Is Donald Trump a feminist?
There was a time when anybody asking such a query may fairly anticipate to be laughed out of the room. But, simply three weeks into Trump’s second time period, the person chargeable for stripping girls within the US of the suitable to an abortion was declared a “feminist kween”, “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” by a number of outstanding feminist writers within the UK.
The event for these declarations was Trump’s all-out assault on trans rights. Since taking workplace, the president has used government orders to try to limit the flexibility of trans People to journey, work, obtain medical care, serve within the army, attend college and take part in girls’s sports activities. Although there are considered fewer than 10 trans athletes among the many greater than half 1,000,000 competing in faculty sports activities within the US, it was this sports-related government order that prompted sure, trans-exclusionary feminists to declare Trump’s feminist bona fides.
How did we get right here? How have we arrived at a spot the place self-identified feminists ally themselves with a person who has so extravagantly devoted his private and political lives to the humiliation, domination and degradation of ladies and women?
I introduced this query to Sophie Lewis, whose new e book, Enemy Feminisms, out this week within the US, seeks to know how and why some types of feminism have diverged so basically from others as to develop into, effectively, enemies.
After we spoke by cellphone, I discussed to Lewis that my technique for coping with such feminisms has tended towards repudiation. I’ve lengthy maintained a private coverage of avoiding the time period “Terf”, an initialism for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, as a result of I reject the concept the underlying ideology qualifies as feminism.
“It’s troublesome – I’d say not possible – to say that [Terfism] isn’t feminism, that the philosophical and motion roots of their entire deal isn’t feminism,” Lewis stated. “That’s the dangerous information. However the excellent news is that there have been all the time different feminists combating them tooth and nail.
“It hurts and confuses us to think about that there are anti-liberatory feminisms, however I believe once we do permit that and we do conceptually break that risk open, that’s when it turns into doable to stake out our floor as an anti-colonial, proletarian, trans feminism,” she continued.
An unbiased scholar and self-described radical, Lewis was raised in France and educated within the UK, and now lives within the US. Her earlier books have advocated household abolition, an concept that seeks to de-privatize the care and social replica that capitalism assigns to nuclear households.
Enemy Feminisms is structured as a “bestiary of enemy feminisms”, tracing reactionary tendencies in western feminism all the way in which again to Mary Wollstonecraft and taking up such archetypes as “the civilizer”, “the KKK feminist”, “the pornophobe” and “the prohibitionist”. All through, Lewis reveals how feminists have been formed – and misshaped – by the ideologies and historic situations of their occasions, from the alternatives that slavery and imperialism afforded some white girls to the strictures of working inside a liberal democracy and the seductive lure of violence.
And what a bestiary it’s. We start with Wollstonecraft’s 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Lady, a foundational textual content for feminism and a primary instance of how feminist evaluation can comprise its personal types of misogyny (Lewis calls it “the unique declare to being not like the opposite women”) and straight-up white supremacy. Wollstonecraft’s incapacity – or unwillingness – to parse the distinction between the chattel slavery imposed by the British Empire on Black folks and the metaphorical “slavery” of upper-class married Englishwomen is simply the primary instance.
Right here we’ve got Might French Sheldon, a rich American feminist who in 1891 traveled “alone and unescorted” – that’s, carried by 150 employed African employees however no white folks – by Kenya and Tanzania beneath a US flag and a banner studying “noli me tangere” (contact me not), solely to report on her return that in every single place she went, Africans had gathered round “entreating her to stay and rule over them”. She would go on to make a number of journeys to Africa and develop into a staunch denialist of the Belgian genocide within the Congo. Sheldon’s is one among a number of types of feminism that may solely be expressed by the domination of individuals of colour, an unique sin of the motion that also troubles it in the present day. (Lewis attracts a direct line from Sheldon to Israel’s promotion of so-called “lionesses of the desert” who fought for the first time on the frontlines in Israel’s struggle on Gaza, writing: “Genocide is typically feminist.”)
And right here we’ve got Mary Richardson, a British suffragette whose enthusiasm for the motion’s marketing campaign of violence, arson and bombing noticed her earn the nickname “Slasher” after she took a meat cleaver to a Diego Velázquez nude within the Nationwide Gallery. After the primary world struggle, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists and rapidly assumed management of the ladies’s part, solely to be expelled, two years later, for demanding “truthful play” for ladies.
Whereas in style feminist historical past usually idealizes the British suffragettes, and lingers notably on the brutal violence enacted upon their our bodies by the British state, Lewis argues that extra consideration have to be paid to the violence they themselves carried out. Emmeline Pankhurst’s band of feminist activists “detonated as many bombs between 1912–13 because the Irish Republican Military did throughout its 1939–40 ‘S-Plan’”, she writes.
“To this present day, it’s not notably in style in academia to speak about this bombing and violence except you’re principally an anti-feminist,” she says. And whereas Lewis doesn’t need to denounce violent ways throughout the board, she warns: “I believe we have to discuss how actions that lean closely on terrorism are prone to take an authoritarian inside kind that very a lot favors a rightward political lurch.”
For some suffragettes, that lurch got here because of the onset of the primary world struggle. When Pankhurst ordered her followers to cease bombing the British state and begin serving to to arm it for the struggle effort, it left among the most radicalized to fall into “a feminist-fascist estuary fashioned within the crater generated by Mrs Pankhurst’s pivot from law-breaking insurgency to conformist cheerleading”.
Betrayed and disillusioned, these suffragettes misplaced religion within the democratic system and located a brand new hero to worship in Oswald Mosley, founding father of the British Union of Fascists. “How will we make sense of that?” Lewis asks. “They’re reacting to one thing actual … however they’re making, primarily, a fascist alternative.” Lewis compares what she calls a “feminism of fools” to the thought of the “socialism of fools” – that’s, the way in which wherein consciousness of structural injustice within the economic system can veer away from Marxist evaluation towards antisemitic conspiracy theories.
One other feminist ancestor on this custom was Mary Sophia Allen. A British suffragette, Allen jumped on the alternative the primary world struggle gave her to “larp” (live-action position play) as a form of volunteer auxiliary police officer, patrolling the non-public lives of working-class girls dwelling close to troop installations. Her postwar profession noticed her touring the world as a “lady’s police’ marketing consultant”, selling the doubtful however persistent concept that criminalizing girls’s intercourse lives could be feminist if a girl is the one making use of {the handcuffs}. She wore a police uniform and monocle, referred to as herself the “commandant” and spent a substantial period of time in Spain and Germany, the place she developed each a dedication to fascism and private relationships with Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler.
In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis additionally takes on the anti-pornography flip that some radical feminists took within the Seventies and Eighties, the rise of the Islamophobic femonationalist (“dying by drone bomb is best (and extra feminist) for ladies than life is below sharia regulation”), the Twenty first-century girlboss (“we would take into account starting with a common girlstrike”) and, lastly, the “grownup human feminine” – or Terf.
Although trans-exclusionary feminism originated with a subset of radical American feminists within the Seventies, Lewis notes that the concepts discovered little help within the US past a tiny fringe of eco-feminists and the explicitly anti-feminist non secular proper. Anti-trans considering survived and thrived within the UK, nevertheless, changing into a part of institution feminism, solely to be “exported again to the US within the Twenty first century like an unholy boomerang”, she says.
Terfism grows from most of the tendencies of earlier enemy feminisms, Lewis demonstrates, such because the “femmephobia” of Wollstonecraft and the Nineteenth-century ethical panic round “white slavery” that drove some feminists to embrace prohibitionism and xenophobia. She additionally attracts an analogy between Terfism’s inaccurate insistence on intercourse as an immutable binary and up to date nationalism.
“It’s virtually like a nationalism of intercourse,” she says of Terfism. “On the psychic degree, they need sturdy borders, they usually need to make sexuation nice once more.”
Enemy Feminisms debuts at a deadly second within the rising world motion for state repression of trans folks; its blatantly rightwing, authoritarian and non secular nature (key proponents embody Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and the Vatican) is difficult by the alibi afforded it by a handful of trans-exclusionary feminists. It’s because of their efforts that Trump can body a bigoted assault on a minority as “defending girls from gender ideology”.
Lewis isn’t the primary to attach Terfism to the rising energy of the worldwide far proper. The thinker and gender research scholar Judith Butler has warned for years of the rising motion in opposition to “gender” – and the injury that feminist transphobia does to the coalition constructing wanted to fight fascism. “Persevering with the ‘anti-gender ideology’ discourse locations up to date ‘radical feminists’ ready of woeful complicity with the important thing goals of latest fascism,” they wrote within the 2024 e book Who’s Afraid of Gender.
“It isn’t unfair to carry anti-trans British feminists co-responsible for this agenda of the non secular proper [in the US],” says Lewis. “The historic report may be very clear about this: American rightwing transphobia was solely in a position to roar into life after the infusion of radical-feminist language, framing, help and vocabulary.”
Some Terfs who bestowed the title of “feminist” on Trump declare to have executed so begrudgingly and regardless of, not due to, most of his private and political assaults on girls. However others seem to welcome his help. On 9 February, the writer and anti-trans activist JK Rowling credited Trump with influencing anti-trans insurance policies within the UK and expressed hope that he would additionally assist stymy a proposed UK ban on conversion remedy for transgender youth, saying: “I suppose we’ve got to hope Trump says it quickly. Then, perhaps, they’ll pay attention.”
To publish a e book that quantities, in a sure gentle, to an annotated enemies record is its personal provocation, and Lewis is bracing herself for criticism from feminists who may view the present local weather because the flawed time for infighting, or preferring to not deal with the skeletons in feminism’s closet. However Lewis argues that it’s an particularly pressing time to combat fascism, even when which means combating fascist feminists. And she or he claims that the undertaking was in the end “a form of love letter to feminism”.
“I belong to feminism,” she instructed me. “The primary passionate emotions I ever had, the primary political animus I ever harbored, at 4 years outdated, had been feminist, and I’ve chosen to stay with feminism or – to invoke a Donna Haraway phrase – to stick with the difficulty and to not cede the bottom of feminism to those actors who’re sadly additionally grounded in feminist ancestry and feminist historical past.”
Final fall, when Lewis was looking forward to the e book’s launch, she anticipated that its reception would happen below a freshly inaugurated President Kamala Harris. The last word glass ceiling being damaged by a politician who embodies Lewis’s archetype of “the policewoman” might need made for attention-grabbing discussions. How may leftwing feminists have reconciled our aid at reaching relative security from a second Trump presidency with its coming by the elevation of a Glock-owning, intercourse worker-prosecuting, “most deadly combating drive on the earth”-touting Black and South Asian lady?
These conversations gained’t occur now. The re-election of Trump has demonstrated resoundingly the weaknesses of Harris’s model of feminism, even because it has precipitated crises in each facet of American life that demand a feminist response.
“My God, you realize, it’s a scary time,” Lewis instructed me, after I requested her what comes subsequent for feminism, “however I suppose one may optimistically say that the lay of the land now turns into slightly clearer.”
“Individuals know what to do, in some ways as a result of they’ve been compelled to do it for therefore lengthy. You understand, folks within the south had no abortion entry lengthy earlier than Roe v Wade was stricken down, they usually’ve been making abortion occur anyway, for many years. The identical goes for estrogen, which is being distributed all throughout the nation, DIY … Persons are actually doing DIY healthcare for themselves. They’re standing up for one another within the face of eviction, within the face of deportation, within the face of sexual violence and familial abuse and patriarchal terror … That’s simply how feminism works.”
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Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Towards Liberation is printed by Haymarket Books
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