intersectionality

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

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

My time got monopolized by two idiotic and antagonistic men.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about the impacts of SB 132 on women:

Dispatch from the feminist animal rights closet

Woke culture has overtaken the vegan and animal rights movements and the effects have been as harmful as elsewhere. I’ve spoken before about how, ironically, this has gone hand in hand with the sidelining of vegan radicals and the trend towards corporatization and pro-neoliberal discourse and activism. Indeed, “intersectional veganism” and the pro-corporate vegan movement are two sides of the same coin.(1)

What I’ve not yet spoken about is the specific issue of sexism and anti-feminism in the AR movement–a topic that would have already been worthy of discussion before the adoption of gender ideology by much of the movement. I don’t know if animal rights/vegan circles and organizations are particularly bad for women in relation to other social movements (it’s not like non-vegan leftist men have a good track record either, and veganism also holds appeal for those who lean right) but I do know that in absolute terms, it’s pretty bad. Now it has gotten even worse. Woke culture has veered the AR movement in an anti-feminist direction, and in some ways this movement is more susceptible than others to the unquestioning acquiescence to the edicts of SJW thought leaders.

With gender ideology, we’ve gotten to a place in the AR movement where women are branded as TERFs; driven out of their organizations; denied platforms and funding due to their feminism; in my case have their work plagiarized (so that I don’t get credit and visibility from it); blacklisted and excluded from events; and the women who avoid these consequences do so at the cost of never publicly voicing their feminist views. Either that, or they just leave the movement.

I wanted to share a dispatch from the closet that many feminist animal rights activists have been shoved into. It’s an email that was sent to me by a female acquaintance after I wrote my post last year on being dropped as an author from an animal rights anthology. I’m sharing it with her permission and I edited it very slightly to keep it anonymous.

Hi Nassim,

Ugh, I don’t know where to begin…

Your early FB posts on this, and Mary Kate’s writings prompted me to pay closer attention.(2) And then I heard that MK got *fired* from her job because of something she’d written -wtf?

A lot of the verbiage had been troubling me but it wasn’t until I read of Meghan Murphy’s talk (in a Canadian library) being hounded and shut down that, with horror and disbelief, I started reading about what had been developing in the past several years, especially in the UK.

I wanted to write to you, especially when you posted your last piece on FB re being dismissed from the book, but, coward that I am, was ashamed to be another of the many women who tell you of their admiration and support, but will not also speak up.

I’ve been following a number of sources and barely have the emotional strength to read about it let alone act.

Not only am I struggling to make a living, but the wildly dystopian and incomprehensible nature of what has manifested out of the whole shift from what I thought was settled years ago— that “gender” is a set of artificial “norms“ imposed, especially on women, not a fixed set of behaviors that one can escape or adopt by “identifying” or surgically altering one’s body—is deeply troubling and frightening…

When I was last with a group of friends, one said,

“Well, I don’t think I’d go as far as to agree with Mary Kate, but…”

What?, but hers is just basic feminism…

I’ve tried writing about it but the fury leaves me unable to focus on anything else.

The lock-step anti-“TERF“ comments I see on FB, by people who consider themselves deep-thinking progressives … is dumbfounding.

At the Conscious Eating Conference at the end of Feb, just before the lockdown, Pax, acting as conference host and moderator, stood at the podium to introduce Carol J. Adams, and found it relevant to loudly assert that “Trans women *ARE* women”.. and the room erupted in wild applause. (3)

Enough for now…

Notes:

(1) While I have long opposed “intersectionality” as understood in the animal rights/vegan movements, this does not at all reflect an opposition actual intersectionality, as formulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

(2) She is referring to Mary Kate Fain, who was kicked out of an animal rights organization she had founded (not only kicked out, but accosted by AR activists who hurled abuse at her on the street). After losing her job she went on to found the feminist website 4W, that in a short amount of time has become one of the most important resources for the feminist movement and that hosts the writings of dozens of women from around the world (and pays them too!); she co-created Spinster, an alternative platform to Twitter which has the habit of booting off uppity women; she is a prolific writer who also recently started a podcast, and on top of that got a job with a radical feminist organization. Basically Mary Kate is some sort of Wonder Woman who could have put her talents towards animal liberation, but the movement preferred to hound her out.
(Read Mary Kate’s story of losing her job in her article Fired For Feminism.)

(3) The Conscious Eating conference is organized by Hope Bohanec, the editor who dropped me from her book because of my feminism. From my interactions with her, it became clear that she has little experience with and interest in human-related issues but strives to tick the requisite boxes of diversity so as to avoid criticism. Being of relative privilege and disconnected from much of the oppression that women experience in this world, she thinks that “transwomen are the most oppressed of women”. This conference took place shortly after Hope dropped me from her book. The focus that year was “to explore overlapping oppressions”; a panel on the history of the animal rights movement with prominent female activists was titled Animal Rights Herstory Panel.
By Pax she is referring to Pax Ahimsa, a trans-identified female who started “educating” the AR movement on gender ideology, “inclusivity” etc etc years ago. Pax’s blog reveals a person who has no grasp of basic feminist analysis and whose ideas are in complete opposition to it.
Carol J. Adams is a renowned vegan second wave feminist who, interestingly, has been attacked by trans activists for various reasons in the past, but is now seemingly on board with gender ideology and has become mealy-mouthed on sex and gender, presumably to gain the approval of the “intersectional vegan” crowd. Maybe this is the sad result of having built an audience composed more of vegans than of feminists.

Maya Forstater, A Galileo of these Nutty Times

Maya Forstater is a gender critical feminist whose court case against her former employer is bringing some visibility to the utter nuttiness of the trans movement and the broader progressive and leftist community.

Earlier this year, tax expert Maya Forstater was fired from her job at the Centre for Global Development for tweeting that men cannot become women. It is an indisputable fact that humans cannot change sex. A male who gets breast implants is still a male. A male who gets his penis reconstructed into a cavity is still a male. A male who wears eyeliner and declares that he has a woman’s soul is still a male. Whether or not one believes in the existence of an innate gender identity has no bearing on this question. Biological sex is immutable.

A few weeks ago her case against her former employer opened at an employment tribunal, where she was grilled on her “belief” that sex is immutable, i.e. for stating a scientific fact. When this started, I wrote on Facebook that this was some Galileo-level shit. But to be honest, I thought that some level of reason would prevail. Not so. Two days ago, the judge ruled that Maya Forstater’s employer was justified in firing her because her view that sex is immutable “is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others”.

It is discriminatory to fire people for their beliefs and utterly fascistic to fire them for opinions expressed in their non-professional life. A few weeks ago a woman posted to Reddit because she was called to meet with her boss over private Facebook posts that were considered transphobic. Imagine what we would have said twenty years ago if we thought of losing our jobs over comments we made to our friends at a pub. We would have cited 1984 and most wouldn’t have believed that in the West we were at risk of such scenarios. Social media has taken over the private sphere and it’s absolutely chilling. And with sexist tech bros as our new communication overlords, women are taking the brunt. Women are routinely banned from social media and sent violent and hateful messages, including rape and death threats, for voicing basic feminist analysis.

In the case of Maya Forstater, we’re not just talking about any beliefs or political opinions. What got her sacked was a plain-old, value-neutral statement of fact. In 2019, women who believe that humans are a sexually dimorphic species are like Galileo in front of a tribunal of believers in a magical gender essence that overrides material reality. I’ve said this before: that the trans movement has gotten acquiescence to their dogma inscribed in law and policy is religious fundamentalism.

Debate causes irreparable harm in this brave new world.

This case is in the UK, but Americans are no better. The stereotype of American conservatives is that they are anti-science and ignorant with their denial of evolution and climate change. Now, progressives have surpassed the right in their anti-science attitude. Ultimately this finds its roots in a deeper problem with the culture that is not limited to political affiliation. In his article Modern Biology and Ecology: the Roots of America’s Assertive Illiteracy, Jim Britell warns that; “In worldwide surveys of people’s grasp of biological science and evolution, the results for the U.S. jump out as similar to pre-industrial societies. Chomsky says that to find the scale of ignorance about modern biology found in America today, one must go to mosques in Iran or rural Sicily. Ten percent of Americans believe in modern evolution; 75 percent literally believe in the devil! Americans do not generally realize that the furious debates about teaching evolution and creationism are unique to America.”

There is a problem with thinking that only “the other” (in the US this would be the red states) are a problem. After Trump was voted in progressives threw the blame for all potential catastrophes on Trump voters, but Democrats are erasing women as a class and removing our sex-based rights. Articles have been circulating for a while about the rise of right-wing authoritarianism (Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin..) and its dire effects on women’s rights, but in Trudeau’s Canada women are being assaulted by men in prison. In California, Democrat Scott Wiener authored a bill ensuring that men can be housed in women’s prisons, regardless of anatomy. This not only puts female prisoners at risk, it forces female guards to conduct searches on male prisoners if said prisoner professes he is a woman. I agree with Jo Bartosch, magical thinking should have no place in law.

Denying the reality of biological sex is anti-science, anti-intellectual and untethered to reality. But denying that biological sex is socially, politically and legally relevant is also part of a fundamentally conservative backlash against the gains made by women. It is on par with “I don’t see race”–you can’t fight sexism if you can’t name sex. You can’t provide women their own services, spaces and resources when you can’t define the word woman. People support this because it has been cloaked as social justice and nobody wants to be on the dreaded “wrong side of history”. Sadly, the failure of progressives to think critically is harming those who are already the most marginalized and vulnerable. Women in prisons and homeless shelters are forced to share rooms with men as long as the man proclaims he has some inner feminine essence, children are medicalized and sterilized for gender non-conformity and lesbians are being attacked by the woke crowd for not having sex with males. Not quite the social justice we were sold.

From the New York Times article, Across the Globe, A Serious Backlash Against Women’s Rights: ‘Over the last few years, a global surge in right-wing, authoritarian movements has spurred a broad backpedaling on women’s rights and, in particular, protections against gender-based violence. “In general, we see a very serious backlash against women’s rights,” said Kalliopi Mingeirou, who leads the U.N. division focused on ending violence against women and girls. And that backlash, added Mingeirou, has helped normalize violence and harassment, either by dismantling legal protections or by hollowing out support systems.’ What they fail to mention is that transactivism is part of this backlash and the Left has been eating it up.

Women who speak the truth are branded as witches again. Is it any wonder that JK Rowling came to our rescue? The meltdown in response to her tweet has been epic. Transactivists are calling her a TERF, a nazi, a bigot, a cunt; complete with calls for her books to be banned and burned. Ricky Gervais has come to the dark TERF side and people are finally starting to ask what the hell is going on. So far, progressives have gone along with the demands of transactivists without trying to understand what those demands were. With the firing of Maya Forstater, the dogma they have been ramming through law and policy with no public discussion is starting to become clearer.

Dr. Jane Clare Jones explains that it is thanks to this lack of public engagement that their gains have been won, “The reason why the trans rights movement cannot allow there to be a public discussion around its political ideology and its implications is because if people really understood that it’s political ideology is committed to denying that there are male and female humans, then the collective ‘What the Actual Living Fuck?’ would be so deafening that the whole political project would be dead in the water. So, instead, it has had to be achieved by a) a ton of behind-the-scenes collusion between trans rights organization and individuals in positions of political and civic power and, b) silencing public interrogation by bullying dissenters, hamstringing the press and public bodies, and making sure that everyone understands the very high social sanctions for speaking out.”

Hopefully, the visibility of JK Rowling and Ricky Gervais are ushering in this collective “WHAT THE ACTUAL LIVING FUCK” moment. It’s about time.

Is Animal Liberation Incompatible with Food Sovereignty?

I am currently writing a chapter on the role of social movements for a very exciting book on the transformation of food systems, and thinking about the different elements that will allow us to build a veganic food system. I remembered this comment that I posted to Animal Liberation Currents some months ago and would like to share it here.

I founded the People’s Harvest Forum in 2015 as a way to promote food sovereignty and agroecology, while working within a vegan ethic. I think that if we simply present veganism as the better way to eat or grow food, then advocating for a strict adherence to veganism is fundamentally incompatible with food sovereignty. This is one of the reasons the forum never included presentations on veganism as a necessary solution to environmental, social or public health issues (e.g. veganism as a response to climate change). On the other hand, I think we can stand firmly behind an animal liberationist ethic and promote veganism in the same way we promote women’s liberation and other social justice causes – with all the conundrums these pose and despite the fact that these are also often at odds with the traditions and the status quo of groups with which we interact.

The reason vegans feel the need to make veganism about everything else under the sun is because we are an ideological minority and veganism is very far from being normative, so it stands out in a way that accepted positions don’t. The strategy of the People’s Harvest Forum was to consciously reverse that attitude and treat our empathy towards cows as something no different than our empathy for dogs. So in our panels on agroecology, there was of course an element that went against tradition, however those who promote agroecology will tell you that while they want to maintain tradition in how we grow food – to a large extent – they also want to do away with tradition in regards to relationships of power between men and women. There are vegans who would have liked to help build the food sovereignty movement and have had difficulty plugging in. Some have given up activism, others have given up veganism. Seed the Commons was created as third solution, a place for activists to work towards a transformation of our food system that includes nonhuman animals in our ethic.

Unfortunately, the animal rights movement is mostly focused on individual consumption – even the voices that pass for radical in the movement push the notion of voting with ones dollar. There needs to be a true radicalization of people in the movement (by this I do not refer to extremist tactics but rather to a focus on transformation of food systems instead of the liberal approach of advocating for small improvements to existent structures and corporations). On the other side of it though, I don’t think the food sovereignty movement will easily take on animal liberation because so many people within the movement live off of animal exploitation. For better or worse, the social transformation here is probably going to be led by a more middle class, urban mainstream. As veganism becomes mainstreamed, it will be easier for people within radical movements to advocate for an inclusion of nonhuman animals.

Your Intersectionality is Bullshit

These days I’m less connected to the animal rights movement and less present on social media, so I’m not on top of trends, but for a while intersectionality was a BIG THING. It’s always been bullshit, but I thought people had moved onto different framing, different language…. like “radical veganism”. I guess I was wrong. Getting back on facebook has me coming across pro-intersectional posts from vegans, so the bs still needs pointing out.

I see the appeal of the punchy, self-righteous language, but this is empty virtue-signalling. The people who popularized “intersectionality” in the animal rights movement are in no way fighting against ALL oppression. Or even the most widespread oppressions. Who right now is organizing against the wars in the Middle East? What vegans are working with the labor movement? And don’t get me started on how the “intersectional” crowd is purging women who speak up for women from the movement.

These messages are harmful because they shame people away from their activism. Single-issue activism is completely fine as long as it doesn’t serve to oppress others. Yes, your animal rights activism should not become a vehicle or an excuse for racism. This is not the same as saying that if you spend time on animal rights activism you must also spend some time doing anti-racism activism. Basically, this is an All-Lives Matter response to animal rights or whatever other activism is being shamed (typically animal rights or women’s rights; other movements are more often left alone to do the limited good they do).