A case against “TERFs” uses interesting research in the service of the absurd
One of the many unpleasant side-effects of being called a TERF is how hard it makes it to take accusations of fascism seriously. If someone’s compared you to Hitler for defending single-sex rape crisis centres, it becomes very difficult to believe them when they claim to be upset about, I don’t know, actual fascists.
As a TERF of several years standing, I’ve often had this thought, then panicked about it. Hang on! If these people think they’re the anti-fascists — and look, it’s not as if they haven’t identified some genuine fascists — what if they’re right about me? What if my knee-jerk dismissal of their claims is defensiveness because I fear they’re right? What if I’m too much of s stupid fascist to understand why thinking sex matters is, like, totally fascist?
This has been worrying me for a while now. Thankfully, I’ve just read Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms and now it’s not. Don’t worry, fellow bog-standard lefty women whose unwillingness to be known as ‘uterus havers’ has led to us being compared to Trump and Putin. If this is the “why gender critical feminists are all fascists” argument, then it seems to me we’re not the ones with the problem.
To be clear, Lewis’s book does feature feminists who could, with justice, be called fascist (including some who would embrace the term). Lewis may not be the first person to write about hatred and white supremacy within the movement, but she is absolutely right to identify it as an area where vigilance is need (although guess what? Some TERFs have done this too). I suspected that reading Enemy Feminism would depress me. Even so, it’s important that as feminists we don’t allow those who call us names to push us so far that we become incapable of self-criticism. Let’s not allow others to turn our feminism into the thing they are already claiming it to be.
That Enemy Feminisms is a book with a particular agenda is made clear in the subtitled (“TERFs, Policewomen and Girlbosses against Liberation”) and in the introduction, which indicates that this is an extension of Lewis’s 2019 New York Times article “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans”. Like Laurie Penny, Lewis has taken on the job of Britsplaining TERF Island to supposedly baffled outsiders, as though one couldn’t just listen to what “TERFs” themselves are saying (it seems that if a working-class woman wants her own changing room at work, such a desire must be reinterpreted by better, more “educated” women, women who nonetheless claim to hate it when posh white ladies talk over others). Right from the start of Enemy Feminisms, you find yourself looking for the links, asking yourself how this KKK-supporting preacher or that Oswald Mosely-adjacent suffragette is going to eventually morph into a woman who thinks female prisoners shouldn’t have to share cells with male rapists.
To give Lewis credit, she works much harder at explaining this than Penny and Judith Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender? (in which gender critical feminists are essentially the same as Trump because Trump thinks biological sex is immutable, too). I’d even say there’s much to admire in Lewis’s approach, were it not ultimately in the service of defending the indefensible.
Unlike Butler and Penny, Lewis makes a clear effort to identify a thread within (primarily) white, Western, middle- and upper-class feminist thought which is both specifically feminist and white supremacist / colonialist / racist / classist in its outlook and impact. That is, rather than say — as many of us are wont to do — “alas, some women were bigots as well as being feminists” or “a lack of awareness of class or race can make some ‘feminist’ solutions harmful”, Lewis argues that we cannot always separate the feminism from the things we see as spoiling it (“imperial feminism really does come from feminism”, she notes). I think this is brave and important.
We already know that many feminist concerns — with the body, reproduction, sexual boundaries — are also white supremacist concerns, and that rhetoric regarding the protection of women and girls can be used for good and for ill. Still, Lewis’s particular framing made me think harder about the relationship between the good and the ill, and whether it is legitimate to “no true feminist” all those whose seemingly feminist principles have drifted too far in the direction of ill. Here, Lewis’s arguments are justifiably discomforting if, like me, you’re the kind of person who resorts to “well, they’re not proper feminists anyways” whenever the going gets tough. What if ‘they’ are? The chapter “The Pro-Life Feminist” made me wonder whether my own views on femaleness, dependency and relationality do indeed set one on a path to an anti-abortion position. I don’t think they do, but I’m suddenly conscious that it’s a question I’ve been frightened to ask, and such questions are invariably the ones that one should.
Yet the book ultimately fails, and it does so in a way that cannot be put down to some angels on a pinhead disagreement about what gender actually is. It does so in a way that undermines Lewis’s opposition to the feminisms she (rightly) denounces, sacrificing a sustainable analysis of feminist harms on the altar of sex denialism, selling out, girlboss-style, the most marginalised women in the process. Lewis’s central idea — that “the biggest reason for British feminism’s transphobia is empire” — is hammered home again and again in declarations such as “whenever a cissexist definition of womanhood is being imposed, a colonizing, fertility-disciplining gesture is in play” and “the purity impulse driving gender-critical and pornophobic lesbians […] express[es] an eco-fascistic need for clean boundaries and unambiguous definitions”. In Lewis’s worldview, to assert, as Jenny Lindsay does in Hounded, that “women are materially definable as a class of human being” and “women (as adult human females) are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns” is not to hold a set of beliefs which are the starting point for feminist activism. It is to hold a set of beliefs which are the starting point for feminist fascism.
One thing Enemy Feminisms makes absolutely clear is the way in which the sex denialist position brings with it a set of follow-on, increasingly offensive positions (ironic in a book about feminisms which have poisoned roots). One must, for instance, conflate sex with gender, and femaleness with femininity, thereby jettisoning — pretending not to know or to understand — the straightforward reading of gender as a social hierarchy facilitating the oppression of women on the basis of sex. All criticism of femininity — as it is imposed on women, and as it seeks to “naturalise” subordination — must henceforth be dismissed as “femmephobia”. Lewis peppers her analysis of earlier “enemy feminisms” with language which suggests that a modern-day, queer theory-soaked approach enhances, rather than trashes, any meaningful recognition of oppression. Ironically, and doubtless inadvertently, what we end up with is not a refinement of arguments, but another form of feminist racism.
For instance, in her discussion of moral panics over “white slavery”, Lewis describes womanhood being defined “in opposition to an un-gender ascribed to many native and/or unmarried mothers, sex-working mothers, and enslaved mothers”. “In short,” she writes, “the white slave feminist constituency was a formidable racist and cissexist weapon.” What, exactly, is the word “cissexist” doing here? Are we meant to think “native and and/or unmarried mothers, sex-working mothers, and enslaved mothers” are less female than white bourgeois mothers? By conflating femininity with femaleness while simultaneously critiquing the way in which “womanhood” has been defined (and rendered exclusionary) by its association with privileged white women, we end up with the logic of if those women are allowed to be women, then male people should be, too. It’s a racist logic. Whereas the supposedly fascist “TERF” argument – that femininity should never be used to qualify the inclusion of some female people within the category “woman” – is not racist (it’s probably “femmephobic” by Lewis’s standards, but I’d say that matters less).
When the topic is male violence and female vulnerability, Lewis is, like all sex denialists, utterly woeful. Her stance is similar to that of Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Alison Phipps, author of the #metoo-bashing Me, Not You (who appears in the acknowledgements). Like Butler, Lewis delights in telling us that penises aren’t weapons — they’re really small, when you think about it, and most of the time they are flaccid! And besides, Lewis informs us, “many women love their own cocks and each other’s very well”. She dredges up an idea mentioned in her earlier work, Full Surrogacy Now, that of “circlusion” (“the antonym of penetration, that is, the same process, only it’s understood from the standpoint of the mouth, not the finger. Our organs don’t objectively plough, engulf, “circlude”, or drill anything”). I hate to stare the bleeding obvious — no doubt another trait Lewis would put down to “the anti-intellectualism of today’s gender-critical feminists” — but none of this accounts for the fact that penises tend to come with significantly stronger male bodies attached. Lovely though it is to consider things from a different “standpoint”, there’s a reason why men can threaten women with penetration and women can’t threaten men with “circlusion”.
Then again, according to the laws of sex denialist feminism, suggesting that male people are physically stronger than female people is also considered racist. The justification for this, used by both Lewis and Phipps, is that racists have a habit of playing off the vulnerable white women against the threatening, non-white male “other” while treating women of colour as unfeminine and unrapeable. This is true, but rather than recognise that women as a class are physically vulnerable in relation to men as a class (regardless of race, social status or personal politics) sex denialist feminists respond by treating the very idea of female physical vulnerability as a prissy performance of white femininity, an act of collusion in white supremacy (how this helps women of colour is anyone’s guess).
In the end, acknowledging the reality of male physical dominance and the maleness of sexual violence is considered a form of cheating, a sneaky way of letting women who are obviously the baddies steal the place of men whose victimhood necessarily makes them the goodies. In Enemy Feminism, this way of seeing the world is at its ugliest in Lewis’s attitude towards Israeli rape victims. Several times in the book, she casts doubt on the extent of sexual violence committed by “the armed national liberation party Hamas” on October 7th 2023. The evidence “that Gazan fugitives and ‘terrorists’ had ‘systematically’ raped settlers” is “trumped-up”; mass sexual assaults are a “genocide-justifying distraction that has been debunked”.
The physical vulnerability and emotional immaturity of children, meanwhile, is a real pisser for anyone whose “utopian” vision of the future doesn’t involve any pesky boundaries. The innocence of the child is regarded as an irritating, fascist-adjacent fantasy in a similar way to the vulnerability of the adult human female. Lewis is right that child victims of sexual abuse should not be “pathologized […] as deviants”, but she does not seem to see prostituted children as victims at all, instead using the term “juvenile sex workers”.
The final chapter, “The Adult Human Female”, is where women like me are meant to come face to face with our own evilness. It does not engage with any contemporary left-wing feminist arguments against gender identity and trans activism they are currently constructed, nor does it take any great pains to differentiate between feminists who believe sex matters and are not actively racist, and women who believe sex matters and are. Lewis acknowledges such a distinction exists, but she doesn’t have to delve into it any further because hey, we’ve already established that thinking sex matters is inherently racist. Nor is it necessary for her to quote what trans activists actually say about women because that would no doubt be another “distraction” (later this month Lewis is taking part in a panel on “what happens when trans people in the public eye commit real or perceived wrongs?”. God forbid the sacred class are judged by the same standards as everyone else).
The conclusion of Enemy Feminisms is part-enraging, part-hilarious. Lewis has done so much research — so much valuable research, so many important stories — yet she cannot be bothered to find out what her ultimate “enemies” think at all. She quotes the fiction writer Alison Rumfitt claiming in 2022 that “without realising […] gender-critical discourse shares much with trans arguments”:
A lot of TERFs talk at length about not feeling like women, not feeling any sort of association with it as a category or role beyond their biology…. But we are past the point of ever fulfilling the dream of them realizing en masse that this is exactly what trans people often feel.
I mean — seriously? I must have imagined that time in 2014 when Roz Kaveney castigated me in the New Statesman for going too far in claiming to feel what trans people often feel. Lewis then goes on to announce that “counterintuitive as it might seem, we all already know that our sex can change”. This she demonstrates by quoting Emma Heaney’s introduction to Feminism Against Cisness:
‘A butch can experience masculinist priority amidst community in the dyke bar,’ offers Heaney, and that is maleness. She can then be ‘feminized by harassers on the subway home,’ and be unpleasantly reinscribed into femaleness. Within one day, a CEO can ‘rhetorically dominate a boardroom and be subject to brutal or subtle misogynist undermining by her husband at home.’
This is not changing sex (much as I’d love to see the clownfish version of it). It’s a conscious, overworked failure to understand gender (sex) constancy. It’s at this point that I felt real anger. This is where we have ended up? This is what all that uncovering of exploitation and cruelty has been put in the service of? It’s as though other women’s suffering — centuries of it — exists only to do a clean-up job on the bullshit politics of today’s self-styled utopian visionaries.
I expected more and Lewis could have offered more. If it is “girbossery” to stand on the backs of other women while claiming to empower all, then here’s your ultimate girlboss. I might be a TERF, but at least I’m not that.
