[A]s some wag has proposed, terfs aren’t even feminists. They’re. FARTS! Feminism appropriating radical transphobes.
Sophie Lewis, aged 33 and 3/4
This seminar on ‘Enemy Feminisms’ was held as part of Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies’ week long look at ‘Gestation: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice’. Of course, the blurb manages not to mention the words: woman, female, uterus, womb, or even pregnancy! You have to marvel at the commitment to remove all traces of large immobile gamete producers.
‘Gestation’ is the Institute of Advanced Studies’ annual theme for the academic year. Past themes have included the breathe, AI, time, water and sound. It was set up in 2017 and I can’t really work out what it does, though the Festival of Failure sounded like a barrel of laughs. It also isn’t short of a few bob, as a lovely lunch was put on and there was tea, coffee and biscuits post-brain drain. Later in the week, Nat Raha, a trans-identified male, was to do a poetry performance:
Nat’s performance will connect to themes of queer and transfeminist world-making, and collective living as a resistant practice, in a lineage of queer and trans feminist of colour thought.
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias/events/2024/may/gestation-performance/
But not connect, I suspect, to gestation.
The blurby bit for the Enemy Feminisms seminar
Sophie Lewis, author of the forthcoming book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, is in conversation with Victoria Browne and Jilly Boyce Kay. The book presents a left, transfeminist takedown of the notion that feminism is an inherent political good. It identifies a wide range of feminisms – from 19th century imperialist feminism to contemporary anti-abortion and TERF feminisms – that must be understood as enemies of liberatory feminism, and fought against as such. The respondents will offer reflections on the significance of the book for contemporary left feminism, as well as for their own work on reproductive politics (Browne) and micro-fascism and ‘dark feminine’ dating influencers (Kay).
From the Eventbrite listing (My emphasis)
Background
For a bit of background about Sophie Lewis, she first came to attention with her batshit anti-family book ‘Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family’. Certainly, my first experience of her was the panel discussion held on the same at the Barbican in October 2019. She’s good value for money, I’ll give her that. Also influential with academics in gender studies departments.
So, she has written a book now called Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation through a ‘trans feminist takedown’. Lewis – surprise surprise – is (or was) in a relationship with a trans-identified male. Also famous for this dippy tweet:
This book has been a long time in the making, as I attended a webinar in March 2021, during lockdown, when she had hoped it would be a ‘handy political guide’, sharing some hilarious details on the contents. As promised in that blog, I have turned up for the promotion gig, pitchfork at the ready.
As for the other two academics involved in the meeting, both are at Loughborough University; Victoria Browne is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy and Jilly Boyce Kay is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, both of whom have a focus on feminism.
So, how much had changed? Or was Lewis just to regurgitate her babbling from three years hence?
Sophie Lewis’s talk
Well, stunningly but not bravely, Lewis made even less sense than she did when the book was just a twinkle in her eye. Some thirty people were in the room but others watched online (presumably from Loughborough, the talk itself was held at its London satellite). Several students were brandishing keffiyehs, with one wearing hers à la Yassar Arafat. Following the talk, there was an academic from SOAS talking about Palestinian feminist activism (so nothing to do with gestation then, just like this seminar). The words ‘divest’ and ‘genocide’ were predictably also uttered, while ‘hostages’ and ‘mass rapes’ inevitably weren’t.
“Women are not horrible”
Lewis wanted to explain to us that some women actually are horrible (as if anyone ever thought any different) and selectively quoted from a Guardian article, featuring artist Jenny Holzer:
What does she wish she could say to her younger self about the future of the feminist movement? “Ooh.” She pauses. “Make it a constant focus. Don’t feel guilty for making it a constant, out-loud focus. Women are not horrible. We’re largely not the problem.”
Guardian article: Artist Jenny Holzer: ‘Women are not horrible. We’re largely not the problem’, 4 January 2023
Lewis explained that implicit in the artist’s (cherry-picked and misrepresented) statement, was that if women were horrible it would make sense to be apologetic about being a feminist. Our supposed ‘non-horribleness’ is what legitimises our full throated feminist positions, she explained.
To prove that some women and some feminists are indeed horrible, Lewis put up a slide which included two photos of Posie Parker aka Kellie Jay Keen (who doesn’t describe herself as a feminist), including the moment she and Julia Long confronted the Human Rights Campaign spokesman, Sarah McBride, in Washington DC, incorrectly stating that their trip was funded by the Heritage Foundation. (That someone could still be harping on about this very minor episode five years later is really rather petty.) At that time (January 2019) Lewis had been commissioned to write a piece about trans exclusionary radical feminists, as the yanks didn’t know anything about terfs, and Lewis, having both lived in the UK and the US for several years, was perfectly placed to explain to them that ‘no nonsense anti-utopianism prevailed on Terf Island,’ though ‘anti-trans feminism wasn’t universal,’ she consoled the assembled GITs (gender identity terrorists).
Terfs stated that gender was self-indulgent, frivolous and individualist and Lewis said it fused with an ‘older British feminism of fear’. Trans women equaled sexual menace in the eyes of terfs but moreover it was un-British (which no terf has ever said).
Thus, the biggest cause of British terfism was colonialism (a slide of what looked like recent tomes bewailing the links between feminism and colonialism went up – convenient). Shockingly it seems that women during colonial times had contributed to the needs of Empire and had done so feministly, drawled Lewis. We were waiting on tenterhooks for a specific example, but – as always – none were given, despite her having a forty minute time slot in which to expound her batshit theories. Lewis claimed that in today’s climate it was regarded as utterly distasteful to bring up Britain’s colonial past (later contradicted when she mentioned that there had been thousands of workshops on decolonisation and that the [prison] abolitionist movement gained new recruits every day). The real fight was ‘bodily autonomy’. Of course.
She also showed a slide of a feminist she does respect, a full on GIT, and someone who I suspect is likely a trans identified male – Emma Heaney.
Lewis also had a slide of all the article headlines she had written on the subject (available paid on her Patreon, no doubt, you know what these commies are like). The problem wasn’t anti-feminists, it was feminists, the wrong kind. In the past, ‘women are not horrible,’ had been a well-used take and Lewis wanted to name the type of feminists, GITs should actively oppose and view as enemies. It wasn’t about purification though. Oh, no, no, no. It was about the courage to draw lines, to fight the fascists, handbags at dawn metaphorically-speaking.
Lewis – one of the biggest fools you could ever hope to come across – wanted to defend the right of people to be fools. In fact, she almost called the book The Feminism of Fools but didn’t because she had responded to the call to withdraw her academic labour in solidarity with Palestine. Foolishness suggested that such feminists were really just fools, where if you called them enemies that emphasised they had to be fought. There were a lot of feminists who made the excuse that getting older was the reason for them rejecting the utopianism that so inspires Lewis. Mary Harringon and Louise Perry, Lewis is looking at you!
Anti-semitism is the socialism of fools
A slide went up of anti-semitic imagery. ‘Antisemitism is the socialism of fools,’ she told us, somewhat pompously, and that that it was ‘the royal road to fascism’. She failed to explain the proper context of the phrase, which she described as going ‘viral’ in the late 19th century. I think what she simply wanted to say was that ‘anti-genderism is the feminism of fools,’ but the opportunity for such a succinct phrase eluded her entirely, all her effort focused on sounding highbrow whilst she inarticulated the history of anti-semitism in Germany.
Some leftists have been willing to accept or tolerate anti‐Semitism since the mid 19th century as some sort of groping toward a progressive anticapitalist position by masses in contact with Jewish businessmen. Since leftist movements invariably received considerable support from Jews who properly resented the anti‐Semitic politics of the assorted conservative and monarchical regimes of Europe, this often meant that anti‐Semitic movements included Jews among their activists. The Russian Nihilist Populist Narodnaya Volna, for example, had many Jewish youth in its leadership and membership, while openly welcoming peasant pogroms against Jews as evidence of the emergence of mass revolutionary antibourgeois consciousness. Similar favorable reactions to popular anti Semitism among German and Austrian Socialists led August Bebel, the famous German Socialist leader, to describe anti Semitism as “the socialism of fools.”
‘The Socialism of Fools‘ by Seymour Martin Lipset, The New York Times, 3 January 1971
There was no real reason to display the anti-semitic images, and, in contrast to how academics behave nowadays when showing potentially sensitive material (usually just examples of misgendering), no trigger warning was given. Just random examples of gratuitous racist caricatures shown to a room full of keffiyeh-wearers. I think Lewis was trying to virtue signal to us, at least nominally, that she definitely wasn’t one of them. However, if you want to know how Lewis really feels about anti-semitism and Hamas’s rape of Jewish women on October 7th, simply read her essay on ‘Zionist feminism’ and wonder no longer.
Many pundits probably still believe, even now, that they are speaking the truth when they bellow in vague yet graphic terms about countless, countless rapes endured on 7 October.
Some of my best enemies are feminists: on Zionist feminism, Sophie Lewis, 8 March 2024
So, apart from ‘Zionist feminists’, who else is on the naughty step?
Lewis, ever the modest, expressed that she wished she had known about her own ‘feminism of fools’ concept twenty years ago, since no one had ever explained that ‘certain feminisms actively wreak a great deal of evil’ (the Dunning-Kruger effect is real with this one). Whenever she encounters a feminist who she doesn’t agree with, she just labels them ‘not a real feminist’. In order to count as feminism, your position has to fulfil the criteria of being anti-racist and anti-capitalist, said Lewis. All her friends thought the same and would automatically discount the views of anybody who did not apply this criteria to their feminist utterings. ‘These so-called feminists do not speak for me,’ was a hard hitting slogan to deploy.
Feminists, who aren’t actually feminist, include critics of hijab, whorephobic feminists, kink shamers, pro lifers, and: ‘[A]s some wag has proposed, terfs aren’t even feminists. They’re. FARTS! Feminism appropriating radical transphobes,’ said a suddenly animated Lewis. She also missed the opportunity to exchange ‘radical’ for ‘racist’, this is how truly dull the woman is.
Not only that, but feminism didn’t even arise from Western thought or politics. No, feminism is like way older than that. Like, four thousand years old – cue slide proving that with scenes from antiquity, with her providing extra context by briefly mentioning Sappho and Native American wisdom. We predictably moved back onto how awful ‘white feminists’ were. Again, as proof, a slide of all the recent books on white feminism was deployed. How very persuasive. Whiteness could not be disentangled – slide of gender critical feminist journalists – from the bad stuff. I looked round the room at this point, people mainly looked glazed, at least one had her eyes closed. Myself, I had drifted several times.
Currently, such masochistic populism in the United States takes the form of identifying with the values, statements and tactics of black militant groups. Many of these have increasingly engaged in anti‐Semitic propaganda, often only partially disguised as anti‐Zionism.
‘The Socialism of Fools‘ by Seymour Martin Lipset, The New York Times, 3 January 1971
In brief, the Black Lives Matter ‘from the streets’ movement had identified that the women we thought of as pioneering feminists, were, in fact, ‘committed white supremacists’. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft (born 1759), had committed the crime of advocating for the freedoms of all women, comparing the plight of Western women to those enslaved in the West Indies. During the Haitian revolution too! Wollstonecraft’s opposition to slavery was ‘sincere’ but not ‘meaningfully anti-racist,’ Lewis complained.
The pattern of bourgeois women talking over the anti-colonial narrative was over two hundred years old, she argued. Just look at all these recent books, indicated Lewis, which successfully demonstrated to us that wokeness sells books … to white women. For Lewis, it was an indication that white ladies were finally ready to unlearn Imperial Feminism. Why even Koa Beck, previously editor at Vogue, had written a book on it! You know it’s progress when upper middle class twats are also involved!
But, if you thought that it was just white feminists who were the baddies, there are also femonationalist feminists, these are enemy feminists who aren’t white, but say the same things as white feminists, you know, women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or ‘Japanese terfs’ (proving, yet again, that the ‘race is a construct’ gang, don’t believe their own mantra).
Feminist misogyny
The address petered out on a half-hearted plea to fight ‘feminist misogyny’ and ‘not aid the patriarchy’. The room was so brain dead at this point, we didn’t even realise that Lewis was wrapping up, despite the shared unspoken plea for her to stop talking.
All in all, a great deal of feminism has imagined its central subject as hard-working, non-disabled, health-full and prosthesis-free, these being the unspoken complements to a womanhood […] non-violent, or at least law-abiding and self-respecting, i.e. not a body modifier. Or a bottom.
Sophie Lewis, contribution worthy of Pseuds Corner
In essence, Lewis looks forward to a time when there is no disambiguation between the sexes and even her own kind of feminism is obsolete, in other words she has a religious belief in a Marxist revolution. Her speech received a well earned staccato applause.
The interminable second half
I use the word interminable a bit too much perhaps but few things have truly been more boring than what I endured – nay suffered, next. I’ll be brief, the two academics invited to be ‘in conversation’ with Lewis, droned on and on, in what they believed was a highly intellectual fashion, going over the same points numerous times. They’d been granted early access to Lewis’s manuscript and had been overwhelmed, which is understandable.
The Pro-Life Feminist
The philosophy lecturer had looked at ‘pro-life feminists’ and sounded utterly amazed with her own daring, though it did all sound rather peripheral, I have to say. Never mind that pro lifers don’t actually describe themselves as feminists and hold that feminism is antithetical to their cause, she wanted to understand ‘the different variations’ of ‘anti-abortion feminism’. Yes, really. Talk about fight yourself with a paper bag on your head.
Somehow she failed to mention the substantive pro-life argument, i.e. that life begins at conception and that to terminate that life is morally wrong, causes the unborn baby distress and ultimately the earliest of deaths, nor that their primary claim is that they fight for the rights of the unborn child, not women.
Of course, the grown up version of debating this issue would be to say that one disagrees with the pro-life position, that the life of the woman (or sometimes a girl) should be held in greater esteem than that of a foetus; then we are just left debating as to when the cut-off point is, because, presumably, even ‘anti-forced birthers’ have a point in pregnancy where they would feel a termination would no longer be legitimate for personal reasons and would ‘force’ a woman to give birth. Needless to say, we didn’t hear from Victoria Browne about where she thought that cut-off point might be and I suspect that is probably because she hasn’t really thought about the issue.
The media studies perspective
The media lecturer, Jilly Boyce Kay, somehow managed to be even less erudite, wanging on that feminism wasn’t progressive and causing harm. Lewis’s book, of course, had been a big influence. The problem with feminism, as depicted in the media, was that it was very individualist, and she thought they needed a more angry powerful depiction instead. Guess who else was against individualism? Terfism. Seems like we have the media in the palms of our hands, ladies!
Apparently Beyonce is your typical ‘girl boss’ feminist, i.e. very ambivalent, only paying lip service to feminism (or, in the case of Beyonce, just shaking your bum a lot) in order to make money.
At the moment, she was looking at the ‘media sphere’ of ‘female-centric communities’ which had sprung up in response to pick-up artists, like Andrew Tate, who identified as ‘femcels’ and ‘female dating strategists’. This meant there was a ‘mirroring dynamic’ going on between incels and femcels. Which is funny, because when I put the term ‘femcel’ into twitter, what came back was a plethora of ‘femcel’ accounts with anime avatars.
The example of the Female Dating Strategy reddit was even less convincing, as basically it is a place where women bitch about perceived slights and useless men.
As you can see, it does not describe itself as feminist, merely that it is for women who ‘want to take control of their dating lives’. The associated website’s About page also says literally nothing about feminism. Boyce Kay, however, claimed that they explicitly described themselves as feminists and the advice website was explicitly and implicitly transphobic because it talked about the difference between the sexes.
Ultimately The Female Dating Strategy is for heterosexual women, who want to bag a man, and has nothing to do with feminism. How anyone could look at it and see anything more, is beyond me. Yet Boyce Kay persisted with her ‘mirroring’ and ‘bioessentialist’ theory, which is hilarious when you consider that pick-up artists, like Andrew Tate, place more importance on femininity (aka gender) than they do on sex, meaning that Tate agrees with them, not us.
Lewis responds
I like to think Lewis was equally unimpressed by their contributions, since very cautiously she responded to their silly points. With even sillier points, to be fair, but still. For example, you couldn’t be in Lewis’s church if you didn’t agree with her one hundred percent on any given issue, and she didn’t go to church, but is happy to hold hands across the aisle with Hamas and it adjacents, when it came to fighting ‘against genocide right now’. Nuff said.
There was also a ‘revival of a certain kind of social democratic Wollstonecraftian-catholicism’ as women in the US pro-life movement (who are not feminists or social democrats and probably aren’t familiar with Wollstonecraft, even if they might be Catholics) had argued that abortion harms women. Victoria Browne had done a really good job, she said, in thinking about how far down the road in that church could you go with an ‘anti-abortionist feminist’. Erm, no she didn’t, was the almost perceptible collective sigh.
Lewis agreed with Boyce Kay’s theories about The Female Dating Strategy but hilariously admitted ‘a while ago’ she had been ‘hard pressed to see what possibly could be the case for its feminist-ness’. In other words, she saw straight through the BS and hadn’t been convinced either. In a mirroring dynamic, she mentioned the mirroring dynamic, proving that at least she had listened.
‘Eating pussy is gay,’ was an Andrew Tate maxim, said Lewis disapprovingly, eyebrows slightly knitted. She was referencing the Tate video posted below, which she clearly hasn’t watched, since surely, having been in a relationship with a ‘trans woman’ herself, she would agree that a female-identified person eating a female-identifying pussy (aka girl dick) would actually be gay? Or that a male-identified person fucking a ‘trannie who’s a legitimate ten’ would be straight? It’s all so confusing …
Lewis wanted to emphasise first and foremost she is a Marxist, believing in a marxist utopia, which is obvious, because the material everyday issues affecting most women, like maternity, child care, etc, mean nothing to a ‘card carrying family abolitionist’ like herself. Although she is supposedly fully committed to being ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-colonial’, she is utterly blind to the racist and colonial nature of Marxism. Despite including, what she thought a clever reference to ‘the socialism of fools’, she had failed tragically to join the dots back to Marx himself. As Douglas Murray pointed out in his book, The War On The West, there has been no serious retrospective look at Marx’s anti-semitism by left wing academics.
In one letter written in 1862, Marx turns his wrath on one of their fellow radicals, Ferdinand Lassalle, for not only being Jewish but for also having negroid features and hair. (‘It is now quite plain to me he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt.’) He uses the N-word more than once.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10724839/DOUGLAS-MURRAY-dont-Left-care-Karl-Marx-vicious-racist.html
Did Mary Wollstonecraft ever say anything as egregious as this? Did she use the N-word? I suspect not. But yet, in Lewis’s mind, and those like her, Wollstonecraft is a villainess for talking about rights for women while there was a revolution thousands of miles away in Haiti at a time when news travelled by horse.
As for taking the side of radical Islamists, who are intent on installing a worldwide Caliphate, force women to take the veil, and throws men, suspected of homosexuality, off the top of buildings? Well, it’s a bit rich to profess to be anti-colonialist/racist, pro- bodily-autonomy and *anti-cis in those circumstances.
*That’s the conclusion of her book, ‘feminism against cisness’, I guess you’ll have to read the book to find out what it means.
Question and Answer session
Lewis asked for questions from her audience, these were:
- If feminism is integrally linked to liberalism and colonialism, why would we stick with it? Why not focus on ‘women’s liberation’ instead? (Female academic from the Middle East)
- How do we engage with enemy feminists? Who should we be in solidarity with? (Female academic working on a book about ‘solidarity’)
- One woman made the point that we should not discount historical figures, like Mary Wollstonecraft, simply because some of their views were now anachronistic, using Charles Darwin as a comparable.
- What counts as liberatory feminism? Must it be materialistic and dialectical? Your highlighting of aids is absolutely crucial. (Victoria Browne, fawning)
As proof of the degeneracy of radical feminists, Lewis, sounding a little bit like a kink-shamer, claimed that in the late 60s/early 70s Andrea Dworkin was ‘advocating eroticised transsexuality, bestiality and incest’. I’m not sure which question she thought she was answering here but perhaps she just wanted to advertise her upcoming essay on Dworkin. The essay fails to mention these advocations, but, to be honest, I am done checking out such accusations via Mr Google. For argument’s sake, let’s just say I believe it. Certainly, Dworkin appears to have been a very disturbed woman.
I further hypothesize that, having almost died by the hand of what [Andrea Dworkin] took to be her very own Frankensteinian creation—this batterer she made, this human being she turned into a man—she could no longer tolerate or countenance any remotely kinky forms of enjoyment. She’d learned, had she not, that S/M was fatally and evilly perverse. So she set out to kill S/M, not just in herself—in the whole world.
Battlefield Ecstasies by Sophie Lewis (on Andrea Dworkin)
Answering the question about terminology, Lewis was sticking with ‘feminism’ over ‘women’s liberation’ because the ‘constituency of gender freedom was broader’. Just a fancy way of saying she believed men’s sexual desires were also feminist goals, in other words. She also thought of herself as a ‘queer communist trans feminist’ and that feminism needed to be decolonised. Yawn.
A recording of the seminar is available.
What a handmaiden!
It would be a bit rich of me to denounce Sophie Lewis’s branding of ‘enemy feminisms’, when I am guilty of calling a certain head girl, Binbag. Though, to be fair, Binbag started it, by calling us a ‘poundshop ava braun’ [sic]. We also have ‘ultras’, ‘anons’ and ‘socfems’, so it’s not like gender critical feminism doesn’t also have the problem of childish name-calling, even if it is sometimes funny. To write a whole book on such perceived stereotypes though, that is something else, especially when you’re exhorting your own side to never work with such people. But there again, that sounds a lot like Binbag …
One thing we definitely aren’t going to say though is that Lewis isn’t a feminist. It seems to me that Lewis very much is a feminist and perhaps women who want to be feminist-adjacent need to look more closely at the nuttier things that feminists generally decry. Certainly the notion of ‘the patriarchy’ is one. ‘Feminist’ is not a label that I would not willingly attach to myself anymore, having described myself as one for years, and, like Lewis, mistakenly believed it represented ‘good politics’. The straw which broke the camel’s back came on October 7th, when so few feminist organisations bothered to condemn the abduction and rape of Israeli women and girls, the principled women of the WPUK being notably quiet on the subject. Or not so quiet, in the cases of Cátia Freitas and Lucy Masoud (examples below). Being unable to unequivocally condemn rape appears to be a feminist thing now and who wants anything to do with that?
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