being housed in women’s prisons and provide a separate space for trans-identified males. The argument for SB 132 by its author, Senator Scott Wiener, was that male violence is a serious concern (for other males), yet today he dismissed women’s concerns around male violence as “ridiculous”. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and the UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders both recognize the vulnerability of female prisoners and mandate that they be kept in separate institutions from male prisoners. But Kamala Harris handwaved the issue brought up by Bret Baier as “negligible” and offered zero acknowledgement of the costs of gender ideology to the dignity, safety and human rights of female prisoners.
Gender ideologues believe that humans have innate “gender identities” and that we should redefine the words “woman” to no longer mean “adult human female” but instead to mean “one who has an internal gender identity of “woman”’. There is no proof of the existence of innate gender identities, but even if these were proven to be real, it does not follow that the words woman and man should be redefined on the basis of this newly discovered attribute of the mind. The words woman and man have always referred to the biological state of being female or male, i.e. to one’s reproductive function. Feminists have been fighting to maintain these definitions, but in a way, this is not the real issue either. Shuffling semantics do not change the reality of sex-based oppression, and ideally, modern education would have endowed people with the ability to discuss issues abstractly.
Rightly or wrongly, until very recently, it was uncontroversial to name humans whose reproductive organs are organized around producing eggs, “women” and “girls”, and humans whose reproductive organs are organized around producing sperm, “men” and “boys”. Whether or not it was wrong, ignorant or bigoted to name them that way, it is undeniable that that is how these words were understood by virtually everybody. It is with these definitions that there was a meeting of the minds in any policy and legislation that used the word “woman” or “girls”. Hypothetically, if as a society we were to decide that we want to now change the meanings of “woman” and “man”, it does not follow that we do away with what was signed, understood, and agreed upon in our legislation or policies. Instead, we would need to update these documents so that their language stays consistent with the meaning to which the parties agreed (e.g. swap out “woman” with something like “potentially egg-producing humans” or “those whose reproductive organs used to be called female”). To do otherwise is to undo the legislation or policy in question, without transparency or public debate. Likewise, to replace “sex” with “gender identity” in Title IX, would have amounted to nothing less than doing away with Title IX.
One certainly has the right to argue that we live in a world in which people with a “man gender identity” (rather than people with penises) have historically oppressed people with a “woman gender identity” (rather than people with vaginas)–but those who make this case need to do so clearly, and ideally provide data. Instead, they’ve befuddled the public with semantics games and stomped out all attempts at debate. The confusion and silencing surrounding gender identity ideology has allowed transactivists to ride on the coattails, and appropriate the work and arguments, of feminists, while undoing what feminists fought for.
Women have been losing our rights in plain sight and Western “progressives” have refused to acknowledge what is happening, in part because it conflicts with their self-image. It makes sense to them that Afghans or Iranians would resist advances made by the women in their countries. That women’s path towards equality in the West is also not linear, that it also draws backlash, and that much of the present backlash has been rubberstamped by Western liberals is, on the other hand, unthinkable. And yet the similarities with countries like Iran and Afghanistan are actually striking, because the trans/gender identity movement is not only misogynistic, it is based on a quasi-religious belief system. Genderists often describe gender identity as something akin to the soul, or they ascribe gender to the mind or soul. There is nothing verifiable about the existence of innate gender identities nor about which of these identities a given individual experiences; it’s all about belief (and forcing that belief onto others). (And again, whether or not gender identity is real is wholly irrelevant to the social organization and power structures that define patriarchy. “Women” who were born with a “woman’s soul” and a penis were afforded the right to vote before vagina-havers, along with every other penis-haver.) In addition to their beliefs, the zealotry, undemocratic tactics and violence of transactivists also place them in the camp of male supremacist fanatics.
The woke love to associate anything they don’t like with white supremacy and I am wary of jumping on that bandwagon, but in this instance, I think there is a legitimate case to be made for a white and Western supremacist bias. We are witnessing a backlash against feminism driven by a male supremacist neo-religious movement. If women in the Middle East were seeing the same unraveling of their gains, if feminists there were undergoing the same systematic and rabid attacks, the same censorship, the loss of jobs, the physical attacks when they gather to speak of their rights, it would be so easy for Westerners to name what was going on.
‘A woman in the Iranian Parliament will be suspended from her position in a political party for 9 months for speaking in public about women’s rights. Oh wait sorry, small typo. In the Victorian Parliament, in Australia. Oh and a member of the “conservative” Liberal Party.’ This 2023 tweet by an Australian commentator captures the dismay that many of us have felt both at the political repression of feminists in the West and the accompanying hypocrisy. There are many cases of women being investigated or arrested for questioning or opposing (or appearing to question or oppose) gender ideology. In the UK, a woman was visited and interrogated by the police merely for taking a picture of a sticker critical of gender ideology.
In 2015, the BBC made a documentary about Iran’s lesbians and gays being pressured to undergo sex-change operations, and Westerners denounced what was happening in Iran as homophobia. But Western institutions pathologize gender non-conforming children to such an extent that they mutilate these children, sterilizing them in the process and turning them into lifelong medical patients. These crimes against children are allowed because of rigid gender norms (of which homophobia is an integral part).
Six years ago, The Times reported that five NHS clinicians who had worked at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service had quit due to ethical concerns, notably that their therapy constituted a form of conversion therapy for gay children. According to The Times, ‘so many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left”.
Westerners manage to look at this and tell themselves that what they are seeing is “tolerance” and “acceptance”. War is peace. Mutilating and sterilizing gender non-conforming children so that they are a simulacre of the opposite sex is “allowing them to live as their authentic selves”. Sexism and homophobia are ignored, minimized or reframed as progressive–as long as they come from Westerners.
(As an aside, transactivists never explain why they have opposite standards and narratives for adults and children. Why is it that in the case of adults, we are told that gender identity has nothing to do with biology, that a penis is as much of a “female organ” as a vagina, and that to associate womanhood with wombs or vaginas, or to expect trans-identified males to be have body dysmorphia and/or to alter their bodies before accessing female spaces, is heinous transphobia… But when it comes to children, the script is flipped and it is a matter of life and death that gender identity and biology be forced to align in the traditional sense. We are told that children will kill themselves if we don’t block their natural puberty and modify their bodies (curiously, we are never presented with data on suicide rates of trans youth before the advent of hormone blockers, cross hormones and “sex-change” operations). By the adult standards of the trans movement, to deny a trans girl the possibility of becoming a trans woman with a functioning, fully-grown penis; to deny a trans boy the opportunity to grow into a man with breasts and the capacity to give birth; to make the bodies of trans-identified children wrong rather than to recognize that any type of body is valid for any gender identity, is transphobia.)
Another way that the gender identity movement courts white and Western supremacy is in who it has centered. With the achievements of liberation movements of the past century, belonging to an oppressed or marginalized group came to carry a certain clout in some circles. The fundamental power structures of our society have barely changed though, so wealthy white men and privileged western youth found ways to maintain and gain social status by positioning themselves at the top of this new hierarchy. Affluent people, cosplaying as oppressed, hijacked the momentum that had been built for the liberation of those who experience true oppression. They even hijack the sympathy earned by the trans people who are indeed oppressed and victims of violence, such as trans-identified males who are victims of violence in Latin America (largely as a result of homophobia and being marginalized to the point that they are pushed into the sex industry, which is inherently violent). Straight white trans-identified males in the US (many of whom are indistinguishable from any other man) do not face the same violence, but co-opt the stories of those who do. When self-proclaimed leftists started to devote orders of magnitude more resources to trainings on pronouns and the navel gazing of upper/middle class youth of the world’s most wealthy and powerful country, they aligned themselves more with neoliberal forces than with the workers and oppressed of the world.
In her analysis of what she calls “queer colonial extractivism” in Latin America and especially Argentina, Maria Benetti notes the central role of influential foundations and NGOs, and argues that “the progressive and inclusive rhetoric was the frame in which neo-liberal queer entrepreneurship entered in Latin America. From then on, the legal, political, and cultural discourse began to adjust to the self-identity and constructible model that gender identity presupposes.” In leftist and liberal circles in the US, there is an oft-repeated belief that feminist movements of the past were especially lacking when it came to including and advocating for women who were not white and upper/middle class. This narrative is so seeped into collective consciousness that anything that resembles it is automatically taken to be true, and any proposed remedy is automatically taken to be righteous. Likewise, stories about the successive struggles of various oppressed groups, and the meeting of resistance at every step, are central to how we think of recent history. It was then easy for “trans” to get slotted into the role of the new civil rights frontier, and for women who oppose the abandonment of the core tenets and project of feminism to be cast as reactionary. Continuing the discussion on Argentina, Raquel Rosario Sanchez notes that, ‘Around the world, advocates for “gender identity” policies do not campaign openly as the men’s rights movement that they represent. Campaigners camouflage trans rights as simply a subset of the women’s liberation agenda. Although cynical, it should not surprise us that at a systematic level, their first steps are usually to co-op the institutions that feminists have long-fought to establish: women’s services, feminist organisations and yes, ministries of women.’
One imagines aid dollars being used to address extreme humanitarian need in poor and war-torn countries–but critics have long pointed out that foreign aid is complex and often a tool for soft power and market expansion. It’s worth noting that one of the victims of Trump’s budget cuts was Stonewall UK, a transactivist British non-profit that lost six hundred thousand dollars in funding from USAID. (Stonewall UK is infamous for turning its back on homosexuals, in spite of its name.)
I was born in California and, with Silicon Valley pioneers as grandparents, my Bay Area roots are deep by American standards. (The scholarship that is in my grandmother’s name, and that was established to help female engineers follow in her footsteps, is still very much needed–and very much pointless if males can claim it.) Growing up and living in Europe until my thirties, California and Iran were both my “origins”. After a lifetime of being told how terrible Iran is, it’s the Californian in me that saw my homeland strip away the human rights of women and children and lead in the globalized backlash against feminism. From Silicon Valley to Hollywood and the porn industry, we craft and export culture for the whole world, and what we’re exporting is misogyny. Not to make light of Iran’s repression of women, but the world doesn’t look to Iran to tell it what’s hip. California sets new trends, new norms and new milestones of “progress”. If the United States has positioned itself as the pole of liberal values in the last century, California is the US twice over. And with social media platforms (including Reddit, Medium, WordPress, Youtube and Twitter) having systematically censored feminists over the course of a decade, it’s not just about soft power but the hard imposition of the edicts of Silicon Valley. Jo Bartosh wrote in 2019, ‘In the UK, and indeed across most of the globe, what social-media giants consider “misgendering” might be deemed impolite, but it is not a crime (yet). By compelling users to adhere to a policy which is based in ideology, not reality, social-media mega-corporations are seeking to engineer new social norms. This is undoubtedly a new form of cultural imperialism, whereby the social-justice warriors of Silicon Valley set the parameters of acceptable debate.’
From my early teens, I became aware that the fight against sexism is weaponized for racist and imperialist ends. The Israeli and American genocide in Gaza has made this as horrifically glaring as ever. It took me twenty more years to begin to see that the fight against racism is also weaponized–to keep women in their place. Moving to the US was key to my understanding of this, because the way in which “white women” have been conceptualized and vilified in American progressive culture has much to do with the gaslighting and defanging of feminists.
I have often seen the following question pop up: How is it that a movement that is so obviously by and for the affluent, presents itself – and is believed by many Western progressives to be – about the most oppressed? Raquel Rosario Sanchez wrote ‘If white feminism is a thing, gender identity ideology epitomizes it’. True, but simultaneously, the white/POC binary confuses the issue. When I started frequenting American leftist and “woke” circles, I noticed that the people who most talked about privilege often seemed to be blind to it. US-centrism plays a role in these incongruities, notably because Americanness is so normative that it is often invisible to Americans, so only other identifiers are salient to them. Americans also often assume that their norms and realities are universal, and American liberals tend to keep to circles where racial diversity hides the fundamental homogeneity of the milieu, and where “people of color (POC)” who typically are American citizens, are part of the same elite subcultures and have the same educational backgrounds as the white Americans of those milieus, are taken to speak for the “POC” and the “marginalized” of the world. The white/POC binary is relevant at times, but by insisting on seeing everything through this lens and only through this lens, many Americans remain oblivious to the variables that often matter more, as well as to the realities outside their bubble. Among other things, this lens erases class and it erases a Global North/Global South framework. Furthermore, POC are actively recruited to be the face of whatever needs selling. We’ve seen this in the political sphere and I’ve seen it up close in the animal rights circles in which I was active. One black man I knew was very open about the fact that he called himself a vegan only because he was paid to do so, so as to counter the perceived whiteness of the vegan movement.
In the last election, I voted for Jill Stein. It was not with a full heart, because I was voting for the lesser of three evils. Jill Stein’s platform was excellent on many issues but she, too, failed women, and the sexism of the Green Party is well entrenched. In 2020, the Georgia Green Party signed the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and as a result was kicked out of the national Green Party and smeared as transphobic. The national Green Party could have taken the opportunity to also sign the declaration and align themselves with the goal of women’s liberation, instead they doubled down on their anti-woman stance.
Jill Stein’s VP pick was Butch Ware, a Muslim convert, who has announced his campaign for Governor of California in 2026 as a Green Party candidate. Ideally, Butch Ware would have had solidarity with Muslim women (if not all women) and, for example, push back against policies that would force Muslim women to share changing rooms with a man. It’s not likely, given how quickly he backtracked when AOC criticized him for saying that biological males should not be in women’s sports. He immediately took to X to affirm his support for men in women’s sports and his party’s “2SLGBTQIA+ Rights” platform.
One area of concern with the Green Party ticket was Jill Stein’s promise to “prevent and repeal any legislation that purports to protect religious liberty at the expense of the rights of others”. The Olympus Spa in Seattle is a woman-only spa at which nudity is expected. A man brought the spa before the Washington State Human Rights Commission for excluding him from the space, and he won (the spa fought back and the case is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). At a panel discussion on this issue, advocate and former candidate for State Representative Susanna Keilman said that many Korean women had stopped going to the Olympus spa, and she spoke of her fear that her culture, history and traditions were being eliminated. Does Dr. Ware believe that, if this were a Muslim-owned spa that served Muslim women, the spa should be forced to open their doors to people with penises, as long as these people identify as women?
In Canada, Jessica Yaniv, a trans-identified male with intact male genitalia, sued several female estheticians for refusing to wax his genital area. The Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, which represented five of the estheticians, reported that at the hearings, Yaniv “contended that immigrants use their religion to discriminate against trans people because they refused to wax the male genitals of those who identify as women” and that the Human Rights Tribunal had found that Yaniv had a ‘“grievance” against certain ethnic groups and targeted them out of racial animus to “punish” them for their cultural and religious views’. If a similar scenario were to arise with Muslim estheticians in the United States, does Dr. Ware believe that they should be forced to handle male genitalia, as long as the owner of said genitalia identifies as a woman?
Iran forces women to veil themselves in the presence of men; in the US, women and girls are being denied the right to not undress in front of men and boys. In San Francisco, trans rights (men’s rights) activists recently subjected two spas to social media uproar, protests, smoke bombs and complaints to the SF Human Rights Commission, following the spas’ mild efforts to maintain some level of sex-segregation. Both spas have since folded (though one of them still offers men the right to privacy from women). Leftists and liberals pretend to care about Muslims, but they lost their minds at the thought that a spa would provide Muslim women the opportunity to use their facilities, penis-free. Archimedes Banya recently announced their once-monthly Women’s Day would be limited to “biological women” so as to accommodate the religious beliefs of women in their community. Uproar ensued. The spa course-corrected by announcing two monthly “women’s nights”: an “inclusive” one and a female-only one, which they named “cultural and religious night women’s night” and that was “designed to provide a space that aligns with the needs of women from religious or cultural backgrounds who observe practices requiring a female-only environment based on sex assigned at birth.” This was still unacceptable to activists, who protested the first (and last) of these events. Reddux reported that one of the protesters, portrayed sympathetically by the media, is a convicted rapist. The monthly male-only night was not subject to controversy and is still on the schedule. An article about the Imperial Day Spa blithely quotes a trans-identified male about his “hurt” after he was told that a female employee “didn’t like” performing a treatment on him; it is clear that this employee was not warned that her client would be male. There is no acknowledgment that what is being described is sexual assault of the female employee. Her “hurt” doesn’t matter.
My aunt has experienced both above mentioned systems. She grew up in Iran as the eldest of eight siblings and emigrated to the US at the age of 18. She strove to build a life that was radically different from what she had seen of the lives of women growing up. Always independent, she’s never been married and is now 80, very fit, and lives in San Francisco. She recently encountered a man in the locker room as she was coming out of the shower at the San Francisco Presidio YMCA. When she complained to the YMCA staff, they were condescending and dismissive. My aunt told me: “When you are from Iran, it feels like whenever you want to do something, it needs to be ratified by the men. Then when you come here, even though you know that there is sexism, it feels theoretical. You still feel like you are free to make your life and do what you want to do. When this happened at the YMCA, I felt for the first time that we are just as limited here, that we only ever have what the men deign to give us, and we’re supposed to just take it and say thank you. We are truly 2nd class citizens.”
In her letter to the YMCA, my aunt asked “What about my rights, don’t I matter?” Her words echo those of a 17-year athlete who asked her California school board “what about us?”, after she was forced to share a locker room with a trans-identified boy. When females young or old, white or “of color”, homeless, in prison, or whatever, ask liberals “do I matter?”, the answer is a resounding NO. Andrea Dworkin said that right-wing men see women as private property and left-wing men see women as public property. Where are the politicians willing to step out of this paradigm and affirm women’s personhood?
None of our political parties represent women’s interests–though I wouldn’t say that electoral politics have zero impact. The vast majority of Americans disapprove of the demands of transactivists (in my experience, even some fundraisers for the ACLU become upset upon learning about the work that the ACLU does to push gender identity ideology). This dissatisfaction was leveraged by the Republicans to ensure their win. The new administration’s Executive Orders on gender identity, starting with “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, are a win for women–but the broader picture is bleak (for women and almost everyone else).
It goes without saying that Trump, Vance and Musk are simply another flavor of misogyny. Conservatives have benefitted from erasing feminists from the picture so as to portray themselves as leaders in the fight against gender ideology and turn the public towards conservatism. Gender critical feminism is a continuation of second-wave feminism, i.e. the feminism that first articulated a critique of gender as a harmful social construction, the feminism that was born from the leftist movements of the 60s and 70s. It is gender critical feminists who have followed the issues around gender ideology from the start, who have produced the analysis and built platforms to share it, who have fought censorship and sanction, who have taken the risks and received the backlash. I would wager that most still consider themselves somewhere on the Left.
By erasing this part of the Left, the Right was able to portray itself as the only pole of sanity and funnel the public to itself. For a time, the Left (or leftist men) also benefited from making feminists invisible, because it allowed for misogyny to win out and put women back in their place (which on the Left entails being champions and workhorses for every cause except that which is specifically their own). People who saw themselves as progressive and who had doubts about the progressiveness of gender ideology, looked around, didn’t see anyone in “their clan” who opposed gender ideology… and concluded that their concerns were either unfounded or that it was best to not voice them. (For years, I had the nagging thought “is this not just gender essentialism?”, but I repeatedly told myself that there might be something I was missing.) Conformity was achieved by creating the illusion that the vast majority of people, or at least the “good people”, were on board. The façade is now crumbling.
Many who care about women’s rights wanted to give the Democrats their vote–they simply asked that the Democrats offer something slightly better than the Republicans and they did not feel that the Democrats were listening. I do have hope that things can change; the UK Supreme Court has just ruled that the legal definition of woman is based on biological sex, and the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has found that UPenn violated Title IX by allowing men to compete in women’s sports and occupy women’s spaces. However, at this time, women in most of the world do not have a political home. We have been working at the grassroots to rebuild political power, coming together powerfully across nations. We’ve had to start again from scratch: to re-explain that sex-based oppression exists and why feminists before us fought for what they fought for. This time, we’re also wading through the defenses of liberals who sold out women’s rights while smugly calling themselves “inclusive”. If the Left wants to finally ally itself with women, it will require a real moment of consciousness-building. They looked forward to the day where they would be congratulated for being “on the right side of history”, but the reckoning that the present day actually requires, is for Western leftists and liberals to face their sexism.
