The anti-feminism of anti-trans feminism

On 4 February 2023, the Centre for Gender Studies as SOAS University of London in the United Kingdom spontaneously hosted a conference titled We are the feminisms in the lecture theatres (and in the streets). The event was put together within 10 days and speakers from London-based SOAS, University College London (UCL), London School of Economics and Cardiff University, Glasgow School of Arts as well as independent scholars promptly agreed to share their work and – as the subtitle to the conference promised – their understanding of feminisms as ‘intersectional, transnational and interconnected with fighting racism and hate against lesbians, trans + queer people’ ¹ (CGS, 2023). The conference took place on the same day as another event, across the road from SOAS, at the UCL-based IOE. Under the title Education for women’s liberation, ² this conference hosted an arsenal of academic and activist speakers known for their essentialist views on women and sex, their discriminatory views and politics towards trans people and trans women in particular and for their various documented overlaps with conservative and far-right agendas. ³

In this article, ⁴ I want to take the SOAS event as a ground for pondering: How can we continue to imagine the political potentials of transfeminisms while also attending to a current political moment in which globally critical scholarship and activism on gender, sexuality, race and migration is under attack? These attacks come from a variety of actors, ranging from the far right including both the conservative mainstream and Christian fanatics to liberals or traditionally left-wing institutions like strands within socialist parties, trade unions and certain strands of feminism. We are currently witnessing a supernational unification of far right, centrist and leftist agents using anti-gender, anti-feminist and transphobic mobilisations, populist affects and strategic disinformation as accelerators for hateful and anti-democratic agendas. Ultimately, this leads to a consolidation of the global shift to the right.

Yet, where there is oppression, there is resistance, there is community building, there is imagining otherwise (Olufemi, 2021). Our feminisms are trans-feminisms, they are trans-inclusive, trans-national and in translation (Tudor, 2017). They are intersectional and inherently concerned about countering dogmatisms and engaging with contradictions in political and academic movements seeking radical social transformation, including an ongoing awareness and critique of the possibility of their own shortfalls. As a nod towards this community building through jointly produced knowledge, this article engages the thinking and contributions of all SOAS conference speakers, among others, as an attempt to methodologically grapple with the how and who of ‘imagining otherwise’.

Intersectionality

Let me start with the most basic analysis of intersectionality (or the incapacity to conceive thereof). When the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS tweeted about the upcoming conference, one reaction particularly stood out to me because it was so hermetically sealed towards intersectional thinking. One response (amid many enthusiastic tweets and retweets) to our conference announcement and probably as reaction to its subtitle ‘Feminisms are intersectional, transnational and interconnected with fighting racism and hate against lesbians, trans + queer people’ by an account with the name XX Matters reads:

Feminism is about women. It’s not about coercing women into serving as the mothers and caretakers of every OTHER oppressed group on earth. What’s next, ‘BLM is intersectional & connected w fighting sexism & homophobia worldwide’ & you shame BLM for focusing ‘too much’ on racism? ⁵

When I speak about intersectionality, of course I refer to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) term, but I am also using it as a shorthand to hint towards the messy, complex and contradictory workings of power. All attempts to grasp the interdependent, rhizomatic assemblages (Puar, 2006) in which power manifests itself in specific contexts, locations and ever-changing conjunctures (Demirović and Bojadžijev, 2002; Tudor, 2018: 1070), are necessarily simplistic and will linguistically butcher complex realities. They are only an (imperfect) attempt to name the multifaceted, complex and often ungraspable dimensions of the functioning of power in ‘our necropolitical present-future’ (Puar, 2006: 121). With this, I am resisting a polarisation of intersectionality and assemblage theory and just – forgive my laziness – intend to find a word that makes clear that when I speak about feminisms as movements for radical social transformation, I speak about ways to resist single-issue-politics.

The formulations in the tweet are almost too revealing. Imagining ‘every OTHER oppressed group on earth’ as outside of the claimed category ‘women’, especially as a reply to the conference’s focus on intersectionality, transnationalism and fighting racism and hate against lesbians, trans and queer people can only mean that its author assumes the ‘women’ of this feminism as not-lesbians, not-queer, not-trans and not subjected to racism. With stunning openness, the tweeter in other words admits to advocating for a feminism that is only for White, female assigned at birth and woman identified, binary gendered, straight women and not interested in transnational solidarities or struggles. How else should we understand the not one, but two references to the global (‘every OTHER oppressed group on earth’ and ‘worldwide’) in such a short utterance?

What’s next?, the tweeter asks. And I sense a certain horror in her or his (as she or he certainly does not go by ‘they’) words. What’s next? What horrible OTHER thing are you going to ask of me? Caring for OTHER people subjected to violence, suffering and death who are not (like) myself? Imagining politics that thrive to keep everyone safe and not only (people like) myself? Imagining a relationship to OTHERS that does not involve repro-normativity, the fixation of women into the role of caretakers and mothers as the blueprint for all our social interaction? Conceiving of OTHER people who are exposed to violence, suffering and death as comrades and not as objects of saviour discourses that (re)centre myself once again as the agentic (even though reluctant) caretaker?

Can you feel the affect transported in ‘What’s next’? The horror that comes with being confronted with the demands of intersectional, lesbian- queer- and trans-inclusive, anti-racist and transnational feminisms? The feeling of being shafted by OTHERS. The frustration that comes with being asked to understand ‘women’, a social positioning the tweeter apparently cares for, as always already intersectional. Why should White, non-migrant, cis, straight feminism care for OTHERS? Women dying trying to cross borders? Women dying in childbirth in the United Kingdom at horrendously higher rates than White women because of anti-Black racism (Mohdin, 2021)? Women (trans or not, lesbian or not), trans men and non-binary people assigned female at birth attacked for being gender-nonconforming, queer and/or trans? Too complicated! Why bother?

The weaponisation of accusations of violence

Here I am, being caught in interpellation (Did you know that Althusser murdered his wife? Shouldn’t we abandon his terminology?). How can I critically reflect on the fact that I cannot help myself but react to the ‘Hey you’ by trans-exclusionary feminism, being addressed by those who supposedly speak for women or even lesbians? While I am trying to make an argument here about the politics and potentials of transfeminism beyond pushing back against trans-exclusionary feminism, I am finding it difficult to resist the interpellation by trans-exclusionary feminism that constructs ‘us’ as violent. And with this refusal of their terms that comes with exposing the violence in their terms, I also resist their claim that they are THE feminism, they are the ONES who fight for women’s liberation. (Or that feminism is only about women’s liberation, for that matter.)

I think we can agree as feminists, as queer feminists, as transfeminists, that is, as people who have fought all our lives against misogyny, that it is horrible to be accused of misogyny by people who clearly do not share the most basic vocabulary of radical feminist thought. Yet, with formulations such as this, they reveal themselves as not part of most of the movements and activisms that our feminisms are rooted in. The trans-exclusionary call for bringing an allegedly missing feminism back into the lecture theatres, requires actively ignoring the feminisms that are already causing disruption and dismantling power in lecture theatres and in the streets, those who for decades have been educating, theorising and putting into practice radical social transformation. Hence the SOAS conference title We are the feminisms in the lecture theatres (and in the streets).

Trans-exclusionary feminists are using the trope of ‘protecting women’ as their main weapon while accusing trans-inclusive feminisms of misogyny. It is a rhetorical figure that we can call ‘the weaponization of accusations of violence’. And we witness it as a strategy cutting across many contexts, for example, blanket accusations of anti-Semitism against anti-Zionists, accusations of Hinduphobia ⁶ to shut down resistance against Hindutva, and accusations of misogyny and sexual violence against transfeminism (or trans-inclusive feminism, which may or may not be the same thing). These accusations of violence, in turn, come with claims to disempowerment and vulnerability that might also be understood as an attempt to gain more power through what Kata Kyrölä (2018) has theorised as the complex politics of negotiating vulnerability to secure a privileged discursive standpoint. The interplay of accusations of violence and claims to vulnerability always works to split progressive movements and to consolidate the far right. Analytically we witness a twofold mechanism: First, violence is located in the resistance against Zionism, Hindutva, transphobia and so on, while the violence of Zionism, Hindutva, transphobia and so on is denied. Second, this distracts from the actual location of violence, the spheres in society where anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny thrive. This strategy makes these power relations indiscernible to such an extent that it becomes impossible to fight them. With this, the accusations of violence by trans-exclusionary feminists against trans people and allies is inherently anti-feminist: it protects and fosters violence, factually doing the contrary of its own claim of opposing violence.

We are told that trans-exclusionary feminism cares about women’s liberation and fighting sexual violence. Yet, the recurring strategy of externalising sexual violence and ascribing it to the ‘pervert other’ (trans women, gender-nonconforming people, migrant men, Muslim men, Black men, etc.) is shared across transphobic, migratist, ⁷ racist and Islamophobic debates (Khan, 2021). They overlap in the idea that sexual violence takes place ‘somewhere else’ and will be invited in through plurality, migration and weak borders, what Miriam Ticktin (2008) aptly calls ‘sexual violence as the language of border control’ – and through gender studies, LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and intersex) rights and legislation.

This widespread disinformation makes it more and more impossible to address misogyny and sexual violence in the realm of the traditional family, in normative gender and in the nation, where it regularly happens without the need to import it from the outside, and where it so direly needs resistance. Given the high exposure of queer, dyke, trans and non-binary people to sexual violence in institutions like families, schools, prisons and so on, it is important to reject the idea that it is only trans-exclusionary feminists who have reason to counter sexual violence as well as their claim that resistance to sexual violence requires essentialising sexual difference (Tudor, 2021). We find ourselves in a global political moment – ‘right wing times’ ⁸ – in which anti-gender and anti-transfeminism is going mainstream and shamelessly grooms people into joining conferences in the name of seemingly innocent promises of ‘women’s liberation’. But of course, movements that will liberate women, will keep them safe – ALL women, including the many, many women female assigned at birth who identify as women – are actually happening on our side of the road and are labelled ‘intersectional, transnational, anti-racist, lesbian, queer, abolitionist and trans-inclusive’.

Antisemitism, racism, imperialism, misogyny, sexual violence and so on are well and alive. Yet the weaponisation of the terms against anti-Zionist Jews (Butler, 2012), against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the global south who are accused of introducing imperial and colonial feminism and gender (Rao, 2014), against queer and transfeminists, against gender studies scholars and against queer and trans people for merely existing (Koyama, 2003; Stone, 1987; Stryker and Bettcher, 2016) serves as a right-wing distraction (Tudor, 2020).

In recent UK debates, we have been witnessing these manoeuvres in accusing Corbynite Labour of anti-Semitism, that, in turn, made the Tory party look like the safe space free of anti-Semitism (and racism for that matter). Similarly, we are experiencing attempts to make the conservative and right-wing mainstream appear to be a safe haven for women, demonising pro-trans strands in the Labour party and in trade unions. The most recent low of this media driven debate was reached when in The Guardian a comment piece equated pro-trans Labour MPs with hardcore misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. ⁹

The point here is not to deny the existence of anti-Semitism or misogyny in left-wing institutions (and indeed possibly also in anti-Zionist and pro-trans positions as these are not immune to the working of power), rather it is to question the reverse conclusion that the right will protect women and Jews (the subjects in need of protection in my two examples here) from violence, discrimination and when it comes to it, death. In an extraordinary representational twist, misogyny, sexism and violence here stick to queer and trans people and queer and transfeminists, enabling anti-feminist, patriarchal and homophobic right-wing institutions to appear as feminist. We are faced with the fact that power relations come in conjunctures, and they vary in form at the same time as they appropriate knowledge from social movements and adapt to resistance (Demirović and Bojadžijev, 2002; Tudor, 2018: 1070). In other words, transphobes can only accuse ‘us’ of ‘misogyny’ because of the decades of knowledge ‘we’ produced that made it possible to call out misogyny. But while they did not learn anything from us on how to historicise, analyse and fight misogyny (as intersectional with other forms of oppression), they have appropriated the linguistic capacity to call it out that we have generated through our work and weaponise it against us. Indeed, we are all doomed.

Trans-feminisms

Sara Ahmed (2017) has elaborated on what it means to live a feminist life. She makes clear:

Lesbian feminism gives us the tools to build a world in which we become each other’s building blocks. We love our co-builders; they are our lovers, which is not to say that we might not struggle at times to agree about what we are making. (p. 252)

In her theory, lesbians love other lesbians, they love their comrades-in-arms, not body parts that supposedly make them into women or bear the eternal sign of sexual subordination. Being a lesbian then is not only about gender and sexuality of the other (but it is also not not about gender and sexuality), it is about being a political subject in the eyes of the other – it is about loving the politics of the other, desiring the other as political, desiring their ethics, convictions and passions, trusting their politics and the capacity to work with rather than flatten contradictions, failures and disagreements within the jointly built communities.

While I don’t really care that much for feminisms that centre heterosexuality (as opposed to the ones that deconstruct heteronormativity no matter who the subjects and objects of these feminisms are), I remain very concerned about lesbian feminism’s role in anti-gender and anti-trans movements, and about the cute butches revealing on social media that they attended the conference that took place across the road from SOAS. ¹⁰ But of course, contrary to the claim that trans existence erases lesbians, we can rely on a massive body of lesbian/feminist work that teaches us transing gender. By the ‘lesbian/feminist work of transing gender’ (Tudor, 2019: 362), I mean approaches that teach us that deconstructing heterosexuality and epistemological attention to intersectional forms of power will necessarily change what we understand as ‘woman’ and lead towards categorically refusing a gender binary. ¹¹ Indeed, I want to suggest that trans-feminisms are about resisting the labour of misogyny. ¹² But what is misogyny? And how can we resist the labour it requires?

On one hand, we can make this quick: Misogyny is not what trans-exclusionary feminists make us believe it is. Misogyny is not following Judith Butler (2007 [1990]) in their theoretisation that sex has always already been gender. It is not following Emi Koyama (2003: 5) in her claim against essentialising gender identity (which she understands as just as dangerous as biological essentialism): ‘Instead of justifying our existence through the reverse essentialism, transfeminism dismantles the essentialist assumption of the normativity of the sex/gender congruence’. (Indeed, both approaches are very well suited to combat misogyny.)

But then, on the other hand, misogyny is a complicated concept and defining what it is requires a lot of specificity. Fighting misogyny requires addressing the many forms it can take: the hatred against trans women; the hatred against queer femmes; the hatred against non-binary people female assigned at birth, butch dykes, intersex or trans masculine people. What happens to this thought if racialisation is seen central to the emergence of gender? This implies then that to counter misogyny certainly requires, as, for example C. Riley Snorton (2017), in his chilling engagement with the racist/misogynist roots of early gynaecology demonstrates, acknowledging that sexual violence has been a tool of White supremacy for centuries. If medical knowledge on biological sex is based on slavery, as Snorton (2017: 41) demonstrates, ‘sex and gender are effects of racial science’. Which again points towards the lack of capacity in intersectional thinking of a feminism that centres genitals as the basis of its politics.

While there are many ways to tell the story of the relationship of queer, trans and lesbian to feminism and to each other (e.g. Hemmings, 2011; Stryker, 2004; Tudor, 2019), it remains clear that queer and trans studies like Snorton’s have been key in developing tools to analyse gendered violence. As Julia Serrano (2021) states: ‘[T]ransmisogyny strives to describe the interplay of transphobia and misogyny that many trans female/feminine people experience’, but also extends this thought to include the ‘role that misogyny plays in policing trans male/masculine identities’ ‘which undoubtedly falls under the umbrella of transmisogyny’. Giving an account of the danger that comes with interdependencies of transphobia and misogyny, Cameron Awkward-Rich (2017) reminds us that ‘trans women must also deal with the added risk of both being seen as women and as failing to be so (p. 836)’. He then adds, relying on ‘antiracist, queer, and disability feminisms’ to underline that ‘related forms of this double bind also structure the lives of crip women, queer women, and women of color’, and trans/non-binary/gender-nonconforming people assigned female at birth who do not identify as women but also cannot and often do not want to pass as binary gendered, one might want to elaborate. Following Butler (2007 [1990]), to fight violence, including sexual violence, requires interrupting the Automatised nexus of gendered and sexual normativity. This ‘normative violence’, as Butler (2007 [1990]), calls it needs to be countered with a political movement towards legitimising, ‘bodies that have been regarded as false, unreal, and unintelligible’ (p. xxi).

In other words, misogyny subjugates women (trans, queer, intersex or not), but also people assigned female at birth or intersex people who do not identify as women, or who do not have access to the category because of being read consistently outside of it. We could either suggest that ‘transmisogyny’ is a term that grasps these complex layers of what misogyny is better than the original term ‘misogyny’ does, or, if we want to theorise from the margins, we could make the case for the more generic term (misogyny) needing to always already include ‘transmisogyny’ (= misogyny, dikephobia and transphobia as analytically inseparable) it its very definition. To shift the focus away from oppression and towards resistance, one could argue the same about the relationship of ‘transfeminism’ to ‘feminism’: Feminism must thus always already centre transfeminism, or, transfeminism is a broader concept than feminism, grasping more layers of resistance. It does not matter where we settle. What matters is that we don’t think our work is done when we come together. On the contrary, we are just getting started.

In JK Rowlings’s transphobic Twitter escapade that she placed conveniently ¹³ at the height of transnational Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, she ridiculed an article that uses the inclusive phrase ‘people who menstruate’: ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’ (quoted in Tudor, 2020). However, demanding reproductive dignity and safety for bodies that menstruate and can get pregnant, and demanding dignity and safety for bodies that trans gender, are overlapping related struggles, often fought by the same people. Emi Koyama (2003) underlines: ‘Before the feminist critiques of modern medicine, female bodies are considered “abnormal” by the male-centred standard of the medical establishment, which resulted in the pathologisation of such ordinary experiences of women as menstruation, pregnancy and menopause’. Building on this, she envisions a transfeminism that brings together the demand for a safe and dignified trans health care with broader feminist movements demanding reproductive rights. In a similar vein, Francisco Fernández Romero (2021) asks us to ‘conceive of a different history’ in his research on trans contributions to struggles for reproductive rights including abortion rights in Argentina. As EJ Renold et al. (2017) point out through their analysis of qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015–2016, young people’s expanded vocabularies of gender identity and expression come with critical reflexivity on their relationship to gender and sexuality and gendered and sexual rights. Clearly, the knowledge of and participation in sexual and gendered democracy, as the authors underline, helps young people negotiate wider cultures of gendered and sexual violence, or as EJ Renold (2018) puts it, engaging young people as interlocutors enables ‘safely and creatively communicate and potentially transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices’ (p. 37). In all these examples, resisting a narrow idea of gender and sexuality helps, expands and fosters sexual and gendered safety for gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming subjects alike.

As a repeating pattern across various discursive locations, it becomes evident that the tools we are supposed to use to combat sexual violence are always punitive and seem to settle with widespread rape culture by pretending we can just stop it by not having sex, not educating about sex or locking offenders away. Yet, as we know, these tools do not work (If they did, it would not be so difficult to get rapists convicted). As SM Rodriguez (2022) reminds us, the prison industrial complex relies on and stabilises violent gender and sexual regimes and uses gender and sexuality as arguments for its very necessity (see also van der Drift and Raha, 2022: 19). Rodriguez (2022) theorises the exposure to sexual violence that is central to the functioning of imprisonment as ‘sexual corrections’ – ‘the labeling, surveillance, punishment and disciplining of the sexed body’. Similarly, we are being told that migration poses a sexual threat to the nation and that it is borders that keep us safe. Abolitionist perspectives however do not see migration as the problem, but the system that we could call ‘border industrial complex’: ‘corporate profiteering from borders’ (Cowan, 2021), the existence of highly policed national borders that require dangerous and precarious crossings and that create populations made for suffering, violence and death (Schmidt Camacho, 2005). It follows that feminisms that are really interested in tackling gender and sexual violence need to centrally dismantle the ways in which border regimes and a prison system based on the fear of sexual violence (Rodriguez, 2022) create populations highly vulnerable to sexual and gendered violence and misogyny among other and overlapping forms of violence. Abeera Khan (2021: 101) points out that we need to interrogate convergences of ‘secular’ feminisms and transphobic organisations that often comes with ‘a scepticism towards abolitionist struggle that aims to eradicate carceral violence’. It is no coincidence then that we, as Khan so convincingly underlines, encounter these convergences of Islamophobia with transphobia and the demand for punitive measures against violence in diasporic communities in the line-up of the conference across the road.

It becomes clear, an intersectional and trans-national understanding of struggles, connecting local struggles to what Sumi Madhok (2021) calls ‘most of the world’, is crucial for transing feminisms, going beyond the paradigm of nationalist methodology, but also decentring the (Western) ‘here’ by radically refusing its universal power and appeal and understanding it as always already diasporic (Brah, 1996). This also means that while self-proclaimed feminists use anti-gender argumentations against trans people, globally, it is mostly anti-feminism that drives the attacks and its targets are women, feminists, lesbians, queer and trans people and gender studies scholars alike. Yet, Clare Hemmings (2020: 29) reminds us, ‘this anti-feminism is not entirely straightforward. In both its religious and political versions, anti-“gender ideology” activists cast themselves as on the side of women’s equality, and only antagonistic to a feminism that takes things too far, is too aggressive[. . .]’.

However, if we want a change of paradigms, if we want to go beyond neoliberal inclusion (van der Drift and Raha, 2022), resist ‘women’s liberation’ as a project of nationalist respectability, and work on the relentless brutal task to fight misogyny, we must take things ‘too far’ and be ‘too aggressive’ for a mainstream taste. Misogyny won’t go away from us gently or politely asking. Using a concept of misogyny that includes both women and gender-nonconforming people to theorise transnational movements against femicide in Africa, Awino Okech (2021: 1029). asserts the need for un-polite resistance against deadly anti-feminism: ‘Through mourning, grief, and rage, feminist digital counterpublics’ push back against the misogynist idea that ‘toxic and angry feminists who must be disciplined’.

Going back to the tweet which I used as a springboard for this article, it is clear that the tweeter is getting it wrong all over again. The implied analogy she or he is making when saying ‘What’s next?’, ‘you shame BLM for focusing “too much” on racism? ¹⁴ ’ is ‘you shame [trans-exclusionary] feminism for focusing “too much” on misogyny’. Yet that’s not what we are doing, on the contrary, we are actually shaming this movement for not focussing enough on misogyny! Indeed, for getting the very paradigms of what misogyny is and what kind of intersectional, transnational feminisms are needed to fight it, completely wrong.

It is of the utmost importance to emphasise, embrace and accentuate the collective efforts to counter the looming disaster of the destruction of the left and the subsequent far right and fascist triumph, far right radicalisations accelerated by anti-gender and anti-trans rhetoric. The rifts are going deep and the battles are being fought along the lines of trans-inclusion and border, police and prison abolition. In short, one side is against migration and trans people and for prisons, borders and policing. The other side resists. Transfeminism then needs to react to the ongoing challenge of how to resist static understandings of what this resistance looks like. As van der Drift and Raha (2022: 20) put it: ‘Trans, a term of changing ethical formation, undertakes the work and play of relationality in the knowledge that belonging or community is not a given; instead, trans in its indeterminacy suggests belonging is created through openness. (p. 20)’