Me, Not You Quotes

“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Mainstream white feminism, which uses the corporate media and state/institutional discipline to redress individual injuries, cannot tackle the intersections of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism that produce sexual violence. At the thicker end of this wedge, reactionary feminism is complicit with the far-right politics also produced by this intersectionality of systems. The necropolitics of reactionary feminism is where the political whiteness of the mainstream ends up.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Contemporary trans-exclusionary feminism is animated by the fear of being ‘overrun’. And this fear is almost always sexualised: reactionary feminists have much in common with conservatives who claim that increased immigration will result in increased rape.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Claiming to be silenced amplifies and circulates reactionary forms of speech by generating outrage. And this manoeuvre works not because reactionary feminists are speaking truth to power and being accused of transphobia, but because they are speaking for power by expressing transphobia.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“There is narcissism in [the] white feminist refusal of intersectionality, this privileging of gender over race, class and other categories of oppression.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Traversing borders is a threat – and in the colonial mindset, the borders of class and nationality are at one with the borders of gender. Binary gender is a colonial and capitalist project, what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa called the ‘absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“I do not want to centre white feminists and our problems; I want to expand our capacity to deal with them without expecting others in our political communities (and women of colour especially) to do the work for us.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Instead of using the white feminist wrecking ball, we should build towards a world without sexual violence. This is not about forgiveness, empathy or being ‘nice’ – it is about the fact that we cannot end violence by doing violence. Even – no, especially – if that violence manifests as tears.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“We cannot continue to ‘wage war’ driven by outrage and desire for power; we must not dwell on our own border anxieties while the Western ‘we’ is violently reconstituted in a futile drive to resurrect Empire. In other words, we need to dismantle power, not merely demand a shift in who wields it.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Today’s reactionary feminists are descendants of nineteenth-century ‘vice-fighters’, Christian moralists and anti-miscegenationists, the bourgeois women enlisted by Fordism to ‘improve’ the working class, and those who ran the reformatories for ‘wayward’ Black girls and who abused them ‘for their own good’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“This backlash against ‘precious snowflakes’ exposes a key foundation of the current rightward shift: from a position of privilege, equality can feel like oppression.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, not you: The trouble with mainstream feminism

“Reactionary feminists are the ultimate wounded white victims. They are endangered as a ‘sex class’ (by people who are simply trying to survive). They are content to be defended, like property, by men who reserve their own right to perpetrate abuse.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Sex workers and their allies are dismissed as the ‘pimp lobby’. Trans people and their allies become the ‘trans cabal’, or in an incredibly offensive formulation, the ‘trans Taliban’…. And any challenge to reactionary feminist views is repackaged, via these conspiracy theories, as evidence that they are indeed right. Terms such as ‘trans Taliban’ echo other reactionary monikers, such as the racist ‘woke Stasi’ and misogynist ‘feminazi’, which are common on the far right. They also tap the contemporary appetite for conspiracy that has supported recent rightward shifts. Reactionary feminists may well be the InfoWars of the movement.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Despite the scraps of socialism in its history, [trans- and sex worker-hostile feminism] is bourgeois feminism rooted in disdain for those who think and live differently, whose bodies are not easily assimilated to capitalist production and reproduction.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Reactionary [trans- and sex worker-hostile] feminism accelerates the white feminist ‘war machine’, using the media and social media outrage economy to maximum effect. Although its numbers are small, this movement is tightly networked and highly organised. Its tactics are similar to the notorious harassment campaign Gamergate: it identifies and then relentlessly attacks target after target, seemingly with the aim of total submission.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Gender relations are currently being challenged and rethought, and equality gains staunchly defended as the resurgent right tries to roll them back. Perhaps this has given privileged white women the opportunity – and drive – to seize some power for ourselves. In a world of kill or be killed, or grab or be grabbed, this is Pussy Grabs Back.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“At a very basic level, anti-rape activism is about survival. Many of us are survivors trying to survive, and spectacles of mass wounding such as #MeToo evoke a gendered state of siege. Being raped often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not – it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back. And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us. And the destruction of bodily boundaries involved in criminal punishment mirrors the experience of rape.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Our anger at heteropatriarchy demands criminal and institutional punishment. But saying ‘fuck the patriarchy’ is hardly radical when this is followed by calling on patriarchal disciplinary power.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The infliction that comes with white feminist anger, with its willingness to create collateral damage, perhaps makes it less of an ‘outlaw’ emotion than we might wish. In the symbolic and material game of ‘cops and robbers’, we are often identified with the cops.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The feminist ‘war machine’ is white. And white rage is necropolitical rage: political whiteness is characterised by a desire for power and punishment. When righteous anger about sexual violence is channelled through race and class supremacy, it can produce a need for infliction.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The general category of ‘women’s rage’…trains our sights on gender, and away from race and class. It positions bourgeois white women as victims, and erases our complicity in racial capitalist exploitation and white supremacy.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“While bourgeois white women claim our right to be ‘nasty’, we expect more marginalised women to be nice.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Claiming the right to be nasty in resistance to gendered respectability politics is often done by women who continue to be positioned as respectable by the world at large. And the ‘respectability’ of bourgeois white women has been central to colonial narratives that construct us as superior to women marginalised by race and class. Affronts to this ‘respectability’ have justified fatal violence against men of colour. This position of race and class supremacy means that our anger may not always be as radical or transgressive as we might like.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“This…exemplifies how trans-exclusionary feminism uses the experience of rape. Drawing on the radical feminist idea of the penis as a weapon, it ‘sticks’ this organ to trans women through an obsession with their surgical status. The ‘threat’ posed by the trans woman is then juxtaposed with the threatened (white) femininity of the abuse survivor. Cue outrage.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Anti-sex-industry feminism makes excellent use of outrage. This is generated, quite rightly, in response to the trauma of sex industry survivors. But the telling of survivor stories works in tandem with the idea of a ‘pimp lobby’, which positions sex workers and their allies as malign. This strategy is very effective: it means that people who support decriminalisation, many of whom are sex workers and/or feminists, are not only failing to ‘listen to survivors’ but are supporting ‘pimps’ instead.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism