"Why Feminism?"

By Edie Wyatt

November 30, 2023

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This post was published by Edie Wyatt on her Substack, Culture and State, a few days ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I’m not sure I agree with all of her framing, and I’m unfamiliar with the “pile-on” involving Helen Pluckrose she refers to. However, her piece resonates on a lot of levels, especially given several conversations in the past few weeks among people who consider themselves generally on the same side of opposing “gender identity.” I am sharing it here with her permission. Please check out her Substack if you can, and follow her on X (@msediewyatt).

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Like any movement, the gender critical movement has factions and shifts over time. I have been criticised over the years for sticking with the feminists in the fight, when what is needed is a broad movement that includes men and especially parents, yet I am unperturbed.

I can’t give you one reason why I can’t turn away from the plight of women and girls specifically. It may be because of my experience with child sexual abuse, maybe it’s because I have daughters, but anytime I have strayed away from the central issue of women and girls, I feel like I’m away from home politically. For whatever reason, the plight of women and girls is my main focus and in that, the enforcement in law of a legal class in which women and girls can find the protection they need from the violence and oppression women typically face and don’t perpetuate, specifically the violence and oppression of men.

Alliances have been formed with trans identifying activists, who also resist the problems that have arisen from institutional corruption, the medicalisation of gender non-conformity, and the indoctrination of children. As much as I respect people like Scott Nugent, for instance, who have diligently and passionately fought against a capitalist and corruption driven machine that mutilate bodies, I have never felt in the same fight as trans identified people because of my denial of trans identity as legitimate and my view of it as a social harm.

This does not mean that I want to shame people or compel people to live in a certain way, it just means that “identity” has become political in a way that is now materially harmful to females. People can’t change sex, so what benefit is it for me to pretend they can, even if it is just with the use of a pronoun in polite society? It may have a small emotional benefit for one person, but with that pronoun, I am betraying women by feeding a fiction that does a much greater harm.

For many GC feminists, women’s rights activists, and radical feminists, using a feminine pronoun for a male, or applying the cultural sympathy that our society gives to women to a man, is a betrayal of women and girls.  It is hard to deny that the first people to take this line were radical feminists, since Janice Raymond was talking about it in the 1970s.  This does not mean that everyone who now takes this line is a radical feminist, Kellie Jay Keen has fought publicly and frequently with radical feminists and takes what is now called a hard line on not giving ground to gender ideology in culture or law.

The latest critique from the centre toward gender critical feminism is an interesting development but not a new move. Glenn Greenwald referred to the growing women’s movement in the UK in 2020 as “anti-trans fanaticism”. For some time now there has been a suggestion from the political centre that the movement of women who have been labelled TERFs are “extreme” in their approach to never bow to sex denial, not even in a pronoun. But the people who make these claims are by no means neutral, they have a bias and cater to a market base.

Three years ago, I was part of what is called a pile-on.  I made a comment with hundreds of others in protest to a post by Helen Pluckrose, where she claimed that trans people were more oppressed than women, and that women were not particularly oppressed.

In my engagement with the men’s rights activists in the conversation I realised that many MRAs want just enough gender identity to destroy women’s rights, but not enough to have their daughter lose at sport. They call this position “nuance”. I realised in 2020 that a group of influencers were situating themselves as the “sensible centre” on the issues by calling themselves “anti-woke”, but the vagueness of that phrase is often a deliberate obfuscation of the underlying political doctrine that leaned right on almost everything except pornography and trans acceptance and completely disregarded the political needs of women, and especially the need for women to organise and speak for their own needs. I parted ways with Benjamin Boyce on this very issue because he suggested that women speaking exclusively for themselves was “standpoint theory”. I won’t address the stupidity of that.

The Pluckrose pile-on was not my first encounter with MRAs but where I saw my own uncharacteristic blindness to misogyny. About five years ago, when I was “between careers” because of a health issue, I renewed my interest in politics with writing and meeting politically engaged people. Having escaped the left I began to listen to a lot of conservatives and men’s rights activists and talked to them about how they were proposing to tackle government overstep.  A local guy who I knew from the real world was becoming involved with a group of Australian content creators called Discernible (@discernableco).  I watched his podcast and checked out a range of content the channel was producing including explainer videos on political theory. 

After watching an explainer video on Marxism and Post-Modernism I raised my concern with my friend that the content was inaccurate, when he asked me what part, I said “all of it”.  It was as if the people teaching about Marxism and Post-Modernism had learned their political theory from Wikipedia and American right-wing comedians. On raising these issues, I was accused of being arrogant and relying on political theory degree from a university department (humanities) that was part of the problem.  “Oh the Humanities” as Sheldon Cooper so eloquently said.

Almost all the people who I became mutual follows with during my time investigating the right and centre right, are now no longer part of my circle. The disagreements I had were almost always about the “vibe” of what I was saying rather than the content. No one has been able to dissuade me from feminism with political argument.

When I unwittingly joined a gender critical pile on almost exactly three years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered myself “gender critical”, I was just seeking the most effective political approaches to attack the corruption we all can see. 

I can’t tell you why I was initially blind to the blatant misogyny in the anti-feminist push other than to say I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t think that any normal sensible person could actually be against women’s rights, until I engaged with Helen Pluckrose and her scrotie followers that day. It was Helen, almost more than anyone, who made me the TERF I am today.

But it wasn’t until just this last few weeks that I have noticed the way the feminist resistance is treated by the anti-woke and how there is an attempt to appropriate the followers of the gender critical movement, not with argument and political engagement but by framing feminism as extremism, basically ineffective and of course “woke”.  

After Helen made her infamous post in 2020, she made the following tweet about the volume of responses she got from gender critical feminists, liking us to “bedbugs” and calling us “buggers”. 

She also referenced a tweet by gay rights activist Fred Sargent, where he said that stating that women don’t “face much abuse” is a “truly dumb take”.  Ironically, Pluckrose referred to the tweet by Sargeant as “abuse” from gender critical feminists, even though Fred is not a feminist. I guess saying she was being abused by an elderly gay rights activist, may not have hit the same chord.

The onslaught I was receiving from men’s rights activists who were defending Pluckrose at this time, made me realise that these people are her base, the quality of their arguments was low because they understood neither feminism nor liberalism. 

The political discarded of the centre are a budding market for reactionary leaders who lean into aesthetics or vibes more than political theory or sensible approaches against institutional corruption. They feed off resentment and ignorance, but the rubber hits the road in argument.

The reason Pluckrose was being ratioed by feminists is that she was denying the rationale for the existence of women’s protections being in the law in the first place.  Women have a protected category in liberal human rights doctrine because of historical and material oppression. Women are oppressed by men in almost every society that has been recorded and in every society that we know of before feminism.

It was the political organisation of women that has led to the implementation of all the women’s rights we have in the west today.  Without the continued political organisation of women for women and girls, our granddaughters will be born into a society with less rights than their grandmothers had.

Feminism, the political action of women for the rights of females, is the reason Helen Pluckrose can make an argument that women don’t suffer oppression or that a type of men suffer more oppression than women.

The denial of women as a political class, is the denial of the legitimacy of women’s resistance. Without political resistance of women to the state there is no feminism, without feminism women’s activism is forced in an alliance with issues that consider the political claims of men.  Considering the political claims of men is great, but men still manage almost all our political and financial systems. Women rely on collective power to influence our political and financial systems for their own interests and that of children. 

The institutions that are currently in the state to represent the interests of women and girls have been corrupted because they now include the interests of some men. They are not grass roots and they have embraced a kind of nuance that equals erasure.

If the political action of women is vital for the human rights of women, we have to listen to the base, we can’t call them, or let them be called “bitches and hags” like James Lindsay did, or “bedbugs” like Pluckrose did, or invite shame on them, or laugh along with creepy podcasters who’s dulcet tones fill the ears of men who want to wank themselves into being women.

If people are uneducated about the finer details of politics and human rights, it’s our obligation to teach them in easy-to-understand terms that translate to their everyday lives. This is not because the working class are stupid, as someone accused me of suggesting, but people are busy and we need to have a simple clear case for the political action of women against the tyranny of the state, what we used to call feminism.