#WomenRise: The Power of Global Solidarity

I used to speak and write a lot about the grassroots, especially in the context of food system change. The power of the grassroots, the importance of the grassroots, the importance of keeping things grassroots, etc etc. I admit that sometimes I would pause and ask myself if I really believed what I was saying or if I was just going through the motions–all the more as I saw the obstacles faced by the grassroots.

This past Friday was a true testament to the power of grassroots activism, even when one faces a Goliath. Women have been fighting big money, tremendous bias, media that ignores us and social media giants that have repeatedly censored us. And yet we still managed to speak to each other and organize with each other. No wonder the Taliban don’t want women hearing women’s voices. It’s like the water that gets through and around the boulder.

When I met Chema in the early 2000s, he was an independent media activist. Where he was squatting was also an Indymedia center. To witness that and then to see how independent media was overtaken by mega corporations run by tech bros was depressing enough – to then also see, as soon as I got involved in feminism online, how quickly those tech giants silenced and shut women out was chilling. I am referring to Youtube, WordPress, Twitter, Google Play, Reddit, Medium, and I’m sure I’m missing some (I’m not going to link stuff now but feel free to contact me for articles on any of these).

To see then how women have nonetheless managed to speak, and connect, and be heard, and raise awareness, and find solidarity, and organize, and have an impact, is amazing. This past Friday, as Germany’s repressive, regressive, wholly misogynistic Self-ID law went into effect, women from East to West rose up and said NO. We went to German consulates and embassies, and those who couldn’t posted pictures online. Grassroots activism doesn’t have to be about getting hundreds or thousands into the streets; there are so many ways that one can build a powerful movement and that something relatively small or accessible, like posting a picture with a hashtag, can have a big impact. The importance of creativity in particular shouldn’t be overlooked.

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I was at the SF protest, joining women across national borders and also ideological ones. Indeed, the SF protest was organized by Women Are Real and WOLF, which was founded by Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, and Lierre joined us in SF. I have a lot of respect for Lierre as a writer and organizer, however, outside of feminism, I don’t merely disagree with her views; she is an important part of a whole trend that I spent years critiquing and organizing against (mostly in the form of growing a movement for veganic farming). Those disagreements stand, but movements and actions need people and focus. November 1 was the day to come together and focus on women and the harms of Self-ID.

My aunt also came out in support of German women. On the topic of small things that make an impact: Over the years I had mentioned my objection to gender ideology to my aunt, and while she agreed it was all BS, I didn’t think she was keeping abreast beyond what regular media covered. Then the last time I saw her, I said something to the effect of gender ideology being about misogyny and she exclaimed “Of course it’s misogyny!” and went on about “all these men” who say they’re women. I was a bit surprised – where was this coming from? – but carried on. Then when I mentioned I was going to the WDI convention, she knew it was in Atlanta. Huh? It turns out that she’s been on the WDI mailing list since I forwarded one of their fundraising emails to some of my contacts years ago (I think it was the fundraiser I mentioned in Shabe Yalda, or why I paid $12 for Nancy Pelosi to read about women’s rights).

If you need some inspiration this week, check out the hashtags #WomenRise and #SelfIDHarms on X, and watch (and share!) this beautiful video.

 

Read more: Rocking the Reichstag by Josephine Bartosch

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

Great interview on the state of the left: identitarianism, appeals to authority, transactivism as McCarthysm, and more

“When you challenge an oppressor, the first thing you have to be able to say is ‘You are not who you say you are’. And what identitarianism does is that it deprives us of the ability to say that” – Stuart Parker

This is a great interview with Stuart Parker – a guy I hadn’t heard of before this – on the state of the left. I am generally not a big fan of Meghan Murphy’s youtube content (though I think she is an excellent writer when it comes to feminism) but this interview hits it out of the park. There is a lot that’s spot on and well articulated regarding transactivism as a new McCarthyism, the stupidification of the left and how gender identity fits into that, identitarianism and more.

A couple of comments: Regarding this stupidification, he points out that the billionaire class pushes gender identity ideology because it’s in their interest that we be incapable of having coherent conversations with each other. While I appreciate that he names that this is what’s happening, I think it is only part of the picture. They don’t mention in the same context that this is also a direct attack on women’s rights, which also serves the billionaire class (not to mention men as a whole) because the exploitation and disempowerment of women is foundational to capitalism and especially to several industries that are currently flourishing.

While this is mitigated by the comments on billionaires in a different segment, they do also depict the gender ideology movement as being genuinely about the safety of trans people, which is misleading. For example, they rhetorically ask who it serves to repeat the mantra “transwomen are women” and assert that it serves no one, not even trans people. But this isn’t true. It serves men as a class for women to be erased politically, legally and conceptually, and for women’s spaces and resources to be up for grabs again by men. Many transactivists and supporters and funders of the movement are not trans themselves, however I think that in recognizing this point they are also portraying all trans people as being separate from the larger movement, outwardly gender non-conforming and at risk of violence. It seems that the speaker is referring to the trans people of 30 years ago and not taking into account how the definition has changed, especially with gender self-ID. There are men who identify as women, present entirely as male and are therefore not remotely at risk of male violence or in need of third spaces. There are people who identify as trans and also participate in misogynistic harassment and advocacy, who are motivated by misogyny and not merely the discomfort of gender roles or a sexed body. These are not mutually exclusive.

On the question of third spaces, they point to the example of transwomen pushing for separate bathrooms in Thailand as an obvious solution, but that doesn’t square with the current reality of the movement here. Instead, it generously presumes that the problem the movement seeks to address is male violence against trans-identified males, which isn’t true. If it were, why admit entirely male-presenting men to women’s spaces? Third spaces aren’t the solution most advocated for because both on a micro level and certainly on a macro level it’s not only about safety.

Regarding McCarthyism: this is not unique to the gender movement but is instead a fact of woke culture in general. In the few years that Seed the Commons (STC, the organization I co-founded) was active in local animal rights circles, we experienced a lot of unethical behavior from within the movement. I’ve written about the backlash I received for my disbelief in gender, but it actually started before that. One of the issues that people took with us was that we weren’t seen as sufficiently opposed to Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), an animal rights organization/network that is highly contentious and maligned within the movement. My organization never partnered with DxE and none of the founders or board members of Seed the Commons were ever members of DxE. In fact, I have had my own reservations about, and frustrations with, DxE. But what we did was enough to tarnish us as friends of the bad guys and therefore bad guys ourselves.  

This is what we did: In 2016, Seed the Commons signed a letter of support for DxE when they were facing an eviction, we shared a video of theirs on Facebook, and we invited one of the founders of DxE to speak at our conference. For context, we have shared content from numerous groups, many of which are not vegan. I also invited a wide range of speakers to my conference, again, many of which weren’t vegan. Somehow this was never an issue for animal rights folks, but any sign of anything other than hostility towards DxE was subject to veritable policing.   

On the letter and video: When the Berkeley Animal Rights Center (the de facto DxE headquarters) was facing what seemed like an unfair and politically-motivated eviction, STC was one of many organizations to sign a letter of support addressed to the mayor of Berkeley. Both myself and the other founder of Seed the Commons had been very involved in anti-eviction activism in the Bay Area in previous years, and one of our board members was a professional housing advocate and anti-eviction organizer; it would have been strange and hypocritical for us to not extend this barest level of support to a local organization facing an unfair eviction. As soon as the letter was made public (like, instantaneously) one of our volunteers emailed me to ask for an explanation. She had been contacted by a friend of hers who sounded the alarm on, I guess, our questionable associations, or her questionable association to us. 

Just like free speech is for everyone and not just those you agree with, illegal and unfair evictions are no less wrong if the people getting evicted aren’t to your liking. Opposing evictions is a cause that surpasses the story of any individual evictees, and all the more so in the Bay Area. Amazingly, this was not how our volunteer saw things, despite being a person who was building her career and identity on being at the forefront of progressive causes and preaching to vegans about social justice. Instead, she did some mental gymnastics to minimize the wrongness of the eviction and to criticize DxE for fighting back. Her friend then informed her of the video we had shared weeks prior, and that sealed the deal. The volunteer said she could no longer work with Seed the Commons, but that she did want to continue working with me and the other STC founder as individuals. What this really was about was avoiding a public association with a tarnished organization, not because of her personal conviction, but just for the optics. (1)  

As to inviting Wayne Hsiung to speak at our conference, this was used against us for years to follow. Lauren Ornelas, a person who has marketed herself as a reference and arbiter on all things social justice to the animal rights crowd, tried to get me uninvited from Berkeley Earth Day in 2018, using my invitation of Wayne (two years prior!) as a pretext. Berkeley Earth Day was organized by the same person who later dropped me from her book for my gender critical views, but in this instance, she agreed that this was an unreasonable level of guilt by association (and she shared with me that she herself had been bullied into not letting Wayne speak at another one of her conferences, and was very frustrated with what she saw as irrational groupthink on this issue). Lauren got angry with the organizer for not uninviting me and canceled her own talk at Berkeley Earth Day instead. I also later found out that this was not the only time that Lauren had berated organizers for giving my organization a platform, accusing us of being “in cahoots” with DxE. None of this was made public, indeed she asked the organizer of Berkeley Earth Day to keep the whole thing secret. By using guilt by association, a person with clout in the movement was throwing their weight around to exclude others. This was nothing other than behind-the-scenes bullying, which leads me to my next point.    

There is also a connection between identitarianism and McCarthyism, where the first enables the second. In my experience in the animal rights movement, the policing of others often came from people of color or other minorities who put forth this facet of their identity as a way to establish themselves as an authority on social justice. White people are typically not willing to challenge their ideas or behaviors, for fear of being perceived as too fragile, unwoke, etc. In cases where people of color with whom I’ve spoken have plainly used the words “bully” and “bullying” to describe certain individuals and their behaviors, white people were much more diplomatic and circumspect. Identitarianism can foster an environment in which bullying is unchecked, because the opportunity to use your identity to be an unchallengeable authority appeals to a certain type of personality. In his recent article Identitarianism created Jessica Krug, Jesse Singal wrote “If you’re a certain type of attention-seeking person — particularly the type who wants to be able to browbeat or bully others — it must be irresistible to seize this type of power. It’s something that no one can take away from you — who wouldn’t want to be the subject of that sort of deference?”. (2)  

We ended up in a different place than where we started, and it got more personal than planned! But going back to the interview: my few comments and bones to pick don’t change that I find it interesting and very insightful. A+, would listen again.

(1) This is the person whose book I helped make happen, as I mentioned in my post on getting dropped from an animal rights anthology. At some point I will tell that story because as I’ve said before, it is the perfect illustration of the problems with so-called “intersectional veganism”.

(2) Ironically and sadly, despite an apparent reversal of power and increased representation at a superficial level, ultimately power and wealth mostly remain in the same hands. Those who are from groups that have traditionally been unheard and unrepresented, typically remain so. This is also something that I touched upon in my recent post, How being a feminist got me dropped as an author of an animal rights anthology.