I’m sure most people have now seen this New York Times piece “How British feminism became anti-trans.” Personally, I think it should be posted far and wide, but this key bit here is something that resonated with me.
[caption: “middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummelling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have]
This is so accurate it’s unreal. British feminism is generally 20 years behind, not just on trans rights but on many things. It’s not a coincidence that the “feminists” writing transphobic nonsense in the Guardian and New Statesman have also made sneering comments about intersectional feminism.
Here’s Helen Lewis in the New Statesman complaining that intersectional ideals demand too much of feminists. And here’s Hadley Freeman in the Guardian complaining that intersectionality leads to too much “feminist infighting.” Julie Bindel deliberately conflates intersectional feminism with liberal feminism, so she can sneer at both. We know Caitlin Moran rightly got pilloried for saying she “doesn’t do race.” Same shit from Zoe Williams.
There’s a lot of good work done by feminist women of colour in the UK - you can read much of it on Media Diversified or gal-dem. You could also follow Guilaine Kinouani or Judith Wanga or Sara Ahmed on Twitter. But these voices are not the predominant voices in British feminism. They’re not getting regular columns in the Guardian or giving takes on BBC news.
Who gets the columns? Helen Lewis. Caitlin Moran. Julie Bindel. Hadley Freeman. Zoe Williams. This post is already too long, so I won’t get into the history of these women when it comes to writing about race, sexuality, disability and religion. I could list pages and pages of shitty things they’ve said. The point is, these are the women who speak for British feminism. These are the women who get top billing.
It’s not good enough. We deserve better. We deserve more working class voices, more diverse LGBTQ voices, disabled voices and women of colour’s voices. We need to amplify them wherever we can, because these white middle class assholes in our newspapers are trying to claim that they’re doing this bullshit for us.
And not only is that allowing transmisogyny to hurt one of the most marginalised groups in Britain, but it’s opening the door to a raft of toxic bullshit that they’re getting away with in the name of feminism. Fuck knows who they’re gonna target next.
It’s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed “biological realities” of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)
I wrote 4K on this for a class this year, but: British TERFism especially, and TERFism more generally, relies on ignoring intersectionality, because the root of their politics is that men oppress women in every situation. This means they have to erase the times that (some) women have power over (some) men, like white women’s participation in the enslavement of Black men, or abled women’s participation in the institutionalization of disabled men. Admitting that these forces interact would destabilise the polarisation that their political ideology needs in order to appear coherent.