THE NEW YORKER, September 13, 2021 Issue

Who Lost the Sex Wars?

Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs
of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.
By Amia Srinivasan

September 6, 2021
Today, one of the most visible feminist debates is over the place of trans
women.Illustration by Lucy Jones; Source photographs from Getty

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Ruskin College, in Oxford, England, was founded in 1899 to

serve working-class men who were otherwise excluded from
higher education, and went coed in 1919. In 1970, it was the site
of the inaugural National Women’s Liberation Movement
Conference. Women’s-liberation groups had already been
meeting across Britain, inspired variously by the high-profile
women’s movement in the U.S.; anticolonial and pro-democracy
struggles in Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and working-class
women’s strikes closer to home, in Dagenham and Hull. But the
Ruskin conference was, for the women who gathered there, a
heady moment of consolidation. One participant, the playwright
Michelene Wandor, described Ruskin as an “exhilarating and
confusing revelation . . . six hundred women . . . hell-bent on
changing the world and our image as women.”

The conference produced several demands: equality in pay,

education, and job opportunities; free contraception; abortion on
demand; and free twenty-four-hour nurseries. Yet these demands
(though still largely unmet) undersell the radicalism of what the
women at Ruskin were trying to achieve. As Sheila Rowbotham,
a feminist historian and one of the Ruskin organizers, writes in
her new memoir, “Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s,” such
measures seemed readily attainable and unambitious. “The
reforms did not address the underlying inequalities affecting
working-class women,” she writes, “nor the diffuse sense of
oppressed social dislocation which many young university-
educated middle-class women like me were experiencing.”

For Rowbotham and the other socialist feminists who dominated

the British women’s movement, women’s liberation was bound
up with the dismantling of capitalism. But it also required—and
here they departed from the Old Guard left—a rethinking of
everyday patterns of life, relating to sex, love, housework, child
rearing. The most iconic photograph from Ruskin is not of the
women but of men: male partners who had been tasked with
running a day care for the weekend. In the black-and-white photo,
two men sit on the floor, surrounded by small children; one of
them, the celebrated cultural theorist Stuart Hall, clutches a
sleeping toddler to his chest, looking meaningfully into the
camera.

Among many contemporary British feminists, especially those

who lived through the arc of the liberation movement, Ruskin
evokes both regret and hope—a promise that was not delivered
but might be delivered still. In February of last year, an event was
held at the University of Oxford to commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of the Ruskin conference. There is no iconic photo of
the event, but there is an infamous YouTube video. It shows
attendees demanding to know why Selina Todd, a feminist
historian who teaches at Oxford and who had originally been
scheduled to give remarks at the gathering, had been
“deplatformed.” In fact, she had been dropped after other speakers
threatened a boycott, owing to her involvement with Woman’s
Place U.K., an organization that advocates the exclusion of trans
women from women’s spaces. (A few months after the
conference, it was revealed that a project Todd led at Oxford, on
the history of women and the law, had paid Woman’s Place a
“consultancy fee” of twenty thousand pounds, the group’s largest
source of income between 2018 and 2020.) One of the irate
audience members was Julie Bindel, a radical feminist who
campaigns against male violence, sex work, and trans rights.
(“Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would
look like the set of Grease.”) She said, “How do you think it feels
for a feminist who has advocated all her professional life . . . on
behalf of disenfranchised women to be told that she is too
dangerous and vile to speak?” The audience held a spontaneous
vote, and overwhelmingly supported letting Todd speak, but by
then she had left the premises.

Those who protested Todd’s deplatforming tended to think that

the event’s organizers had violated the spirit of the original
Ruskin conference. John Watts, the chair of Oxford’s history-
faculty board, thought so, too: “We believe it’s always better to
debate than to exclude. This seems to us a key principle of 1970.”
Yet Ruskin had its own exclusions. Like the 2020 conference that
commemorated it, Ruskin was overwhelmingly white and middle
class. One of the few Black women who attended, Gerlin Bean,
has said that she “couldn’t really pick on the relevance” of the
event “as it pertains to Black women.” (Bean would go on to co-
found the influential Organisation of Women of African and
Asian Descent.) Whether or not the divisiveness of the 2020
Oxford conference was in keeping with the spirit of 1970, it was
certainly in keeping with the spirit of later episodes in the British
movement, as its fault lines grew more visible during the
seventies.

They were visible on the other side of the Atlantic, too. The
women’s-liberation movement in the United States, from its
beginning in the late sixties, had been characterized by tensions
between socialist feminists (or “politicos”) who saw class
subordination as the root cause of women’s oppression and
feminists who thought of “male supremacy” as an autonomous
structure of social and political life. At the same time, there had
been growing tensions between feminists (like Ti-Grace Atkinson
and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) who embraced separatism and,
sometimes, political lesbianism as the only acceptable responses
to male supremacy, and feminists (like the “pro-woman”
members of the group Redstockings, founded by Shulamith
Firestone and Ellen Willis, in 1969) who rejected such “personal
solutionism” for its rebuke of heterosexual desire and its tendency
to alienate “non-movement” women.

In 1978, the tenth National Women’s Liberation Movement

Conference was held in Birmingham, England. Self-identified
“revolutionary feminists” submitted a proposal to cancel the
demands established at previous conferences, insisting that it was
“ridiculous for us to demand anything from a patriarchal state—
from men—who are the enemy.” Revolutionary feminism had
been baptized the year before, when Sheila Jeffreys, in a lecture
titled “The Need for Revolutionary Feminism,” chided socialist
feminists for failing to recognize that male violence, rather than
capitalism, was the root of women’s oppression. At the
Birmingham conference, the revolutionary feminists’ proposal
was left off the plenary agenda, and, when it was finally read
aloud, chaos erupted: women shouted, sang, and wrenched
microphones from one another’s hands. Many attendees walked
out. It was the last of the national conferences.

What happened at Birmingham prefigured what happened at

Barnard College, in New York, four years later. At that point, a
lightning rod had emerged for the contrary currents of feminism:
pornography. “Antiporn” feminists saw in pornography the
ideological training ground of male supremacy. (“Pornography is
the theory, and rape the practice,” Robin Morgan declared in
1974.) Their feminist opponents saw the antiporn crusade as a
reinforcement of a patriarchal world view that denied women
sexual agency. In April, 1982, the Barnard Conference on
Sexuality was held, in one organizer’s words, as “a coming out
party” for feminists who were “appalled by the intellectual
dishonesty and dreariness of the anti-pornography movement.” In
the conference’s concept paper, the anthropologist Carole Vance
called for an acknowledgment of sex as a domain not merely of
danger but of “exploration, pleasure, and agency.”

A week before the conference, antiporn feminists started calling

Barnard administrators to complain, and administrators
confiscated copies of the “Diary of a Conference on Sexuality”—
a compilation of essays, reflections, and erotic images to be given
out to participants. At the event, which drew about eight hundred
people, antiporn feminists distributed leaflets accusing the
organizers of supporting sadomasochism, violence against
women, and pedophilia. Feminist newspapers were filled with
furious condemnations of the conference and indignant replies.
The event’s organizers described an aftermath of “witch-hunting
and purges”; Gayle Rubin, who ran a workshop at the conference,
wrote in 2011 that she still carried “the horror of having been
there.”

In an illuminating retelling of this period of American feminist

history, “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the
#MeToo Era,” the political theorist Lorna N. Bracewell
challenges the standard narrative of the so-called sex wars as a
“catfight,” a “wholly internecine squabble among women.” For
Bracewell, that story omits the crucial role of a third interest
group, liberals, who, she argues, ultimately domesticated the
impulses of both antiporn and pro-porn feminists. Under the
influence of liberal legal scholars such as Elena Kagan and Cass
Sunstein, antiporn feminism gave up on its dream of transforming
relations between women and men in favor of using criminal law
to target narrow categories of porn. “Sex radical” defenders of
porn became, according to Bracewell, milquetoast “sex positive”
civil libertarians who are more concerned today with defending
men’s due-process rights than with cultivating sexual
countercultures. Both antiporn and pro-sex feminism, she argues,
lost their radical, utopian edge.
“If we had left earlier, we wouldn’t have gotten caught in this.”


Cartoon by Amy Hwang

This sort of plague-on-both-their-houses diagnosis has gained

currency. In a 2019 piece on Andrea Dworkin, Moira Donegan
wrote that “sex positivity became as strident and incurious in its
promotion of all aspects of sexual culture as the anti-porn
feminists were in their condemnation of sexual practices under
patriarchy.” Yet the inimitable Maggie Nelson, in her new book,
“On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint,” sees a “straw
man” in such dismissive depictions of sex positivity. She says that
skeptics forget its crucial historical backdrop—the feminist and
queer AIDS activism of the eighties and nineties. For such
activists, Nelson writes, sex positivity was a way of “insisting, in
the face of viciously bigoted moralists who didn’t care if you
lived or died (many preferred that you died), that you have every
right to your life force and sexual expression, even when the
culture was telling you that your desire was a death warrant.”
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Janelle Monáe on Growing Up Queer and Black

Both Bracewell and Nelson raise an important question about how

disagreements within feminism are seen. Where the famous rifts
within the male-dominated left—between, say, E. P. Thompson
and Stuart Hall over Louis Althusser’s structuralism—are
regarded as instructive mappings of intellectual possibility, as
debates to be “worked through,” feminists tend to picture the
great “wars” of their movement’s past as warnings or sources of
shame. This is not to deny that feminist debate can have a
particular emotional resonance. Sheila Rowbotham, though not
averse to relitigating old arguments (especially with Selma James,
a founder of the Wages for Housework campaign), admits that
“connecting the personal with the political” could pose a
particular problem for the movement: “when ruptures appeared
these proved all the more painful.” She explains, “Theoretically I
did not hold with the notion that because we were women we
would wipe away political conflicts, but emotionally, like many
other feminists, I was attached to a vision of us birthing a new
politics of harmony.”
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As a professor, I detect a similar hope in the students who take

my feminism classes, especially the women (as most of them are).
Many of them come to feminism looking for camaraderie,
understanding, community. They want to articulate the shared
truth of their experience, and to read great feminist texts that will
reveal the world to which they should politically aspire. They
want, in other words, something akin to what so many women of
the second wave experienced in consciousness-raising groups. As
the British feminist Juliet Mitchell put it in 1971, “Women come
into the movement from the unspecified frustration of their own
private lives,” and then “find that what they thought was an
individual dilemma is a social predicament and hence a political
problem.”

But my women students quickly discover, as an earlier generation

did, that there is no monolithic “women’s experience”: that their
experiences are inflected by distinctions in class, race, and
nationality, by whether they are trans or cis, gay or straight, and
also by the less classifiable distinctions of political instinct—their
feelings about authority, hierarchy, technology, community,
freedom, risk, love. My students soon find, in turn, that the vast
body of feminist theory is riddled with disagreement. It is possible
to show them that working through these “wars” can be
intellectually productive, even thrilling. But I sense that some
small disappointment remains. Nelson suggests that looking to the
past for the glimmer of liberatory possibilities “inevitably
produces the dashed hope that someone, somewhere, could have
or should have enacted or ensured our liberation.” Within
feminism, that dashed hope provides “yet another opportunity to
blame one’s foremothers for not having been good enough.”

Today, the most visible war within Anglo-American feminism is

over the place of trans women in the movement, and in the
category of “women” more broadly. Many trans-exclusionary
feminists—Germaine Greer, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond,
Robin Morgan—trace their lineage to the radical feminism of the
nineteen-seventies: thus the term “trans-exclusionary radical
feminist,” usually shortened to the derogatory “TERF.” But the
term can be misleading. As young feminists like Katie J. M.
Baker and Sophie Lewis have suggested, the contemporary trans-
exclusionary movement might have as much to do with the
radicalizing potential of social media as with the legacy of radical
feminism. In the U.K., trans-exclusionary activists have worn
buttons proclaiming that they were “Radicalised by Mumsnet,”
Britain’s largest online platform for parents. On message boards,
mothers, justifiably aggrieved by a lack of material support and
social recognition, are encouraged to direct their ire at the “trans
lobby.”

Talk of “TERFs” also makes it easy to forget that many radical

feminists were trans-inclusive. As the critic Andrea Long Chu
points out in her blistering 2018 essay “On Liking Women,” an
emblematic confrontation over trans women’s place in the
movement—an episode in which Robin Morgan denounced the
trans folk singer Beth Elliott, at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian
Conference, for being “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a
destroyer”—is more complicated than is often depicted. Elliott
was not just a performer at the conference but one of its
organizers. And when Morgan called for a vote to eject Elliott,
more than two-thirds of the attendees voted no. When Catharine
MacKinnon, among the most influential theorists of radical
feminism, started working as a sex-discrimination lawyer, she
chose a trans woman incarcerated in a male prison as one of her
first clients. In a recent interview, MacKinnon said, “Anybody
who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around
being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.”

MacKinnon’s view is widespread among young feminists. In

“Feminism, Interrupted,” Lola Olufemi, a Black British feminist
who withdrew from the Ruskin-anniversary conference because
of Selina Todd’s involvement, describes “women” as “an
umbrella under which we gather in order to make political
demands.” Chu notes that this idea can be found even in a second-
wave text as unreconstructed as Valerie Solanas’s
“SCUM Manifesto.” In Solanas’s assertion that if only men were
smarter they would try to transform themselves into women, Chu
sees “a vision of transsexuality as separatism, an image of how
male-to-female gender transition might express not just
disidentification with maleness but disaffiliation with men.”
Still, there are feminists who are critical of trans women’s claims
to womanhood because of an ideological commitment to what
they consider radical-feminist principles. In particular, the view
that gender is a “social construction”—that, in Simone de
Beauvoir’s phrase, one is “not born, but becomes, a woman”—
has been taken by some feminists to imply that trans women who
have not undergone “female socialization” cannot be women. In
2015, the American journalist Elinor Burkett expressed this view
in the Times: “being a woman means having accrued certain
experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain
courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.” Trans women,
Burkett said, “haven’t suffered through business meetings with
men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d
forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They
haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle
of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their
male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear
of being too weak to ward off rapists.” But most contemporary
trans-exclusionary feminists insist that trans women aren’t women
simply because being a “woman” is a matter of biological sex.
Women, as they like to say (and, in the U.K., used to plaster on
billboards), “are adult human females.”

Today’s trans-exclusionary feminists typically claim that they

seek to dismantle a gender system that oppresses girls and
women. Yet they tend to reinforce the dominant view that certain
bodies must present in particular ways. Although officially on the
side of butch lesbians, who are, they say, existentially threatened
by “gender ideology,” trans-exclusionary feminists support laws
that make such women’s access to public spaces precarious: since
the start of the “bathroom wars,” butch lesbians in the U.K. report
being increasingly harassed in women’s bathrooms. Meanwhile,
trans-exclusionary feminists often criticize trans women for
embracing stereotypical femininity. A few years ago, the British
philosopher Kathleen Stock tweeted, “I reject regressive gender
stereotypes for women, which is partly why I won’t submit to an
ideology that insists womanhood is a feeling, then cashes that out
in sexist terms straight from 50s.” In a new book, “Material Girls:
Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” Stock rows back from this
sentiment: “It seems strange to blame trans women for their
attraction to regressive female-associated stereotypes when
apparently so many non-trans women are attracted to them too.”
Yet the reprieve is partial. Her view is that being trans—
immersing oneself in a “fiction” that one is of the “opposite” sex
owing to a strong identification with it—is a species of gender-
nonconforming behavior that can be morally tolerated, but not in
cases where it might pose any risk to non-trans women. For
Stock, that bar is so high she is not sure that even using a trans
person’s pronouns clears it. A journalist recently told me that she
found a high-profile trans woman’s embrace of femininity
“grotesque.” When Shon Faye, the author of “The Transgender
Issue,” a powerful new call for trans liberation, was asked to host
Amnesty International’s Women Making History event in 2018,
one feminist tweeted a photo of her with the description “a
biologically male person, performing as a blow up doll.”

At the same time, trans-exclusionary feminists often ridicule trans

women who fail to “pass” as cis women. In 2009, Germaine Greer
wrote of “people who think they are women, have women’s
names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow who seem . . .
to be a kind of ghastly parody.” And such feminists tend to be
dismissive of nonbinary people, who, in their refusal of gender
distinction, have a good claim to being the truest vanguard of
gender abolition.

Trans advocates typically distinguish between gender identity

(whether people feel themselves to be male or female or
something else) and gender expression (how “feminine” or
“masculine” they self-present). In truth, the contrast is not always
clearly marked. The American Psychiatric Association, which
differentiates gender identity from gender expression, lists as a
criterion for identifying trans girls “a strong rejection of typically
masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of
rough-and-tumble play,” and for trans boys “a strong rejection of
typically feminine toys, games, and activities.” The C.E.O. of
Mermaids, a British support service for trans and nonbinary
children, said of her young trans daughter that, before the child
knew what gender was, “the things that she was doing, the
preferences that she had, the way that she behaved, didn’t fall into
what I considered to be typical boy behavior.”
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Trans-exclusionary feminists tend to read such statements as

falsely suggesting that to be a boy is to be disposed to think, feel,
and behave in stereotypically “boy” ways, and to be a girl is to be
disposed to think, feel, and behave in stereotypically “girl” ways.
In that view, tomboy girls and feminine boys either don’t exist
(they are really trans boys and trans girls) or they are aberrations.
But, as the philosopher Christa Peterson has pointed out, seeing
gendered behavior as evidence of gender identity need not
presuppose that gender is a matter of being inclined to perform in
gender-stereotypical ways. It could be that trans boys, for
example, are attracted to doing stereotypically “boy” things
because they first identify other boys as being of their gender and,
as a result, take their behavioral cues from what most other boys
do and are expected to do. This would mean that people could
have innate gender identities that express themselves in
historically and culturally contingent ways. Such a view would
require rejecting the thesis, dear to some feminists, that humans
are born without any innate gender concepts. But it wouldn’t
entail that being a man or a woman is a matter of being
stereotypically masculine or feminine.

These are subtle distinctions. But few trans-exclusionary

feminists appear interested in the subtleties of what trans people
say about themselves. Many trans people, in making sense of
themselves, refer to the idea of an innate gender identity; many do
not. Kate Bornstein’s 2012 memoir, “A Queer and Pleasant
Danger,” is subtitled “The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who
Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later
to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today”—a straightforward
repudiation of the idea that transition is necessarily a matter of
securing social recognition of the gender one always was. In
“Crossing: A Memoir” (1999), Deirdre McCloskey compares
transition to immigration: “I visited womanhood and stayed.” In
“An Apartment on Uranus,” Paul B. Preciado describes his
transition as a process “not of going from one point to another,
but of wandering and in-between-ness as the place of life. A
constant transformation, without fixed identity, without fixed
activity, or address or country.” Shon Faye writes, “I am often
surprised and infuriated by accusations that because I am a trans
woman I am the proponent of an ideology or agenda that believes
in ‘pink and blue brains,’ or in an innate gender identity that
stands independent of society and culture. I believe no such
thing.” Neglecting such testimony would seem to make it easier
for trans-exclusionary feminists to deny the truth: that many trans
women and men are fellow-dissidents against the gender system.

Stories about identity, even deeply personal ones, are responsive

to political conditions. The “born this way” narrative has been
crucial in the fight for gay and lesbian rights, the logic being that,
if you can’t help it, you shouldn’t be punished for it. At the same
time, the narrative has been stifling for many gay and lesbian
people. In 2012, the actress Cynthia Nixon provoked the anger of
L.G.B.T. activists by saying, “I’ve been straight and I’ve been
gay, and gay is better.” She was accused of implying that being
gay is a choice, thereby playing into the hands of homophobes.
Although this response was inevitable in 2012, it’s instructive to
ask whether it would be the same today. The legalization of same-
sex marriage and the growing visibility of gay people in public
life and in mass culture make it easier for gay people like Nixon
to be candid about the psychic complexities of choice, desire, and
identity. Likewise, if trans people secured legal protection and
social recognition, would they be freer to speak the full truths of
their lives? As trans people have pointed out, the stories they tell
about themselves—most obviously, when trying to satisfy
medical gatekeepers—are often the ones demanded by those who
are not trans.

In an essay titled “Trans Voices,” which appears in her new

collection, “On Violence and On Violence Against Women,” the
psychoanalytic critic Jacqueline Rose writes of a continuity
between trans and cis lives:

However fervently desired . . . transition rarely seems to give to the

transsexual woman or man an unassailable confidence in who they are. . . .
Rather it would seem from their own comments that the process opens up a
question about sexual being to which it is more often than not impossible to
offer a definitive reply. This is of course true for all human subjects. The bar
of sexual difference is ruthless but that does not mean that those who believe
they subscribe to its law have the slightest idea of what is going on beneath
the surface, any more than the one who submits less willingly. . . . The
“cis”—i.e. non-trans—woman or man is a decoy, the outcome of multiple
repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams.

Rose’s point is that we are all in the business of repressing and

accommodating our discomfort with a binary that can never
capture the complexity of the human psyche. The political
question is whose accommodations are penalized and whose are
permitted. And so Rose says that anyone hostile to transgender
people should be asking themselves, “Who do you think you
are?”

In drawing a connection between the experiences of trans and

non-trans people, Rose is on tricky terrain. It is often considered
transphobic to suggest that cis people know something of gender
dysphoria, which Faye defines as “the intense feeling of anxiety,
distress or unhappiness” that some trans people endure in relation
to the physical traits of sex and the gendered ways that such traits
cause others to respond to them. (Others take gender dysphoria to
be simply the condition of being trans, and therefore, by
definition, only trans people experience it.) The claim that cis
people can experience something akin to gender dysphoria is
worrying to trans advocates; they fear it supports the idea that
there are, for example, no trans boys, only confused cis girls. Yet
Rose is persuasive when she suggests that we have more to gain
by recognizing that certain experiences—the acute distress that
some non-trans girls feel as their bodies go through puberty, for
example, and the horror that puberty kindles in many trans boys—
can speak, in different ways, to the pain caused by the “bar of
sexual difference.”

“I’d like to start reading separate books.”



Cartoon by P. C. Vey

In “The Transgender Issue,” Faye, who cites Andrea Long Chu’s

description of gender dysphoria as “feeling like heartbreak,”
follows the conventional line that “gender dysphoria is a rare
experience in society as a whole . . . which can make it hard to
explain to the vast majority of people.” It is true that a very small
percentage of human beings feel sufficient distress about their
bodies to need hormonal or surgical intervention. It is also true
that many non-trans women know something of the heartbreak
caused by a body that betrays—that weighs you down with
unwanted breasts and hips; that transforms you from an agent of
action into an object of male desire; that is, in some mortifying
sense, not a reflection of who you really are. That’s not to say that
the precise character, intensity, or longevity of such distress is the
same for trans people and non-trans women. But what might a
conversation between women, trans and non, look like if it started
from a recognition of such continuities of experience?

Like Rose, Faye sees a connection between trans liberation and a

broader project of human freedom. “We are symbols of hope for
many non-trans people,” Faye writes, “who see in our lives the
possibility of living more fully and freely.” But Faye also astutely
notes that it is the sense of possibility contained within trans lives
that can drive trans-exclusionary politics. “That is why some
people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of
our freedom,” Faye suggests. The journalist who called a trans
woman’s embrace of femininity “grotesque” also expressed
dismay at trans boys who bind their breasts. Unlike them, she
said, she had been told as a girl to love her body. Trans-
exclusionary feminists often deplore what they see as the
encouragement that trans boys receive to intervene in their bodies,
rather than to accommodate themselves to them. Occasionally, I
also detect in their disapproval a whisper of something akin to
wistful desire. In a viral 2020 essay in which she detailed her
“deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement” is
having on young people, J. K. Rowling wrote, “I’ve wondered
whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to
transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been
huge.” Given the generations of women who have had to learn to
lead the lives, and inhabit the bodies, of women, what does it
mean, Rowling and others seem to ask, that increasing numbers of
young people elect not to? And given the painful experience that
this living as women is for so many, what right do trans women
have to claim that experience as their own? “As much as I
recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of
maleness,” Burkett, the American journalist, writes, “they cannot
stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on
mine as a woman.”
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This sense that someone else’s life lived differently is somehow

an affront to one’s own is a familiar intergenerational political
phenomenon. We see it, I think, in some older women who tell
the young women of the #MeToo moment to toughen up—as they
were forced by hostile circumstances to do—as well as in some
gay men of the AIDS generation who cannot reconcile themselves
to the fact that many young gay men have, thanks to the drug
regimen PrEP, been released into the freedom of sexual
promiscuity. The late Ann Snitow, a founder of the second-wave
group New York Radical Feminists, repeatedly warned against
nostalgia. “It is in the interest of feminists of all generations to
invent and reinvent a more complex, resistant, and sexually
curious strain in feminist thought and action,” she wrote. When
Snitow died, in 2019, Sarah Leonard, a founding editor of the new
socialist-feminist magazine Lux, wrote that she was “the only
person I’ve ever met who seemed unthreatened by the dissolution
of the categories that were fundamental to her field and by that
field’s reshaping by successive generations. She delighted in
change.”

In “Why We Lost the Sex Wars,” Bracewell suggests that the

women’s-liberation movement could have retained its radical
edge had it paid more attention to its Black and Third World
participants. Feminists of color on both “sides” of the sex wars—
Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Cherríe Moraga, Mirtha
Quintanales—cautioned against using the power of the carceral
state to address the pathologies of sex and imagined a form of
sexual freedom based on the eradication of racism and
imperialism. Today, activists readily agree that feminism must be
“intersectional”—that is, alert to the complex ways in which the
workings of patriarchy are inflected by race, class, and other axes
of oppression. And yet intersectionality is often seen as a
primarily domestic concern. In a recent conversation with Barbara
Smith, one of the authors of the 1974 Combahee River Collective
Statement, a founding document of intersectional feminism, the
Black feminist Loretta J. Ross observed, “In the seventies and
eighties and nineties we were much more transnational in our
organizing than I am seeing today.”

“Direct, personal internationalism,” Sheila Rowbotham writes,

“was very much part of sisterhood.” Her memoir describes visits
to, and from, the women’s movements in Germany, Italy, Spain,
Greece, and France; time spent poring over a friend’s notes on a
Vietnamese women’s delegation; and research into the role of
women in nationalist movements in Cuba and Algeria. In the
United States, “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” the hugely popular 1970
anthology of writings from the American Women’s Liberation
Movement, edited by Robin Morgan, was followed, in 1984, by
the publication of “Sisterhood Is Global,” a collection of essays
on the women’s movement in nearly seventy countries, each
written by a feminist theorist or activist working on the ground.

Such internationalism has largely withered away in Anglo-

American feminism. This no doubt has something to do with the
broader demise of the international workers’ movement, with a
general Anglo-American tendency toward insularity, and,
perhaps, with the Internet, which has simultaneously given us too
much to read and corroded our capacity to read it. These days, it
can seem that, because feminism is so pervasive, so much on the
best-seller lists and the syllabi and Twitter, we already know all
about it. But there is, unsurprisingly, still much to learn. Shiori
Itō’s “Black Box,” which appeared in English this year, is an
arresting first-person account of a Japanese journalist’s attempt to
secure justice after she was raped by a prominent TV personality.
First published in Japan in 2017, “Black Box” has been central to
the #MeToo movement there, laying bare how the country’s
culture and history shape a specific regime of male sexual
entitlement. It could be read instructively alongside Chanel
Miller’s “Know My Name,” her 2019 memoir of being sexually
assaulted by the Stanford student Brock Turner.
On March 8, 2017, millions of women from more than forty
countries took part in the global Women’s Strike. It came about
largely through the efforts of Argentine and Polish feminists, who
have been leading powerful movements in their countries. Two of
the most important works to emerge from this new internationalist
feminism are Verónica Gago’s “Feminist International: How to
Change Everything” and Ewa Majewska’s “Feminist Antifascism:
Counterpublics of the Common.” Both Gago and Majewska—
central figures in Argentine and Polish feminism, respectively—
document the practice of building large-scale radical coalitions,
which is an achievement that has so far eluded Anglo-American
feminists. Such coalition-building, Gago writes, “was anything
but spontaneous. It has been patiently woven and worked on.”

Both books also open out onto invigorating theoretical horizons.

Majewska maintains that the “feminist counterpublics” of the
Global South and the “semi-periphery” (including Poland) are the
most potent force today against the rise of fascism. She advocates
what she calls, channelling Walter Benjamin, a politics of “weak
resistance,” in contrast with the customary model of heroism.
Gago shows how the “feminist strike” extends beyond
conventional parameters—unions, the wage relation, male
workers, male bosses—to draw in sex workers, indigenous
people, the unemployed, workers in the informal economy,
housewives. She discusses the “general assembly” as both an
abstract idea (“a situated apparatus of collective intelligence”) and
a concrete political tactic that has allowed Argentine feminists to
forge surprising alliances. In one assembly held in a Buenos Aires
slum, neighborhood women explained that they could not strike
because they ran the community soup kitchens, and had to feed
needy residents, especially children. Eventually, the assembly
found a solution: these women would go on strike by handing out
raw food, withdrawing the labor of cooking and cleaning. Mass
movements are made, Gago argues, not by softening their
demands, or narrowing their scope, but by insisting on radicalism.

That commitment is also seen in Gago’s and Majewska’s

insistence that feminism include more than people traditionally
understood to be women. It must, they say, include people who
are trans, queer, indigenous, and working class. Although the
struggle for abortion rights has been critical to both the Argentine
and Polish movements, neither has placed significant emphasis on
“female biology”—a lesson, perhaps, for those who think that
mass feminist solidarity cannot be constructed on any other
foundation. For Gago and Majewska, biological essentialism is
the enemy of mass politics; after all, in both countries, as in much
of the rest of the world, the forces that conspire to repress straight
cis women are also those that conspire against gay and trans
people. (In Argentina and Poland, the primary opponent of
“gender ideology” isn’t other feminists but the Catholic Church.)

Still, there is dissensus. Throughout “Feminist International,”

Gago uses the phrase “women, lesbians, trans people, and
travestis”—the final term is used by some Latin American trans
women, especially sex workers. In a footnote, Gago explains that
the formulation “is the result of years of debate” and means to
highlight the movement’s “inclusive character beyond the
category of women.” In 2019, an assembly organized by the
feminist collective Ni Una Menos was disrupted when members
of Feministas Radicales Independientes de Argentina—which
formed in 2017 to oppose patriarchy, capitalism, prostitution, and
the recognition of trans women as women—took their turn to
speak. Other attendees shouted in protest, and one, allegedly a
trans woman, physically attacked a radical feminist. Afterward,
Ni Una Menos issued a statement proposing that the next
assembly adopt a motion to formalize what, the organization said,
had been collectively agreed: that trans-exclusionary feminists not
be given a platform at future meetings. “The Argentine movement
is transfeminist,” one woman argued. “That’s how it grew, with
the presence of trans and transvestites. We owe them the
movement, so their inclusion is really non-negotiable.” For Gago,
the pursuit of “unexpected alliances” makes discord inevitable,
but not a source of shame. “When we don’t know what to do,” she
writes, “we call an assembly.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 13, 2021, issue,
with the headline “The Sex Wars.”
Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political
Theory at Oxford University and the author of “The Right to Sex:
Feminism in the Twenty-first Century.”