Towards trans-feminist coalitions in the post-Yugoslav space: Building feminist radical solidarities

Abstract

The conflict between trans-inclusive and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) has recently erupted in the post-Yugoslav space, adding to the urgency of embracing trans-feminism. In order to forge the ground for such a feminist orientation, this paper interweaves two theoretical reflections: the subject of feminism, and the historical lesbian experience of becoming ‘included’ with/in it. Beginning with the idea that, similarly to trans, it also took time and effort for lesbianity (see discussion on this concept in the article) to be recognised as a ‘legitimate’ subject of feminist emancipation, I extend Wittig's negation of lesbian womanhood to trans women. With this in mind, I argue that feminist radical solidarity requires an open-ended, liminal conception of gender. I then draw upon nine interviews with predominantly cis-gender lesbian activists from the post-Yugoslav space to explore the ways in which they endeavoured to bring about feminist radical solidarity in their activist engagement. I conclude that solidarity rather than normative inclusion that we, lesbians, fought for as feminists, should eventually be put at the service of trans-feminism. Like that, trans-feminism can become an integral part of women studies, trans women can be recognised as subjects of feminism, and trans persons embraced as our political and personal allies.

Keywords

feminism lesbian activism solidarity TERF post-Yugoslav space exclusionary politics trans activism

Introduction

The conflict between trans-inclusive and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), which has been present in the Western feminist movements for decades (Straub and Epstein, 1991; Enke, 2012; Stryker and Bettcher, 2016), has recently erupted also in the post-Yugoslav space, adding to the urgency of embracing trans-feminism. This task is particularly relevant in the current capitalist re- entanglements with re-patriarchalisation, the ever-increasing social and moral control over women, the strengthening economic and political pressures against women and LGBT subjects, all of which are fuelled by the global rise of populist “anti-gender ideologies” (see Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Zaharijević, 2019). It is enough to take a look at governmental attacks on women's and transgender rights across Central-Eastern Europe to feel an impetus for radical solidarity, rather than continue being stuck in a quagmire of discomfort around gender, on the one hand, and bitter exclusions built over misconceptions and clashes transposed from the Anglo-American context, on the other. The accusations about trans women taking over feminist organisations, beating feminists, date-raping other women or using ‘inappropriate’ toilets,¹ hardly bear any relevance to the post-Yugoslav political milieu. Nevertheless, they are regularly invoked in activist disputes that perpetuate discrimination against this seriously marginalised population.

This paper connects and concretises two concepts and practices, namely gender and solidarity or concretelly, “feminist solidarity and trans identities” (Bettcher, 2014b). It starts from the persuasion that centre stage should be given to those who have unwaveringly supported gender-varied and trans-respective feminist practices, policies and programmes. Led by the wish to contribute to the critical argumentation, support, and development of feminist and trans activist coalitions and an articulation of multiple feminisms in the region, I reached out to nine predominantly cis lesbian feminist activists, including one bisexual and one non-binary person. My aim was to learn from their experience about how, on what basis and with what motivation solidarity with a social group that is not always identical to their own can be achieved, and how these practices can be conceptualised as feminist radical solidarity.

The urgent need for feminist solidarity reveals the cracks and discrepancies among various gender philosophies that have served as the foundation for different feminist politics. Engaging with the “epistemologies and practices that produce gender” (Enke, 2012, p. 1) means being ready to enquire about the meanings of ‘womanhood’ in novel and courageous ways. Bearing in mind these ‘definitional struggles’, in the first part of the paper I revisit some feminist theories regarding the subject of feminism, in order to refute the threat that feminist solidarity is only a myth. In the second part I zoom in on the post-Yugoslav space to present how lesbian feminist activists, throughout the 1980s, endeavoured to put lesbianity² on the political agenda of the nascent feminist movement. By doing so, I set the background for my argument that lesbianity took time and effort to be recognised as a ‘legitimate’ participant in the overarching project of feminist emancipation, and that it is now trans persons’ turn to go through such a process. I then focus on my interview material to examine the challenges which post-Yugoslav lesbian, queer and transfeminist activists have encountered while struggling to forge solidarities with trans persons. I want to show that rather than being an obstacle, lesbian and queer feminist and even radical feminist theory and experiences can be crucial in assuring that the inclusion we as lesbians fought for in feminism, is eventually put at the service of trans-feminism becoming an integral part of women's studies, trans women being recognised as subjects of feminism, and trans persons embraced as our political and personal allies.

The myth of feminist solidarity?

What causes the rift in feminism regarding the participation of trans women is an issue that can be traced along a trajectory starting with The Book of the City of Ladies, leading to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to The Second Sex or to the more recent The Empire Strikes Back. It is precisely the question “what is a woman?”, that is, what the subject of feminism is. Since the answer is open- ended, the quest for feminist solidarity is deemed to be a myth, that is something unreal and impossible to reach in practice. How to assure theoretically that feminist solidarity among cis and trans persons is not a sheer impossibility?

Can it be that the subject of feminism itself is actually so evasive because it is based on familiar omissions of race, class, colonial and national belonging, sexuality, etc, from the historical feminist ‘waves’. In order to have lesbians recognised as subjects of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s in the West, lesbian feminists insisted on being solidary with women, given that they themselves were doubly oppressed. Black women's rights and lesbian feminist activists like Charlotte Bunch, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, whose works were translated in feminist publications in every post-Yugoslav republic since 1993 (Đurić, 2011), were particularly influential in fighting for lesbian visibility and agency within feminism.

To support the argument that the lesbian and trans struggles for ‘inclusion’ in feminism are similar, I propose to follow Wittig's argumentation that lesbians are not women due to not fulfilling the requirement for heterosexual relations with men. This idea appears rather contrary to the powered notion of inclusivity on the one hand (i.e. who includes whom) and questions lesbian feminist solidarity based on women's identity on the other (i.e. inclusion based on what criteria). I critique the notion of inclusivity by questioning the power invested in the relation that defines the authority that includes/excludes, and I call for acceptance rather than mere, though rightful, inclusion. To take both those issues seriously, I have opted for the concept of radical solidarity instead.

In this respect, Wittig's negative claim of lesbians not being women can be for the same effect extended to the claim that trans women are also not women due to not fulfilling the requirement for naturalised and essentialist relations with/in gender (Hale, 1996). If this is so, then trans-feminists are in the same historical position as lesbians who fought and still fight for feminist alliance. Socially, politically and epistemologically, what intersex is for sex, transgender is for gender, and lesbian (and bisexual) is for heterosexuality. Here, gender and sexuality have a potential for being resistant while posing as a deconstructive signification.³ As such, gender's and sexuality's constitutive disruption to the binary should be kept as politically relevant to liberation (Lugones, 2008) and emancipation. Liberation and emancipation are not related only to the notion of gender deconstruction but also to the notion of change, that is not only to how we think about gender but also concretely to ‘gender change’. If gender can be changed, it implies that gender as a category is mutable and unfixed, and consequently the subject of feminism might prove to be infinitely liminal (i.e. nebulous, tenuous and transgressive). Indeed, what is more relevant than the monolith onto-concept of ‘woman’ is its opposite, that is, the resistant and open-ended socially based one (Moya, 1997) which can contribute to feminism through transformative practices that are coalitional and liminal (Bettcher, 2015).

If within the processes of the naturalisation of woman we decipher the intersections with class and relations to capital, we can unveil a more in-depth social and economic hegemony at work. Arruzza (2013) shows how the relationship between gender and class is especially pertinent as global capitalism continues to restructure relations of family, sexuality, and production: “social and economic factors connected to the production, expropriation, and distribution of the surplus and of labour power rather than biology are crucial in explaining the origins of women's oppression” (p. 86). Once again, seeing the origin of women's oppression in biology and then seeing biology as the exclusive identity signifier under which we unite, that is naturalisation, has to be problematised if we are to reduce the class and gender gap and secure a more intersectional meaning to feminism's main subject. The lack of consensus around this issue of the subject of feminism still remains a basic unresolved problem that resonates in non-unified strategies and coalitions against patriarchal gender binaries.

On top of this, it appears that feminists cannot agree whether one is born or becomes a woman. The imaginary utopian conceptual space that Wittig created with her statement opened further with de Lauretis (1990; 2003) and her differentiation between Beauvoir's “One is not born but becomes a woman” and Wittig's “One is not born a woman” (original emphases):

Almost the same words, and yet such a difference in meaning – not to say such a sexual difference. In shifting the emphasis from the word born to the word woman, Wittig’s citation of de Beauvoir’s phrase invoked or mimicked the heterosexual definition of woman as “the second sex,” at once destabilizing its meaning and displacing its affect. (de Lauretis, online, 2003)

Those radical feminist activist stands that hold on to gender essentialism and the non-transformability of gender as a social and personal category, seem to be motivated by sustaining the historical and actual feminist efforts in the field of fighting the oppression of women, whoever this category manages to encompass and politically represent at a given time. In line with some deconstruction-inspired feminist authors, it can be argued that our sex and gender systems cannot be conceptualised as a solid binary pillar. The same applies to those trans-feminist views which claim that the medical regulation of transsexuality is one of the main ways in which society tries to erase transgender people by forcing them into the binary (Bettcher, 2014a, p. 384). The ‘beyond the binary’ gender model does not invalidate those trans or lesbians who self-identify as men or women, but rather focuses on the potential erasure of those identities that occupy the binary, precisely in as long as they are structurally dichotomous and immutable. If women are not the binary counterpart of men, then the change of woman to man and vice versa does not imply the eradication of the ‘original’ gender but rather a shift in the structural place and stability of one's gender (Pan, 2014).

Inspired by lesbian sexuality, de Lauretis (1990) argued that we need to learn to conceive ourselves as the “eccentric subject” – as eccentric to the heterosexual, traditional codes (applying to body and language).

What characterizes the eccentric subject is a double displacement: first, the psychic displacement of erotic energy onto a figure that exceeds the categories of sex and gender, the figure Wittig called “the lesbian”; second, the self-displacement or disidentification of the subject from the cultural assumptions and social practices attendant upon the categories of gender and sex. (de Lauretis, 2003, online)

In this respect lesbian and trans persons, bodies, materialities are facing the same theoretical and practical anti-oppressive feminist task, the one I put forward with the question what is a woman.

Transgressing post-Yugoslav and gender borders

The issue of trans exclusion in the post-Yugoslav space is reminiscent of how lesbian feminist involvement with processes of breaking heteronormativity in the second-wave feminist movement in (post-)Yugoslavia since the 1990s or earlier was treated in the context where sexual rights, anti-nationalism and war collided (Špehar, 1994; Hughes, Mlađenović, and Mršević, 1995; Iveković, 2005; Miškovska Kajevska, 2017). Due to invisibilised lesbian feminist involvement in humanitarian aid and peace-making before and during the war it was historically necessary for lesbian activists in Yugoslavia to argue for the involvement of lesbians as political subjects in the feminist movement, to which they were already strongly contributing. Nowadays we find the same task with trans persons’ involvement, and trans-feminism as feminist activism and politics.

In Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space, lesbian feminists who often co-established the movement and were prominent in some of the never-ending feminist work, had to plead for lesbian visibility to be considered a feminist matter (Dobnikar and Pamuković, 2009). The ‘border’ between the private and the public largely contributed to lesbian invisibility within the Yugoslav feminist movement which started to crack with the establishment of the first public lesbian organisations from 1985. At the four Yugoslav feminist meetings that took place in Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana between 1987 and 1991 there were repeated calls to support lesbians in creating groups, networks and share information throughout Yugoslavia (Dobnikar and Pamuković, 2009, p. 16; Živković, 2015, pp. 15–19). There were also calls to politicians regarding the new constitution to prohibit the discrimination of women and men based on sexual orientation (Pamuković and Dobnikar p. 46). This testifies to a certain component of anticipation and wishful thinking about feminist politics which would acknowledge lesbianity as part of its agenda and fight for lesbian rights from the 1980s, and particularly from the 1990s, to which I can testify from my involvement in post-Yugoslav lesbian feminist activism since 1997. Moreover, in the documents written often in the form of statements by lesbian feminists who met at the Yugoslav feminist meetings, one can trace an expectation that lesbianity as the feminist subject would cease to be the sole interest of lesbian feminists but should be embraced by non-lesbian feminists, too. At the same time, (post-)Yugoslav lesbian feminists also called for feminism as a fight for women's rights to involve lesbian activists who were not yet feminist lesbians (Oblak and Pan, 2019). Although sexually differing from other feminists, lesbians (and bisexuals etc.) sought solidarity with feminists on the ground of gender identity and human rights, that is the right for sexual choice which echoed the predominant global lesbian feminist theories from the 1970s. The re-invisibilisation of lesbianity proved to be a particularly pertinent matter within the misogynous context of war which “creates a priority of survival needs” (Mlađenović, 2001, p. 384; see also Mlađenović, 2016; Mlađenović, 2001 Q2])⁴ and in which many lesbian feminists contributed to peace and engaged in solidarity with heterosexual women but were not visible as lesbians (Bilić, 2020). The struggle of lesbians to be accepted as ‘proper feminists’ within some feminist circles in the post-Yugoslav space is ongoing, while lesbian invisibility seems to get entangled with the trans-exclusionary option by way of the lesbian being advanced politically as a ‘proper’ woman's position against the trans one as an ‘improper’ one.

In discussions of the options of coalitional and intersectional feminist collaborations, there has been a significant understanding that, due to the experiences of war, the most important notion offered to the post-Yugoslav feminist paradigm is the one of borders (Zaharijević, 2012, p. 27; Iveković, 2005), which, in my theoretical conception, is related to gender change/ability and categorical liminality. Within self-organised trans activist groups, we can see the notion of border heavily invested in gender and sexuality writings again, thus having the transgression of gender borders figuring prominently in multiple feminist activisms, theories and arts (Poštić and Hodžić, 2005; Puača, 2006; Gržinić and Stojnić in Kosmala, 2014; Gržinić, 2018). Beyond the more universalistic philosophical stances around the normative subject of feminism, what is politically specific for the post-Yugoslav space is the experiences and circumstances of post-Yugoslav feminist antimilitarism (see Kašić, 2015; Lazić and Urošević, 2016), socialist anti-paternalist contexts within LGBT rights activism (see Bilić and Kajinić, 2016), and the search for local and regional alliances made across feminist engagements which started back in the 2000s (Poštić, Đurković and Hodžić, 2006).

Introduction to the interviews

To gain an insight into how some of the practices based on coalitional feminist solidarity are articulated in the post-Yugoslav space, I conducted nine anonymous semi-structured interviews in May 2020 with six cis lesbian, one cis bisexual, one genderqueer, and one non-binary feminist activist from North Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. All of the activists have had a long-term involvement in LGBTQ (or only lesbian and feminist) groups or organisations, NGOs and belong to the middle-aged activist generation. The interviews highlight the experiences of facing oneself, reflecting on one's own activism and the problems around trans inclusion since the beginning of the 2000s.

The point of choosing among my own activist contacts ‘pro-trans’ feminist activists rather than trans-feminist ones, is to give space for reflection to those feminist activists who do not identify as trans and could reflect on my theoretical conception of working across differences, that is of radical solidarity precisely from the lesbian feminist perspective. Apart from their experiences in lesbian feminist, queer feminist and LGBT groups or organisations, I was interested in finding out what gender conceptions such activists had and how these informed their feminist practice. The aim of the article is not to explore existing conflicts alone, consequently no direct voice was given to feminist activists who demonstrate TERF standpoints, nor was I interested in exploring the conflictual relationships that interviewees could attest to, often in relation to the prominent actors of the early and contemporary post Yugoslav lesbian/feminist activist space.

The concept of feminist radical solidarity that I initially introduced to the interviewees proved to be productive and intriguing; it evoked ideas, opinions but also emotions regarding radical feminism and TERFism and experiences that I later analysed along three predominant themes embraced within the titles of the following sections, taken from the interviews. The three themes, broadly encompassing the notion of borders, cover the following topics: understandings of gender by activists; ways of utilising personal experiences of difference in activism and relating them with the wider political topic of feminism's necessity for inclusivity; and radical practices of inclusion and their challenges (e.g. safer spaces, feminist shelters for violence survivors). Finally, radical politics and understandings of radical solidarity are thematised by the activists in the mode of critical self-reflection and self-examination.

Like boats in the night

When discussing ‘our’, that is post-Yugoslav feminisms and the trans issue, one of the interviewees expressed her perception of the long-term, still ongoing process of trans inclusion in feminisms with a metaphor: “our feminisms were like boats in the night”. This refers to the question about the common premises that (could) unite or separate various feminisms and reassesses the importance of theoretical navigation as a kind of satellite communication when sailing without seeing the trajectories of other boats (i.e. emphasising a possibility of collision). This long-term feminist and LGBT activist phrased the core problem in a following way:

There is always an issue with how people take, differentiate and structure gender. If it is split into only male and female, we have a problem immediately. If there is a more flexible way to have it, then a space gets created for many people who simply dwell there. (Personal interview LS)

In general, the interviewees saw a political potential for coalitional solidarity in the ‘extensive understanding of gender’. Nevertheless, they agreed that earlier feminism was immensely important. Recent attacks against abortion rights and imposing traditionalism on women in the countries of authoritarian rule (Hungary, Poland, Russia) indirectly manifest this: the same ideology that targets LGBT persons targets and (historically) targeted women, as well. Here, the plurality of standpoints and an epistemic virtue that Medina (2013, pp. 186–216) termed “meta-lucidity” seems to be implicated in the subject itself, and feminism is practised as solidarity-based in justice. In principle, the reasoning of the interviewees can be represented by this view:

As a feminist, I do [include trans persons], naturally, we must be inclusive. We cannot go a few generations back to be reduced to sex, sexual characteristics and to vagina, it is obsolete. I also see no sense in having disparate fronts among organisations in the post-Yugoslav space, or even worse, going back to gender checking, no, no, no. We should unite in solidarity for god’s sake! After all we all fight the same batlles! (Personal interview LA)

Yet again, one can see the awareness of structural gender hierarchy as based on the insights about the performative functioning of power and the rejection of creating a monolith, that is biology-oriented sisterhood as a basis for feminist solidarity and resistance. The interviewees support my view that unchangeable gender never has and never will shield us from capitalist patriarchy which actually produces it, precisely as naturalised, immutable and as such, one that disables emancipation. Thus, activists call for a more in-depth structural approach resonating with radical solidarity:

We are legally dealing with hate crime when it comes to violence against trans persons while violence against women is seen in a family context. But here, actually, there could be a space for solidarity. Because we have the same enemies, most often the same causes, so let’s see what we can do together! (Personal interview LE)

The interviewees express determination about intersectional feminist solidarity being a concern for both LGBT and women's rights, for example abortion. They in general endorse the premise that the more oppressive attitudes towards trans and LGB people are, the more they are so for women and vice versa.

The fact that lesbianity took time and effort to be considered a feminist issue was reflected in the interviews as indirectly related to feminism's patronising and exclusive identity attitudes:

Feminism has positioned itself as a moral judge. I came to feminism to run away from the moral judgement of my family, the street, etc. We need to fight for our standing within feminism, because it is just what we do. (Personal interview LI)

But what can such ‘extended’ solidarity be based upon, apart from justice? Being aware that being a lesbian gave them a stark social and political agency, most of the activists managed to back up their solidarity beyond political persuasion, basing it on their own experience of gender and sexual difference:

My gender expression in childhood was such that I was considered a boy, then I started being silenced in public spaces as a woman. Both of those mean women’s experiences to me. Nowadays, most people would not consider me a lesbian, for example. I am aware that my gender expression potentially offers me a privilege, on the one hand, and opens up new layers, injustice and tons of other stuff, on the other. (Personal interview LE)

Certainly, there is enough authority in feminism to be eligible to decide who the proper subject of feminist politics is and who is not. But there should hardly be any authority, if at all, to decide who counts as a woman. Contradictory as this might be, what matters, especially regarding the recurring issue of ‘the disappearance of lesbians’ because of ‘going trans’, is to try and see the closeness, the blurry lines between identities rather than the biological gap between them. Such viewing can certainly contribute to better acceptance and respect towards trans persons and eliminate the perception of lesbian identity erasure:

There were butches coming to our group and programmes who were living, so to say, ‘the lives of men’, and were integrated in their communities as some kind of men. Thus, it could make it easier to accept trans identities, so the comments directed against trans were sporadic during our programmes. (Personal interview BJ)

The idea of infiltration that predominantly appears in relation to trans women presumes purity, and in this case, definitive and normative gender boundaries. When those get blurred, some feminist activists do not see them as a welcomed but rather as a scary prospect. For this reason, the interviewed activists see the disparate perception of gender particularly related to the non-inclusion of trans people in feminism. Even if deconstructed, the cis-gender norm prevails. If we are to deal more effectively with the presumed ‘trans-ideology’ ‘invasion’ which figures as a potential threat to our local and regional feminist achievements, we need to be able to contextualise it first:

This conflict about trans inclusion/exclusion started among NGOs in the context of their capitalist corporate system of funding. Another important point in this conflict is the feeling of seeking merits; to recognise how much older activists did for lesbians, for women all these years. Then trans and queer tore those achievements down in a few years, and suddenly made their activism seem redundant and too exclusionary. Smarter NGOs widened their field of work to different oppressions. So I see this conflict as strongly embedded in the frictions among NGOs and funding policies. (Personal interview LT)

For the reason of seeking merits for one's activist achievements it is important to find commonalities amidst social and political dispersion, for example regarding lesbian and trans invisibility, with both needing collective mutual support, that is radical solidarity.

I find lesbians and trans lacking positive visibility in public. In the mainstream culture we see trans women sexually contextualised, which was the same for lesbians twenty years ago. We founded our lesbian organisation particularly to change the perception of lesbians so that they stop being seen through the eyes of straight men. Let’s be realistic, trans women nowadays also have nearly no space to express themselves positively in various fields, be it literature, science, pornography, for example. (Personal interview LA)

The gates opened for questioning and change

When asked about the principal problem of trans and/or lesbian involvement with/in feminism, an interviewee expressed it with the metaphor of a door (of feminism) that needs to remain open for further revitalisations and self-examination, regardless of its difficulties. As far as violence is concerned, there is a consensus among the interviewees that trans persons should not be excluded from the services and solidarity that exist among lesbians.

During a feminist festival in a neighbouring post-Yugoslav country we held a banner: ‘Trans women are our sisters’. I am honestly sorry for not having more visible trans-feminists. The sad truth is that they are not empowered enough to establish themselves, it will take a few generations of trans-feminists to do so, just like it has taken for cis women. (Personal interview LA)

For us, trans issues were not in focus, though we were aware that politically it is clear, it is part of our issues, we are on the same page. Like the gay men, also trans are part of it. At night we had gay men who were beaten up coming to us seeking shelter, and once we moved to work in the public space, it was important for us to do the Transgender Day of Remembrance. If we don’t do it, who will? (Personal interview BJ)

Against the insistent invisibilisation of the lesbian, and clear exclusion of trans issues among some feminist organisations in the post-Yugoslav space, both the above quotes express the political responsibility across liminal belonging based on gender and sexuality. Historically, feminisms seem to have been challenged by all kinds of ‘imposters’ and their subject had to be gate-kept. In the first wave those ‘imposters’ were considered to be feminist men – who ‘cannot be feminist by definition’. In the second wave such ‘imposters’ were lesbians – who ‘act like men towards women’. Currently, by means of harmful misidentification, trans women are seen to be the ‘imposters’ to feminism – by ‘pretending to be women while they are actually male’. Gatekeeping seems to be just as important in contemporary lesbian and/or feminist safer spaces. An interviewee sketched how this broader long-term process worked out within their group:

When starting our lesbian feminist group we debated how safe they would feel if a trans woman joined. By a cis man they would feel threatened, because a man is a man. After a while we concluded that we were open for lesbians, trans women, trans men and non-binary persons. The bottom line was, if only one woman feels unsafe, we need to respect it and keep on debating until we reach consensus. (Personal interview NB)

In this respect, safer space practice is an important platform for learning (as demonstrated above by debating in/exclusion in advance, facilitated by a non-binary person) where persons are safe also in the sense of not being hurt by anyone present, where one can think about gender more freely and also get communal support to alter their persuasions. Simultaneously, the interviewees exposed the need for feminist practices of separatism and safer spaces in order to build ‘bottom-up’ political practices. Separatism functions as a ‘huddle’ here, a necessary organisational and community safety net safeguarding against the invisibility of lesbians, bi, and especially trans lesbians, who are positioned lowest in the political hierarchy.

Radical feminist practices of care have equipped lesbians with valuable practices of creating safer spaces which extend beyond the entrance gate and aim beyond mere inclusion towards acceptance. The interviewees critically stress that such practice of mutual care and sharing should be extended to trans NGOs as well. Some activists have experiences with shelters for women and children victims of domestic violence, and they extend unwavering support to trans women. Still, amidst the actual practices of not accepting trans persons to shelters, which all the interviewees reported about, the problems related to sometimes too principle- and less community-oriented approaches are to be critically reassessed and avoided. The demand for including trans women in safe houses, which is addressed mostly on the level of advocacy, does not engage trans groups to work closer on the broader issue of violence against women, like partnership violence or issues of consent. Apart from this, some activists find it problematic to persuade activists who have worked in the field of violence against women for over twenty years that they should do things differently. This results in differing opinions about whether lesbians and trans people should be included in existing services or whether new facilities should be developed instead:

This particular activist issue is very complex. We know that lesbians of more masculine appearance are considered to be a problem in shelters, too. Thus, we should develop our demands within the existing services that would be accessible to trans women and lesbians. But not in an exclusivist way, otherwise we will have non-binary persons and trans men left out. Such demands need to be addressed holistically. I am aware that some demands are easier to achieve legally than in practice. The services are quite essentialist and act very protectively towards cis women. After all, has anyone ever asked cis women and trans women where and with whom they would feel the safest? (Personal interview LT)

It seems that so far only in North Macedonia have activists succeeded in establishing a sheltering facility that also cares for trans persons. It is a service offered by an LGBT, not a women's organisation. However, in relation to the aforementioned bottom-up approach, which we can find embedded in the activist practices of nearly all of the interviewees, all are urging community spaces to offer mutual care:

In 2012/13 we opened a space, we needed it badly. There were only coffee places, and during parties there was a great class segregation, not everyone could enter. Our centre was open for all. We found a video on YouTube, a person was posting about their transition, we contacted them. They came with a friend and started to come to our office to print texts, it was truly grassroots. This way, with those two persons, the community started to form. This is how the trans group started. (Personal interview LI)

What does feminist radical solidarity Look like?

In the light of complex problems, the interviewees strongly suggested critical self-examination and self-reflection both on personal and group level. It can be even set as a systematic task (e.g. with some kind of a protocol, examining accessibility for poor women, for sex workers, for trans women who are sex workers and similar intersections). These examinations point our navigation towards issues that cause the greatest social discomfort, that stir polemics, contradictions, violence. If we are to progress, the issues that are tabooed and cause double invisibilisation need to be worked and reflected on. An interviewee who had been working in the field of violence against women for more than a decade stressed it in the following way:

I would certainly remember if we had ever received a helpline call from a trans person. There were other issues that were tough, for example when lesbians called while we all knew that lesbians were involved in the establishment of those feminist services. A lesbian calls for being beaten by a woman. We are so quiet about this type of violence! But wait, here, here are the parallels between lesbians and trans. (Personal interview BJ)

In line with demands for critical self-examining, some activist responses to the problem of tokenising Anglo-American individual cases of violence usually brought up by TERFs, refer to a symptomatic lack of problematisation and dealing with inter-lesbian violence. Shifting focus and seeing trans women solely as potential rapists of lesbians and women-beaters is a way of turning most of the violence into taboo, precisely where violence perpetrated among lesbians themselves is at stake. On the other hand, as one interviewee pointed out, a certain tabooisation can happen due to ‘political correctness’, where particular cases of trans bullying in trans-inclusive groups fail to get addressed. In fighting violence against women, the interviewee concluded that lesbians and trans persons were crucial for feminist solidarity.

When working in feminisms across intersections of class, race and nation, solidarity appears as universal but also as particular. The insistence on the universality of solidarity rests on the notion of the common which differs from context to context, that is it is particular. Therefore, what is taken to be radical in the given place is bound to change and can be understood only at the level of the radical freedom of (radical) otherness. The following experience exemplifies how difficult it is to put radical solidarity into practice:

After the international lesbian conference in Vienna that took place outside the city centre and was trans-inclusive, we met a group of lesbians that were cooking for migrants at a pro-migrant demonstration. It turned out they were exclusionary towards trans people. We got into conversation and perfectly understood each other on many other issues but we refrained from talking about trans. One of us questioned if we should still collaborate with them given the fact that we intersectionally connected well but not on the trans issue. We wondered, is it so that one needs to choose between going with TERFs or with ‘nice’ liberal feminists? (Personal interview LT)

Establishing radical solidarity seems just as hard if not utopian as establishing a common ground in coalitional feminisms’ final goal, that is gender equality, emancipation, freedom. The transformation of the current movement and opening up for “working together on joint agendas and a joint movement” does not refer only to feminism but also to our LGBT activisms, mostly because, as the interviewees claimed, LGBT activisms predominantly focus on gay men, and trans people were, till recently, “the most silent part of the LGBT community”.

Various existent aspects of ideological conflict are manifested in the controversies around funding, which is a standard component of the trans-exclusionary arguments:

Tension also gets created around a fake dilemma of LGBT organisations in particular, which are said to be taking money away from women’s organisations. Many women actually believe this to be the case. Since I am familiar with the funding policies, in our country this is definitely not so. (Personal interview LI)

In relation to trans-exclusionary activists or the ones yet uncomfortable around trans issues, the interviewees have a strong trust in the power of persuasion and education. They find it important to believe that some exclusionary positions are temporary, which is particularly relevant for the younger activists who tend to immediately ‘cancel the persons’ (Personal interview LJ). Highly emotionally charged reactions instead of a processual approach can discourage people to opt towards acceptance.

What matters more is the chance of experiencing a productive epistemic friction of differing views in order to advance knowledge (Medina, 2013). As all the interviewees claimed, after the initial state of such frictions as expressed by the metaphor of the wondering night boats, some experiences were gained by tireless educating and debating, and by now we can testify to the increasing waves of acceptance and solidary coalition-building against the anti-trans positions also present in the post-Yugoslav lesbian feminist activist space.

Conclusion: towards trans-feminist coalitions

In this paper I interwove two theoretical reflections: the issue of the subject of feminism and the historical lesbian experience of becoming ‘included’ within feminism, with the aim to support the forging of feminist coalitions based on feminist radical solidarity with trans persons in the post-Yugoslav space. To theorise this option, I first argued that an open-ended, liminal (meaning nebulous, tenuous and transgressive) conception of gender is needed, and secondly, I argued that lesbianity took time and effort to be recognised as a ‘legitimate’ participant in feminist emancipation and that now trans people are fighting the same process. In this process, however, lesbian feminist experience can be instrumental in being solidary with trans persons. My aim in this paper was to contribute to improving epistemic conditions for trans involvement as based on the proposed notion of feminist radical solidarity.

The first claim I have made derives partially from my own activist experience since the mid-nineties, and the documents created in the aftermath of the four Yugoslav feminist meetings (1987–1991), where lesbian social visibility and visibility within feminism started to emerge. This has inspired me to elucidate the parallels between lesbian and trans invisibility on the one hand, and between their efforts and obstacles in being considered feminist subjects (and this way becoming the subjects of feminist solidarity) on the other, as Wittig and Lugones argued for lesbians and women of colour and Bettcher for trans. However, inclusion among women has urged me not to call for inclusivity, but for feminist radical solidarity instead (Pearce, Erikainen and Vincent, 2020).

The concept of radical solidarity can be put in relation with the wider notion of “radical imagination”, which relates to social movements (Haiven and Khasnabish, 2014) and to the notion of “network solidarity” that is “not achieved at the expense of differences, but rather, through relations that preserve differences” (Medina, 2013, p. 308). I find it also compatible with bell hooks’ notion of an “intersectional transformational solidarity” (hooks 1984), which can be aligned with the idea of feminists’ coalition movements, based “not on essentialist but on transformational identities”, which result in Ferguson's conception of the Marxist Radical Solidarity principle of justice (Ferguson, 2009), or in Bettcher’s (2015) trans contribution to women studies and feminism.

The themes I discussed with the interviewees are broadly related to the theme of borders. Partially overlapping with regional authors, in the interviews, borders are figuring not just as a split but a dwelling area embracing dimensions of gender and sexuality as lived identities; the feminist subject in deciding who is a woman and who is not; the gates that are kept open for examining and revitalising feminist tradition; the political passage between the private and the public as it is contextualised in lesbian and trans invisibility; gatekeeping between safer and non-safe activist spaces; transgression to the Other as a radical solidarity practice; and the footbridge between different feminist conceptions.

Nearly all of the interviewees steered towards discussing safer spaces, proving the pertinence of the current exclusion of trans but also LGB persons from feminist shelter facilities. Safer spaces can be understood in two ways: as shelters for victims of violence or as spaces that are opened for sharing group affinity – another heritage of the radical feminist focus on care and connection that should be carried over into new queer communities (Rudy, 2001). In this respect, when struggling with TERFism, the interviewees stressed their trust in processuality, be it through education (especially against uncritical copy-pasting from Anglo-American contexts), or through putting into brackets harmful exclusivist stances as temporary until they transform into inclusive ones. However, this is not always easy to expect, especially in cases of unease or conservativism around gender and sexuality issues, or in cases where the sensed lack of acknowledgement to other (second-wave) feminist achievements coincides with the accusations regarding funding issues and their instrumentalising for various political purposes (Bakić, 2020).

Having stated that, I show that one source for radical solidarity is conceived in the interviewees’ personal experience with trans women being women who have as many problems with their ‘womanhood’ as lesbians have. While simultaneously criticising the idea of having a common experience of being a woman (Mikkolla, 2019), interviewees touched upon the “nebulous boundaries between butch and trans identity” (Manders, 2020). The other source for solidarity is understood politically, in perceiving themselves and trans persons as socially invisibilised, oversexualised, and multiply oppressed socially. The notion of radical solidarity takes us from self-reflexive practical questions, like how we exclude other people with our actions or lack of actions, to reflecting on how we ourselves are oppressed.

How to forge effective political alliances in feminisms (Heyes, 2003, p. 1093)? I have shown that TERF tensions result in the increasing lack of coalitional cooperation, particularly within a capitalist corporate system of funding NGOs, which embeds conflicts among NGOs and funding policies. This turns out especially divisive in common fights like those over the control of one's own body. Coalitional cooperation proves particularly urgent in the time of writing these lines, when the Hungarian Parliament (neighbouring Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia) banned legal gender recognition for trans and intersex people (Transvanilla, 2020, online). This implies the immediate insertion of authority over matters like our names, our bodies and genders, and calls for consolidation against the common enemy. In this respect, rather than being an obstacle, women of colour, lesbian and queer feminist experiences can be crucial in assuring that the solidary rather than normative inclusion lesbians and/or women of colour have fought for as feminists, becomes a political choice and chance, especially but not only in such an unstable political space as the post-Yugoslav one remains to be.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Besides being grateful to the interviewees, the author wishes to thank scholars-activists Bojan Bilić, Dorottya Rédai and Iwo Nord for their invaluable radical solidarity in shaping and sharpening this text.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maja Pan

Notes

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