Iâm sure most people have now seen this New York Times piece âHow British feminism became anti-trans.â Personally, I think it should be posted far and wide, but this key bit here is something that resonated with me.
[caption: âmiddle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummelling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have]
This is so accurate itâs unreal. British feminism is generally 20 years behind, not just on trans rights but on many things. Itâs not a coincidence that the âfeministsâ writing transphobic nonsense in the Guardian and New Statesman have also made sneering comments about intersectional feminism.
Hereâs Helen Lewis in the New Statesman complaining that intersectional ideals demand too much of feminists. And hereâs Hadley Freeman in the Guardian complaining that intersectionality leads to too much âfeminist infighting.â 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 âdoesnât do race.â Same shit from Zoe Williams.
Thereâs 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. Theyâre 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 wonât 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 theyâve said. The point is, these are the women who speak for British feminism. These are the women who get top billing.
Itâs not good enough. We deserve better. We deserve more working class voices, more diverse LGBTQ voices, disabled voices and women of colourâs voices. We need to amplify them wherever we can, because these white middle class assholes in our newspapers are trying to claim that theyâre doing this bullshit for us.
And not only is that allowing transmisogyny to hurt one of the most marginalised groups in Britain, but itâs opening the door to a raft of toxic bullshit that theyâre getting away with in the name of feminism. Fuck knows who theyâre gonna target next.
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