… when real feminists do fascism.
I used to find Sophie Lewis rather amusing, but this outing has most decidedly changed that. I have covered Lewis’s bilge on her Enemy Feminisms book before, so haven’t gone over too much of the ground covered there. However, I’m very pleased to say that since then Lewis has expanded greatly, not in her thinking, but just generally. In all directions. If you know what I mean. And if you’re thinking ‘no one is going to take you seriously if you make fat jokes,’ (sorry to labour the point) believe me, no one takes me seriously, no one actually does, so save your breathe, prick. (Or possibly pricks.)
Intro from the hosts (there were four of them)
qUCL – Research on Sexual and Gender Diversity at UCL
qUCL had been set up ten years ago to promote the various strands of queer theory currently popular in academia, e.g. gender-, trans- and queer-studies and the various intersections with other ‘minority’ groups, race, class, disability, etc. It exists to challenge ‘normalcy’ and ‘hegemonic power and discourses throughout the academy’. It also helps run free queer adult education classes with Greenwich Council in association with QueerCircle (which Meg-John Barker is involved with, a red flag if there ever was one). It was also about to publish a big piece of research on the experiences of LGBTQ+ staff at UCL.
UCL Gender and Feminisms Network
One of the women from the UCL Gender and Feminisms Network (GFRN) also gave an introductory speech. Community building was particularly important for the GFRN and it prioritises help to PhD students and early career researchers. Sophie Lewis’s work was regarded as immensely important and inspired them to pluralise the word feminism in the network’s title, since some feminisms promoted ‘exclusion’ and ‘violence’, even at UCL! (A heads up for what’s in that ‘big piece of research’, peeps.)
GFRN’s latest work was on ‘centring sex workers in academic spaces’, which the speaker described as ‘one of the most joyful wonderful events’ she had ever been involved with at UCL. This was what the GFRN wanted to stand for.
Sarah Parker Remond Centre
Then the Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, which studies race and racialisation, spoke. She was very worried about the current battle lines which had been drawn, ‘often in very dishonest ways using institutional means’ without giving a single example. She hoped we could all understand why qUCL, the GFRN and her group all stood together. She also wanted no one to ever stay in their lane, which fell rather flat after she had just made clear which lane she wanted us to take up.
Xine Yao
Then it was the turn of Xine Yao. This is the academic who once described my sarcastic tweets (see page 5, paragraph 1) as a threat to academic freedom (the incident in question a hilarious misgendering resulting in the punishment of a black minimum wage worker). She was excited for Sophie Lewis to deliver qUCL’s annual lecture. Previous speakers had included porn-sick Grace Lavery and next year she had her fingers crossed for Jack Halberstam. But don’t tell anyone!
It was a fierce room, said Yao, and explained that she had reclaimed the word ‘fierce’ from ‘racialised communities’, who had had it used as a slur against them. Now it was being appropriated by ‘queers’, for all the right reasons, of course. (It’s always fine when they do it, obviously.) On her introduction of Lewis herself, the only interesting thing to note was that she referred to her as ‘they’, which is news to me and possibly to Lewis.
Sophie Lewis begins
Keffiyeh yeh
Stood behind the lectern draped with her own keffiyeh, Lewis spoke about the need to fight fascism. I must admit I didn’t actually notice the keffiyeh until she muttered the word ‘inshallah’ much later, which I’ll explain when we get to it. But just to highlight up front how clueless Lewis and academia generally is towards an ideology which would happily vaporise them in an instant.
‘A woman-led vindication of women’
Lewis’s bargain basement definition of feminism was the transphobic-sounding ‘a woman-led vindication of women’. The kind of feminisms that have sustained Lewis were those which critiqued ‘Capital’s lie’. Feminism was ‘anti-work’. A workshop had been held earlier that day looking at overlapping feminisms and not-so little Lewis’s head was bursting with the amazing discoveries made by the screaming ninnies who’d attended.
Who are the baddies?
Lewis told the audience that 46 percent of the US female electorate had ‘voted MAGA’. She also repeated the lie that The Heritage Foundation had funded the Women’s Liberation Front (it didn’t, Kara Dansky merely spoke at a Heritage Foundation conference voicing concerns about puberty blocking for children).
She encouraged people to say ‘that’s not feminism’ – the benefits two-fold, let everyone know it’s bullshit and let the target know we have their back. For example, ‘civilising crusaders against the hijab’ are not feminists. I presume Lewis includes Iranian women like Hamideh Zarei in this? She is currently in jail and sentenced to 178 lashes. Whorephobic feminists were also bad. Kinkshamers were also not feminists. Lewis also told her dire ‘fart’ joke again (Feminist Appropriating Radical Transphobes). Again to no laughter. You have to admire the commitment though.
However, the feminism of anti-transness has spread like a pogrom. Today it is unsurprising to find self-described feminists at the forefront of policy to deny gender affirming healthcare or make bathrooms and sports lockers cis-sexual at all costs.
Sophie Lewis making no sense, as per usual.
Lewis told us that ‘trans women’ were being ‘un-womaned’ by ‘cis-sexists’ and gave the example from the 1970s of Beth Elliott, a man who forced teamed his way into Sisters, a lesbian feminist magazine, as written about by Dr Em for Uncommon Ground Media. Lewis claimed that feminist Robin Morgan attempted to have Elliott ‘lynched’ and, as proof, flashed up on screen one of Elliott’s articles. (Dr Em’s research reveals a more prosaic truth: he was voted out after a number of sexual assault claims were levelled against him.) She also flashed up Robin Morgan’s response to Elliott, which she described as ‘unreadably small’, so could be excused from reading any of it out, I suppose. Unfortunately for Lewis, much of Morgan’s response is publicly available, again care of another Dr Em article. You will be staggered to learn that Morgan did not in anyway advocate for a lynching but did correctly identify that Elliott was a transvestite.
A whizz through the suffragette years
There was a suffragette called Mary Sophia Allen, who was a lesbian feminist/trans masculine. She was a fascist and down with Oswald Mosley, yeah. She was also friends with Hitler, or was it Mussolini? Lewis couldn’t remember but used it to illustrate the supposed deep links feminism had to fascism. (Wikipedia says she met both, if true I would wager this was part of a convoy, rather than cosy one-on-ones.)
Lewis pointed out that militant suffragettes planted bombs, as many as the IRA had done between 1939-40 she claimed, and was concerned that this ‘fact’ had been forgotten, describing it as a ‘deliberate erasure of political violence’. However, she rather forgot that the suffragette bombs hadn’t killed or injured anywhere near as many as the IRA’s had, nor that the IRA had links to Nazi Germany (according to Mr Google). To my surprise, Hamas-loving Sophie was also keen to point out she wasn’t against bombing.
White feminism
Women inside the Klu Klux Klan had had sought the rights to divorce and owning property, Lewis told us, and that feminists could be fascists with the ability to think of particular groups of women as ‘un-women’. ‘Un-women became targets of feminist annihilation fantasies,’ said Lewis, apropos of who exactly, she didn’t make clear, but we suspect that even she was leery of making an outright comparison between the plight of black women to that of trans-identified males.
We couldn’t have Wollstonecraft as a feminist, if we didn’t also accept that white women in the KKK were feminists, said Lewis. (I suspect women in the KKK had little time though for a belief in ‘the patriarchy’, unlike herself.)
As per her previous lecture, Lewis ‘proved’ that feminists were really into critiquing ‘white feminism’ because there had been a publishing fad about the same. Despite her rabid concern about racism in feminism, Lewis was blasé about the Karen meme. Amusingly, it appears she doesn’t think of herself as white, but did have to admit ‘it was a difficult one’. (It certainly is when you’re that pasty and ginger, petal.)
The real enemy – Zionist feminism
Like last time, Lewis revealed that the real enemy among all feminisms, is Zionist feminism. This had all become clear, of course, since October 7th. Tales about infanticide, femicide and rape carried out on that day by Hamas were ‘Israeli lies’. Little pig that she is, Lewis snorted with laughter, drily claiming the Jerusalem Post had suggested Hamas had been motivated by a hatred of feminism.
On the plus side though, it had all lead to a flourishing of anti-Zionist feminism, with the help of groups like the US-based Palestinian Feminist Collective (whose website, at the time of writing, has not been updated for several months). Moreover, because trans liberation was inherently anti-colonial and inseparable from Palestinian freedom, trans activists had been at the ‘forefront’ of the Gaza solidarity protests (I think she meant to say ‘ubiquitous’). Has Lewis not seen the clashes between jihadists and their LGBTQIA+ simps? Why do Queers for Palestine hold separate events? Is she even aware that homosexuality is forbidden by Islamic law?
Lewis accused the media, and the New York Times in particular, of lionising female soldiers in the IDF. She used the phrase ‘zionesses, these lionesses of the desert’ and said female IDF soldiers:
[E]mbody the seduction of gendered settler colonial power qua rape revenge in the anti white slavery mode. However, their credibility is hurt, perhaps irretrievably so, inshallah.
Sophie Lewis, aged 33 and three-quarters
In attempting to summarise this gibberish I was actually desperate enough to ask Grok for help but ultimately realised it wasn’t worth spending that much time on. However, given Lewis had already told us no raping had occurred on October 7th (whatever happened to ‘believe all women’?) and had blamed female Jewish conscripts for the war Hamas started, invoking Allah really is quite the head fuck, especially from someone I assume is an atheist.
Lewis went on to paint a picture of real feminists crawling out of the woodwork to fight back against all the evil feminists out there. Why, people were even fighting in DIY oestrogen underground abortion networks! Warms the cockles of my heart to think of it.
Respondents
The trans-identified male PhD student
Victoria Mangan, a trans-identified male, is researching ‘transgender literature in two periods’, pre- and post- the transgender tipping point (so, the whole of time?), and is currently teaching students at UCL.
On introducing himself, Mangan told us that he and Lewis had that morning recorded a podcast together, which I look forward to missing. The revelation the book had bought home to him (though he was at pains to stress that he had already realised this many moons ago, so not a revelation at all in that case) was that many feminists regarded feminism as only for females. Lewis’s book was a ‘provocation’ of how feminists might go about making it inclusive of men like him (again, another redundant comment, progressive feminism has been inclusive of these saddos for years now). He invited us all to think how we could shut out gatekeeping terfs.
The early career fellow
Gala Rexer, from Warwick University, is essentially an activist for ‘decolonisation’, with her sights squarely set on Israel. Rexer has written extensively on this topic and is originally from Germany. She is currently under contract to write a book about the ‘reproductive injustice’ Palestinian women supposedly face undergoing fertility treatment in Israeli hospitals (real injustice would look like zero access or forced sterilisations but clearly this hadn’t occurred to her). She told us that she had spoken to patients accessing the service and to the Jewish and Palestinian medical staff delivering it. The book had been written prior to October 7th so provided a ‘pre-history’ to ‘what we see around us today’ and that Palestinian reproduction was regarded as a threat to Israeli society. This was not dissimilar to the eugenicist thinking of the early part of the 20th century (she could have just said the Nazis, but opted not to).
One of her papers on the health of women in the Gaza Strip is publicly available and you will be unsurprised to learn that it doesn’t contain a single mention of Hamas and only alludes to its government twice, whereas Israel gets a whopping 129 mentions. An eyeball is all that is required to see that it is incredibly weak sauce.
Anyway, Rexer’s bugbear was that Germany had positioned itself as an ally to Israel following October 7th, including continuing to supply weapons. Rexer had no reflections on why Germans, much older than her, might feel a responsibility to support Israel following Hamas’s blood thirsty attack, referring instead to ‘Israel’s genocidal war’. This was obviously part and parcel of an ‘enemy feminism’ when espoused by female feminist politicians (though she really just meant women).
Rexer claimed to be concerned about the rise of AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), oblivious to the fact that it is the crazy left wing politics of people like herself was the reason why people are turning Right. It was also now the salient moment to bring up Nazi Germany and that the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, had ‘downplayed the significance of Nazi Germany’s history’. According to Rexer, Weidel was also hostile to LGBTQIA+ people, but couldn’t explain why Weidel was so open about her relationship with another woman (and a non-white one at that), so she invited us to giggle about it instead. She also wasn’t sure if Weidel identified as a feminist, but never mind, give her the enemy feminism tag anyway!
The gender studies loon
Sorry, I meant lecturer. Emrah Karakus. On responding to the book, he also wanted to focus on colonisation and the link to the ‘anti-gender movement’. For example, in Turkey, Kurdish activists were often depicted as mad and inherently violent and Kurdish trans activists had it even worse! Karakus fully embraces Lewis’s intemperate language and talked about how ‘enemy feminists’ encouraged violence against marginalised groups, but zero specific examples given, as per usual. Enemy feminisms weren’t ‘life affirming’ (unlike Lewis’s plea for Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family?).
In the UK, we see gender critical feminisms continuing their efforts to restrict trans lives while openly calling for violence against them in public discussions. […]
For me, feminism has always been a shelter.
Emrah Karakus
Karakus was especially impressed with how the book dealt with specific actors and their particular techniques to drive forward their enemy feminisms. But alas! He again failed to mention who, what or how. So we’ll just have to take his word for it, won’t we? One of the main problems was the Left’s inability to tackle these issues head-on (like his not being able to even name-a-fucking-name for a start) and felt the best way to rebut terfs was to whinge about decolonisation instead, which was working very well for the Kurds.
Lewis responds to her respondents
What a palaver! How could we make ourselves ‘feel special’ and ‘undisposable’ (sic)? Lewis wanted some shoutouts from the panel and the room. In particular, she wanted to know how to ‘draw lines and hold them’ so that ‘feminism may not build walls’, followed by a pathetic giggle, as even someone as dimwitted as she could see the contradiction with that statement. With regards to Mangan’s contribution, Lewis correctly detected that he believed the constituency of feminism should not be limited to women and Mangan furiously nodded, despite Lewis basically telling the whole room that he was not a woman.
Lewis was disdainful (or pretended to be) of the gender critical feminist ‘desire’ for a ‘terrain of innocence’ (think it’s more about fact-based policy, pet). However, it was fine and dandy for Palestinian women to seek ‘political love’. The gender critical narrative was going to be increasingly bare-faced and shameless, she warned.
Question & Answer session
The sex work shill
A young woman with a plummy voice, came with a clearly rehearsed statement. She claimed to have done sex work in the past but was now working for a ‘big trade union’ and upset it had a lot of ‘anti-sex work ideology within its ranks’. Why, just the day before, a sex worker union had been at the TUC Women’s Conference and found themselves under attack from other female trade unionists via ‘intimidation and harassment‘. Failed motions on *decriminalisation had been put forward and she complained that it was ‘mainly older women’ who had blocked the motions. After this long preamble, she simply wanted to know what Lewis thought about it.
*ASLEF, GMB and CWU had all supported the call for decriminalisation, it seems.
Referring to ‘pornophobes’ and quite a bit of word salad after that, Lewis informed us that women who were against ‘monetised sex’ were really just prissy and that it was a ‘technology of cisness’. Lewis apparently consumes ‘terf discourse’ and analyses it (interesting that she didn’t share any of these insights with us then) but wasn’t following this specific activity in the UK. Surprise, surprise though, she was in favour of it and quickly returned to her favourite topic, Zionists. Andrea Dworkin had apparently been one and had spoken about women setting up their own homeland, which was awful.
No idea
Another very posh young lady, who I couldn’t see but was probably wearing a pair of white gloves, hilariously bemoaned the ‘panic’ about the four-day week and asked a word-salad of a question. Lewis said that pro-lifers argued that women were under duress to have abortions so that they could continue the daily grind at the office. This was not evidenced, she said, and merely right wingers exploiting an anti-work rhetoric (popular with layabouts and leftists everywhere). Trad wives were hypocrites because they were in fact working whilst making videos and selling products. Boo!
The terf hater
A third wanted to know about the relationship between terfs, trans and borders. Basically she was worried that terfs could use the same trendy arguments re: colonisation that trans activists and the Left currently do.
Lewis clarified that trans was inherently decolonial and the project she was currently working on was ‘trans liberalism is mobilised in zionist settler colonialism’. Having an analysis of ‘cisness’, said Lewis, enabled us to understand the bourgeois, racialising from above, without falling into the error of historicising trans as something very recent. It sounds absolutely fascinating.
Final comments
Karakus spoke at length without really saying anything and a man stood up and told a very boring anecdote about the time Leigh Miller was photographed in Hitler’s bath, right after she had visited Dachau. He was very concerned about the rise of the Far Right. Drawing a line wasn’t as straightforward as you might think, said another of the invited academics, and talked about the flow through circuits. She also had a downer on older women but felt sorry for them, which was nice. Rexer was still scratching her head over why people supported Israel’s fightback against Hamas and finally informed us that in Germany this was something to do with being responsible for the Holocaust, somehow still not managing join the dots back to the salacious violence Hamas had live streamed on October 7th. Mangan reiterated his earlier point about making feminism for him, describing it as his ‘key takeaway’.
Lewis, continuing with her flowery language about lines and fluidity, said she was connecting psychically with enemy feminists (waves) and their ‘seductions and libidinal offerings’ (sounds interesting). However, if someone started saying something that might be part of enemy feminism, just tell them they were full of shit, she urged. Why, recently some people she knew had even started saying weird things about Islam! But don’t cancel her though, just anti-fascism her and maybe she will come back, said Lewis, strictly in lip service to tolerance.
Summing up
Why left wing feminists have fallen in with woman-hating patriarchal Islamic jihadists, I will never understand. What is clear though is that since the pogrom on October 7th there has been a surge in interest from these feminists wanting to connect the two and their complete indifference to the sexual violence Jewish women and others suffered suggests this is motivated by racism. Though in Lewis’s case, it is much much more than indifference, and let’s just leave it at that.
Shortly after attending Lewis’s lecture, I came across an online flyer for an event called ‘Palestine, Gender and Sexuality’ which includes a workshop looking at ‘How Israel weaponises gender to subordinate Palestinians’. The workshop is hosted by Queer Circle, the organisation that qUCL aligns itself with, that I mentioned at the beginning and run by persons who identify as Palestinian diaspora.
Somehow these people always fail to mention the role of Islam or the actions of the Hamas government in the oppression of women. For example, women aren’t allowed to travel without a male guardian, as per a Hamas court judgment, but you would never learn anything about that in these academic spaces.
The other thing to note – and I do find myself saying this a lot – not a single contributor had anything of substance to say. For example, they could have explored the case that For Women Scotland had bought to clarify the Equality Act 2010 and explained why they thought FWS’s position was wrong. Or taken up the issue of sports and explained why they support the inclusion of ‘trans women’. But this is the thing you see, they can’t explore our side because all they have are weak arguments. So weak in fact they daren’t even rehearse these arguments amongst themselves. Chronic but perhaps a reason for gender crits to be cheerful?
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The Lies They Tell 
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