The cool kids say
Julia Carrie Wong chats with “scholar” Sophie Lewis about those evil women who dare to call themselves feminists even though they don’t think men are women.
…just three weeks into Trump’s second term, the man responsible for stripping women in the US of the right to an abortion was declared a “feminist kween”, “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” by several prominent feminist writers in the UK.
The occasion for these declarations was Trump’s all-out assault on trans rights. Since taking office, the president has used executive orders to attempt to restrict the ability of trans Americans to travel, work, receive medical care, serve in the military, attend school and participate in women’s sports.
Are trans Americans foreigners who claim to be American but aren’t?
What this dishonest “journalist” is talking about of course is not letting people do all these things with fake identities and/or with the aid of cross-sex hormones. Newsflash: nobody gets to travel or work or serve in the military with fake ID. The whole point of ID is to make sure you are who you say you are.
How did we get here? How have we arrived at a place where self-identified feminists ally themselves with a man who has so extravagantly dedicated his personal and political lives to the humiliation, domination and degradation of women and girls?
I brought this question to Sophie Lewis, whose new book, Enemy Feminisms, out this week in the US, seeks to understand how and why some forms of feminism have diverged so fundamentally from others as to become, well, enemies.
Ya it’s a good question – how did you fuckers get your “feminism” so twisted that you celebrate men in skirts who take everything that belongs to women, while you demonize women who object? Please do tell us all about the thought process.
“It is difficult – I would say impossible – to say that [Terfism] is not feminism, that the philosophical and movement roots of their whole deal is not feminism,” Lewis said. “That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there were always other feminists fighting them tooth and nail.
“It hurts and confuses us to imagine that there are anti-liberatory feminisms, but I think when we do allow that and we do conceptually break that possibility open, that’s when it becomes possible to stake out our ground as an anti-colonial, proletarian, trans feminism,” she continued.
She continued, implying that feminists who think feminism is for women are also colonialists and anti-worker.
In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis also takes on the anti-pornography turn that some radical feminists took in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of the Islamophobic femonationalist (“death by drone bomb is better (and more feminist) for women than life is under sharia law”)
So genuine feminism is Islamophilic? How does that work exactly? Islam does not repeat does not return the love.
Lewis is not the first to connect Terfism to the rising power of the global far right. The philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler has warned for years of the growing movement against “gender” – and the damage that feminist transphobia does to the coalition building needed to combat fascism. “Continuing the ‘anti-gender ideology’ discourse places contemporary ‘radical feminists’ in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” they wrote in the 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender.
Butler wrote it therefore it’s obviously true, yeah? No.
Butler wrote a lot of things
Anti-colonialism is the same as colonizing women’s spaces?
Proletariat is the same as middle class? Which is what most of these men are…
Trans-feminism is the only term I could agree with – they are non-feminists who identify as feminists.
This has actually always been the bad news about feminism; there were always women (and men) willing to fight tooth and nail, and some of those were our so-called partners in the fight. Some feminists spent so much time fighting each other, they didn’t have time to fight the Patriarchy, and they lost sight of who was the enemy. It was from the ranks of these feminists that trans-feminism arose…not to mention pro-pornography and difference feminism.
The first link is to an article in the Times by Hadley Freeman. Here’s the relevant passage:
Anyone who cannot detect the irony is tone deaf.
The second link is to a piece by Janice Turner in the Sunday Times. The headline reads: “Sports edict makesTrump a feminist hero”. Anyone who knows anything at all about journalism is aware that headlines are supplied by sub-editors, not the journalist who wrote the piece. Here’s part of what Turner herself has to say:
So Julia Carrie Wong was very sparing with the truth about those “prominent feminist writers in the UK.” Very sparing indeed.
Twerp.
Your reminder that Sophie Lewis ran an ominously-titled Kids’ Liberation seminar at the Brooklyn Institute in winter 2024, that used work by the academic Jacob Breslow .This was AFTER 2022, when it was discovered that Breslow had been writing paedophilia apologetics:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240817145218/https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/childrens-liberation-autonomy-and-control-2/
WHY doesn’t Julia Carrie Wong ask Sophie Lewis about why Lewis thinks that Mr. Breslow has important insights into “liberating” kids?
As part of her Khmer Rouge-ish “abolish the family” philosophy, Lewis puts forward a warped view of children as little adults who need to be “de-privatised” and “liberated” from their nasty TERF-ish parents:
https://www.tumblr.com/whitehotharlots/711822696904851456/sophie-lewis-is-a-revolting-dunce
“Child sovereignty”.
No doubt there was a Victorian Sophie Lewis decrying that era’s bans on children smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol as being attacks on “child sovereignty”.
Yikes.
It’s all very Foucault.
One of the several big lies on the Left side is that abortion is the supreme issue. I mean, while I’ve literally been part of reproductive rights activism as far back as my conscious memory goes, it’s not the end-all-be-all of women’s rights. To hear Dems talk, however, you’d think that abortion is the precondition on which everything else is grounded. And not, ya know, workable concepts of man and woman.
I’ve had to obliquely suggest to (female!) family members that those women who voted for Trump or abstained maybe—just maybe—had other issues that they weighed against the right to terminate a pregnancy. That maybe there were other concerns that were more pressing and presented a more imminent, clear, and present danger to them.
And every time I do, they look at me like I’ve spontaneously begun speaking in tongues, because the very idea has never even occurred to them that there could be a coherent rationale to any perspective other than their own. (Which coincidentally mirrors the media they consume. Coincidentally.)
The propaganda bubbles we live in now leave me in horrified despair sometimes.
Eh, outside of the trans debate, I don’t think ANY aspect of the Trump movement is going to end how women want it to. Sure, they’re talking about Title IX now, but as soon as they’ve finished extracting what public good will they can, they’ll hit Title IX at the knees.
That said, analyzing the election numbers, it’s pretty clear that Trump’s support isn’t any better than it was when he lost to Biden. The issue was that a lot of people, including women, didn’t show up for Harris, not that they were supporting Trump. Nullius, you might find it easier to convince your relatives that a lot of women just threw up their hands in disgust at not having any party that they felt actually supported them as anything other than a talking-point.
Not being supported beyond a talking point kind of sums up politics in general.
In other words it’s just another bad pun. Just like there is no non-trivial definition of “man” that applies to “Chase” Strangio and me at the same time, there is no non-trivial definition of “feminist” that applies to both Sophie Lewis and Julie Bindel.
Of course there are also gender critical* “feminists” out there who have gone all out MAGA, and not all of them have always been reactionaries who wanted women back in the kitchen, gays back in the closet and blacks back to Africa. As I keep pointing out, many of the people currently riding the trans bandwagon used to say the kind of things for which they would now go out of their way to destroy other people’s lives. Likewise, many of the people currently defending pussygrabbing and the overturning of Roe v. Wade** would have been horrified by these same attitudes less than ten years ago. They didn’t just change their political affiliation to match their values. The values really did change as well, in many cases beyond recognition.
Along with the all too human tendency to think that any enemy of your enemy is, if not exactly a “friend”, then at least not entirely bad, I once again think cognitive dissonance is a major part of the explanation. What may have begun as a purely pragmatic decision to make a common cause with the MAGA crowd against the excesses of wokeism and cancel culture means you have a stake in defending your choice: “If they really were that bad, a decent person like myself wouldn’t be working with them”. So you start excusing and rationalizing one thing after the other. On your path over to the dark side you never cross a “line” where things go from “definitely OK” to “definitely not OK”, and before you know it you have turned 180 degrees from where you started and are now actively embracing the polar opposite of everything you used to stand for.
*”Gender critical” is an expression like “atheist”. It only says something about what a person doesn’t believe in. A shared lack of belief in gods or gendered souls doesn’t necessarily imply any positive shared values.
**Not to mention the attempt to overturn an election, the part about threatening Denmark and Canada while sucking up to Putin, as well as a lifetime of crime, corruption, pathological lying, and cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/157417026
If this link works (it might not), this person has written a fantastic explanation of how it’s not feminism that’s “colonialist” or whatever bullshit terms they are throwing at women who dare to say “No!” to entitled males this week. It’s ideal for feeding straight back to the kind of idiots who wilfully refuse to see who is causing the problem. It’s written in their own format, using familiar terms, but firmly pointing out reality.
Quite long, but very useful. It’s also nice to know that all the examples used of male aggression and entitlement are firmly evidenced, and can be found despite their efforts to make it impossible to hold a man accountable for his behaviour if he claims a special gender soul.
(If it doesn’t work, will try posting the title, and find it by searching)
Bjarte, don’t forget the bit about dismantling the greatest powerhouse of medical and other scientific research the world’s ever known (parts of that may be saved).
No, to an extent maybe Butler has a point… but I can point my finger right back at her. “Feminists” chose the wrong side, but so did other “feminists”; MAGA and trans are both Team Bad Guy they just wear different colors.
Abortion may be the thing the Dems latched onto (because it polled as their best issue) but the real women’s rights fight is “the pill”. Most of women’s ability to be independent are tied to contraception and the skinwalkers and fascists can’t let that stand.
Let’s not forget that!
Thanks for the link, cluecat. It’s very useful.
I had a quick look at “Enemy Feminisms” in Google Book Search and found this line about Mary Sophia Allen, the suffragette-turned-fascist:
A bar where you can drink alcohol during Prohibition is somehow “queer” now, according to Pick-Me Lewis.
Well you see it “emblematizes”. That’s all you need to know.
Somebody should send that passage about speakeasies being “queer” into “Pseud’s Corner” in “Private Eye” magazine.
Another line from the Lewis book:
How interesting.
What sort of people does Sophie Lewis want to order to differentiate the “TERFs” from the “real feminists”, and how will these people be empowered to strip real or imagined “TERFs” of cultural and institutional power?
Reminds me of a line from the rock band Drug Church’s song “Tillary” :