Sex/Gender Exclusions & Transversalism Revisited

 (This is a draft of a talk and not to be cited without my permission. It was ‘written to be spoken’ so apologies for the colloquialisms)

This talk is a product of bewilderment – my own confusion – when confronted by a group of feminists (a couple of whom I had counted as friends) who were making alliances with right-wing, conservative, evangelical groups (for example, Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, The Heritage Foundation, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Concerned Parents and Educators, and so on) known for their attempts to limit women’s reproductive rights, forbid gay marriage and parenting, criminalize Black Lives Matter, and prevent the teaching of Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies. They were making these alliances in the name of what they considered to be a ‘higher goal’ – the protection of ‘womyn-born-womyn’ from what they called the ‘trans menace’. It wasn’t that I was naïve – I have written extensively about women in conservative and far-right movements – but I knew that, historically, trans and non-binary people have been long-standing allies of progressive, feminist, and LGBTQ+ organizations and ideologies. Why would a small but highly vocal and media-friendly of feminists and even LGB (no ‘T' there) activists be not only ostracizing them but actively persecuting them?

I also knew that the anti-trans movement was part of broader ‘culture wars’, of which I have written (see my website). Sex and gender binarism have long played a prominent role in the good-versus-evil binaries espoused in these so-called ‘wars’. I was also aware of some of the linguistic problems in even discussing this topic. As a non-trans woman, there is a risk of co-option as well as ‘speaking for’, which is why my talk will be primarily focusing on the toxic discourses spouted by some non-trans people. This does not eliminate the risk of silencing people harmed by some of the transphobic discourse I will be citing.

There are also extremely subtle ways of undermining inclusive arguments. Terms such as non-binary, ‘cis’, FTM/MTF, and trans itself (Latin for ‘across’) can in almost imperceptible ways imply that the binary male/female exists or that the sex designated at birth is stable. Then, there is the matter of the label TERF, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Although when coined by TigTog in August 2008, it was not intended to be a slur (it was meant to be simply a shorthand way of distinguishing radical feminists who were trans-exclusionary and those who were trans-positive), it is regarded as such by most non-inclusive feminists. Furthermore, since anti-trans sentiments are now mainstream and endorsed by institutions with no link to radicalism or feminism, it has become less appropriate. That said, I am also aware of the problematic nature of using the friendlier term – ‘gender critical’ – because (as Claire Thurlow argues), the invention of the term ‘gender-critical’ was deliberately intended as a rebranding by TERFs to garner mainstream support: in Thurlow’s words, it involved a ‘linguistic pivot from “anti-trans” to “pro-woman”’.

 I am aware that this is a long preamble…. So, with these caveats in mind, let’s start:

Today, we are living through a period of heightened risk to people identifying as trans. Only hours after his inauguration in 2025, and in his first address to the nation, Trump appealed to one of the central tenets of the ‘culture wars’, that is, an insistence that his administration would only recognize two genders: ‘male and female maketh He’. Since then, a vast array of laws and regulations have been passed limiting trans access to medical care, slashing their welfare provisions, disallowing their participation in the military, banning them from sports dedicated to ‘girls or women’, eradicating Gender Affirming Care, excluding them from using gender-appropriate public toilets, forbidding amendments to birth certificates, and withdrawing even basic forms of recognition. As Jules Gill-Peterson rightly argues, the laws against transgender people have gone beyond that of a ‘culture war’: it is now a biopolitical assault on an entire population who are excluded, criminalised, and persecuted.

Central to these bills is a definition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ based on simplistic, biological markers, most frequently reproductive markers such as the appearance of genitals or the ability to produce sperm or eggs. The ‘sex assigned at birth’ simply refers to a process of sex assignment by a medical professional. It can be helpful to remind ourselves there is a vast amount of scientific evidence countering such markers. Sex is a complex phenomenon, influenced by chromosomes, goads, hormones, genitals, and other secondary sex characteristics. Some of the most compelling science has been explained by developmental biologist Claire Ainsworth, Sari M. van Anders (professor of biological and cognitive psychology and Canada 150 Research Chair in Social Neuroendocrinology), neuroscientist Cordelia Fine, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Suzanne Kessler. (I will be posting this talk on my website, where you can find references). A person can have female-typical genital but 46, XY chromosome designation; and a person assigned ‘female’ can have higher than typical, naturally producing testosterone levels. Some scientists estimate that as many as one person in 100 has some form of DSD, or Differences of Sex Development. In most cases, the person is completely unaware of the fact. DNA sequencing and cell biology have also revealed that ‘almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match the rest of their body’.

These facts are well-known – but, in themselves, they present a risk. It is a dangerous and potentially counterproductive to use physiology to disrupt binary ideas of sex – it perpetuates the view that if we only looked hard enough at bodies, they will reveal a ‘truth’. Trans rights should be based on bodily autonomy, not biological essentialism.

However, even such scientific evidence is denied by prominent heteroactivists on the political and evangelical Right. That is not surprising. What is more surprising is the highly vocal nature of attacks on non-binary, and especially trans, people in recent years within certain media-friendly, feminist circles. ‘Non-inclusive feminists’ (often referred to as gender-exclusionary feminists) have a history going back to radical or dominance feminist traditions post-1970s. It peaked in the early 1990s, fell into abeyance later in that decade, then was revived again in the 2010s.

I will be complicating the arguments shortly but, in shorthand, the slogan of non-inclusive feminists is ‘womyn-born-womyn’, meaning the sex assigned at birth dictates a person’s sex throughout life. They seek a nostalgic return to ontological certainty, which includes binary sexual identities. They see transgender woman as threats to born- or ‘cis-women’ (as noted earlier, a controversial term). Centres of risk for cis-gendered girls and women are female-only workplaces, gender-free toilets, women’s music festivals, sporting venues, and rape and domestic abuse shelters. As we will see, in its later iterations (that is, post-2010s), many of these non-inclusive feminists have sided with conservative and Republican women’s movements, strategically setting aside conflicts over other ideologies, including over abortion, women’s rights, and censorship. This is the neo-conservative version of the ‘transversalism’ of my title (of which I will say more later).

For three classic statements by non-inclusive feminists, we can turn to the doyens of dominance feminism: Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, and Janice Raymond.

In Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), Brownmiller claimed that ‘By anatomical fiat – the inescapable construction of their genital organs – the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey’. ‘Women Only’ spaces were sites where such fears were enacted. Most famously, at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in the 1990s, some women responded to the presence of trans-women in the showers (after asking permission, it must be added) by talking of ‘horrific violation’, feeling ‘terrorized and violated’, and being ‘confronted with a strange naked biological male, penis and all, when she herself is unclothed and vulnerable’. In short: a person born with a penis is an oppressor; a person born with a vagina, a victim.

The second classic statement is Robin Morgan’s keynote speech at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in California in 1973. Morgan’s target was Beth Elliott, a lesbian activist who help set up the West Coast Lesbian Conference, was vice president of the Daughters of Bilitis (the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S.), and a trans folk singer who had been booked to sing at the Conference. Morgan repeatedly misgenders Elliott, telling the conference attendees that

I will not call a male ‘she’; thirty-two years of suffering in the androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the name ‘woman’; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Morgan’s ‘suffering’, which she says has earned her ‘the title “woman”’, is a classic statement of what I call ‘wound feminism’, in which a universal (which is coded white) ‘female’ is the eternal victim, rendered innocent of any of the structures of power that pervade the lives of people occupying other, multiple subject positions, including those of racialization, skin colour, class, sexuality, dis/ability, religion, age, and so on.

Thirdly, ‘this wound feminism’ is most blatantly espoused by Janice Raymond in her book, The Transexual Empire (1979, reprinted 1994). In it, she critiques trans dependency on the ‘medical establishment’ and drug companies. She attacks trans people (including Sandy Stone, a sound engineer at the women’s music collective ‘Olivia Records’, who went on to publish the rebuttal The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto) for their ‘usurpation of female biology’, sneering that trans women ‘can play our parts… apparently better than we can play them ourselves’. Raymond insists that trans women reveal ‘yet another face of patriarchy’ – it is yet another male strategy to infiltrate, undermine, and destroy cis-women, lesbians, and feminists. For her, trans-ness is ‘the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society. Literally, men here possess women…. Transexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female to an artifice, appropriating the body for themselves’. Echoing Morgan’s lecture of 1973, Raymond contends that trans women cannot be called women because they have not been ‘encumbered by the scars of patriarchy that are unique to a woman’s personal and social history’. To critics who implore Raymond to practice empathy, she responds that ‘sympathy for all oppressed groups… fail[s] to see that such liberalism is repressive’. Although dating from the late 1970s, Raymond’s arguments have been repeated ad nauseam. Incredibly, The Transexual Empire remains a standard reference point for non-inclusive feminists.

A central tenet in all these discussions is a homogenized (‘white-washed’) ‘woman’. The author of ‘Transgender Menace’ (1999) was explicit: ‘surviving girlhood in patriarchy is a miracle’ and although there are differences between women (some have ‘greater’ while others have ‘fewer scars and triumphs’), all women share ‘commonalities’ that could never be experienced by a person designated male at birth. Sociologist Pauline Bart asserted that ‘if one did not believe that all women had at least something in common there could not be feminism’. Academy Award winning documentary director Elinor Burkett was equally forceful, stating in her 2015 article ‘What Makes a Woman?’, published in the New York Times, that

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women… shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman. Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity…. Being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.

In other words, people assigned a male sex at birth can never become ‘women’ because have not been socialized as such or experienced either pervasive oppression or patronizing belittling. What these commentators are effectively saying is that trans women are not ‘women like me’. This was ‘cis-terhood’ at its worse: denying trans women the subject position of women and, in the context of ‘safe women-only spaces’ insisting that the well-being of cis-women is prioritized over that of other women.

This universal ‘woman’ was white and comparatively privileged. Robin Morgan was unabashed about this fact, going as far to deny claims of racist and classist bigotry within the feminist movement and contending that differences between women were simply ‘patriarchal creations’. In her words,

Isn’t it way past time that we stopped settling for blaming each other, stopped blaming heterosexual women and middle-class women and married women and Lesbian women and white women and any women for the structure of sexism, racism, classism, and ageism, that no woman is to blame for because we have none of us had the power to create those structures. They are patriarchal creations, not ours.

Morgan’s blindness to her own privileged whiteness was forcefully disputed by feminists of colour, who observed that they were being erased from the analysis. The racist oppression that feminists of colour experienced on a daily basis was being blamed on ‘patriarchy’ in which ‘white feminists’ played no part.

This is despite the fact that, in relation to men as well as in relation to many of radical feminists, transpeople are severely subordinated on the basis of their sex – and in many similar ways to cis women (for example, in housing, employment, rights to certain spaces, health care, and so on). Statistics about the violence they experience is truly horrifying. The argument that trans women had benefitted from male privilege assumes that cis women have had similar experiences of oppression – when it is clear that many white cis-women have been more privileged that people who were assigned male at birth. This was a criticism made repeatedly by feminists of colour.

If the trans threat to (white) ‘woman’ was a mirage, so too was their perceived threat to lesbianism itself. Despite the leading role played by trans activists in gay liberation movements, most notably in 1969 at Stonewall, the founding event of the LGBTQ+ movement, some of the most voracious opponents of the ‘T’ in LGBTQ are lesbian activists. The rise of gay politics frightened many of these radical feminists. In the words of one, gay politics was ‘boy-based’ and far too welcoming of trans people. Morgan contended that the gay movement was not only ‘male dominated’, espousing ‘male supremacy’, but the word ‘gay’ itself was a ‘trivializing, male-invented, male-defining term’. A leading article in the most important feminist news-journal Off Our Backs by Karla Mantilla in 2000 developed the argument. Entitled ‘Men in Ewe’s Clothing: The Stealth Politics of the Transgender Movement’, she sought to explain why ‘the transgender movement’ is ‘dangerous… to feminism and women’. Mantilla called the entire LGBT movement ‘radical chic’. Because gay activists ‘masquerade as progressives with a shared political mission’, trans are ‘the biggest threat to women’s space since it began to be used as a strategy to fight patriarchy’. Indeed, for feminists like Mantilla, the word ‘inclusion’ was a slur. She insisted that gender ‘does not reside for the most part in our bodies’ but ‘in our heads, where gender socialization occurs’. Crucially, this socialization is so ingrained that it ‘cannot be totally overcome by a conscious or intellectual decision to be different’. Indeed, Mantilla believed that the ‘transgender movement’ was one ‘whereby men’s interests have found a clever way to siphon off lesbian and feminist energies into a liberal agenda of identity politics, individual freedom, and inclusion which make us forget altogether about challenging patriarchy’. She insisted that ‘we’ll have inclusion when we live in post-patriarchy’.

Some of these concerns were about the distribution of resources. In October 1993, for example, Off Our Backs published an article accusing trans people of ‘parasitically’ attaching themselves ‘to whatever meagre social and political gains Lesbians and gaymen have achieved’. They should ‘start their own organizations and stop trying to take our over’, demanded the author. As Dreher contended: if ‘we’re all just transitory states of being’ the resources accumulated by lesbians ‘belong to everyone’.

The alleged threat posed by trans people to lesbianism is made even stronger by Sarah Dreher speaking at the Lesbian Liberation Rally. She attacked the whole concept of trans as well as queer, arguing that both identities are eradicating ‘woman-born-woman-loving-woman’. Drawing on George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dreher claims that the ‘disciples of Newspeak would lump us all together – Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transexuals, transgenders’ as ‘Queers’. She maintained that this umbrella term was being used to ensure that sexual minorities

float around in a sea of ambiguity, never saying who or what we are because that could change at any minute…. There’s no need for us to have women-only space, because there aren’t any such thing as women, or Lesbian-only space, because there’s no such thing as a Lesbian.

They were especially dismayed by the rise in the number of FTMs (female-to-male trans, a very problematic term), accusing them of taking the ‘profoundly political’ choice not only to ‘identify with the oppressors, but actually become like them’. As one woman complained, she was struck by ‘the sheer numbers of FTM’s everywhere’ at a LGBT conference, lamenting that ‘their flight from womanhood [was] conspicuously endorsed by the oddly invisible gay men and Lesbians running the show and bent on “inclusion”’. Such fears were amplified by folk singer Alix Dobkin, who asked:

Can you conceive a population more exquisitely groomed to ‘change gender’ than the generation informed by deconstructionist Queer Studies? In the blur of ‘Gender’, represented as little more than a ‘social construct’, injustice might easily be confused with inconvenience.

She was particularly worried that young lesbians, confronting prejudice and oppression, were left feeling that they could find a solution to their conflicts by becoming men: ‘why not jump at the chance to escape “gender distress” – the universal female condition forever afflicting “the second sex”? How instantly gratifying, how perfectly consumer friendly. This postmodern all-American quick fix come complete with academic sanction’. Dobkin recognised these ‘young butch Dykes walking the FTM [female-to-male] path’ as part of the history of lesbianism which is why she lamented they were ‘flee[ing] womanhood’ and ‘rejecting their female bodies along with our shared history’.

Such highly charged rhetoric was free-floating, unmoored to actual threat or risk. Attempts to ground the debate in facts or theory were dismissed as ‘intellectualising’ feminism, a term of abuse. Academic courses in ‘Women or Gender Studies’ were disparaged. Lesbian separatist Julia Penelope warned in 1993 that ‘Lesbian identity is under attack, especially from the academics who control Women’s Studies’. Three years later, sociologist Pauline Bart agreed, arguing that a lot has been ‘lost by the academizing [sic] of feminist and lesbian thought in post-modern theories in which not only lesbians, but women as women disappear’. Instead, these non-inclusive feminists boasted of their ‘folksy’ commonsense; celebrating intuitive perceptions based on essentialist ideas about the biological markers of sex and, crucially, a ‘life lived’. This enabled Raymond to concede that the question of ‘who is a woman’ is complex, but then to immediately follow it up by adding that ‘the only answer we can give… is that we know who we are’. Kathy Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery (1979), was even more vehement, urging fellow-feminists not to get ‘bogged down in academic research’ but rather ‘rely more on our common sense, our own convictions’ and ‘what we see in front of us’. The rejection of science and philosophy was not a passive unknowing, but an active (a deliberate) way of being in the world.

This fear of loss of privilege is expressed by Sheila Jeffreys when she argues that

The term ‘cis’ creates two kinds of women, those with female bodies who are labelled ‘cisgender’, and those with male bodies who are ‘transwomen’. Women, those born female and raised as women, thus suffer a loss of status as they are relegated to being just one kind of woman and their voices have to compete on a level playing field with the other variety, men who transgender.

It allows elite, white women to claim that they are the ones being victimized. They instrumentalized their oppression, turning it into a weapon to attack and further marginalized people who have a political claim to ‘real’ oppression due to inequality and structures of power. This is the power of ‘wound feminism’.

*

It is important to note that there are significant differences between the US and the UK. The US has a much longer history of anti-trans rhetoric, arising from the exclusionary debates from the 1970s within radical feminist circles (as I have been quoting from), as well as from white evangelical and Catholic circles. As a consequence, the American radical feminist movements are much more aligned with conservative, evangelical, ultra-right nationalism. In contrast, the British gender-critical feminists tend to be more single-issue movements, namely trans identities. As Sarah Lamble observes, gender-critical movements in Britain are more a ‘backlash’ phenomenon emerging from proposals by the Conservative government in 2018 to reform the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to allow for self-recognition without the highly bureaucratic task of obtaining a gender recognition certificate as well as the need to be given a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. As a result, in the UK, it was much more of a ‘single issue’.  Partly as a consequence, the British movement is much more driven by white feminist from the full range of political-party adherence, including leftist (for example, A Woman’s Place, which was established by trade unionist and leftwing feminists in 2017 and Sheila Jeffrey’s Women’s Human Rights Campaign, while in the US (Lamble shows) it is part of a much broader ‘anti-democratic and patriarchal restoration project’. In addition, the American anti-trans movement also had much stronger ties with anti-LGBTQ communities more broadly. In contrast, in Britain, there is a very strong anti-trans movement from within Lesbian and Gay communities – most notably, the LGB Alliance, founded in 2019, which supports cis-gay men and women, but not trans people.

*

Let me now turn to the second word in my title: Sex/Gender Exclusions and Transversalism Revisited

In previous work of mine – especially Disgrace: A Global History of Sexual Violence – I found inspiration in the concept of transversalism. The concept was coined by activists in Bologna during the early 1990s and had proved useful in encouraging productive dialogues between Palestinian and Israeli feminists. Nira Yuval-Davis, along with other scholars who employ transversalism in their work, are interested in how people who regard each other as adversaries can come to a mutual understanding in the interests of a shared goal. It encourages shifting from identity politics (‘who’ we are) to goal-orientated politics (‘what we want to achieve’). In Disgrace, I used it to think about anti-rape initiatives.

I stand by the concept of transversalism – but with one massive caveat: as the concept originally emphasized, feminist alliances that do not alter power disparities can do great harm to minoritized people. In other words, for all the talk about solidarity, it is easy to forget that coalitions can be made across well-honed political divisions of Right and Left or feminist/anti-feminist

This is exactly what happened in the context of anti-trans movements. A combination of wound feminism and wound nationalism have driven coalitions between right-wing organisations and gender-critical feminists across the Atlantic. These include Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, an American organisation, founded in 2017, with the explicit aim (as I mentioned at the beginning of this talk) of enabling links between non-inclusive feminists and conservative organizations such as The Heritage Foundation. Despite being a conservative organisation that want to limit women’s reproductive rights, Hands Across the Aisle state:

For the first time, women from across the political spectrum have come together to challenge the notion that gender is the same as sex. We are radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation, which we have come to recognise as the erasure of our own hard-won civil rights. As the Hands Across the Coalition, we are committed to working together, rising above our differences, and leveraging our collective resources to oppose gender identity ideology.

It is an extraordinary statement, adopting the language of transversalism, leftism (solidarity), and rights.

LGB Alliance has links to the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom, both of which have been vocal opponents of gay marriage and parenting. The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) has formed a coalition with Focus on the Family, an anti-abortion group to oppose transrights, including access to bathrooms. The Women’s Liberation Front is also partnered with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an anti-LGBTQ Christian advocacy group that is also anti-abortion as well as trans people. In coalition with Hands Across the Aisle, The Women’s Liberation Front wrote to the Department of Housing and Urban development ‘in favor of barring trans women from women’s homeless shelters’. As WoLF member Kara Dansky argued at a joint panel with the far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation, if the US Equality Act, which protects sex orientation and gender identity, was passed,

Male rapists will go to women’s prisons and will likely assault female inmates as has already happened in the UK. Female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters. Men will dominate women’s sports. Girls who would have taken first place will be denied scholastic opportunity. Women who use male pronouns to talk about men may be arrested, fined, and banned from social medical platforms. Girls will stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed sex toilets. Girls and women will no longer have the right to ask for female medical staff or intimate care providers, including elderly or disabled women who are at serious risk of sexual abuse.

In 2017, the Values Voter Summit, a conference for Christian conservatives and organized by the Family Research Council, explicitly laid out their policy which aimed to ‘separate the T from the alphabet soup’. The tactics included framing trans rights as being ‘at the expense of’ the rights of cis girls and women; using language ‘based on biology and reason’ rather than religious languages; and collaborating with anti-trans feminists. As Meg Kilgannon of Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County, admitted during that conference, feminists ‘make eloquent arguments that gender identity really is the ultimate misogyny and the erasure of women. And lesbians in the group are concerned that trans and masculine girls is a form of lesbian eugenics’.

‘Wound nationalist’, white women may be strange bedfellows with non-inclusive radical feminists, but they share a powerful sense of loss and trauma. These groups fear the removal of certain privileged entitlements; they seek ontological certainties; and they prefer neoliberal, rules-based feminism over inclusive, ‘woke’ iterations.

*

There is nothing new in debates defining who is or is not a woman – we are reminded of black activist Sojourner Truth’s question in 1851: ‘Ain’t I a woman?’  More recently, in the 1960s, powerful feminists in the National Organization of Women (NOW), the largest feminist organization of the second wave feminism, attempted to drive out lesbians. In 1969, NOW’s president Betty Friedan referred to lesbians as a ‘lavender menace’, claiming that lesbians threatened the political efficacy of the organization, were a slur on feminism, and would reduce their own identity as women. As NOW Board member Kay Clarenbach explained,

It is my serious contention that to amend our position statement at this time on rights of control of reproductive life to add ‘and sexual life’, and to take a stand on ‘repeal of all laws penalizing sexual activity between consenting adults in private’ would be a disastrous blunder. I believe it would provide the ammunition not only to destroy NOW, but indeed to destroy the decade of advance in the women’s movement. The struggled to be taken seriously, to persuade both women and men that women are not second-class citizens has at least been successful. To present gratuitously a sure-fire weapon to the wavering or to the opposition would be foolhardy…. NOW is not a vehicle for the homophile movement.

They purged lesbian members from leadership roles; refused to acknowledge lesbian rights organizations; and, when Rita Mae Brown argued for lesbian activism at a NOW meeting, she was told that ‘lesbians want to be men and… N.O.W. only wants “real” women’. In Brown’s words, feminist women ‘most of whom were rather privileged and very bright, treated lesbians the way men treated them…. ‘Betty [Friedan] tossed me out and said that I was the Lavender Menace’.

They were not successful, though. The majority of members of NOW responded by insisting that lesbians’ rights were women’s rights. Local chapters openly supported their trans members. From the early 1990s, they established a task force to explore lesbian issues and were a major voice in supporting gay marriage. At national and local levels, NOW accommodated differences. This was not a ‘foregone conclusion’. The success was due to rank-and-file lobbying. It is a reminder of the power of feminisms that take power disparities and difference seriously.

In conclusion, anti-trans hurts cis-women.  Sex segregated sports teams can undermine full equality for all people who identity as female by denying them access to the highest funded teams and grounds. It harms cis-gender women who not deemed to be ‘feminine enough’. Notions about ‘real women’ have racist overtones, given the long history of characterizing Black women as unfeminine. As Chan Tov McNamarah warns, evaluating people ‘on the basis of their bodies and body parts rather than as full moral equals – has been integral to male domination’ and ‘encourage patriarchal protective paternalism…. If cis women’s safety, privacy, or advancement is in need of protection, someone must do the protecting’. It turns out that the ones most concerned about transwomen using female bathroom is primarily cis men not cis women.

Preoccupied with their own suffering and sense of injury, ‘wound nationalists’ shift responsibility for the moral injury to outsiders. The ‘trauma’ of dominant group victims becomes both an enabling factor and explanatory tool. However, the narrative created by ‘wound nationalists’ proves no space for a ‘working through’, as trauma theorists call for. Quite the opposite: it is fetishized by becoming disconnected from ‘real’ injuries. The wounded identity circulates within a vicious circle, repeatedly inflicting collateral damage as well as damage to others.

If this is of interest to you, you might want to look at my blog entitled 'Wound Nationalism: "Culture Wars and the Politics of "The People"'' and another entitled 'Feminist Sport?', which is a review of Open Play. The Case for Feminist Sport by Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Further Reading:

Helen Clarke, ‘(Re)producing Sex/Gender Normativities: LGB Alliance, Political Whiteness, and Heteroactivism’, Journal of Gender Studies (21 January 2024)

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000)

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso, 2024)

Stephanie Gilmore and Elizabeth Kaminski, ‘A Part and Apart: Lesbians and Straight Feminist Activists Negotiate Identity in a Second-Wave Organization’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16. (January 2007)

Sally Hines, ‘Hands Towards the Right: UK Gender-Critical Feminism and Right-Wing Coalitions’, Journal of Gender Studies, 34.5 (2025)

Sarah Lamble, ‘Confronting Complex Alliances: Situating Britain’s Gender Critical Politics Within the Wider Transnational Anti-Gender Movement’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 28.3 (2024)

Craig McLean, ‘The Growth of the Anti-transgender Movement in the United Kingdom: The Silent Radicalization of the British Electorate’, International Journal of Sociology, 51.6 (2021)

Chan Tov McNamarah, ‘Cis-Woman-Protective Arguments’, Columbia Law Review, 123.3 (April 2023)

Catherine Nash and Kath Browne, Heteroactivism: Resisting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Rights and Equalities (Zed Books, 2020)

Clark A. Pomerleau, ‘Empowering Members, Not Overpowering Them: The National Organization for Women, Calls for Lesbian Inclusion, and California Influence, 1960s-1980s’, Journal of Homosexuality, 57.7 (2010)

Claire Thurlow, ‘From TERF to Gender Critical: A Telling Genealogy’, Sexualities, 27.4 (2024)