By Ilaria Michelis
Self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists have grown increasingly loud within the UK political space over recent years. The last few months alone have provided ample evidence of their expanding influence within governmental circles, non-profit and corporate environments. The impact of their rhetoric and political action has been and will continue to be devastating for trans people, from the halting of reforms to the Gender Recognition Act despite public support, to ever more intense levels of transphobic violence taking place online and offline. Recognising these harms as the primary damage, I am curious to understand what are the secondary, less obvious but by no means less insidious, effects of the deployment of ’gender critical’ feminist arguments on contemporary UK and global feminist discourses. More specifically, I explore the function of so-called ‘gender critical’ feminism as a reactionary response to anti-racist and decolonial campaigns which aims to both reclaim the centrality of white women as the ultimate victim in public debates, and to divert attention from calls to recognise and address the role of feminist movements in upholding systems of white supremacy and imperialism worldwide.
In July 2020, JK Rowling infamously decided to take a very public stance on the issue of trans rights and women’s safety through a series of tweets and an essay. As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests spread around the world in response to George Floyd’s murder, and as Edward Colston’s statue was toppled to highlight Britain’s lack of accountability towards its colonial past, the novelist’s choice to use her substantial platform to reignite the debate on trans rights appeared highly insensitive and a product of her current class and race privilege. Alyosxa Tudor asks “How bored and annoyed must JK Rowling be that she thinks the perfect moment in which she can reheat her […] comments is the height of Black Lives Matter?” (emphasis mine). This incident is a good starting point to reflect on how ‘gender critical’ arguments interact, both temporally and discursively, with anti-racist, intersectional and decolonial critiques of Western, white liberal feminism.
Firstly, the exclusion of Black women and other women of colour from mainstream feminism, which generations of Black and decolonial feminists have highlighted and fought against[1], seems to rest on not-so-dissimilar principles to the exclusion of trans-women. One of the core arguments of so-called ‘gender critical’ ideology is that trans women cannot be fully ‘accepted’ as women because their experience of womanhood is not identical to that of cis women and trans women can therefore not fully comprehend or empathise with the supposedly universal subordination of women. This argument rests on the fiction of a single female experience, a fiction which has routinely silenced and side-lined women who experience racism, colonial domination and other forms of oppression that cannot be singularly attributed to their gender.
‘Gender critical’ feminists often demand the exclusion of trans women from female-only spaces based on their belief that they retain some forms of male privilege, which they supposedly accrue from society before transitioning. Such ‘residual’ male privilege, they claim, might disrupt the sense of sisterhood and solidarity amongst women in these ‘safe spaces’, or even make some women feel uncomfortable and unsafe. This argument obviously denies the complexity of trans women’s experiences with a form of privilege that could only be accessed by denying a fundamental part of their identity. It also, however, blatantly singles out one form of privilege as unacceptable, while happily glossing over all other forms of power and domination that are at play in any group of women, such as those based on racial, class, ableist and heteronormative privilege.
Secondly, in addition to dismissing these fundamental insights of Black and intersectional feminism, the political and discursive work done by ’gender critical’ feminists has re-centred a powerful figure in all the debates: the white victim. A mainstay of racist and Islamophobic discourse, the white victim has been mobilised to demonise Black and Muslim men and call for racist and anti-migrant policies for centuries.[2] Angela Davis describes how the “myth of the Black rapist” was mobilised after the abolition of slavery in the US to justify lynching and other violence against Black men perpetrated by white men under the imperative to “protect white women”.[3] In more recent times, the sexual assault of predominantly white women by a group of men including asylum seekers in Cologne fuelled a revival of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and racist rhetoric in Germany and beyond. While these attacks were made in the name of women’s rights, feminist organisations at the time complained about the deployment of the (white) vulnerable victim trope by groups that had never before showed support for women’s safety or right to self-determination. Still, even within the feminist movement, the white victim has been paraded to criticise Black women’s political and artistic expression and reject their claims for visibility and inclusion because of their refusal to a-critically accept and reproduce the narrative of white female victimhood.[4]
Ultimately, the white victim becomes a tool to justify discrimination and violence against minoritised groups, who are in turn dehumanised and demonised in public discourse and the media. Depictions of trans women as deceitful monsters seeking to violate the purity of innocent young women and their ‘safe spaces’ recall all too clearly the starkly racist representations of Black men during the Jim Crow era. The brutalisation of Black men and their portrayal as always duplicitous and dangerous were, and sometimes still are, used to justify their murder and disproportionate incarceration. In a similar vein, the image of a male rapist pretending to be a woman to invade women’s bathrooms and changing rooms is constantly conjured up by ‘gender critical’ feminists to bolster their violent acts of exclusion against trans women and obscure their deeply harmful, and potentially fatal, consequences.
Media and public attention towards BLM and global struggles against racism and coloniality have increasingly challenged white women, including white feminists, to consider their own participation and complicity in systems of white supremacy and imperialism. Concepts like “white fragility” and “white women’s tears”[5] have become mainstream and confronted white women with the consequences of their privileged position in local and global systems of power. Many white women and feminists have started journeys of self-reflection and accountability, committed to listening to Black women and women of colour, and expanded their feminist struggle to include anti-racist objectives.
It is therefore somewhat striking that, in a moment of global reckoning around racism and imperialism, so much feminist energy is being spent debating – or rather, fighting against – the rights of trans people. Perhaps not so surprisingly, we see the figure of the white victim, this time – somewhat innovatively – a white lesbian woman or girl, return to the fore. The unusual centring of lesbian women in ‘gender critical’ narratives deserves questioning if one considers the long history of exclusion of lesbians and their concerns from mainstream feminism.[6] The ‘gender critical’ turn seems to have heralded a new era of solidarity amongst (some) lesbian and heterosexual women, functioning as an “entry pass” into certain feminist spaces for lesbian women who previously did not quite fit in.[7] At the same time, the sudden preoccupation of cis-heterosexual women with butch lesbian women and girls seems steeped into an all-too-familiar desire to rescue other women. As white women’s salvific role in transnational feminist movements is revealed as an imperialist trope rooted in the desire of “saving brown women from brown men”,[8] a new marginalised woman has been pulled out of the shadows to be saved, protected, rescued.
Photo by Oriel Frankie Ashcroft from Pexels
These striking similarities within feminist, racist and transphobic discourses can therefore be considered alongside the curious timing of ‘gender critical’ public outburst in the midst of a global movement against racism, and the suspicious emergence of ‘debates’ on the inclusion of trans-women within feminist movements at the same time as calls to decolonise and diversify those movements gained traction. Perhaps JK Rowling was indeed quite annoyed because BLM and other anti-racist movements had decisively shoved the conversation away from the narrative of white women as the ultimate victim towards the long overdue recognition that Black, Brown and other racialised and minoritised groups, and amongst them Black trans women, suffer incredible levels of daily violence which many white women can barely imagine. Her latest public statement on this issue explicitly depicts her as the victim of violence and intimidation. While she recognises her privilege and the level of protection it affords her, she then goes on to equate her experience to harassment, stalking and threats of rape, powerfully evoking the well-rehearsed discourse of female victimhood. In this light, ‘gender critical’ rhetoric appears as just the latest strategy to re-centre white victimhood against a global tide of anti-racist activism asking white women to consider, for once, whether they might be actually occupying the oppressor’s seat.
It is important to recognise that not all self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists are white women of course. Women of colour engaged in anti-racist activism have expressed their support for ‘gender critical’ arguments, explicitly drawing parallels between systemic racism and the alleged oppression of cisgender women by trans activists. While the analysis of their motivations goes beyond the scope of this essay, it is probably safe to assume that minoritised women active in anti-racist politics are not deploying ‘gender critical’ logics with the deliberate intent to divert feminist struggles away from anti-racist and decolonial objectives and conversations. If anything, I consider whether they might be better understood through a lens of victimhood competition, leading some voices in my own feminist circles to argue that attending to the inclusion of trans-women is an elitist, Western concern which displaces the more urgent demands of women of colour, especially in the Global South, though exploring the roots and validity of these claims would require further investigation.
Nevertheless, if we forefront the parallels between ‘gender critical’ arguments and the racist, imperialist, and homophobic rhetorical tools used by white feminists yesterday and today, it becomes clear who benefits when a narrow definition of womanhood is deployed to exclude trans women. Regardless of intentions, the re-centring of white victimhood in public media debates and feminist discussions has partially obscured conversations about race and systemic racism in the UK and, importantly, within feminist movements. It has also created concerning alliances and parallelisms between racist, sexist, conservative forces opposing the rights of all minorities and ‘gender critical’ feminists. [9] If the historical roots of so-called ‘gender critical’ feminism lie in privileged whiteness, its future is one that does not only uphold essentialist notions of sex and gender, but also systems of white supremacy.
Ilaria Michelis is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Gates Scholar. Her research focuses on intersectionality in feminist movements and organisations who work with survivors of violence against women and girls. Ilaria is also a gender based violence practitioner, working primarily with refugee and migrant women and girls. She has lived and worked with the UN and international NGOs in Uganda, Ethiopia, Iraq and Lebanon, working with the UN and international NGOs for over ten years. Her interests revolve around feminist, decolonial and anti-racist movements, decolonising the humanitarian sector and social work and integrating practitioners’ knowledge and expertise into theory.
[1] Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press; Lewis, G., & Hemmings, C. (2019). ‘Where might we go if we dare’: Moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism. Feminist Theory, 20(4), 405–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700119871220; Carby, H. V. (2000). WHITE WOMAN LISTEN!: Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood. In K. Owusu (Ed.), BLACK BRITISH CULTURE AND SOCIETY (pp. 82–88). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203360644_chapter_7; Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Feminist Review, 30, 61–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395054
[2] Cockbain, E., & Tufail, W. (2020). Failing victims, fuelling hate: Challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative. Race & Class, 61(3), 3–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396819895727
[3] Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race and class. The Women’s Press.
[4] Ferreday, D. (2017). ‘Only the Bad Gyal could do this’: Rihanna, rape-revenge narratives and the cultural politics of white feminism. Feminist Theory, 18(3), 263–280.
[5] DiAngelo, R. J. (2018). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. United States: Beacon Press.; Eddo-Lodge, R. (2020). Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.
[6] Combahee River Collective. (1979). combahee river collective: A black feminist statement. Off Our Backs, 9(6), 6–8.; Carmen, Gail, Shaila, & Pratibha. (1984). Becoming Visible: Black Lesbian Discussions. Feminist Review, 17, 53–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395010
[7] Tudor, A. (2019). Im/possibilities of refusing and choosing gender. Feminist Theory, 20(4), 361–380.
[8] Spivak, G. C. (1993). Can the Subaltern Speak? In Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader Chrisman, Laura and Williams, Patrick. Harvester Wheatsheaf.
[9] Phipps, A. (2020). Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism. Manchester University Press; Pearce, R., Erikainen, S., & Vincent, B. (2020). TERF wars: An introduction. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 677–698; Hines, S. (2020). Sex wars and (trans) gender panics: Identity and body politics in contemporary UK feminism. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 699–717.
Any serious consideration of the “curious timing” of the rise of gender critical activism in the UK should look at events it is studying clearly.
In 2017 the UK government proposed to change the law to enable “gender self ID”; that is to allow anyone to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate (and which the law says they should be treated as for all legal purposes) by a simple declaration.
Many women were concerned at the impact this would have on women’s rights, and the ability to analyse, organise and provide services for women.
Secondarily, many women became alarmed at the backlash against attempts to consider these issues in public debate; refusal to debate, meetings picketed, venues cancelled, academic and policy research institions failing to play their part in creating space for debate, people harassed and investigated at work for writing about this, calls to remove people from political parties, violent attacks….
In response to this organisations such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play for Women were set up and there has been an emergence of a vibrant, growing grassroots feminist movement including both white women (who are the majority of women in this country) and women of colour.
This author ignores all this women’s history and suggests all this can be understood by airily pointing at “the last few months” and at one woman JK Rowling as a cypher for the story the author wants to tell. All the agency and political action of other ordinary women is simply ignored.
This is not scholarship, this is propaganda.
Which ones are the ordinary women?
‘Many women’ were not ‘concerned’ Ms. Forstater. A minority of mostly middle class transphobic people, including many men, decided that GRA reform, (proposed by MP Jess Phillips, a cis woman and self described feminist) was a good excuse to express their prejudices more publicly. They were supported in this by a Conservative government who needed a new scapegoat as homophobia became less socially acceptable.
It’s also interesting that the supposedly ‘feminist’, ‘grassroots’, gender critical hate movement gained traction a year after a large evangelical group publicly stated that they planned to ‘separate the LGB from the T’, ‘using feminist sounding language’, and that they were prepared to put money behind doing that.
And now the EHRC is an utter joke with an openly bigoted chair, choosing to be transphobic is a protected characteristic, and the ‘gender critical’ movement continues to pretend to be a feminist one. Despite the fact that they’re being praised by Putin and Boris Johnson.
‘Gender critical’ columnist Hadley Freeman even said that ‘bathrooms were the biggest issue facing women today’. I cannot imagine how sheltered, privileged and narcissistic you would have to be to think that, let alone say it in public.
Not going to mention the bits where the hate group Fair Play for Women went from being a blog to a slick media friendly vehicle overnight, courtesy of a private donation? Their support for conversion ‘therapy’, proven to cause suicidal ideation? The bit where they said they hoped trans women got ‘a million cancers’, and ‘joked’ about ‘getting the trans exterminators in’?
No, just repeat the lie that they’re a benign feminist grassroots organisation, that ‘many’ women support.
Rowling’s July essay followed this tweet on June 6th 2020:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313
Which was itself prompted (as the essay said) by frustration at contemporaneous moves by the Scottish Government’s, such as committing to legislating for self-id and publishing this guidance on June 2nd:
https://www.gov.scot/publications/gender-representation-public-boards-scotland-act-2018-statutory-guidance/
This guidance redefines “woman” – for the purposes of gender balance on public boards in Scotland – as self-identification, but not “man”.
These are important and controversial issues, personal to Rowling and highly relevant in terms of both geography and timing. To criticise her intervention on the basis of other, US-originating political concerns is far too narrow a perspective, tantamount to cultural imperialism. The world does not revolve around the US, no matter how much of our communication is mediated by US corporations, and people don’t have to subordinate their political concerns to whatever single issue the US is most concerned with at that moment.
The author has made some significant and concerning omissions.
The ideas of “gender critical” feminism may have become more visible to some commentators after certain segments of the media became obsessed with vilifying JK Rowling in 2020, but the notion that people with penises are men is an old, basic view held by most people worldwide. Specific feminist critiques of transgender concepts have been around since at least the second wave: notably from lesbian/revolutionary/radical/separatist feminism. Some of the feminists from that era are still writing today, such as Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond. But, as mentioned in the comment by Forstater, in this country the political re-invigoration of a feminism rooted in issues uniquely faced by females as a biological sex came after the UK government’s announcement to hold a public consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act. That consultation then took place in 2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/reform-of-the-gender-recognition-act-2004
In the run up to that consultation, a white trans person used the mechanisms of the state first to criminalise and, when that failed, privately prosecute a Black woman for her words in a video recording. In 2018, it transpired that South Yorkshire Police had investigated Linda Bellos OBE after a white trans person had watched a pre-recorded video of Bellos on YouTube and felt threatened by her speech. For reference, Bellos is Black, Jewish, lesbian, the first woman of colour on the team of Spare Rib and originator of Black History Month. On the YouTube video, Bellos said she would defend herself if any trans person threatened violence against her. Bellos made that statement as a response to the 2017 physical assault on the “gender critical” Maria Machlachlan by a different white trans activist at Speaker’s Corner. South Yorkshire police then questioned Bellos under caution because of the white trans person’s allegations and referred to the CPS. The CPS “reviewed the matter at a high level and decided that there was no realistic prospect of conviction, taking into account the context in which the words were uttered and the fact that Linda Bellos would have a defence of freedom of speech under Article 10 of the ECHR.” Following this, that white trans person then took out a private prosecution. The case was later discontinued by the CPS, after it was argued this was a politically motivated and vexatious action against Bellos. (Quote sourced from & for more information: https://www.2harecourt.com/2018/11/30/gudrun-young-successfully-defends-leading-feminist-anti-racist-campaigner-linda-bellos-obe/ )
This case study, with its more complicated racial dynamics and the apparatus of the state, goes unmentioned by Michelis.
Michelis instead focuses on Rowling, to the exclusion of any Black woman’s critical statements on this subject. So, for example Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was been entirely left out of this piece. (Adichie’s beautiful writing and clear thinking is worth reading regardless of political allegiances, eg: https://www.chimamanda.com/news_items/it-is-obscene-a-true-reflection-in-three-parts/) Other feminists that might be labeled as “gender critical” by Michelis or others, but who come from different backgrounds and offer more varied perspectives than trendy academic gender studies include: Claire Heuchan (https://sisteroutrider.wordpress.com/about/), Raquel Rosario Sanchez (https://womansplaceuk.org/tag/raquel-rosario-sanchez/), Vaishnavi Sundar (https://vaishnavisundar.com) and Hibo Wardere (https://twitter.com/HiboWardere). None of those women’s insights, or their work sharing the voices of even more women, has been included here. This omission weakens the blog considerably. The creative, emotional and intellectual work of women of colour who hold “gender critical” views should be at least as thoroughly engaged with, or better still elevated, compared to any white woman’s writing on on these matters – most urgently if the topic is racism. It is unfortunate Michelis appears not to have done any of this, instead speculating that these women’s views “might be better understood through a lens of victimhood competition”… Many of the most prominent women in the UK “gender critical” movement taking legal cases to challenge systems of power are NOT white women (see for example Keira Bell, Allison Bailey and Sonia Appleby). Black women are visibly at the forefront of this particular fight for women’s rights, despite the cost to themselves. Many of these women suffer far worse abuse than white women from strangers claiming to defend trans rights, who may mete out racism in addition to misogyny and lesbophobia (see: https://twitter.com/BluskyeAllison/status/1480143656380252161). Yet not one of those women has been quoted in the blog. The thoughts, actions, motivations of these Black women are mentioned in passing. Their names, their significance to the grassroots “gender critical” feminist movement, their stories, are all but erased by the very author of this piece.
Finally, for an author whose biography indicates at least passing familiarity with the concepts of coercive control, victim blaming, systemic silencing of women and the global lethality of male violence against women and girls, Michelis comes across as utterly dismissive of threats made against a woman. That is especially concerning in the context of Rowling who had shared her private history of abuse. Michelis states: “…she then goes on to equate her experience to harassment, stalking and threats of rape, powerfully evoking the well-rehearsed discourse of female victimhood.” While evidence should not be needed to back up Rowling’s credibility and her sense of danger, here are two sources for things that have happened to her since she began speaking up on this subject. A series of screenshots of online abuse: https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d The doxxing of her home address: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-59372838
There is no excuse for minimising the experiences of any woman like this, or insinuating that she is somehow playacting. Especially a female survivor.
“but the notion that people with penises are men is an old, basic view held by most people worldwide”
Sorry, but you lost me there. It’s not about that, is it? Even someone who is ‘post op’ and has had genital reassignment surgery, is condemned to the depths of the gallows from the emotional gender ‘critical’ activists.
You’re trying to simplify and rephrase things in your own words to the unsuspecting viewer, but you’re not fooling anyone.
The parallels between the rhetoric of ‘gender critical’ activism and racist rhetoric of the past and present are quite stark. While many GC activists reject notions of racism, the fact that they often diminish the issues faced by black, brown and indigenous women and downplay the role of white women in past and current colonialism to reject such claims is patently hypocritical and very ironic. The way that Allison Bailey is used as proof that GC activism isn’t racist is also very problematic and has a definite feel of ‘I can’t be racist I have a black friend’ about it. Some GC groups have now openly criticised Critical Race Theory, yet another grievance they share with right wing groups. It doesn’t stop at racism, either. Several GC ‘feminists’ such as Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock have openly expressed biophobic attitudes – Bindel recently referred to bisexual women as ‘interlopers’. Attacking women of minority sexual identities is hardly very feminist. I think increasingly the GC movement shows itself to be bigoted in multifaceted ways and certainly not feminist. In fact some in the GC movement have stated that they are not feminists (Helen Joyce for example). The fact that many GC activists do very little for women’s rights and seem to focus solely on attacking trans people and what they term ‘transgender ideology’ (a term coined by the right wing) – such as Maya Forstater, who’s comments on this article seem to confirm the very issues you highlight- is also very telling. I’m glad there is serious analysis of the GC movement and it’s hijacking of feminist debate being done despite attempts to silence such critique as anti-feminist etc. Thank you for this piece.