Enemy Feminisms

by Sophie Lewis

But a story about girls possessing special powers to uplift, heal, soothe, and generally morally edify the nation and, by extension, the economy, lives on. Today, instead of leading “auxiliary” volunteer services on the home front, Girl Scouts are encouraged to use their special girlpowers as Pentagon commanders, which is a perfectly feminist goal if you believe that, to quote erstwhile National Organization for Women president Eleanor Smeal, “peace is not a feminist issue.”

If we really want to bury the girlboss, we might consider beginning with a general girlstrike.

A Syrian woman may find herself feministly welcomed to Europe, but only on condition that she toil in janitorial or elder-care facilities and commit to preaching the gospel of assimilation to her menfolk.

Notably, the women who had actually been harmed and groped, far from being centered in Germany’s response, disappeared from public view, just as their assailants did. They were largely rendered unreal, two-dimensional, and voiceless.

Magazine covers ran cartoon images of naked white female bodies menaced from all sides by dark, groping hands (a tactic much repeated after October 7, 2023, to illustrate comparable narratives about Hamas militants’ brutal assaults on Israeli women). They posed the ominous question, “What REALLY happened that night?” and speculated about whether, on a national level, tolerance had perhaps been taken too far. “Have we gone blind?” one popular German magazine pointedly asked. The overall message was unmistakable: your nation, your culture, is in peril.

It turns out that feminists who are prepared to go to jail for preventing fetus “murder” are working with none other than Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue (now called Operation Save America)—a renowned pro-life terrorist network that was responsible for scores of abortion clinic bombings, arson attacks, and several actual murders in the 1980s and ’90s.

“I changed my name to Sebastian for a while,” writes Harrington. “I pondered whether I really was female.” She is now firmly cisgender, it’s strongly implied. Therefore, so is everyone else.

The most famous was J. K. Rowling, the richest author in the world, who now says things like “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class,”19 and even engages in a form of Holocaust denial—disputing the well-documented facts that the Nazis targeted trans women and burned trans sexological research.

The cover of Shrier’s Irreversible Damage shows a white child with a hole where her uterus should be, really ramming home the gist of the book’s fertility panic. The commercial success of both, despite their eugenicist, queerphobic, mother-blaming bents, benefited from love shown them by North American feminists like Meghan Murphy and gender-critical hubs like FiLiA, among other TERF channels.

Speaking on Louise Perry’s YouTube show (alongside episodes with Bachiochi, Harrington, Smith, Joyce, and Power—the whole transphobic gang) Parker cryptically said that, because “most women are not feminists and don’t want to hear about misogyny or patriarchy, to protect women’s rights, we must abandon feminism.”

The Diary records, “Although she lives with a man, she’s trashing women who work with men. She says we should hate men. Now she’s trashing Kate. Now she’s trashing us over the transsexual thing. She’s trashing EVERYONE. I can’t believe she ever wrote anything about ‘sisterhood.’” Those who invited her feel betrayed. “What have we done? An hour and a half of HATE!”

But in Morgan’s tirade, there’s a legacy of Langham Place’s refusal of the “wrong” kind of nineteenth-century feminist sister (too Scottish or Irish; too savage or wild; to emigrate with us under our banner; not really a woman).

Faced with the wordless proposition that trans and cis lesbians face the same enemy and share the same struggle, Morgan refuses the contamination of “her” people, opting instead for a disavowal of common interests, even of common humanity. Elliott understood this well about Morgan: “You are treating me just like men treat women…. The idea that I might be the same as you threatens you, so you hold me down.”

In A Short History of Trans Misogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson explains that a key thing transmisogynists do to their targets involves “sexualizing their presumptive femininity as if it were an expression of male aggression.”

Contrary to Helen Joyce’s assertion, in Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality, that “sex is why women are oppressed,”115 sex is not in itself the reason anything happens; rather, it is pressed into service as a concept rationalizing oppression. Defining women is not and has not, historically, been remotely necessary for feminism to proceed, and until recently, it was hardly ever feminism’s game.

My hope is that this mini-encyclopedia of Western cisfeminism you’ve just read will not drive you to despair, but rather percolate in your brain, spawning speculative fabulations of past and future feminisms against cisness and against whiteness, its twin.

When it comes to feminism, it is always easy to kill something, mock something, deflate something. Nonetheless, in print and on the streets, an extraordinary coalition is denaturalizing capitalist gender, building monstrous affinities, and seeking ways to communize care.