Radical Feminism | Sister Outrider

Open Letter to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Staff and Trustees

Posted on September 18, 2021 by Claire

With thanks to Jean Hatchet for her feminist documentation and transcription work. This one is for Sally, and all the other women in too vulnerable a position to publicly advocate for single-sex services.

Dear Edinburgh Rape Crisis,

My name is Claire Heuchan. I’m a survivor of men’s sexual violence. And I’m writing this letter to express concerns about the troubling implications of comments made by your CEO, Mridul Wadhwa, at a recent event with SayiT Sheffield. This letter is in no way intended as an attack on Edinburgh Rape Crisis; I have the greatest respect for your organisation, and believe you do lifesaving work. The recorded incidences of rape and attempted rape in Scotland continue to skyrocket, yet the conviction rate is among the lowest for any type of crime – which means that you are, unfortunately, more necessary than ever before. But women who have survived horrific acts of male violence are going without support, self-excluding from your service and others, because these spaces are now mixed-sex.

That’s not an untruth, exaggeration, or story made up to fit a particular agenda. It’s the reality here in Scotland; a reality acknowledged directly by your CEO. Wadhwa admitted that “in Scotland, where you have large groups of survivors, some are not using our services because they see us as trans inclusive and feeling that they may be exposed to an issue that they are not prepared to deal with.” But women aren’t self-excluding because “they may be exposed to an issue.” They’re self-excluding because they may be exposed to males in the aftermath of surviving male violence. Any trauma-informed service – as ERC claims to be – must have the capacity to acknowledge why that is problematic.

Wadhwa recognises that survivors are self-excluding from mixed-sex services. But frames the attitudes of women who have survived male violence, as opposed to the mixed-sex spaces, as the problem. These comments were made by the CEO of ERC – someone with the power to shape the ethos of your organisation and survivors’ experiences within it. Wadhwa’s words have consequences, as does the attitude they embody.

The feminist policy analysists Murray Blackburn MacKenzie “wrote to Scottish Women’s Aid to ask whether they were aware of any work undertaken by any of the violence against women and girls organisations in Scotland that sought to quantify the scale of potential self-exclusion by women from both specialist and mainstream services should they admit transwomen.” They received no response. Transparency and public accountability would both go a long way towards resolving the conflict of interests where self-ID is concerned.

Therefore, I would like to know: has Edinburgh Rape Crisis undertaken a change impact analysis or any other study into the consequences of making your services mixed-sex spaces? And, if so, will the findings be made public? In the absence of data from Rape Crisis or Women’s Aid, Women and Girls Scotland undertook their own research. And this is what they found:

“A majority of women (80.1%) said that female victims of male violence should be able to access female-only survivor support services and refuges, and a majority (71%) said that if they had reason to use survivor support services or a refuge, they would not be comfortable if the service was inclusive of trans-identified males.“

Since 2018, Women and Girls Scotland have pointed out to both Rape Crisis Scotland and Scottish Women’s Aid “that failures to be clear regarding whether or not their network of providers will offer their services on a female-only basis for those who need it, has led to women self-excluding from their services.” I don’t know how many women have self-excluded from Rape Crisis or Women’s Aid services because they are mixed-sex. Apparently, nobody outside of these organisations does. But I would argue that if even one woman self-excludes from these services, that is one woman too many.

No woman is disposable. And it is nothing short of Orwellian that women are now self-excluding from services because of policies made in the name of ‘inclusivity.’ It’s not inclusive if it doesn’t work for women. And ‘women supporting women’ was a banner founding members of Edinburgh Rape Crisis marched under. It was a founding principle of your organisation. Nobody says it better than Caroline Burrell, who led ERC before Wadhwa:

“Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was founded by a group of women who wanted to create a safe and confidential space for women who had experienced sexual violence.”

Burrell’s successor has deviated from these principles, arguing that “being really radical in our inclusion of those who are marginalised does not discriminate against those who have relative privilege in our society.” But what “privilege” does this mean, when at least 1 in 4 British women will experience male violence? Two women a week are killed by a current or former (male) partner in England and Wales alone; and approx. 85,000 women experience men’s sexual violence every year. Male violence against women and girls happens at a similar rate in Scotland – and, indeed, around the world. No other demographic is assaulted and killed on this scale; not in Scotland. Therefore, I’m concerned that ERC’s CEO seeks to create a hierarchy of survivors by positioning women and girls as an advantaged party.

*Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre: Women Supporting Women*

When it comes to male violence, women as a sex class are the least ‘privileged’ demographic on the planet. Yes, the vulnerability of some women is heightened by race, class, migration status, disability, faith, or sexuality. And specialised services do vital work, with significantly less funding than mainstream organisations. But sex is the commonality between women’s experiences of male violence, and feminist analysis must reflect that.

Wadhwa also suggests that “organisations might… have open conversations with survivors if they wish and are willing to engage around what equality and diversity means.” But the women’s sector exists to support women through the aftermath of male violence, not do EDI training with survivors.

The SayiT Sheffield event is not the first time Wadhwa has advocated services carry out a form of EDI training with survivors. Speaking on the Guilty Feminist podcast, Wadhwa stated that “sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well. And so, you know, it is not a discerning crime. But these spaces are also for you. But if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma. But please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices.”

As Raquel Rosario Sánchez points out, this directly contradicts ERC’s claim that your services are “trauma-informed” and “non-judgemental” through “judging victims by informing them that they had to ‘reframe’ their trauma so they could overcome the entirely natural fear and distrust that male violence induces on victims and survivors.” Somehow, it’s never men that are asked to do the heavy lifting in terms of trans inclusion – even though they perpetrate the violence that put women and trans people both at risk. But, in this case, that work is put upon women who are trying to make sense of perhaps the worst trauma they will ever experience.

I am far from the first feminist to highlight this issue. For Women Scotland described Wadhwa’s Guilty Feminist appearance as “a masterclass of gaslighting”; and they’re not wrong. FWS have also been consistent in championing survivors’ right to access single-sex services in the aftermath of male violence, and – if the content of this letter has not already made it abundantly clear – that’s a cause I will support until my dying breath. Without a trace of shame or regret. But Wadhwa accuses women who want single-sex services of “associating with fascists and those who would want to eliminate anybody who is not cisgendered and white in our society.”

To whom is Wadhwa referring? Such unsubstantiated claims and veiled comments only add to the toxicity of gender discourse in Scotland. Lorde knows I have little time for the single-issue Gender Critical crowd. But, to the best of my knowledge, not a single woman among them has given even tangential support for the genocide of people of colour and/or LGBT people. And Wadhwa’s claim pours gasoline on a public discussion that was already explosive.

I advocate women-only space as a Black lesbian feminist. And in so doing I would much sooner stand beside Women and Girls Scotland (spearheaded by working-class feminists) or For Women Scotland than a Rape Crisis CEO who prioritises their own interests above the needs of survivors. Some may point out that these WGS and FWS are new and relatively untested, to which I would say that grassroots feminist groups emerge from need – in this instance, a need that is not being met by established and government-funded feminist organisations.

In her book Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation, campaigner Julie Bindel warns against the dangers of “femocracy”; the corporatisation of the sort of feminist activism that built the women’s sector from nothing. When feminist organisations “became fearful of offending their stakeholders”, Bindel argues, “the form of feminism they espoused became tamer and less threatening to the establishment.” And as I read these words for the first time, I thought of Edinburgh’s feminist organisations – was this why you stayed unanimously silent when Julie was attacked in your city after giving a talk about male violence against women?

More to the point, I wonder: is it fear of public retribution that led to Edinburgh Rape Crisis shifting towards a mixed-sex team and spaces? Is it fear that you will lose your funding? Or a combination of the two? I am not without sympathy. The cost attached to advocating women-only space is now disproportionate as it is vicious. And generations of feminists fought tooth and nail to build the women’s sector into what it now is – if defunded, that infrastructure is not easily replaced. Especially not while the politics of austerity govern Britain.

That being said, what about the women self-excluding from your service and others? When are we going to have an open discussion about the consequences of making services mixed-sex? Where is the research into the efficacy of mixed-sex services? These are all questions in desperate need of an answer.

Edinburgh’s feminist organisations have demonstrated an unwillingness to engage with women’s concerns about self-ID or the Scottish Government’s proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. In this, Edinburgh Rape Crisis is certainly not alone. Engender were scheduled to hold a meeting about the GRA and women’s rights. It was postponed… indefinitely. And I still wonder, if they’d held that meeting, how might gender discourse be different in this country? Let’s face it, this conversation can’t get much uglier.

I think that if Scotland’s feminist organisations had facilitated open and mutually respectful public discussion around this subject – instead of leaving two marginalised groups of people to get locked into a cycle of conflict over social media – we might have reached something close to consensus by now.

But instead we are here: where women self-exclude from a Rape Crisis service, and the problem goes unaddressed. Something has clearly gone wrong in the Scottish women’s sector, when the CEO of a Rape Crisis Centre can repeatedly make comments such as Wadhwa’s without reprisal; especially when, as Wadhwa recognises, some women choose to carry trauma alone rather than accessing support via that service. But it is fixable. If I didn’t think this problem could be resolved, I would have spent my Saturday swimming and reading lesbian books instead of wading further into a public discussion that is utterly thankless and, frankly, excruciating.

I’m writing this letter because I believe it is possible for there to be a range of services that meet the specific needs of women and the specific needs transgender people both; and that, one day, we can build a world where neither set of services is needed because patriarchy has been dismantled. And in the short term it is my hope that these words will open up the space for discussion; between Edinburgh Rape Crisis staff and trustees; between Edinburgh Rape Crisis and the women alienated by the actions of their CEO; perhaps even between Rape Crisis centres across Scotland. The herstory of Scotland’s Rape Crisis movement is one that we can all be proud of; that herstory does not need a “wash and clean”, as Wadhwa suggests, but rather a radical reclaiming as women build this movement’s future.

One last point. Several feminist organisations seem to have taken the ostrich approach to public discussions around sex, gender, and women’s spaces. But this approach relies on the assumption that it will all blow over sooner or later; that we women who want single-sex spaces and services will simply give up and decide not to make a fuss. But that’s not going to happen. Too much is at stake. #WomenWontWheesht. And we’re ready to talk when you are.

Yours in sisterhood,

Claire

Further Reading

Shonagh Dillon (2021). A Scottish Sister Speaks.

Karen Ingala Smith (2021). Counting Dead Trans People.

Karen Ingala Smith (2019). Counting Dead Women – and counting people who identify as transgender

Eileen Maitland (2009). Woman to Woman, An Oral History of Rape Crisis in Scotland 1976-1991. Hampden Advertising Limited

Women and Girls Scotland (2019). Female Only Provision: A Women and Girls in Scotland Report

Keeping Faith: Towards a More Compassionate Gender Discourse

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Claire

This is the ninth part in my series of essays on sex, gender, and sexuality. It’s dedicated to my dear friend Rosa Freedman, as thanks for our wonderful conversations about feminism and faith.

I’ve been thinking about faith recently. Faith means a lot of different things to different people. When I think of the word faith, it’s Red Dead Redemption 2 that springs to mind first – specifically, the outlaw Dutch Van Der Linde screaming at his followers to “have some goddamn faith!” as he makes increasingly erratic decisions that jeopardise their lives. But for my grandmother, a committed Catholic, faith has a wildly divergent connotation. She doesn’t think of a video game, she thinks of church.

Faith has, at times, been a point of tension in our relationship. When I left the church aged twelve, against her wishes; when I came out in favour of abortion at fourteen, beginning to develop feminist consciousness; again, when I came out as lesbian in my early twenties, expressing the view that same-sex couples should have the right to marry. She’s a devout Catholic. And I’m a radical feminist. We do not see eye to eye on many social issues. But we don’t have to in order to hold love and respect for one another, or to connect in a meaningful way.

Faith has brought my grandmother a great deal of comfort over the pandemic. She livestreams mass from her younger sister’s church, and often calls me over to catch a glimpse of the aunt for whom I was named. There is also an adorable little Black girl being fostered by members of the congregation – not knowing her name, we refer to the child as “that wee cutie” – and the sight of her often prompts my grandmother to share her recollections of when I was small. These are not unpleasant experiences, despite her belief and my lack of it. Listening to the priest in the background as I go about my about my morning is akin to ASMR. It’s relaxing, so long as I didn’t listen too closely to the sermon’s contents.

I don’t agree with the beliefs or tenets of Catholicism. Yet I still set up mass on YouTube whenever my Nana asks. Every Sunday without fail, and on a number of week days too. Why? Because I’ve long outgrown that puerile Richard Dawkins school of atheism that dictates every mention of organised religion must turn into a debate. But also because I’m a grown woman who recognises that different beliefs – even when contradictory – can peacefully coexist. Maintaining this belief in the current political climate has been a challenge.

With Stonewall pedalling the line of “no debate” when it comes to gender identity, and the Scottish Government having abdicated all responsibility to facilitate open-spirited public discussions around their proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act, the situation only ever seems to get uglier. In England, academics such as Rosa Freedman and Jo Phoenix “have been threatened with violence, disinvited from speaking and even blacklisted” for the supposed thought-crime of “asserting that there are two sexes — male and female — and for insisting that some spaces are legally allowed to be organised according to sex and not gender identity.” Selina Todd, an academic specialising in feminist and working-class histories, needs security to attend her place of work after threats made in the name of transgender rights.

Here in Scotland, the poet and programmer Jenny Lindsay has been subject to a sustained campaign of smears and targeted harassment. That her latest collection explores themes of menstruation and sexual violence was – in the eyes of some – sufficient evidence for Jenny to be condemned. Joanna Cherry – an openly lesbian politician opposed to self-ID – was threatened with corrective rape by a young man belonging to her own political party, the most extreme example among the tide of abuse she has received. Despite urging from 120 SNP women, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon failed to publicly condemn the targeting of Joanna Cherry.

Ann Henderson – only the second woman to hold the position of Rector at the University of Edinburgh – spent most of her tenure being slandered by students after sharing a tweet encouraging legislators to attend a Fair Play for Women meeting on her personal Twitter account. And Julie Bindel, when she spoke about women’s rights at Edinburgh Uni, was attacked as she left the premises. We had an hour-long security briefing before that event. And only the intervention of security guards prevented Julie from being beaten. Edinburgh’s vibrant community of feminist activists, organisations, and commentators remained almost entirely silent on the matter.

“There had been a protest outside earlier, but that had gone so he was obviously waiting for me. He was shouting and ranting and raving, ‘you’re a fucking cunt, you’re a fascist bitch, you’re a fucking TERF’, and the rest of it. We were trying to walk to the cab to take us to the airport, and then he just lunged at me and almost punched me in the face, but a security guard pulled him away. I got my phone out to film him for evidence and he went for me again. It took three security guards at this stage to deal with him.”
Julie Bindel, in The Scotsman

I could go on. The list of women deemed hateful and therefore hate-worthy for acknowledging the consequences attached to our sex only ever grows. And it is always women. The beliefs of a left-wing woman who believes that sex is the material basis of her own oppression are met with stronger backlash than the views of a right-wing man who actively upholds the oppression of women and trans people both. And I do not think that is a coincidence. Who wins, when feminist women are so viciously targeted? Patriarchy, of course.

I do believe that a better discourse around gender is possible. And perhaps maintaining that faith is foolish, given all the evidence to the contrary. I have lost a great deal more than I have ever yet publicly admitted because of my contributions to gender discourse. But radical feminism is fundamentally a politics of hope. So, I will continue to write, to speak, to connect the dots between how all of these women have been mistreated and the wider socio-political context of patriarchy. And I will do it in the hope of reaching some point of connection with people whose views on gender do not align with my own, so that these words might serve as a bridge towards mutual respect.

Faith is a word that crops up regularly in gender discourse. More specifically, whether an argument is made in good or bad faith. I promise that every word I have published or spoken on this subject is made in good faith. I also recognise that there are bad faith actors on both ‘sides’ of this discussion, which is why some may be reluctant to believe me.

On one hand, there is an extreme fringe of Gender Critical women who believe that trans-identifying people are predatory fetishists. On the other, there is an extreme fringe of transgender rights activists who persist in framing women they deem so-called ‘TERFs’ as legitimate targets of violence. In my previous work I have drawn a connection between “punch a TERF” rhetoric and physical attacks made against Maria MacLachlan, Helen Steel, and Julie Bindel. I will not rehash that argument (though I do absolutely stand by it). What I will say instead is that the extreme fringes of both ‘sides’ of the schism surrounding gender do more harm than good, bringing cruelty and prejudice to a public conversation that is already fraught with tension.

The bad faith actors do so much damage because they intentionally stand in the way of any shared understanding being reached, or consensus being built. For example, when writing about radical feminist responses to gender identity, Sara Ahmed claimed that “there cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are in effect or intent arguing for the elimination of others at the table.” Similarly, in an open letter to Mary Beard, Natacha Kennedy expressed the view that “one side is effectively being forced to argue for their entire existence against a group of people… who would like to see us dead.” This hyperbole is as extreme as it is dishonest.

No radical feminist would ever advocate violence against transgender people. I believe that people identifying as trans deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, to live free from discrimination and male violence. And I have never met another radical feminist who would say differently. The radical feminist goal of abolishing gender is not a call for the “elimination” of anybody, as Ahmed describes it. Nor does it involve, as Kennedy tries to make out, wishing harm on anybody. Quite the opposite. Radical feminists want a world without gender so that everybody – whether they’re female, or someone who identifies as transgender – can live a full life that is unblighted by male violence.

When I say that I wish we lived in a world without homelessness, I am not suggesting that all homeless people should be exterminated. Rather, I am calling for the provision of good quality social housing that is freely available to all who need it, including migrants and people seeking asylum; a welfare system that allows every single person to live in dignity and comfort; a dismantling of the class hierarchy that forces people into abject, inter-generational poverty then treats them as disposable.

Similarly, when I say that I wish we lived in a world without gender, I am not calling for the elimination of people identifying as transgender – or women, for that matter, who are also gendered subjects under patriarchy. Rather, I am calling for an end to the brutal system of oppression that exists as both a cause and consequence of male violence. The UK femicide census shows that 1,425 women were killed by men in the space of a decade. That’s what gender does. That’s what gender is: hierarchy that places men at the top and women at the bottom – costing us our safety, our freedom, our bodily autonomy, and even our lives.

Having survived more than one brush with male violence, I would much rather live in a world where it did not exist. On that, Ahmed and Kennedy and I should all be able to agree. Should being the operative word. Both of them chose hyperbole over truth. There is far more common ground between those who do and do not believe in gender identity than the people making these bad faith arguments would have their readers know.

Another example of a bad faith actor is Bex Stinson – Stonewall’s former Head of Trans Inclusion – who published an extraordinary piece on the charity’s official website claiming that “some people simply don’t believe trans people exist.” Her argument is fundamentally dishonest.

Of course people who identify as transgender exist. Nobody disputes that reality, which is proven by an abundance of empirical evidence. Some people, however, question the orthodoxy that dictates people have an innately held gender identity – as Stonewall states in their glossary of terms.

*Stonewall’s definition of gender identity*

In a way, the concept of gender identity is rather like a faith. I will use the example of Catholicism, because it is the church in which I was raised and the only organised religion on which I am qualified to comment. Some people believe that we all have an innate gender identity, just as some people – like my grandmother – believe that the Eucharistic elements turn into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Other people believe that gender (to borrow Raquel Rosario Sánchez’s brilliant definition) is the social construction of sexist stereotypes, just as there are people who – like me – believe that the wafer and wine are unchanged in nature by the priest’s consecration.

I recognise that the bread and wine exist, just as I recognise that people who identify as transgender exist. While I may dispute the nature of that existence with theologians or queer theorists, I recognise it without hesitation. One need not ascribe to the theories of transubstantiation or gender identity to recognise that the people holding both sets of beliefs deserve to be treated with respect and compassion.

Yes, differences in faith can be a source of conflict. The west coast of Scotland continues to be divided by sectarianism. I grew up hearing nasty rhymes about “Cathy cats” and “Proddy dogs”, malicious comments about “Fenians” and “Huns.” Boys from the local Catholic school and non-denominational (unofficially Protestant) school would constantly fight. And those boys grew into the kind of men who rampaged through Glasgow last month, spreading unrest and violence under the flimsy pretext of a football match’s outcome.

This division based on religion reminds me of nothing so much as the schism around gender. People have done all kinds of ugly things in the name of faith, convinced that they will be remembered on the “right side of history.” Men in particular. That is the commonality between the divides around religion and gender: the conflict in our lives is almost invariably escalated into abuse by violent men.

I am beyond tired of the extremism within gender discourse: of women being hounded out of opportunities to speak or publish, being denied academic freedom, losing out on their livelihoods, needing security guards to do their jobs, being threatened with rape or murder. It is wildly irresponsible to position feminist speech, as opposed to male violence, as the root of harm against those identifying as transgender. And it is unacceptable that the violent misogyny women are now subject to is being reframed as a form of protest. Protest is a resistance of the dominant, patriarchal culture – not a recreation of that culture.

The blame for violence against women and trans-identifying people both lies squarely with the perpetrators: men. And the sooner we recognise that truth, the sooner we can stop wasting vital energy on this conflict and resume the urgent work of dismantling patriarchy. A better, kinder gender discourse is possible. One build upon a foundation of mutual respect. We only have to keep faith. As Angela Davis said: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

Bibliography

Ann Henderson. (2021). Reflections on the University of Edinburgh. IN Woman’s Place UK

Jane Clare Jones. (2015). ‘You Are Killing Me’: On Hate Speech and Feminist Silencing. IN Trouble and Strife

Jenny Lindsay. (2020). The Anatomy of a Hounding. IN Dark Horse Magazine, Issue 42

On the Same Page: Some Thoughts on Gender & Sexuality

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Claire

This is the eighth part in my series of essays on sex, gender, and sexuality. It is dedicated to Keira Bell.

It’s been over a year since I last updated this blog. Longer still since I wrote specifically about the ongoing tensions surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality – otherwise known as the so-called TERF wars. I try not to use words like war to describe this situation, because the military implications of two ‘sides’ fighting ‘against’ each other are needlessly combative and this conversation is already explosive. In fact, I think there’s a reasonable amount of common ground between women and trans-identifying people, since we both exist as gendered subjects under patriarchy. But instead of pushing men to make public spaces more inclusive for all by stopping the violence that puts women and gender non-conforming people both at risk, too many people get caught up in scrapping over the crumbs from patriarchy’s table.

The reason it has taken me so long to publish as Sister Outrider once more is because I am tired. I’m exhausted by the sheer force of vitriol weaponised against women – in particular to lesbians and older women – in public conversations about gender. I’m shattered because I have fibromyalgia, meaning that my body has a proclivity for converting stress into a mixture of chronic fatigue and pain. I’m worn out because it keeps going on, the ugliness of gender discourse and the complexities of navigating this world as a Black, chronically ill lesbian.

To give an example of what I mean by the ugliness of gender discourse: I recently questioned why, tongue in cheek, on International Men’s Day we did not see more organisations posting about ‘mxn and non-binary people.’ This prospect so enraged one man that he told me he hoped I got cancer and died from it. He had Super Mario for an avatar. Another man told me to kill myself and fuck myself – which, if I could do it in that order, would be a miracle nothing short of a biblical. Another man called me a slag. And on it went. You get the idea.

Absorbing this vitriol, I couldn’t help but imagine what sort of conniptions would result if a feminist woman posted anything similarly vociferous about her concerns re: the shift towards ‘International Womxn’s Day’ on social media. When women suggest men take the lead on trans inclusivity, as men are the ones responsible for violence against transgender people, we get abuse. When women question why trans inclusivity continues to be framed as purely women’s work, like the majority of care and emotional labour around the world, we get more abuse. It’s a lose-lose situation. A vicious catch-22 defined, in a large part, by good old-fashioned misogyny. My point – largely wasted on twitter dot com – was that there is more than enough scope for us to acknowledge the specific needs of men, women, and people who identify as transgender or non-binary.

You see, in my opinion, it is necessary and valid that we as a society devote public attentions to men’s issues – like how many men die from suicide each year, or campaigns of public awareness around prostate cancer. And in my opinion it is even more urgent that we as a society devote public attention to the issues facing women. On top of mental and physical ailments, we keep on dying as a consequence male violence. The recent femicide census found that a woman is killed by a man every three days in Britain – usually by a current or ex-partner, often in the window of time after she has announced her intention to leave.

I also agree that it is important for our society to address the issues facing people who identify as trans and non-binary. In the last decade, Britain has seen a 4400% increase in the number of girls referred for transition treatments. That figure is astounding. We owe it to those girls, and future generations, to question why there has been such a colossal spike in referrals. We need to interrogate why so many of those girls are autistic or lesbian or suffering from poor mental health. Otherwise there will be more young women failed by the system – more young women left in the position of Keira Bell.

You may have heard Keira’s name in the news recently, or found her mentioned on social media. This is because she won a landmark victory in her court case against the Tavistock Clinic, which offers a “Gender Identity Development Service.” At 14 Keira started experiencing intense discomfort with her body. As a young person who did not feel an affinity with the feminine gender role and “hated the idea of growing into a woman”, Keira went to the doctor about her troubles. The NHS’s gender clinic for children didn’t consider Keira’s depression or low self-esteem, but rather put her on a medical pathway. After a meagre three appointments, each lasting no more than an hour, the gender clinic put Keira on puberty blockers. She started cross-sex hormones at 17 and went on to have a double mastectomy at 20.

Now, at 23 years old, Keira regrets her transition. She went to court as a claimant against the Tavistock Clinic, whom she argued ought to “have challenged her more over her decision to transition to a male as a teenager.” And Keira won.

The ruling said that “it is highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers. It is doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences of the administration of puberty blockers. In respect of young persons aged 16 and over, the legal position is that there is a presumption that they have the ability to consent to medical treatment.”

What makes this ruling so significant is the following recommendation, which challenges much of the orthodoxy behind young people accessing Gender Identity Development Services:

“Given the long-term consequences of the clinical interventions at issue in this case, and given that the treatment is as yet innovative and experimental, we recognise that clinicians may well regard these as cases where the authorisation of the court should be sought prior to commencing the clinical treatment.”

In an interview with Raquel Rosario Sánchez, Keira says that “I look back with a lot of sadness. There was nothing wrong with my body, I was just lost and without proper support. Transition gave me the facility to hide from myself even more than before. It was a temporary fix, if that.”

When asked how society can address gender dysphoria in children and teenagers, Keira gave the following answer:

“Gender nonconformity needs to be accepted. Role models are really important. Young lesbians or bisexual women, especially those of us who are black or brown, don’t have many role models.”

Keira’s words about the importance of role models for young lesbians weighed on my mind. Especially when news of Keira’s court case was displaced later that day by an announcement: the actor formerly known as Ellen Page had come out as transgender. This story trended on Twitter and was covered by news outlets on an international scale. In this world, it’s inevitable that someone who is globally famous and white is deemed more newsworthy than someone who is neither of those things. But certain outlets who were quick to post celebratory articles about Page adopting the name Elliot, along with he/him pronouns, were reluctant to post content specific to Keira Bell – most notably, the Guardian. And this gulf in disparity of coverage created by the British media felt significant; ideologically driven.

Until recently, the Guardian was lucky enough to have Suzanne Moore on staff as a columnist. While we have had our share of differences in opinion, I have always been a great admirer of Suzanne’s work. She’s feminist, she’s funny, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic there was something deeply moving about her reflections on life – especially those featuring her little grandson. But Suzanne was also guilty of connecting the misogyny women experience to our biological sex (as opposed to gender). She wrote a column saying that “female oppression is innately connected to our ability to reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology, menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our bodies or voices written out of the script.” Many of her colleagues, along with members of the public who ascribe to the theory of gender identity, were furious.

“…the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting. The sewer was opening, a torrent of women-hatred was pouring out, no one seemed to be able to control it. (Was this helping trans people? Was it coming from them? Mostly I think not.)”
– Suzanne Moore

An anonymous letter to the Guardian’s Editor, denouncing Moore as a bigot without any effort to substantiate the claim, was signed by 338 of her colleagues. Her position at the paper become unsustainable, and the Guardian is all the poorer for it. Amongst the reasons Moore left was that “..many of us knew all the stuff that emerged today in the Bell ruling. We got the receipts and we could not investigate it even as medical malpractice. This is unacceptable.” To her fellow journalists, Moore pleaded: “Let it change.”

And she’s right. There needs to be scope for us to ask the difficult questions; to prioritise truth over dogma. So, I shared my conflicted feelings about the news of Page’s transition over Twitter:

I find it depressing how many young lesbians now feel that, because they do not perform or feel invested in conventional femininity, they can no longer be women. And so they shift from identifying as lesbian women to straight men. Compulsory heterosexuality all over again. If coming out as transgender brings the actor formerly known as Ellen Page any measure of peace, then I am glad for them. But my heart also breaks as the lesbian community grows smaller. Again. And loses a role model. Again.

The backlash was swift. Amongst my most zealous detractors was the individual who attacked Julie Bindel after she spoke on male violence against women at a panel hosted by Edinburgh University last year. This did not particularly bother me, as I place no great value upon the good opinion of someone who weaponises violence in the hope of intimidating a woman into silence. That strain of controlling misogyny is as old as the hills. But the sheer volume of responses calling me a monster, a bitch, a cunt, a nazi, a hag, a piece of shit; they got under my skin.

Gender is an intensely personal and fiercely political subject. As such, a lot of people have very strong opinions and even stronger feelings about it. And these tensions are greatly exacerbated by platforms like Twitter, which are engineered towards conflict.

“Elliot’s identity,” one person told me, “whether or not it is the same as yours, is a win for anyone who’s against the rigid and oppressive standards of gender and sexuality.” But to my thinking there is no more “rigid or oppressive standard of gender and sexuality” than that which tells us women can’t love other women, wear suits, and reject femininity; that, if a woman is a butch of centre lesbian, then she must really be a man on the inside.

I’ve seen some argue that it shouldn’t matter to lesbians; that we shouldn’t be upset by news of what one individual chooses to do with their life, or how they identify. But by that logic we wouldn’t care when any women who are visible on our cultural landscape publicly come out as lesbian. Of course many of us take pride in lesbians who choose to be visible. They uplift us by expanding the space for lesbians to be out and proud in public life, and we uplift them in turn by celebrating these women – like Lena Waithe and Jodie Foster.

It can be encouraging, especially for those of us who have been taught from a young age that being lesbian or gay is something shameful. Section 28 – a pernicious piece of legislation preventing local councils and schools “promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” – wasn’t abolished until midway through my childhood. And even after Section 28 was scrapped, homosexuality was still very much stigmatised in our Catholic community. So, like countless others, I made space in my heart for the women who used their platforms to challenge lesbophobia.

Ironically, nobody has expressed the sentiment of why role models matter better than Page. Speaking at a Human Rights Campaign event in 2014, Page said: “I’m here today because I’m gay, and because maybe I can make a difference. I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility. I also do it selfishly, because I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission.”

Page went on to say that “there are pervasive stereotypes about masculinity and femininity that define how we are all supposed to act, dress and speak and they serve nobody. Anybody who defies these so-called norms becomes worthy of comment and scrutiny. The LGBT community knows this all too well.”

And so it feels heart-breaking that a young lesbian who wore dapper suits and rejected make-up, married her wife and said fuck you to heteropatriarchy, has now effectively transitioned into life as a straight man. That is a loss and I will mourn it, irrespective of how many men decide to send me online abuse as a consequence. All with the assumption that I have no skin in the supposed game.

But these questions of gender and sexuality are not abstract to me. From the time I hit puberty, I dreamed of having my breasts and ovaries removed. It was all I wanted. Over lunch, my grandfather mentioned in passing that one of the women in the organisation where he volunteered had a hysterectomy. It felt like a solution to all of my problems.

I dreamed of slicing off my breasts, hips, thighs, or ripping out my ovaries – in short, of desexing myself. I thought that if I made my body neutral (i.e. less female), it would closer reflect who I understood myself to be and then the people around me would treat me as I saw myself. No more unwanted touching in school corridors or discos, no more assumptions that I was destined for motherhood or to play a supporting role in a man’s life rather than greatness in my own. That denial of girls’ potential, something male teachers did so casually, it cut me deep. I resented my body for how people – mostly grown men – responded to it.

Throughout my teens, I was deadly serious about wanting rid of any and all manifestations of female sex characteristics. Every so often I asked my GP to note this desire for a mastectomy and hysterectomy on my medical file so that, in the future, doctors could not claim it was a spontaneous or passing fantasy in order to deny me.

If I bought into the idea that everyone has an innate gender, then I would probably have come out as non-binary. But that implies there are a whole class of binary people out there. Which I don’t believe. I see gender is a socially imposed hierarchy that subjugates women. If there are binary people, it means that a great many women are inherently suited to being burdened with the bulk of cleaning, cooking, and childcare. If there are binary people, it means that a great many men are entitled to dominate, control, and otherwise subjugate women. This biological essentialism has been positioned as the natural order by patriarchy, in order to normalise a system of rampant exploitation.

I am not without empathy for Page, or any other person who identifies out of womanhood. Where Page and I may differ, though, is that I understand the dysphoric feelings that have plagued me since the age of 12 as a product of internalised misogyny.

What does this society offer women? Especially the ones who don’t conform to femininity? In the UK three of us are killed by men every week. A quarter of us experiences male violence in her lifetime. The media teaches us to hate our bodies and buy endless products to “fix” them. Growing up, girls are taught that women are sexual objects to be used and discarded by men, or sources of domestic labour if we are kept; the ones who get stuck with the bulk of childcare, devoid of the rich inner-lives and freedoms that belong to men. These messages are so deeply ingrained in our society.

With the mainstreaming of violent pornography, with social media promoting less realistic and more restrictive beauty standards than ever before – in short, all the backlash to the gains in women’s rights of the last 40 years – no wonder so many girls find femaleness an unbearable state.

I don’t want to “fix” the bodies of gender non-conforming children or adults, because there is nothing whatsoever wrong with those bodies. But our society is deeply broken. It will only become healthy when we move beyond treating femininity as proof of womanhood, or masculinity as proof of manhood. This, unfortunately, is a contradiction of the ideals brought back into fashion by gender identity.

I am fully aware of how much more smoothly my life would run if I simply went along with this orthodoxy. There are countless members of my peer group – young, left-wing feminists – who would embrace me if I called myself queer and non-binary, agemates who shun me now as a lesbian and gender abolitionist. Queer creatives are also very marketable – it would have been easy to do as a number of prominent authors and artists of my generation did, and jettison the word lesbian in favour of a more ambiguous (and therefore palatable) alternative. But what is easy does not regularly coincide with what is right.

And I do not raise my voice in dissent because I relish being difficult – something for which women are routinely punished, in big ways and small. I do it because, unless we connect the dots between women’s experiences and scrutinise gender as a hierarchy, nothing will ever change for the better. This was the principle that guided the women’s liberation movement. And this is the principle that fuels a new generation of radical feminism half a century later.

Ending Demand: The Sisterhood vs The Sex Industry

Posted on June 6, 2019 by Claire

A brief foreword: this essay is an account of Julie Bindel’s talk at an event hosted by Holyrood’s Cross Party Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation on Tuesday the 4th of June, 2019. I hadn’t initially planned to write about it, but this series of essays is specifically focussed on women’s rights – and the sex industry systematically violates those rights on a scale that cannot be ignored. You can read part one here, and part two here.

Dedicated to Julie, who inspired me to be a proud lesbian feminist.

Decriminalising the sex trade means decriminalising violence against women and children. This is the title of the talk Julie Bindel is giving at an event hosted by the Cross Party Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. When my invitation arrives, I don’t hesitate before accepting. That it will take me five hours to get to the venue in Edinburgh and back again is a small concern. Julie has devoted much of her adult life to challenging and campaigning to end all forms of male violence against women and girls. She is a meticulous researcher, and has travelled across continents to document the harms on which the sex industry is built. The opportunity to learn from her is a gift.

I arrive half an hour early and whip out my knitting. Anxiety makes earliness feel like being on time, and being on time feel like lateness. The venue is part of a chain of hotels and resorts that run my grandmother’s timeshare in the highlands of Scotland. Although I have never been to this particular hotel, there is a welcome familiarity to it. And even though we haven’t met before, some of the women filtering in recognise me as the author of this blog or @ClaireShrugged from Twitter. In this context – a room full of women – I have the sensation of being seen and fitting into a community.

When Julie joins us, she envelopes me in a hug. I am delighted to see her again – this time, up north. We’ve had our share of disagreements, yet I am properly fond of her. Julie is a woman who says what she means, and means what she says. Although Julie’s irreverent way of talking about feminist politics has been the subject of more than one controversy, it’s also her greatest strength. Julie is straightforward and wickedly funny in a way that wins people over to feminist causes far more than any stilted performance of wokeness. I sometimes wonder if my generation has lost an element of feminist joy that comes so naturally to Julie. While every feminist has a responsibility to herself and her sisters, the women’s liberation movement won’t travel very far if every step is tentatively made.

We go into the conference room, and it’s encouraging to see politicians from different parties and branches of government gathered to listen to this talk on the sex industry. While we’re waiting, I strike up a conversation with an academic who has been pushed out of her staff LGBT Pride Network – which has never been a particularly welcoming place for lesbians – because she resists the idea that gender is an innate, biologically fixed quality. We have both lost friendships with straight women for differentiating between sex and gender in our feminist analysis. For all the social and legal gains made in recent years, this is an isolating time to be a lesbian.

Ruth Maguire MSP, who is Co-Chair of the Scottish Parliament’s Cross Party Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, welcomes us to the event and introduces Julie with great enthusiasm. She talks about Julie’s work as a journalist, researching and reporting on various forms of male violence against women and girls. As Ruth highlights the importance of her work as co-founder of Justice for Women, I feel frustrated that purity politics prevents more feminists from recognising the tangible good that Julie’s work has brought to countless women’s lives.
Julie is here to tell us about the research conducted for her book, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. She advocates the decriminalisation of selling sex and the criminalisation of buying it – what’s known as the Nordic Model. To Julie, it is abhorrent that any prostituted person should be punished by the legal system. In this we are agreed. According to the End Violence Against Women Coalition, 85% women in prostitution report physical abuse in the family, with 45% reporting familial sexual abuse. Research by CARE describes prostitution as “one of the most dangerous occupations in the world”; it is a minority of women who do not experience violence within the sex trade.

As Julie points out, the vast majority of people selling sex are women. Sex buyers are, overwhelmingly, male – and Julie has more than a few choice words to describe them. In prostitution, we see the sexual politics of patriarchy writ large. Feminists cannot work towards ending male violence against women and girls without engaging fully with the misogyny underpinning the sex trade. The women who survive the sex trade, and the many who do not, are our sisters in feminist struggle.

In my view, those survivors spearheading the abolition movement represent the very best of the feminist movement. I have had the honour of hearing testimonies given by women who have survived prostitution and are now campaigning to end demand. The courage of women like Fiona Broadfoot, Ali-Marie Diamond, Mickey Meji, Ne’cole Daniels, and Bridget Perrier is an inspiration. For all that they have suffered, each of these women works to make the world a safer place for women and girls. I don’t have the words to capture the sheer generosity of spirit this requires. The most powerful voices in the abolition movement are those belonging to the women who have survived the sex industry – and these are the voices Julie amplifies.
To radical feminists like Julie, it is evident that prostitution hinges on inequality. Hierarchies of race and class as well as gender dictate which women are most vulnerable to the sex industry. Across Europe, “there are so many women in prostitution, many of these women having been imported – by pimps – from African countries.” Julie rejects the professional language used to cover up the reality of this situation, such as the phrase “migrant sex worker.” In her words, the sex industry would have us believe that large groups of African women are “hopping on planes to Sweden to do a bit of sex work.” Trafficking is not spontaneous or casual, but a systematic exploitation of impoverished women living in the global south.

In Julie’s eyes, people who are fine with prostitution but opposed to trafficking are following a twisted logic. Trafficking and prostitution are fundamentally connected. The two cannot be neatly separated, each made into a distinct phenomenon. The sex industry is reliant on trafficking to fulfil demand. Government research shows that only 19% of women working as prostitutes in British flats, parlours and saunas were born in the UK.
The trafficking of women is not an anomaly, but part and parcel of the global sex trade. The EVAW Coalition describes Britain as “a significant site of international and internal child trafficking”; the majority of children trafficked in Britain are aged 14-17, and have been trafficked for sexual abuse and exploitation.

Julie identifies a pattern. Arguments that the buying of sex should be legalised tend to frame it as a rights issue. Decriminalisation is positioned as progressive, likened to legalising gay sex. Words like ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ are used by lobby groups to tell us that women want to sell sex. They assert that “it’s a woman’s right to be a sex worker.” But in this process, the men buying the sex are made invisible. We should be asking why men believe they have the right to buy sexual access to women’s bodies. Julie directs a question towards the audience, and it will stay with me for hours afterwards: “What else do we call a sexual act between two people where only one of them is consenting and finding pleasure?”

If indeed these acts of physical and psychological violence occurred in another context, they would be considered as sexual attacks, cruelty, abuse and rape. Why is it that when they occur within prostitution, they are not considered as such? Is it the money that makes them different? – European Women’s Lobby

During her research, Julie has travelled everywhere from New Zealand to Nevada. There are European countries in which a man can pay €60 for a beer, a burger, and the opportunity to abuse as many women as he pleases. Perhaps naively, I am shocked that women’s bodies are served to men alongside food and drink. As Julie talks about everything that she has witnessed, I am filled with admiration at her courage. Documenting the systematic abuse of women, recording and analysing the details of this degradation, is essential feminist work. But it must be difficult to absorb so much human suffering on this scale.

There is one encounter that weighs on her particularly. At a café in Cambodia, a white British man was buying a 16 year old boy to go home and live with him. The parents had agreed, accepting a sum of money from him, and he phoned the British embassy to make the necessary arrangements. 16 is the age of consent. To classic liberals, there is no ethical issue. To those of us campaigning against the sex industry, there is everything wrong with this situation. It is the result of an unholy union between colonialism and capitalism.

In Ukraine, Julie came across a white man from Delaware, Texas who was looking to buy a bride. Bob was approximately 60 years old and recently widowed. He was looking for a young replacement for his wife and opted for a Ukranian woman in the hope that “she would be submissive and compliant”, unlike the women back home who were “too modern” for Bob’s taste. The word “modern”, according to Julie, is easily substituted with “feminist.” Bob wanted a woman easily controlled; someone pliable and impressionable enough to accept his (mis)treatment.

A minority of men currently demand prostitution, but prostitution demands something of them too. They have to be proficient in viewing women as dehumanised sexual objects. It is a prerequisite for a man actually being able to stand having sex with a woman who doesn’t freely want to have it with him, let alone desiring this and forking out for the privilege. In paying for sex, not only do punters deem consideration of the genuine feelings and wants of women they are paying a trifling irrelevance to the act, many require the performance of the brutal charade that [prostituted women] don’t even possess these basic human faculties. – Kat Banyard, Pimp State

Policy makers are told by the sex trade lobby that New Zealand Model is ideal. This means that prostitution, brothel-keeping, living off the proceeds of someone else’s prostitution, and street solicitation are all legal. Juno Mac and Molly Smith argue that legalising commercial brothels is preferable, because it means that women in prostitution don’t have to work on the street – where they are more vulnerable to men’s violence. But since New Zealand fully decriminalised the buying and selling of sex fifteen years ago, street prostitution has quadrupled.

The intensity of men’s violence against women in prostitution is horrifying. I find most of Julie’s anecdotes deeply upsetting. In particular, the story she tells about meeting a young woman whose bones had been so badly broken by johns that she needed a zimmer frame to walk – something that plenty of sex-buyers liked. Her health had been ruined by men’s violence, along with drug and alcohol addiction. Research shows that 87% of women involved with street-based prostitution in Britain use heroin. When men’s violence is an everyday reality, any form of escape would be welcome.

The Nordic Model isn’t perfect, in Julie’s view, but “there is a normative shift when the buying of sex is criminalised.” Cultural values are more important than the letter of the law. In the future, Julie wants to see generations of girls and boys raised to see buying sex in the same light as smoking in a public building: unthinkable, harmful, a departure from acceptable behaviour. She doesn’t believe the law alone should be a deterrent. Rather than seeing men in jail for abusing women, Julie wants the pandemic of male violence to cease altogether – and with it, the demand for prostitution.
While a lot of what Julie describes makes for difficult listening, the alternative is looking away – which means being complicit in the violence men enact against women and children around the world. Julie’s vision of a world free from the sex industry makes me feel optimistic. As she points out, no other manifestation of inequality is treated like it’s inevitable. Child poverty has existed for as long as prostitution, and – rightly – many people work to abolish it. In the same spirit, we must band together and collectively work to dismantle the sex industry.

I leave the hotel with a copy of Julie’s book tucked under my arm. Walking back to Edinburgh Waverley, I try to envision a world in which the choices available to women aren’t defined by poverty, racism, or gender. Even my choice of route to the station – where and when I will walk through which streets – is influenced by a fear of male violence. We have a long way to go. But with women like Julie at the vanguard, a feminist revolution feels possible.

Lessons from Canada: On Women’s Libraries and Liberation

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Claire

A brief foreword: this essay is the second in a series, written about events in Scotland which explore and champion women’s rights. (You can read the first, my account of Meghan Murphy’s talk at the Scottish Parliament, here.) This essay describes the phenomenal talk Bec Wonders gave at the For Women Scotland event held on Friday the 14th of May, detailing her experiences as co-founder of Vancouver Women’s Library and the value of knowledge produced by second wave feminists. Again, this is my personal account of the event. Although I have tried to be faithful to each contribution in letter and spirit, there is always the potential for human error.

Dedicated to Bec, who truly is a wonder. Never have I met a woman with a more fitting name.

Secret locations and covert meetings are typically associated with espionage, not feminist politics. And yet, in the year 2019, women are often forced to keep the venue secret if we are to meet up and discuss our rights in safety. It is essential for any oppressed group to organise collectively if we are ever to overthrow the system that makes us marginal – in this case, patriarchy. Despite the fresh waves of criticism and controversy, there is a new wave of women’s groups starting to form across the United Kingdom.

Down south there is Woman’s Place UK, who have run a series of successful panel discussions about women’s sex-based rights and recently released a manifesto. Their aims include universal free childcare, sustainable investment in the women’s sector, and increased representation of women in public life. And here up north we have two new grassroots groups campaigning around women’s rights: Women and Girls in Scotland, and For Women Scotland. I have been following their work with interest. And so, when For Women Scotland release tickets for an event in Glasgow, I book a place.

Lessons from Canada is the second official meeting co-ordinated by FWS. The speakers are Meghan Murphy, editor of Feminist Current, and Bec Wonders, co-founder of Vancouver Women’s Library and doctoral researcher. The day before the event, FWS contacts ticket holders directly with the venue details. Boarding the train to Glasgow, I am filled with a sense of excitement. The sun is shining and the sky is blue, which isn’t an everyday occurrence in the west coast of Scotland. And I am going to spend an evening talking, laughing, and drinking with women from a broad range of backgrounds. What more could a feminist ask for?

When I arrive at the venue, there are two security guards keeping watch. Their presence is a comfort. We have all been told to bring ID as part of the security protocol, so I show my driver’s license and sign in. The FWS team are all generous in their praise of the blog post I published about Meghan’s talk at Holyrood. One woman tells me I took the heat right out of the subject – and considering conversations about gender have reached boiling in Britain, this is the best possible feedback I could have hoped for. Nobody wins when the discussion surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality becomes antagonistic – or rather, nobody wins except straight white men. The sooner this conflict is resolved, the more energy women and gender non-conforming people can direct towards dismantling white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.

While waiting to go in to the lecture theatre, I bump into women I know from the digital and analogue spheres of my life. This is one of the great joys that come with occupying feminist space. I am always glad to see Magi Gibson, whose poetry and boldness are both an inspiration. During her time as Reader in Residence at Glasgow Women’s Library, I was too shy to talk to Magi much. But the stories she read us each week, all excerpts of women’s writing, began to nourish a confidence in me.

The books Magi read from, the way they grabbed my imagination and tugged at my heart, unpicked the threads of misogyny I had internalised. After hearing them, it became impossible to think of women’s writing as lesser or insignificant – the way formal education often positions women’s writing in relation to men’s. And seeing the way Magi carries herself, poised with an element of playfulness, was part of what allowed me to stop making myself smaller in public space. Positive female role models make a powerful difference.

When I go through to the lecture theatre, the room is buzzing with positive energy. Crowds are often a source of anxiety for me, and yet I feel at peace in this lecture theatre. The room has a good vibe. Once more, it is mostly women in attendance; women from broadly different social and economic backgrounds finding common cause together.

Susan Smith, from the FWS team, kicks off the proceedings. She tells us that this is only For Women Scotland’s second public meeting, and I am impressed that in such a short period of time they have connected with an international sisterhood. According to Susan, FWS has members from the Scottish borders right up to the highlands. They are keen to support and encourage sister groups around the country.

There is a moment when Susan describes the FWS team as “our ladies” before correcting herself; “women”, Susan says, to applause. Many women in the room, me included, have fought to escape the confines of ‘lady’ – it feels good to hear a term that is loaded with gendered expectations being so roundly rejected. And there’s more applause for Joan McAlpine, the first MSP, and Joanna Cherry, the first MP to bring these conversations about sex and gender into the political mainstream.

On this note Susan introduces Bec Wonders, who is our first speaker of the night. Bec is working on a PhD researching print culture within the second wave of the feminist movement, and from the moment she starts talking it’s evident that Bec has found a sound balance between feminist theory and practice.

In February 2017, Bec opened Vancouver Women’s Library with a friend. To begin with, the Library consisted of 80 books from their personal collections. It opened from the “shared belief that women’s writing is revolutionary, women’s perspectives are world-changing, and women’s histories profoundly matter.” The Library’s purpose was “sharing books by women among women.”

From her research, Bec has reached the conclusion that “women’s presses, bookstores, and libraries were not intended to exist in isolation.” She describes reading as “relational, a call to action that demands feminist accountability.” There must always be a connection between feminist ideas and feminist actions – this, I agree with completely.

A feminism that is rooted solely in academia runs the risk of valuing the production of knowledge over women’s lived realities – it is unlikely to take the action required to change those lived realities for the better. Equally, it isn’t possible to unlock the full revolutionary power of feminism without a grasp of the principles and beliefs that have driven generations of change-makers. To Bec, the unnatural split between theory and practice is why so many younger feminists are trying to reinvent the wheel instead of understanding themselves as part of a movement that has spanned continents and decades.

Publications like WIRES – the Women’s Information and Referral Enquiry Service – emerged as a “reaction to the way women found themselves trapped and isolated” by the patriarchal division between public and private spheres. Women shared information across channels that were not controlled or regulated by men, which was an incredibly powerful strategy for resistance.

In recent years, Bec believes that feminist publishing has regressed. Although we are seeing a resurgence of feminist titles, and even reprints of classics by writers such as Audre Lorde and Simone de Beauvoir, there are fewer independent feminist presses, bookshops, and community spaces now than there were back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “Mainstream publishing houses are interested in movement as market.”

Given the need for feminist spaces that exist independently of the market, the importance of learning resources available to all women without the barrier of cost, it would be natural to assume that Vancouver’s feminist scene would welcome the addition of a Women’s Library. Many local women did – when they opened, the VWL team were overwhelmed by women trying to sign up as members and participate in Library life. But there was also intense and malicious anti-feminist backlash.

When Vancouver Women’s Library held their launch party, an organisation known as Gays Against Gentrification crashed the celebration. A group of 24 protestors intimidated women, and physically barred them from entering the Library despite the evening’s sub-zero temperature. They poured wine on books, tore down a poster of Valerie Solanis’ SCUM Manifesto, spray painted the outside of the venue, stole wine from the Library’s makeshift bar, and pulled the fire alarm in an effort to prevent women from gathering there. Protestors chanted “No SWERFs! No TERFs!”, disrupting multiple women’s attempts at mediation.

Listening to Bec recount these horrors, I am filled with fury that anybody would treat a women’s community space in this way. The culprits were allegedly ‘against gentrification’, but there is nothing further from gentrification than a Library set up by grassroots feminist organising. From this angle, their motivation looks much more like woman-hating than anti-capitalist protest.

In addition, GAG demanded that the Library remove 20 out of their 80 books from circulation. The books GAG found objectionable were mostly written by second wave feminists, many of whom are lesbians. GAG claimed that VWL “enact[s] violence on sex workers by working to deny their access to resources and support. They work alongside the colonial government to pass bills that do direct violence to sex workers, such as Bill C-36.” However, Bill C-36 was introduced in 2013 – four years before the inception of Vancouver Women’s Library. More to the point, the Library contained the accounts and political writings of multiple Indigenous women who survived the sex industry. Living at the intersection of race, class, and gender, Indigenous women are grossly over-represented in Canada’s sex trade.

To say that women who take a global view of prostitution and see it in a context of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and misogyny — [feminists] who aren’t just focused on white Western middle class camgirls — are ‘exclusionary’ makes no sense. It doesn’t hold up to any cognitive scrutiny. – Jindi Mehat

GAG also objected to the Library’s statement of values, which said “we welcome all women regardless of creed/class/gender/race/sexuality.” GAG’s statement denounced this advocacy of intersectional sisterhood, saying “…this language is used by cis women as a move to innocence from their complicity in violence against transwomen. It is used to mark transwomen as ‘Other’ and centre themselves as victims of patriarchy.”

GAG, like any other members of the public, were free to use the Library’s suggestion function to influence which books would become part of the collection, and whose voices could be found within the Library’s shelves. Bec tells us that not a single protestor used the suggestion before or after GAG’s attempts to shut down the Library launch. I believe that it is important for the voices of all people made marginal in a society to be heard and recognised. That being said, women have been made marginal for centuries – so it is a radical and subversive act to confer value on women’s writing.

According to Bec, it is right and good for women to centre ourselves as victims of patriarchy. In this we are agreed. From birth, girls are encouraged to prioritise the interests of other people over their own needs. It is part of feminine socialisation, designed to make us into compliant women who do not resist men’s attempts to subordinate us.

From her work with the Vancouver Women’s Library, Bec has learned “not to let men take up my time with arguments meant to distract us.” This is a worthwhile lesson, as efforts to derail feminist action and conversation are designed to direct us back towards the status quo: patriarchy. Bec describes sisterhood as “powerful”, but “necessarily difficult if we are to take it seriously.”

Bec points out the sexist double standard of venerating male philosophers like Freud, Foucault, Plato, and Nietzsche while dismissing great feminist thinkers such as Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, and Andrea Dworkin as outdated. There is love in her voice as Bec describes the “rich treasure trove” of resources on women’s resistance and organising written by earlier generations of feminists. She is passionate about the importance of learning from the women who have gone before us, the necessity of modern day feminists understanding ourselves as a continuation of a powerful social movement.

After Bec and Meghan finish talking, there is an interesting Q&A. Women talk openly about everything from sexual violence to traumatic experiences of childbirth. I think that it’s a mark of successful feminist space when women feel comfortable disclosing such deeply personal harms. One woman speaks about the way queer community fails lesbian women, and how isolated her daughter feels as a consequence. What she says resonates deeply with me. Gill Smith talks about the way she was pathologised by doctors as a lesbian teenager, and rejected by the LGBT community when she de-transitioned and resumed life as a lesbian. Julie Bindel, Gill says, is one of the few people who stood up for women like her.

A young academic tells us that she’s part of the generation who were taught that all women’s major battles were won, but now she’s feeling the same struggle that our foremothers did – and it’s “fucking awful.” She’s not wrong. Still, there is one great consolation: we are heading to the pub. When Susan announces the name of the bar, where FWS have booked a room for us, there is a mass exodus.
I have been on many a night out in Glasgow. But this is the first night out when I have managed to let go of anxiety to the point that I stop worrying about the time and simply enjoy life. It is an amazing opportunity to speak in person with women I have, until this point, only ever communicated with online. It is a delight to meet Shona Craven, a journalist who has made valuable contributions to the Scottish conversation about sex and gender. A young lesbian feminist speaks with me about the possibility of organising together. I accept with enthusiasm. Gill and I talk about Sheila Jeffreys’ Unpacking Queer Politics. I also meet Councillor Caroline McAllister, and quickly come to admire her – she’s a welcome change from the posh white men who gravitate towards life as career politicians.

I also speak to Meghan, which is a real treat. While the internet is amazing at connecting women across continents, you can’t take meeting a sister in person for granted when there are ordinarily thousands of kilometres and an ocean between you. Though she hasn’t been here for long, the steady calm and rationality Meghan has brought to the gender debate has inspired several Scottish feminists – me included. Meghan has enjoyed her tour of the UK, though she has spent more time in lecture halls and pubs than seeing the sights. Her next visit, Meghan vows, will involve more time exploring. I am glad that there will be a next time.

The night flies by. I connect with women and drink gin – the best way to spend a Friday night. After a round of photographs to document the celebration, I glance at my phone and see that it’s almost time for the last train home. I make a hasty exit; if I’m quick, there’s enough time to get some chips to eat during the journey.

As the train glides out of Central Station, I am perfectly content. Bec’s perspective on the feminist movement, Meghan’s ideas about sex and gender, and my conversations with women all flit through my mind. Bec is right that sisterhood is complicated; as a Black lesbian, it’s not something I can safely assume extends to women like me in every feminist space. Still, sisterhood is the driving force behind my life and politics. I believe in a sisterhood that bridges differences of race, class, sexuality, nationality, ability, and age to encompass all women – and that is what I found in these Lessons from Canada.

Sisterhood and Shortbread: Meghan Murphy at the Scottish Parliament

Posted on May 23, 2019 by Claire

A brief foreword: this essay is the first in a series, written about events in Scotland which explore and champion women’s rights. Each of these events is taking place within the space of a fortnight, and it feels like a turning point in mainstream conversations about sex and gender – worth a spot of feminist documentation. This one describes Meghan Murphy’s talk at Holyrood on Wednesday the 22nd of May, 2019. It is my personal account of the event, and – although I have tried to be faithful to every contribution in letter and spirit – prone to human error. In the next instalment I will write fully about the perspective of Bec Wonders, another Canadian feminist and badass who deserves an essay of her own.

Dedicated to Joan McAlpine, MSP, for her courage.

When Joan McAlpine invites me to the Scottish Parliament, I am pleasantly surprised. It’s a real privilege to receive an invite to Holyrood, and a delight to have the opportunity to hear Meghan Murphy speak. Meghan is the founder of Feminist Current, a radical feminist blog and podcast. I have followed her work for a number of years, and contributed to Feminist Current at the beginning of my life as a feminist blogger. Meghan writes about abortion rights, male violence against women and girls, the harms of the sex industry, misogyny in popular culture, and – increasingly – the competing political interests of women and people identifying as transgender.

Though based in Canada, Meghan uses the platform she has built to highlight feminist issues around the world and amplify the voices of women across different backgrounds. I particularly enjoy the work of Raquel Rosario Sanchez, a bold and brilliant feminist writer from the Dominican Republic who contributes regularly to Feminist Current. Meghan is someone who never flinches from speaking truth to power. She is also a fellow Mean Girls enthusiast. And so I am looking forward to learning from her directly.

Just as I’m about to begin the journey to Edinburgh, my phone pings with an email alert. It’s an invitation to appear on BBC Scotland’s The Nine, subject to change with any major announcements from the Prime Minister. They want me to discuss Meghan Murphy’s visit to Holyrood, and the protests that have been planned as a result.

Until this point I have refused any and all TV requests for two reasons. The first is a deep-rooted fear of the racist, sexist abuse that is directed towards Black women who are visible to the public eye – just look at how Fiona Bruce mistreated Diane Abbott, during her most recent appearance on BBC Question Time. Bruce implied that the first Black woman to be elected as an MP gained a position in the Shadow Cabinet due to a past relationship with Jeremy Corbyn. She interrupted Abbott more than any other panellist, and wrongly contradicted Abbott’s statistics. Bruce’s behaviour normalised the constant stream of misogynoir directed towards Diane Abbott and any other Black woman who claims a place in public life.

The second reason I have declined previous TV requests is a strong distaste for confrontational formats that are designed to bring about arguments instead of creating the space for consensus building – again, see BBC Question Time. But The Nine is a new programme on a new channel. BBC Scotland’s representative speaks to me about wanting to host a respectful discussion instead of a rammy, taking a sensitive approach to the subject at hand and those talking about it. The Nine could be an opportunity for a different, less aggressively macho way of hosting public conversations to take root in television. And so I say yes.

By the time I’ve transferred over to the Edinburgh train, the BBC Scotland representative has called to say the segment has been cancelled owing to Theresa May’s latest announcement. They are keen to cover this subject and have me on to discuss it in the future, but think that it’s irresponsible to squeeze something so important into a couple of sound-bites. I agree wholeheartedly, and appreciate the principles that go into making The Nine. When the time comes, I will gladly accept another invitation from them.

This leaves only anxiety about the planned protest, and the bout of Imposter Syndrome that tells me a mistake has been made, my name won’t be on the guest list, and I’ll have to leave the Parliament under a cloud of embarrassment. Neither worry, it turns out, was worth stressing over. I arrive early enough to avoid the protestors, and am ushered upstairs to a conference room without incident.

Before the talk begins, there is a palpable sense of excitement. There is a community vibe that is characteristic of the most enjoyable feminist spaces – although we are in parliament, many of the women here are from grassroots feminist organisations that receive no government funding, or women’s services that receive altogether too little of it. A woman behind me shares out a packet of sweeties. Another woman, when she finds out that there isn’t any catering on offer, goes out to buy biscuits for everybody and offers them round on a tray. In this moment, I am quite literally sustained by shortbread and sisterhood. Looking at the women around me – for it is primarily women here – I wonder how protestors would reconcile their idea of hate-filled “TERFs” with the clear-eyed and generous feminists in this room.

When our speakers arrive, there is a heartfelt round of applause. Joan McAlpine, the MSP who organised this event, opens the meeting by reminding everyone to keep the discussion respectful. She points out that not everybody in this room shares the same views, which is a positive sign about the openness of this conversation. Joan goes on to point out the pattern of women on the progressive left who have devoted so much of their lives to women’s rights being demonised – Linda Bellos, the gay & lesbian rights activist who brought Black History Month to Britain, Julie Bindel, co-founder of Justice for Women, and Helen Steel, a woman who has shown immense courage speaking out against undercover police officers spying on so-called “left-wing extremism.”

For Joan, the “privacy, safety, and dignity of women” are crucial. She condemns the violent threats and abusive language that have come to define gender discourse online – in particular the misogyny and anti-Semitism directed towards Professor Rosa Freedman, a legal scholar, for her opposition to sex and gender being conflated in the Scottish Census.

Joan herself is resistant to attempts to reframe sex as gender, reminding us that sex is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. She opposes self-identification policies, highlighting the infamous case of Alex Drummond – a member of Stonewall’s advisory board. Drummond is a self-described ‘lesbian’, despite being bearded and male-bodied. Some would argue it is offensive to deny that Alex Drummond is a woman or a lesbian. To Joan, the risks self-ID policies create around women’s safety are what should be considered truly objectionable:

I find it offensive that any man who has a history of abusing women may declare himself a woman and access women’s spaces without any experience of what it is to be a woman.

When Meghan begins speaking, she is like a breath of fresh air. Despite the abuse and threats that have been hurled her way since she became vocal about the differences between sex and gender, she betrays not a flicker of fear. Her voice is steady, her words rational. Meghan starts by defining each of the terms she uses. By ‘sex’ she means biology; whether an individual is male or female. “When I say gender, what I mean is the stereotypes and social roles that are imposed on men and women because of their sex.” By woman, Meghan means “adult human female.” By man, “adult human male.”

More controversial is the phrase “gender ideology.” It’s not an expression I have ever used, because I expect the average person who identifies as trans is more worried about the challenges of rejecting the gender role they have been socialised into since birth than imposing an ideology on anybody. But what Meghan says makes sense. She defines ‘gender ideology’ as the belief that it is possible for someone to be born in the wrong body or change sex. And like a great many feminists , she completely rejects the label of ‘cisgender’. By saying there are women naturally suited to the feminine gender role, a person argues that there are women who are naturally suited to the oppression enacted within patriarchal society.

I do not use the term ‘cis.’ I do not have a gender identity. No-one does. I refuse to define myself by a set of stereotypes used to oppress women.

As a feminist, Meghan believes that we should encourage all people to step outside of traditional gender roles. She wants to live in a world where how we define ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ isn’t limited to a restrictive set of sex stereotypes. A girl is still a girl when she plays with what are labelled boys’ toys. A boy is still a boy is he wears clothes that are classed as girl’s clothes. And vice versa. With this, I am in complete agreement. “Gender under patriarchy is not our friend, is not liberatory, and not to be embraced.”

As the literature handed out says, male free spaces exist for a reason. Meghan points out that single-sex spaces were created in the understanding that women fear men because men are a threat to our safety.

Feminists fought to build transition houses [shelters] for women fleeing domestic violence, and are now being told single-sex spaces are discriminatory. Funding to Vancouver Rape Relief, Canada’s longest running service, was cut after an orchestrated complaint challenging the fact they don’t allow males to train as counsellors or access the shelter. The city pulled their grant for public education about relationships and health, which VRR provided to everyone – male or female – for free.

Meghan says that “there’s no reason why we can’t protect the rights and provide services specific to people who step outside of the gender boundaries attached to their sex while acknowledging sexual dimorphism.” This is a good point. In Britain, women of marginalised ethnic and religious backgrounds have made it their life’s work to build specific services. Southall Black Sisters, Jewish Women’s Aid, Imkaan, Hemat Gryffe, and Shakti are all examples of this vital work. Why not also build services specific to trans and non-binary identified people?

Often, conversations surrounding gender a directed towards feelings. This is not necessarily a bad thing – holding compassion across difference is something I consider key to feminist praxis. However, as Meghan points out, not all feelings are ascribed equal value in this discussion:

If we’re going to talk about feelings, I want to know why the feelings of women don’t matter. What about the feelings of girls who don’t want to see a man’s penis as they change? Survivors of male violence who are afraid to share shelters with male-bodied people? Women competing against male-bodied athletes in sport? We’re putting women and girls in danger to accommodate the feelings of a tiny minority of people. We can treat people with dignity and provide them with the services they need without throwing women under the bus.

Meghan finishes to great applause. Joan opens the floor for questions. I ask how Meghan manages to keep going the face of intense misogynistic abuse, violent threats, and being treated like a pariah. I have a lot of time for Meghan’s politics, but her resilience is what has truly inspired me tonight. Her response: get offline and go to the bar. On a more serious note, Meghan recommends having a solid community of women.

Johann Lamont MSP observes that feminists have spent years fighting for the right to recognise and identify predatory males. She makes a neat analogy: just as criticisms of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church aren’t about saying all priests are predatory, talking about the risks of self-ID isn’t about framing transgender people as a threat. “Predatory men understand how to create a space for themselves with vulnerable people. All of history shows us how devious violent men can be.” And self-ID policies are ultimately exploitable.

Inevitably, the subject of Scotland’s women’s sector is raised. To avoid putting anyone on the spot, I will not name any individual women or the organisations for which they work. A representative from one women’s org is struggling to find ways to voice concern over self-ID. The women’s sector is massively underfunded, and no organisation wants to be put in the same predicament as Vancouver Rape Relief.

A woman who works within this organisation – let’s call her V – told us that women accessing this service want single-sex spaces. When the organisation asked for their views, women accessing the service expressed anxiety over sharing communal spaces with anyone male-bodied. V talked about the potential for further traumatisation, as the overwhelming majority of women are accessing the service as a consequence of experiencing male violence.

According to communications Joan has received from women spread across various organisations, single-sex services are effectively provided in the everyday – but messages coming from the top of certain organisations are causing some women to self-exclude over reservations about accessing a space operating with the policy of self-ID. This is hugely worrying.
Still, there is cause for optimism. Women holding a broad range of political perspectives have found consensus in this area. Politicians representing different left-wing political parties are a part of the audience, receptive to what Meghan has said. While women are at risk of public shaming, abusive messages, and threats of violence for echoing Meghan’s views, it is clear that many are unwilling to cave in and fall silent.

Joan McAlpine opened by talking about some of the abuse she had received for differentiating between sex and gender in her feminist analysis. But as she closed, Joan talked about the cards and messages of thanks women from across the length of the country and breadth of the political spectrum had sent her. I’ve decided to send Joan a thank you card of my own.

Womanhood: On Sex, Gender Roles, and Self-Identification

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Claire

A (not so) brief foreword: this essay was originally commissioned by an independent publisher looking to release an anthology on gender. In 2017 they asked if I’d be interested in writing an essay on womanhood. I was a little surprised, the publisher being explicitly queer and me being a radical feminist, but ultimately pleased: their goal was to publish a collection with plural perspectives on gender, and I believe wholeheartedly that having the space for plural perspectives on any issue is essential for healthy, open public discourse. I knew that my lesbian feminist essay would probably be in a minority standpoint, and felt comfortable with it being published alongside contradictory perspectives. Given the extreme polarity of gender discourse, which results in a painful stalemate between queer activists and radical feminists, it was encouraging to think we had reached a point where multiple views could be held and explored together.

So I wrote the essay, made the requested edits, and produced a final draft with which the publisher and I were both delighted. Their words: “We’re really happy with the edits you’ve done and the areas you’ve developed on upon our request. You did a splendid job refining the essay.” However, certain people objected to the inclusion of my essay before having read it. Some early readers gave the feedback that they were unhappy to find a perspective that they were not expecting, and alarmed that I had connected my personal experience of gender as a woman to the wider sociopolitical context we inhabit. Backlash escalated to the point that the publishing house faced the risk of having their business undermined and their debut collection jeopardised.

They gave me the option of writing another essay for the gender anthology, or having this essay published in a future collection. I declined both choices, as neither felt right – fortunately, there are more projects on my horizon. That being said I have great sympathy for the publisher’s position, and find it regrettable that their bold and brilliant venture should be compromised by the very people it was designed to support. Furthermore, I wish the publisher every success with this project, and all future endeavours. As for the essay, controversial even before being read, I have instead decided to publish it here as the seventh part of the series on sex, gender, and sexuality. It is, in my opinion, a good essay and deserves to see the light of day.

If you enjoy or learn from this essay, and can afford to do so, please consider donating to cover the lost commission of this work. [UPDATE: the publisher has offered partial payment depending on the success of their crowdfunding campaign. Thank you to everyone who has supported me. It means a great deal.]

Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. – Ntozake Shange

I absolutely love women. I love women in a way that leaves me breathless, in a way that catches just behind my ribs and gently tugs at my heartstrings until they unravel. I love women with a depth and fervour that is fundamentally lesbian. And in loving women I find extraordinary reserves of strength, the will to keep on challenging white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984), the motivation to chip away at every hierarchy and oppression that acts as a pillar upholding the ills of society. A love of women is central to my feminism, for bonds between women – links of solidarity and sisterhood in particular – have a revolutionary power unequal to any force on this earth.

According to Adrienne Rich, “the connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.” The connections shared by women, and all that flows across connections between women, open the possibility for radical social change – which is why lesbian existence and feminist politics are complimentary forces in a woman’s life.

Loving women as I do, I have spent a great deal of time musing upon what it is to be a woman, from where the appeal of women springs. As many young lesbians do, I speculate about the nature of the draw which compels us to watch all sorts of random crap on television simply because the middle-aged actress we fancy has a small role in the production. Having grown up in this world as a girl and subsequently learned how to negotiate this world as a woman, I have also reflected upon the social and political significance of the category – the weight which is undeniable. The question of what it means to be a woman has been central to feminist discourse for hundreds of years: establishing what womanhood is, pinpointing the means and motive behind woman’s oppression under patriarchy, and working out how to end that oppression are central feminist concerns.

At present the feminist movement is split in two over how to conceptualise woman and woman’s oppression. The tensions between queer ideology and sexual politics have proven every bit as divisive as the sex wars of the 1980s. The source of the split lies within gender – specifically, whether gender ought to be conceptualised as a hierarchy or as an identity within feminist analysis. Feminists have historically identified gender as the means of women’s oppression: patriarchy is reliant on gender to establish and maintain a hierarchy that enables men to dominate women. But by the turn of the century queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam began to suggest that gender may be subverted and experimented with until the very fabric of society is no longer recognisable.

Owing to the mainstreaming of queer ideology, we have entered an unprecedented era governed by the logic of postmodernism – a time in which the relationship between the physical body and material reality is untethered by the politics of identity. As such, those engaging with the progressive politics – be they liberal or radical – begin asking ourselves anew: what does it mean to be a woman?

Woman as a Sex Class

A key element of feminist analysis is the recognition of woman as a sex class. By this I do not mean that all women’s experiences meet the same universal standards, or that all women are positioned similarly within the world’s power structures: factors such as race, disability, social class, and sexuality all shape where a woman is situated in relation to power. Rather, this perspective offers an acknowledgement of the role in which patriarchy plays in determining the power dynamic between women and men. Women’s struggle against patriarchy is collective, and emancipation from systemic oppression cannot be found through individualising a structural issue. Women of all colours and creeds, women of all classes and castes, are actively subjugated from birth – a political analysis which fails to incorporate this reality cannot truly be thought of as feminist. Women’s oppression is a direct result of having been born female-bodied into a patriarchal society. Considering woman as a sex class is, therefore, fundamental to meaningful feminist critique of patriarchy.

This mode of analysis – radically feminist analysis – can grate when misapplied by white women who seek to deny any difference between women’s lives. But when carried out correctly, with rigour and consideration, it has the potential to change the world.

My own womanhood is hardly conventional, Black and lesbian as it is. I do not meet white Eurocentric standards of female beauty or womanhood and no longer aspire towards those standards, which are rooted in racism and misogyny. Owing to skin pigmentation and hair texture, my Blackness is impossible to conceal – even if it were possible, having begun to unpick the misogynoir I have internalised from an early age, I would not choose to hide it in order to assimilate. To be visibly Other is to live with an increased vulnerability, to be perpetually open to manifestations of structural oppression. For a time I despised both my Blackness and my womanhood as a result of the painful alienation misogynoir brought into my life. I have since learned to place the blame firmly where it belongs, with the source of these cruelties: white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. Since embracing radical politics I have learned to love both Blackness and womanhood, to love myself as a Black woman, in a way that was never possible during my pursuit of conventional beauty standards.

My lesbian presentation (Tongson, 2005) is a further rejection of those beauty standards. I style my hair in a fashion that is distinctly lesbian and have maintained a crisp undercut since coming out. At various points certain members of my family have attempted to enforce compulsory heterosexuality by shaming any outward presentation of a lesbian aesthetic, endeavouring to guide me back into the feminine role. I am told that returning to conventionally feminine presentation would render me “softer”, “more approachable”, and closer to the ideal of beauty. And while I could choose to pass for heterosexual, allowing an assumption that I am available and receptive to men to cushion me from a degree of marginalisation, I do not. I have no desire to appear soft or approachable, least of all to men – the oppressor class. Alice Walker proclaimed that “resistance is the secret of joy”, and she was quite right: there is a feeling of pure elation that flows from resisting the trap and trappings of heteropatriarchy.

Like every single woman living in a patriarchal society, I experience systematic oppression as a consequence of being female. Women – all women – are bound by the rigidity of the gender role ascribed to us on the basis of our biological sex. We are socialised from birth to be soft, compliant, nurturing so that we are primed to adopt the caring role required for upholding the domestic sphere owned by a man, be he husband or father. As Mary Wollstonecraft notably lamented, women are actively discouraged from pursuing our full potential as self-actualised human beings. Instead, women are subjected to a deliberate social (and often economic) pressure designed to create in us an ornamental source of sexual, reproductive, and domestic labour for men.

From Sojourner Truth to Simone de Beauvoir, there is a long and proud tradition of feminists critiquing the role of femininity. During her time as an abolitionist orator, Truth deconstructed womanhood to great effect, asking “ain’t I a woman?” Arguing against the hierarchies of race and gender that determined how the category of woman was understood in North American society during the heights of the transatlantic slave trade, Truth offered her own story as testimony to the falsehood of femininity. Truth used her own strength and endurance as empirical evidence, asserting that womanhood was in no way dependent on or related to the characteristics which construct femininity. Her opposition to gender essentialism and white supremacy continues to influence feminists’ perspectives on womanhood to this very day.

Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir further critiqued femininity, connecting the socialisation of gender to the oppression of women by men. She theorised that man was the normative standard of humanity and woman understood purely in relation to him:

Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

That woman is relegated to the Other, lacking in positive definition, mandates a life that is male-centric. If woman exists as the negative image of man, she is forever bound to him. Self-definition has long been recognised as a necessary tool for the liberation of an oppressed group, and if women remain dependent on men for definition then the root cause of our oppression can never be fully tackled. Adrienne Rich once claimed that “until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves” – as is often the case, her words contain more than a little truth.

Gender is normalised through essentialism, positioned as a natural and inevitable part of life. From the get-out-of-accountability-free card that is ‘boys will be boys’ to the constant refrain of “she was asking for it” when men act upon the cultural conditioning that assures them they are entitled to women’s bodies, the hierarchy of gender maintains the gross power imbalance at the root of sexual politics. Here is how I understand the connection between biological sex and gender roles:

Gender is a socially constructed trap designed to oppress women as a sex class for the benefit of men as a sex class. And the significance of biological sex cannot be disregarded, in spite of recent efforts to reframe gender as an identity rather than a hierarchy. Sexual and reproductive exploitation of the female body are the material basis of women’s oppression – our biology is used as a means of domination by our oppressors, men.

We teach boys to dominate others and disavow their emotions. We teach girls to nurture others at the expense of their own. And I think this world would be a better place if we encouraged more empathy in boys and more daring in girls. If gender were abolished, if we raised boys and girls in the same way, patriarchy would crumble. Like a great many feminists before her, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie advocates the elimination of gender:

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations… Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialisation exaggerates the differences, and then starts a self-fulfilling process. – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All be Feminists

It is impossible to consider the position of women in society, the reality that we are second-class citizens by design of patriarchy, without acknowledging the extent of the harm done by gender. Womanhood is caught up in the constraints of the feminine gender role, prevented from escaping male dominion. In the abolition of gender lies a radical alternative. In the abolition of gender lies women’s liberation.

Therefore, recent reframing of gender as an innately held identity has proven problematic in ongoing feminist struggle. Gender identity politics rely on essentialism that feminists have fought for hundreds of years, an essentialism that argues women are naturally suited to the means of our oppression. If gender is inherent – a natural phenomenon after all – then the oppression of women under patriarchy is legitimised.

Womanhood

During the second wave of feminism, it was argued that woman simply meant a biologically female adult human. Feminists (Millett, 1969; French, 1986; Dworkin, 1987) made the case that womanhood could and should exist purely as a biological category, unfettered by the feminine gender role – a vision of women’s liberation. This perspective is directly contradicted by a queer understanding of gender, which primarily focuses on gender as self-expression:

The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. – Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

A queer notion of gender presents it as a matter of performativity, arguing that dominant power structures may be subverted through transgressing the barriers of masculine and feminine gender roles. Identification with the characteristics associated with a gender role is taken as belonging to the category. Those who identify with the gender role ascribed to their sex class are described as cisgender. Those who do not identify with the gender role ascribed to their sex class are described as transgender. From a queer standpoint, sex is not a fixed category but rather an unstable one. Queer politics are formed gender as a mode of personal identification. Radical feminist analysis, in which gender is understood as a hierarchy, is dismissed as old-fashioned.

If one cannot say with absolutely clarity what is woman and what is man, the oppressed and oppressor classes are rendered unspeakable. Subsequently the hierarchy of gender is made invisible and feminist analysis of patriarchy grows impossible. Without words used as markers to convey specific meaning, women are deprived of the vocabulary required to name and oppose our oppression. Postmodernism and political analysis of power structures make uneasy bedfellows.

Here is where the controversy lies, where gender discourse grows explosive beyond the point of reconciliation between queer and radical feminism. If gender is a matter of personal identification, it is a purely individual matter and, therefore, depoliticised. The power differential between oppressed and oppressor is negated by a failure to consider man and woman as two distinct sex classes. Gender ceases to be visible as a means of oppression, further obscured as the categories of man and woman are considered immaterial. If sex classes are unspeakable, so too are the sexual politics of patriarchy.

If womanhood can be reduced to the performance of the feminine gender role and a personal identification with that gender role, there is little scope for distinguishing between the oppressor and oppressed. Womanhood ceases to be indicated by the presence of primary and secondary sex characteristics and instead becomes a matter of self-identification. The oppressor may even benefit from a lifetime of the privilege conferred upon men through the subordination of woman and then claim womanhood. Dame Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC Woman’s Hour, came under fire for highlighting that prior to transition, transwomen benefit from the social and economic privileges accorded to men in patriarchy. Shortly afterwards, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received backlash for differentiating between the experiences of women born as such and transwomen:

I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man, with the privileges the world accords to men, and then switch gender – it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experiences with the experiences of a woman who has lived from the beginning in the world as a woman, who has not been accorded those privileges that men are. I don’t think it’s a good thing to conflate everything into one.

If it is no longer possible to consider the experiences of those born female, to analyse the relationship between sex and socioeconomic power, feminists can no longer identify or challenge the workings of patriarchy. This is a particularly unfortunate consequence of embracing queer ideology. Women’s rights are human rights, as the slogan goes – inalienable and absolutely worth fighting for. The injustices faced by women around the globe are intolerable: one in three women will be subject to male violence within her lifetime. Yet, if the linguistic tools necessary to critique patriarchy are removed from the feminist lexicon, women’s liberation hits an insurmountable stumbling block: you cannot challenge an oppression you cannot name, after all.

The cultural significance attached to the word woman is in a state of flux. As queer politics would have it, womanhood is simply the performance of the female gender role. As radical feminism would have it, the female gender role exists purely as a sexist stereotype of woman rooted in essentialism and misogyny. The only escape queer politics offers women from patriarchal oppression is for all those who are biologically female to identify out of the category ‘woman’. To claim the label of non-binary, genderfluid, or transmasculine – anything other than a cisgender woman, who is naturally suited to her status as a second-class citizen – is the only route queer politics offers biological women to being recognised as fully human.

Women, by queer logic, cannot be self-actualised and have no meaningful inner-lives. We are simply Other to men. It is for this reason that queer ideology has been able to reduce women to “non-men” – to “pregnant people”, “uterus-havers”, and “menstruators.” It is worth asking: does trans-inclusivity depend upon women being written out of existence? While queer theory has reflected upon the nature of masculinity, it has not deconstructed the category of man beyond the point of recognition. Just as in mainstream patriarchal society, man is the normative standard of humanity and woman defined in relation to him. The positive definition of womanhood is treated as expendable within queer discourse.

As linguist Deborah Cameron asserts, women’s power to self-define is of immense political significance:

The strength of the word ‘woman’ is that it can be used to affirm our humanity, dignity and worth, without denying our embodied femaleness or treating it as a source of shame. It neither reduces us to walking wombs, nor de-sexes and disembodies us. That’s why it’s important for feminists to go on using it. A movement whose aim is to liberate women should not treat ‘woman’ as a dirty word.

However one understands the category of woman, its erasure can surely be recognised as a disastrous impediment to the liberation of women.

Lesbian Sexuality

The controversy over how womanhood is defined manifests most acutely around lesbian sexuality. An unfortunate consequence of queer politics is the problematising of homosexuality. Lesbian women and to a lesser extent gay men (for it is women’s bodies and sexual practices that are fiercely policed within patriarchy) routinely face allegations of transphobia within queer discourse. A lesbian is a woman who exclusively experiences same-sex attraction. It is the presence of female primary and secondary sex characteristics that create at least the potential for lesbian desire – gender identity is of little relevance to the parameters of same-sex attraction. As it is governed on the basis of biological sex rather than personal identification with gender, the sexuality of lesbian women is under scrutiny within queer discourse.

These words are not written with detachment. It is not an abstract concern alive only in theory. The reality is, this is a particularly uncomfortable window of time in which to be lesbian. We face mounting pressure to expand the boundaries of our sexuality until sex that involves a penis is considered a viable option. And sex that involves a penis quite simply isn’t lesbian, whether it belongs to a man or a transwoman.

I am deeply concerned by the shaming and coercion of lesbian women that now happens within queer discourse. The queer devaluation of lesbian sexuality – from the insistence that lesbians are a boring old anachronism to the pathologising of lesbian sexuality that occurs when we are branded “vagina fetishists” – is identical to the lesbophobia pedalled by social conservatives. Both the queer left and religious right go out of their way to imply something is wrong with lesbians because we desire other women.

Lesbian women are attracted by the female form. In addition to sharing a profound emotional and mental connection with other women, lesbians appreciate the female form – the beauty of women’s bodies is what sparks our desire. If biological sex ceases to be recognised as determining womanhood (or, indeed, manhood), it can no longer be said that there is such a body as a woman’s body. If the distinct set of sex characteristics which combine to form womanhood are rendered unspeakable, attraction inspired by those characteristics – lesbian desire – is made invisible. Something vital is lost when women are deprived of the language to articulate how and why we love other women (Rich, 1980).

Lesbians are being coerced back into the closet within the LGBT+ community. We receive strong encouragement to abandon the label of lesbian, which we are told is comically archaic, and embrace the umbrella term of queer in the name of inclusivity. But no sexuality is universally inclusive – by definition, sexuality is a specific set of factors which when met offer the potential for attraction. It is unreasonable – and frankly delusional – to imagine that sexuality can be stripped of any meaningful criteria.

A queer woman is less challenging to the status quo than a lesbian, easier for men to get behind, for queer is a vague term that deliberately eschews solid definitions – a queer woman may well be sexually available to men, her sexuality in no way an impediment to offering men the emotional, sexual, or reproductive labour upon which patriarchy is dependent.

Queer stigmatising of lesbians is a tactical manoeuvre designed to undermine acknowledgement of the female sex category. If there is no need to address same-sex attraction between women, the significance and permanence of sex categories demands no scrutiny. That encouraging lesbian women to consider sex that involves a penis has become newly acceptable, a legitimate line of discourse within the progressive left, is a terrible puzzle. The logic of it is straightforward enough, yet the underlying truths about what is happening within LGBT+ politics are not easy to look at. Yet still I cannot help turn it over and over in my mind, working at the ideas like a Rubik’s cube until the pieces fall into place. Queer ideology seeks to enforce compulsory heterosexuality in the lives of lesbian women just as surely as the standards set by patriarchy. By denying the possibility of lesbians exclusively loving other women, by delegitimising lesbians living woman-centric lives, queer politics undermines our liberation.

Conclusion

There is a persistent thread of misogyny running through queer politics, from the inception of queer to its present incarnation. Queer was the product of gay men’s activism, concerned primarily with sexual freedom and transgression: as such, queer did not represent the interests of lesbian women when it came into being during the 1980s and does not represent the interests of lesbian women now (Jeffreys, 2003). Queer is less about collectively challenging structural inequalities at their root than an individualised subversion of social norms.

Though it promised a radical, exciting alternative – one which many women have embraced, along with men – queer politics are ill equipped to dismantle systematic oppressions. Queer erasure of womanhood, queer disregard for women’s boundaries if they happen to be lesbian, and queer obscuring of the gender hierarchy breathes a new lease of life into patriarchy, if anything.

I dream of a world without gender. I dream of a world where men can wear dresses and be gentle without either being treated as a negation of manhood. But much more than that, I dream of a world where no assumptions are made about what it means to be woman beyond the realm of biological fact. And if that makes me a heretic in the church of gender, so be it – I’m an atheist.

Gender roles and the hierarchy they maintain are incompatible with the liberation of women and girls from patriarchal oppression. It is because I love women, and because I am a woman, that I cannot afford to pretend otherwise. Embracing gender as an identity is the equivalent of decorating the interior of a cell: it is a superficial perspective which offers no freedom.

Bibliography

Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex. London: Vintage

Judith Butler. (1990). Gender Trouble. London: Routledge

Andrea Dworkin. (1987). Intercourse. New York: Free Press

Marilyn French. (1986). Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. California: Ballantine Books

Sheila Jeffreys. (2003). Unpacking Queer Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press

Jack Halberstam. (1998). Female Masculinity. Carolina: Duke University Press

bell hooks. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Pluto Press

Kate Millett. (1969). Sexual Politics. Columbia: Columbia University Press

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (2014). We Should All be Feminists. London: Fourth Estate

Adrienne Rich. (1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

Adrienne Rich. (1980). Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.

Ntozake Shange. (1982). Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. New York: Picador

Karen Tongson. (2005). Lesbian Aesthetics, Aestheticizing Lesbianism. IN Nineteenth Century Literature

Mary Wollstonecraft. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

‘Punch a TERF’ Rhetoric Encourages Violence Against Women

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Claire

A brief foreword. This is the sixth of my essays on sex, gender, and sexuality. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 available here.) I suspect it’s also the least polished, as I was shaken by the assault of Maria MacLachlan and wrote this to work through my thoughts, but it was written from a place of truth.

My grandmother is a brilliant woman. She is clever, compassionate, and unfailingly kind. She is selfless, generous with her time, and loyal to those she loves. I have lived with my grandmother since birth – during childhood she read me Swallows and Amazons at night, sat by the pool during my swimming lessons, and took me to the cinema to see Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – the film which opened my eyes to the magic of cinema as a child. Nana also sat through Shrek and, with thinly-veiled disgust, Shrek 2. If that’s not love, what is? My grandmother and I have always been close. Since my grandfather died last year, and it has been just the two of us in the house, we have grown closer still – we live like what I’d describe as an infinitely more interesting version of the Gilmour Girls.

I’ve also noticed that my grandmother has grown a bit more radical in that time. She has stopped trying to convince me that men have their uses, which she often did after I came out to her as lesbian. She now has faith in my ability to do what were once considered “man jobs”, like building furniture or running heavy things to the dump. She will readily call racism by its name is and receptive to having racism pointed out. She has identified an abusive relationship and asked me for the relevant details about shelters to pass on and how best to support the woman in question as she left the relationship – I’m very proud of her for that.

My grandmother is also pro-life. She does not believe that abortion is legitimate or morally acceptable. She’s a committed Catholic and gets letters from SPUC every so often. I once joked to her that with my advocacy of abortion and her opposition to it, the output from our household basically cancelled itself out. It’s quite strange to think that Nana is roughly the same age as Angela Davis. I used to reason that, being of a different generation, it was to be expected that she held those views. But then, especially as I grew familiar with feminists who were active during the Women’s Liberation Movement and read more feminist books from the ‘60s and ‘70s, it seemed ridiculous to reduce her politics to a matter of age. Either way, I don’t agree with Nana about abortion. She certainly doesn’t agree with me. But we love each other very much and that disagreement – the most fundamental disagreement in our relationship – doesn’t alter the fact we’re ride or die.

On our way out this afternoon, she gently pointed out that I seemed a bit down. My depression has been severe this year, and I know Nana worries. At first I didn’t say much. But months of therapy have made it substantially easier to divine the root cause of a problem. I told her that a 60 year old woman was beaten yesterday in London – that Maria MacLachlan was punched and choked for going to a talk about the Gender Recognition Act. I explained that the original venue, New Cross Learning, had backed out after being harassed into cancelling – the intensity of protest had the library worried about safety of staff, volunteers, and those accessing the community space. I briefly outlined the schism between a queer and a radical feminist understanding of gender. Mostly, I told Nana that I felt heartsick that a woman had been beaten.

Nana didn’t ask if I knew the woman in question, and I loved her for that – for getting that a woman being assaulted, any woman being hurt, was painful to hear of. What she did ask is if the police caught those behind the attack, if feminist women were challenging it. The mechanics of digital media are as much a mystery to Nana as her daily Sudoku puzzles are to me, but she sees me glued to my phone all day long and understands enough to know that if women gather our energies to make a fuss over injustice then something will come of it. And I told her the truth, a truth that left me even more heartsick: not exactly. There are women who have rallied, and there are women who have looked the other way.

Maria MacLachlan, bruised

Credit to Jen Isaacson

And my Nana said what dozens and dozens of seasoned feminists lack the courage to say: that the attackers were brutes. She asked what sort of horrible, small-minded person would deliberately hurt a woman in her sixties.

For a split-second I wondered what the response to describing those behind the attack as ‘horrible’ or ‘brutes’ would be on Twitter. TERF, obviously – that’s trans-exclusionary radical feminist, for the uninitiated. Maybe Nazi. (More and more, I’ve noticed radical feminists who are lesbian described as Nazi – without the slightest recognition that lesbian women were persecuted, rounded up as “asocials” for their refusal to produce blonde-haired blue-eyed babies, and killed by the Nazi regime.) And then I knew, as is so often the case, that my grandmother was right. They are horrible. They are brutes.

The footage is difficult to watch. A group of women gathered at the Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where they had arranged to meet before moving on to the venue – which had

“NO TERFS ON OUR TURF!” Shared by Sisters Uncut

been kept secret owing to the risk involved. The protest – organised by Action for Trans Health London, Sisters Uncut, and Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society – is in full swing. There’s a lot of shouting. The atmosphere is febrile. Amidst the clusters of people, Maria MacLachlan holds a camera to document the proceedings. She is set upon by someone substantially bigger than her. Two more attackers join in after MacLachlan pulls down her assailant’s hood so that they may be identified, as though the beating of a sixty year old woman is too great an undertaking for one man alone. MacLachlan gave her account of her assault to Feminist Current:

[She] had been trying to film the protest when some of the trans activists began to shout, “When TERFs attack, we fight back.” She asked them, “Who’s attacking?” At this point, MacLachlan says a young man in a hoodie tried to grab her camera. “I think he knocked it out of my hand but it was looped to my wrist. He turned back and tried to grab it again. I hung onto it.” As the two struggled, MacLachlan pulled back the hood of the man holding her camera, so onlookers could photograph his face, and another man ran over and began punching MacLachlan. Wood and a third man pushed her to the ground, where she says she was kicked and punched.

The whole incident is disturbing. There is a long history of violence being used to discourage women from collectively organising, and the assault of Maria MacLachlan opens the latest chapter of a story called patriarchy. Both the violence and the context that enabled it to happen must be scrutinised.

How have we reached a point where beating a 60 year old woman can be credited to the politics of liberation? How have we reached a point where feminists can ignore that a 60 year old woman was beaten? How have we reached a point where some self-proclaimed feminists read about this assault and questioned whether a woman was lying about violence, if it really happened, or – if it did happen – she provoked the attack? The silence and disbelief of other women, women who call themselves feminist, is like salt in a wound. Our whole movement is built around the belief that no woman should be subject to violence, and that those women who do experience violence are fully deserving of our support.

The deeper we go into feminist politics and spaces – especially digital feminist spaces – the easier it becomes to forget about certain realities of feminist struggle. The gap between ideas and reality, between the theory being developed and the everyday unfolding of women’s lives, grows until something vital is lost through the cracks of that in-between space. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that queer politics and gender ideology have flourished in the internet age; when so much of our lives are lived online, it is easier to lose focus on the significance of material reality.

While it is certainly shocking that Maria MacLachlan was beaten by trans activists, it was not altogether unpredictable. Last year a transwoman called Dana Rivers murdered an interracial lesbian couple and their son. Not long before committing triple homicide, Rivers protested the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival on the grounds that it was trans-exclusionary. For the last few years, a steady flow of violent rhetoric has been levelled against women, in particular lesbians – much of it from self-identified feminists. Kill all TERFs. Punch all TERFs. Knife a TERF. Burn a TERF. Rivers shot and stabbed the Wright family before setting fire to their house, violence that is mirrored by the language directed towards the women denounced as TERFs. The violence trans activists and allies enacted when Vancouver Women’s Library launched was similarly normalised by misogynistic, abusive language. Given that “punch a TERF” has become something of a rallying cry for those invested in upholding gender ideology, women cannot afford to feign surprise when it actually happens.

Radical feminists have warned against the violent rhetoric attached to the term TERF for years, and been dismissed as bigots for our trouble. Jokes and threats involving violence against women, often indistinguishable, are now commonplace on queer corners of the internet. Etsy stock badges that conflate trans liberation with violence against women. We have reached a bizarre point at which violence against women is circulated as a bold message of resistance by people who claim to be feminists.

Painful disagreements and challenging ideas need not result in abuse. I can’t imagine a single woman campaigning for abortion rights and access to reproductive healthcare beating up my grandmother for her opposing views. Nor could I imagine any of the campaigners who have got in touch with my grandmother beating pro-choice women, even if they do think we’re heading for an afterlife of eternal damnation. The conversations I’ve had with Nana about abortion have been hard for both of us. Realistically, we’re never going to agree. But that doesn’t mean those conversations have to be destructive.

There must be a way to talk about the tensions between gender ideology and sexual politics without abusive language or acts of violence. The subject is fraught, uncomfortable, and certainly not abstract for anyone involved with gender discourse – which is all the more reason to bring empathy to the table. Dehumanising women to the point where we are considered legitimate targets of violence only upholds the values set by patriarchy. We do not approach the subject of gender from a position of power – gender has been used, for hundreds upon hundreds of years, to oppress women. That gender is fundamental to the oppression of women is too often overlooked in gender discourse.

No matter what your politics, we should all recognise that beating up a 60 year old woman doesn’t liberate. It’s violence against women. If your politics justify violence against women, they are shitty and misogynistic politics. It is not complicated. There is no justification. Women are not legitimate targets of violence. Not for having different views to you. Not for listening to or engaging with ideas you disagree with. Never. Plenty of the progressive left looked the other way at “punch a TERF” rhetoric normalising violence against women, and this is what it led to: a woman being beaten.

Violence against women has no place in the politics of liberation. If you ignore this assault to keep your ally cookies on queer identity politics, you’re complicit. If you give language that normalises violence against women, you’re complicit. Violence against women has no place in any context. That is what radical feminists consistently argue. Radical feminist women are depicted as violent simply for our ideas about gender – meanwhile, those who perpetrate physical acts of violence against women are framed as our victims.

When radical feminists critique gender, we are accused of debating trans-identified people’s right to live free from violence or even accused of exterminating trans-identified people. Aside from being falsehoods, these claims serve to discredit radical feminists’ explorations of gender. Writing for Trouble and Strife, Jane Clare Jones unpicks queer misrepresentations of radical feminism:

[Gender] debate is not academic for anyone involved. For both trans and non-trans women, what is at stake is the ability to understand themselves in a way that makes their lives livable. For feminist women, the axiom ‘trans women are women,’ when understood to mean ‘womanhood is gender identity and hence, trans women are women in exactly the same way as non-trans women are women’ is experienced as an extreme erasure of the way our being-as-women is marked by a system of patriarchal violence that aims to control our sexed bodies.
This system of patriarchal violence also marks the lives of trans women, who are indubitably victims of the kinds of male violence feminists have spent years attempting to resist. To cast certain feminists as the principal threat to trans existence, it is therefore necessary for trans-ideology to sideline the patriarchal violence that affects both women and trans people, and instead, position feminists at the apex of a structure of oppression.

Reframing women’s oppression as a form of privilege has enabled the disciples of gender ideology to target women as the oppressor and feel legitimate in doing so. But this perspective fails to consider the reality of the situation: women are an oppressed class, marginalised as a result of having been born female into a patriarchal society. Women do not hold a wealth of structural power over trans-identified people, and claiming that women challenging the means of our oppression are enacting anti-trans violence is ludicrous. Radical feminists are the staunchest and most consistent critics of male violence, which is the cause of transphobic attacks.

If you’re a feminist who has ever used the term TERF to describe a radical feminist, stop and think about the violent misogyny it’s used in conjunction with. Think about how “punch a TERF” led to Maria MacLachlan being assaulted. Think about whether you want to be complicit in violence against women, or play a part in challenging that violence – I suspect it’s the latter.

And if you’re going to keep branding women TERFs, remember: you cannot beat dissent out of women. Trying to do so only recreates patriarchal values, which started the pattern of using violence to render women compliant. It isn’t decent human behaviour, never mind feminist. Women are resilient – we have to be, to make it through life under patriarchy. And we will not fall silent.

Bibliography

Marilyn Frye. (1983). The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory.

Audre Lorde. (1983). The Master’s Toois Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.

Binary or Spectrum, Gender is a Hierarchy

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Claire

A brief foreword: this is the fifth essay in my series on sex, gender, and sexuality. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 are available here on Sister Outrider. With this essay, I challenge the notion that gender can be repurposed as anything other than a hierarchy. This one is dedicated to E, a stellar lesbian and feminist.

“It is impossible to name and act against oppression if there are no nameable oppressors.” – Mary Daly

What is Gender?

Gender is a fiction created by patriarchy, a hierarchy imposed by men to ensure their dominance over women. The idea of a gender binary was established in order to justify the subordination of women by positioning our oppression by men as a natural state of affairs, the result of how characteristics innately held by men and women manifest. Framing gender as natural not only serves to depoliticise the hierarchy, but uses essentialism in order to convince women that radical resistance to gender – the means of our oppression – is futile. Hopelessness breeds apathy, which undermines social change more effectively than any overt challenge. If abolishing gender (and therefore dismantling patriarchy) is an unobtainable goal, women have no choice but to accept our status as second-class citizens of the world. To treat gender as inherent is to accept a patriarchal blueprint for the design of society.

Gender is a hierarchy that enables men to be dominant and conditions women into subservience. As gender is a fundamental element of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984) it is particularly disconcerting to see elements of queer discourse argue that gender is not only innately held but sacrosanct. Far from being a radical alternative to the status quo, the project of “queering” gender only serves to replicate the standards set by patriarchy through its essentialism. A queer understanding of gender does not challenge patriarchy in any meaningful way – rather than encouraging people to resist the standards set by patriarchy, it offers them a way to embrace it. Queer politics have not challenged traditional gender roles so much as breathed fresh life into them – therein lies the danger.

To argue that gender could or should be “queered” is to lose sight of how gender functions as a system of oppression. Hierarchies cannot, by definition, be assimilated into the politics of liberation. Structural power imbalances cannot be subverted out of existence – reducing gender to a matter of performativity or personal identification denies its practical function as a hierarchy. Any ideology which flagrantly disregards gender as the method of women’s oppression cannot be described as feminist – indeed, as queer ideology remains largely uncritical of the power disparity behind sexual politics, it is anti-woman.

The logic of gender identity is fundamentally flawed, resting on the premise that gender is innately held. As feminists have argued for decades, gender is socially constructed – a fabrication designed to grant men dominion over women. The upbringing of children, gendered even before birth, serves to divide the sexes into a dominant and subservient class. Feminism recognises that biological sex exists while opposing essentialism, opposing the idea that sex dictate who or what we are capable of being as humans. Feminism asserts that our character, qualities, and personality are not defined by whether we are male or female. Conversely, queer theory argues that one set of traits is inherently masculine and another set of traits is inherently feminine, and our identity is dependent on how we align with those traits.

Instead of acknowledging that there are multitudes of ways to be a man or a woman, queer theory pigeonholes people into an ever-increasing range of categories organised by stereotype. There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of gendered brains, and claims of inherently gendered brains are the product of neurosexism (Fine, 2010). Yet queer ideology positions gender as an innately held identity, claiming that gender “is what you feel.”

“The manacles of a lifetime of cultural conditioning that has tried to convince me that gender is a biological fact rather than a social construct are more difficult to shake off than I would like.” – Louise O’Neill, I Call Myself A Feminist: The View from Twenty-Five Women Under Thirty

The Trouble with Gender Identity

Despite its essentialism, the queer understanding of gender has grown increasingly mainstream within progressive and feminist spaces. It is not difficult to understand why. Gender ideology acknowledges that a binary of male and female gender roles are restrictive for individuals, but instead of advocating the extensive work required to dismantle the hierarchy of gender, it offers a far easier solution: an individual opt-out clause that enables people to make peace with patriarchy. To embrace gender ideology is to embrace a narrative of exceptionalism. To embrace gender ideology is to accept that there is a class of people naturally suited to their position within the hierarchy of gender (be it oppressed or oppressor), and a class of people who are exceptions to the traditional rules of gender.

There is a fundamental problem with queer gender ideology. As I have previously written, that problem is misogyny. To claim certain groups are naturally suited to the gender role imposed upon their sex category – “cis” people – is to endorse misogyny. The women categorised as cis, by the logic of gender identity, are inherently suited to being oppressed by men. The whole system of patriarchy is therefore whitewashed by gender ideology, presented as a natural occurrence as opposed to a system of oppression built to grant men dominion over women.

As queer identity politics are built around a narrative of exceptionalism, the power dynamics of sexual politics to be ignored altogether. Through the linguistic twist of “cis”, women’s oppression is reframed as a privilege and therefore the liberation of “cis” women from patriarchal oppression ceases to be a priority. Sexual politics are negated by self-identification, through which membership of a sex class is rendered politically invisible.

“So many genders and yet we still know, magically, which half of the human race is expected to wipe arses and scrub floors.” – Victoria Smith, @glosswitch

Gender is a prison, and I have compassion for everyone constricted by it. It is abhorrent that men are discouraged from empathy, kindness, and creative self-expression. There is real cruelty in socialising boys into masculinity. That being said, there is a connection between gender ideology and the laundering of male privilege that demands scrutiny.

This issue is exemplified by the case of Ben Hopkins, one half of the punk duo PWR BTTM. Hopkins is biologically male and, as such, was socialised into masculinity. Like a great many famous persons who are biologically male, Hopkins exploited his fame and power to sexually abuse female fans. According to one of his victims, Hopkins is a “known sexual predator who has perpetrated multiple assaults, bullied other people in the queer community, and has made unwanted advances towards underage minors.” What allegedly sets Hopkins apart from a longstanding tradition of powerful male abusers is that he identifies as genderqueer. As such, queer perspective would have it that Hopkins’ actions cannot be considered male violence against women. Queer exceptionalism as it manifests through the logic of gender identity makes it impossible to name or challenge male violence as such.

Statement from Survivor

Men are taught from birth that they are entitled to women’s time, women’s attention, women’s love, women’s energy, and women’s bodies. Yet, in accordance with the logic of gender ideology, unfortunate yet random as opposed to a likely consequence of the gendered socialisation men receive in patriarchal society. Despite identifying as genderqueer, the sexual violence Hopkins enacted against women with dramatically less social power than him follows perfectly the logic of masculinity. In what sense can a man who carries out the most toxic behaviour rooted in masculinity claim to be queering or resisting gender?

As his actions make clear, Hopkins has not consciously unlearned male socialisation or entitlement to women’s bodies. How Hopkins chooses to identify has little bearing upon the grim reality of the situation. Yet in claiming the label of genderqueer, Hopkins attempted to erase the male privilege from which he continued to benefit. Writing for Feminist Current, Jen Izaakson clearly articulates the paradox of Hopkins claiming to queer gender:

“…Hopkins used glitter, eyeliner, and vintage dresses to demonstrate an understanding of and adherence to queer ideals, to illustrate a rejection of “toxic masculinity” and the gender norms socially ascribed to males. But wearing flowery dresses and lip gloss does not necessarily lead to an actual rejection of the male entitlement and male dominance of men under patriarchy. By centering self-defined identities, individual expression, and performativity, instead of scrutinizing male violence and unequal systems of power, queer discourse has allowed misogyny easy access to the party.”

Similarly, trans activist Cherno Biko (born male) openly confessed to raping a transman (born female) with the fantasy and intention of impregnating them against their will. Despite having publicly acknowledged committing sexual abuse, Biko was invited to speak on stage at the Women’s March in Washington and served as Co-Chair of the Young Women’s Advisory Council for New York City. This raises questions not only about the apparent lack of accountability for sexual abuse within feminist spaces, but also the extent to which progressive political movements are prepared to overlook instances of violence against women if the perpetrator identifies as transgender or genderqueer.

Acts of violence against women are both cause and consequence of patriarchy, and they are normalised by the logic of gender. Gender ideology disregards the power disparity of sexual politics – a hierarchy instituted through gender itself – and instead considers gender purely as a matter of self-identification. The queer perspective deliberately individualises the issue of identity in order to depoliticise gender, thereby avoiding difficult questions about power and patriarchy.

We are told that gender is a deeply personal matter and therefore, as all good liberals know, not to be scrutinised. Yet research demonstrates that transwomen “retained a male pattern regarding criminality following sex reassignment surgery,” and that “the same was true regarding violent crime.” Given that one in three women will experience male violence in her lifetime, this is no small matter: 96% of people who commit acts of sexual violence are biologically male. The safety of women and girls is never an acceptable price to pay, not even in the name of inclusion. Masculine socialisation plays a demonstrable role in shaping attitude and behaviour – if women cannot name the violence we experience or identify the system that makes it possible, we cannot challenge it.

“When Simone de Beauvoir wrote that a girl is not born a woman but rather becomes one, she did not mean that an individual born into the male sex, socialised into the expectation of the masculine gender, can simply decide to take hormones and maybe have surgery and ‘become a woman’.” – Dame Jenni Murray

Through the lens of gender identity, the oppressor may shed his male privilege and claim the status of oppressed. Through the lens of gender identity, the oppressed may also reject the grounds of their oppression by means of self-identification. Gender ideology aims to repurpose a hierarchy as an identity. Unfortunately, one cannot simply opt out of an oppression that is structural and systematic in nature – although queer discourse presents this as a legitimate route to women. Man is the default standard of humanity, with woman relegated to “Other” – defined purely in relation to men (Beauvoir, 1949). Is it no wonder that a growing number of women, dissatisfied by the limitations imposed by the feminine gender role and conscious that self-actualised human beings are more than the hollow stereotype of femininity, cease to identify as women.

Instead of identifying the feminine gender role as the problem, and working to dismantle the hierarchy of gender, women are encouraged to stop identifying as such if they behave or feel as human beings do. Instead of giving women the tools to unlearn internalised misogyny, gender ideology encourages them to disown womanhood and claim to be individual exceptions to the rule of gender. Through positioning full humanity and womanhood as being mutually exclusive, gender ideology invites women to participate in I’m-Not-Like-Other-Girls: Queer Edition.

It is understandable that women are eager to escape the feminine gender role – indeed, women’s liberation from the hierarchy of gender is a core feminist objective. But the feminist movement advocates the liberation of all women from all forms of oppression, not simply the liberation of those who believe their individual oppression through gender is wrong – those who “don’t aspire to any kind of womanhood.”

The Homophobia of Queering Gender

Despite talk of queer community, an alliance between members of the LGBT+ alphabet soup, homophobia has always been at the root of queer politics. Queer ideology emerged as backlash to lesbian feminist principles, which advocated radical social change through the transformation of personal lives (Jeffreys, 2003). The political interests of lesbian women and marginalised gay men – primarily the abolition of gender roles – were dismissed within queer spheres. Individualism precluding any concentrated focus on feminist and gay liberation politics, which queer discourse began to describe as old-fashioned, dull, or anti-sex.

In recent years, this derision has escalated into openly anti-gay sentiment. Attempts to erase lesbian women and gay men are now standard practice within a queer setting. In an opinion piece that questions whether lesbian identity can “survive the gender revolution”, Shannon Keating claims that lesbian and gay sexualities are obsolete:

“Against the increasingly colorful backdrop of gender diversity, a binary label like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ starts to feel somewhat stale and stodgy. When there are so many genders out there, is it closed-minded — or worse, harmful and exclusionary — if you identify with a label that implies you’re only attracted to one?”

There is a persistent strain of homophobia within gender ideology. It manifests so regularly because that homophobia is woven into queer gender politics. Same-sex attraction is relentlessly problematised because it acknowledges both the existence of biological sex and its significance in determining the potential for attraction – a contradiction of the claim that gender, not sex, is the defining unit of identity.

Earlier this year Juno Dawson, author of The Gender Games, claimed that being a gay man was merely a “consolation prize” for those unprepared to opt into a life of transwomanhood. Prior to transition, Dawson lived and loved as a gay man – therefore, it is particularly troubling that Dawson proclaimed homosexuality to be anything less than worthy of respect and recognition as legitimate. Dawson positioned life as a gay man as an inferior alternative, a poor substitute, for repressed transwomanhood. When gay men and lesbian women objected to this homophobia, Dawson delivered a non-apology which hit upon a fundamental truth about the politics of gender identity and sexuality: “Lots of trans men and women previously lived as gay men or lesbians prior to transition so I think it’s a really important thing to discuss…”

It is wildly regressive to argue that gay men are really unfulfilled women on the inside. By that logic, only the most straight and toxic of masculinities is authentically male. And if gay men are really straight transwomen, there is no such thing as gay men. Homosexuality has been ‘cured’ – an agenda that traditionally belonged to social conservatives, but can now be found within queer ideology. And it is not coincidence that so many of those who choose to undergo surgical or medical transition are gay men or lesbian women who, upon undertaking transition, live as heterosexuals. In Iran, where same-sex relationships are punishable by death, clerics are prepared to “accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex.”

Gender ideology is fundamentally conservative. It is based on the premise that gender roles are absolute, that those who stray from the gender role ascribed to their sex must belong to another category. Lesbian women and gay men defy the gender roles simply by loving someone of the same sex, by deviating from the heteropatriarchal patterns of dominance to create a sexual politics of equality. If we are transitioned into heterosexuality, into compliance with gender roles, we are made to conform to the gender roles mapped out by patriarchy.

Nobody is born in the wrong body. A body cannot, by definition, be wrong. The system of gender, on the other hand, is wrong in every way. Problematising bodies as opposed to the hierarchy which confines them only replicates the destructive ideology at the heart of patriarchy. It is an upside-down approach to the politics of liberation, misguided at best and complicit with patriarchy at worst.

Conclusion

Critiquing gender ideology is strongly discouraged – I suspect this is because the more one explores the queer perspective of gender, the more apparent its misogyny and homophobia become. Once the progressive veneer begins to crack – once it grows clear that gender ideology is at best complacent about patriarchy and the harms patriarchy visits upon women – queer politics become much harder to sell to the general populace.

And so those feminists who do question gender ideology are branded bigots, the criticisms and those women brave enough to make them rendered illegitimate. Women who question gender ideology are derided as TERFs – we are told time and time again that their only motive in critiquing gender is malice, as opposed to meaningful concern for the well-being of women and girls. To that, I echo the words of Mary Shelley: “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” Any attempt to discourage women from addressing our oppression is deeply suspect.

Gender ideology creates a false dichotomy of people who are innately bound to traditional gender roles and those exceptional few who are not. Gender politics are the most elaborate and harmful example of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Why queer gender when we can abolish it? Why waste energy trying to subvert oppressive practice when we can do away with it altogether?

Woman is a sex class – nothing more, nothing less. Man is a sex class – nothing more, nothing less. To claim the scope of our identity is defined by the gender role pressed onto our sex class is to legitimise the project of patriarchy. As a feminist, as a woman, I reject queer politics and the gender ideology it advocates. Instead, I argue that women and men living outside of the script set by gender – be it the queer or patriarchal classifications – should be embraced as revolutionaries. Only through the abolition of gender can we achieve true liberation.

Bibliography

Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex.

Cordelia Fine. (2010). Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference.

Lynne Harne & Elaine Miller (eds.). (1996). All the Rage: Reasserting Radical Lesbian Feminism.

bell hooks. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

Sheila Jeffreys. (2003). Unpacking Queer Politics.

Audre Lorde. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.

Cherríe Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (eds.). (1981). This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.

Bonnie J. Morris. (2016). The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture.

Victoria Pepe (ed.). (2015). I Call Myself A Feminist: The View from Twenty-Five Women Under Thirty.

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper. More Radical with Age.

Dear Roxane – An Open Letter on Queer Feminism & Lesbophobia

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Claire

A brief foreword: this letter was written as an invitation for queer, bisexual, and straight women who call themselves feminist to reflect upon their lesbophobia.

Dear Roxane,

As every woman active in the modern day feminist movement knows, there is a growing schism between queer ideology and sexual politics. The conversation has grown fraught, with those on either position growing heartsick from the conflict. It’s difficult, because points of connection are missed, especially on social media – where everything becomes somehow more polar, more about point-scoring than moments of political connection. And it was my aim to connect with you in raising the issue of lesbophobia, to share a meaningful engagement from which we could both develop, because otherwise nothing ever changes and the same mistakes are repeated ad infinitum – and a feminist movement that replicates the hierarchies of mainstream society is in no way equipped to dismantle them.

I am not writing with the intention of ridiculing you, nor do I claim to be some paragon of feminist virtue. The reality of the situation is that I’m just about as bougie as a Black girl can be, and held onto some shitty class politics until turning twenty two, politics which I will spend the rest of my life unlearning and resisting. While it is embarrassing to get things wrong, devastating to realise you have been complicit in the oppression of others, the real shame would be in turning your back on the women who try to address behaviour born of politics that are damaging to them. With this in mind, I hold compassion for you as I address the lesbophobia you displayed on Twitter.

In response to Kat Blaque’s Tweets about a confrontation with Arielle Scarcella, you said the following: “Oh my god. I am on the edge of my seat. Slap her.”

From the context I gather this remark was intended with humour, a pass-the-popcorn type jibe about the drama, but the joke falls flat when we consider just how vulnerable lesbian women are in heteropatriarchy. Just this week it was announced that Aderonke Apata, a Nigerian lesbian rights activist, won her claim for asylum in Britain after a 13-year struggle to have the state recognise that as a lesbian she was at extreme risk of violence if forcibly repatriated. Lesbian women are treated with revulsion simply for loving women. We are disparaged and degraded for experiencing same-sex attraction, and abused – often brutally – for living woman-centric lives. By all means, criqitue Arielle Scarcella’s videos – I’m not stopping you. But please do not suggest that violence against a lesbian woman becomes legitimate simply because she subscribes to a set of politics that are not aligned with your own. Not even in jest.

Blaque is a well-known trans blogger. Scarcella is a well-known lesbian blogger. Blaque has made numerous videos denouncing Scarcella, and the beef between them is well known in the sphere of LGBT+ online community. In many ways, this issue goes beyond the drama that happens between them, stretching to encompass all the tensions of gender discourse.

Gender discourse isn’t abstract. How the politics of gender manifest in our lives has very real consequences for everyone involved. You know this, and have written about it with great eloquence. The tensions within gender discourse have grown particularly explosive where lesbian sexuality is involved. What is sometimes referred to as the cotton ceiling issue – whether lesbian women ought to consider those identifying as transwomen as potential sexual partners – has become hugely controversial in the last few years.

For me, it is obvious: lesbians are women who exclusively experience same-sex attraction. As transwomen are biologically male, lesbian sexuality does not extend to include them. That is not to say lesbian women would not consider taking trans-identified lovers – as I have previously written, the boundary between a butch lesbian and a transman is often blurred, and many non-binary identified people are biologically female too – but rather that our interest is reserved for those who are physically, biologically female. It is also worth pointing out that approximately two thirds of transgender people have reported undergoing some form of gender-confirming surgery, meaning that the majority of transwomen are in possession of a penis – a definite no insofar as lesbian sexuality is concerned.

From what I have seen of her videos, Arielle Scarcella is of a similar view – she defends lesbian women’s right to assert sexual boundaries and the validity of same-sex attraction. No matter your opinion on Scarcella’s work, one question arises when considering the accusations of transphobia levelled against her: why, in 2017, is it contentious for a lesbian to categorically reject sex involving a penis? The short answer is homophobia and misogyny, both of which can be found in abundance in queer attitudes towards lesbian women.

When I pointed out that your words were lesbophobic, you claimed this could not be because you are “queer as the day is long.” Since you are queer as opposed to lesbian, it is not for you to decide what is lesbophobic or not. Being queer does not inoculate you against homophobia or, indeed, lesbophobia. Queer is an umbrella term, a catch-all which may encompass all but the most rigid practice of heterosexuality. It is not a stable category or coherent political ideology, as anything considered even slightly transgressive may be labelled queer. Queer is a deliberately amorphous expression, avoiding specific definitions and fixed meanings. It need not relate to the politics of resistance, and indeed cannot relate to the politics of resistance because queer lacks the vocabulary to positively identify oppressed and oppressor classes. Queer seeks to subvert the dominant values of society through performativity and playfulness as opposed to deconstructing those values by presenting a radical alternative to white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. Queer is the master’s tools trying to dismantle the master’s house, and – inevitably – failing. Predictably, queer replicates the misogyny of mainstream society. As lesbophobia is essentially misogyny squared, identifying as queer in no way indicates a politics that values lesbian women.

Being a lesbian woman is not the same as being a queer woman. That observation is not rooted in purism, but fact: lesbian and queer are two different realities. Devoid of concrete definitions, to be queer is to be sexually fluid – meaning the term queer is male-inclusive. Within the possibilities implied by queer, there remains scope for men to gain sexual access to women. As queer women’s sexualities do not explicitly – or even implicitly – reject men, queer womanhood is accepted in a way that lesbian womanhood will never be. The lesbian woman represents a threat to the status quo, to male dominion over women, in a way that the queer woman by definition (or lack of) never could. As a result, lesbians have been consistently pathologised and abused since the 1800s. I do not dispute that there are difficulties in the lives of queer women, but a degree of social acceptance may be purchased through vocally disparaging lesbian women in the way that you disparaged Arielle Scarcella.

To publicly shame and ridicule lesbians in an effort to alter our sexual boundaries is to follow the blueprint created by compulsory heterosexuality. And make no mistake – it is Arielle Scarcella’s adherence to lesbian sexual boundaries that Kat Blaque takes issue with, the outspoken self-definition of a lesbian woman, that have resulted in allegations of transphobia. The problematising of gay and lesbian sexuality is an unfortunate product of queer politics. If biological sex is unspeakable, so too is same-sex attraction; if same-sex attraction is unspeakable, so too is lesbian sexuality – the logic of queer forces us back into the closet by insisting that lesbian women and gay men abandon self-definition. And self-definition is fundamental to the liberation of any oppressed group. Sooner or later, those embracing the label of queer must reckon with that homophobia.

Arielle Scarcella sought to address the tensions between queer people and lesbian women in her videos – which, regardless of whether or not one agrees with her content, is a brave thing to have done. Few feminists want to speak publicly in a candid, heartfelt way about the relationship between gender and sexual politics because, irrespective of whether or not one speaks in good faith, a witch hunt is all too likely to ensue. Without having exhaustive knowledge of her work, I can at least say that I’m grateful Scarcella is speaking up for herself and her lesbian sisters. Even and especially within LGBT+ community, this is a particularly unpleasant time to be a lesbian.

The long answer as to why it is newly acceptable to pressure lesbians into altering our sexual boundaries reflects upon the history of anti-lesbian sentiment within feminism, from Betty Friedan branding us the “lavender menace” to Buzzfeed’s Shannon Keating dismissing us as “stale and stodgy.” Lesbians are routinely used as a foil to reassure the wider world that ‘normal’ women can engage in feminism without ending up ugly, angry, and bitter like the dykes. We are caricatured with great cruelty, presented as a malevolent extreme or reduced to a joke. The comparatively mainstream branches of feminism, be they liberal or radical, actively engage in the devaluation of lesbian womanhood.

The only reason your ‘joke’ about slapping Arielle happened is because she is a lesbian who categorically rejects dick. Queer politics have created a strange, painful context where lesbian women are acceptable hate figures in feminism for simply maintaining our sexual boundaries. But lesbians are not the whipping girls of other women, queer or bisexual or straight, nor do we exist as your symbol for all that is wrong within the feminist movement. Using lesbian women as such builds upon a long history of lesbophobia.

If lesbian women are suggesting to you (as many of us did) that your words contain lesbophobia, it is time to listen. Lesbians are not the oppressor class, and we certainly don’t hold the lion’s share of the power in an LGBT+ or feminist setting. Brushing us off as malicious TERFs is a whole lot easier than engaging with anything we have to say about the relationship between gender and sexual politics, a slick manoeuvre that enables queer discourse to delegitimise our words and the women with the courage to speak them. Lesbian women are lesbian precisely because we love women – not because we feel hatred towards any other demographic, although a respectable case has been made for misandry. Lesbian women do not exist to provide validation. The sole purpose of our sexuality is certainly not to provide affirmation. Lesbian sexuality is not a litmus test for transwomanhood.

When it comes to queer politics, lesbians are made into some sort of bogeyman – a spectre that haunts the progressive left. “Cis lesbian” and “TERF” are used almost interchangeably in queer discourse, used as shorthand to convey how utterly contemptible we supposedly are. If our concerns about coercion within queer culture are “TERF nonsense”, our sexual boundaries can be challenged without compunction. There is an Othering, a monstering of lesbian women, that is fundamental to this process. Demonising lesbians for being lesbian means that we are not worthy of compassion or basic human decency, that jokes about slapping, punching, raping, and otherwise abusing us are fair game in feminism.

Demonising lesbians for our sexual orientation is lesbophobia, no matter how you look at it. And I hope that you do look at it, Roxane, that you – and other women, be they queer or bisexual or straight – have some honest, critical self-reflection about why bits of your feminism come at the expense of lesbian women, about why you think that is an acceptable trade to make. This conversation is long overdue.

Yours Sincerely,

Claire

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