> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.medusarising.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # RadFems, Do You Want to Win the US Midterms? | by Esmée Streachailt - URL: https://www.medusarising.org/radfem-midterms-1/ - Published: 2026-08-27T05:33:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T05:33:57.000Z - Description: The Emergency | Part 1 |The Political Winds and a Radical Materialist Feminist Compass - Author: Esmée Streachailt - Tags: Coalition, Domination Systems, Lesbiana, Radical Feminist ![X post by PoliticsGirl noting that David Levin, election website hacker of yore, has been hired by the regime to oversee election security.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-23-172536.png) The one thing *some* Democrats get right is their **estimate of the stakes** in this era: the future course of our nation. Not in the nudgy, little incremental, lots of push back, not-really way we’re used to. It’s big swings or compliance. Authoritarians or republicans? Fascists or democrats? ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/media/2026/08/Untitled-audio---Aug-19--2026--08_30AM_thumb.png) Want to Win the US Midterms? | by Esmée Streachailt 0:00 /2362.113016 1× We cannot keep noodling along in the chasms of neoliberalism & empire and dealing with their avatars: radical gender identity ideology on one side and ICE agents on the other. It’s really **All Against the Fash or knuckle under**. I’m not convinced that, for all ****our recurrent separatist impulses**, we have a plan for bringing women through ****a generational fascist shift** alive and intact. Because those are the stakes. Loads of even tempered centrists will say this, so I don’t know why we should not recognize it and act accordingly. In the future when I’m telling stories to my women friends' daughters, I do not want those stories to be about how I curled up inside my life and my .org and waited for the Democrats to grow both courage and fortitude. I think we need a new, no kidding resistance, an underground, women who know the pass through the Pyrenees and what time of year the Ohio River is *just* low enough and where. But **this post is about what I hope we will not do instead of create a real, strategic, radical feminist network focused on two possible projects: survival and sabotage, or (if we get lucky this year and in two and four and six years).** On this topic, [you can catch me at TORCH with TWV in October](https://www.totalwomanvictory.com/torch2026?ref=medusarising.org). The history of feminist ideas and action is full of the strategies we need to not only beg to be heard but to take our place having real effects in the long climb out of this deeply white-supremacist, christo-fash-rape-culture (the puritanism of the old testament and saint Paul’s sharia law is fine by them), and economic corruption on a scale yet to be measured. But, for all our brilliant and often exiled work, we are discredited thanks to the twin effects of TRA propaganda and cancellations and the rightward drift of many “GC” feminist and women’s groups in spite of the obviously anti-woman and anti-feminist policies of the right internationally. Yet, all three of the major radical feminist organizations in the US are focused solely on liberal feminist projects: The ERA, not-the-ERA, defense of the word ‘woman’, sex realism in sport, intimate spaces, and prison. All essential work, all necessary because of the one-two punch of the anti-feminist, anti-woman movements among conservatives and progressives. It’s a sign of how far back women’s gains are pushed. And yet, not the only problem women are facing, even in carceral contexts. Some girls confined in Dilley \[Correction: and [San Benito](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DW2ATFQgH9c/?ref=medusarising.org)\] concentration camp need abortions too, [though this is no new problem](https://www.google.com/search?q=ICE+center+where+rape+is+suspected&sca%5Fesv=6773fdf2b6d43799&rlz=1C1HKFL%5FenUS1219US1219&sxsrf=APpeQnu3y2lg9ZjOYxkxUTyysp%5Fps-IVqA%3A1786107392025&ei=ANZ1atGNAaW6qtsPvt6zqAY&biw=1920&bih=945&ved=0ahUKEwjRjYfFyI6WAxUlnWoFHT7vDGUQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=ICE+center+where+rape+is+suspected&gs%5Flp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiIklDRSBjZW50ZXIgd2hlcmUgcmFwZSBpcyBzdXNwZWN0ZWRIqh9QhQZYuh5wAngBkAEAmAGoAaABpROqAQQwLjE4uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIFoAKXBMICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPCAhcQLhjcBhi4BhjaBhjYAhjIAxiwA9gBAcICBhAAGBYYHsICCxAAGIAEGIoFGIYDwgIFEAAY7wXCAggQABiJBRiiBMICCBAAGIAEGKIEmAMAiAYBkAYMugYECAEYGZIHAzEuNKAH-h6yBwMwLjS4B48EwgcDMi01yAcWgAgB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp&ref=medusarising.org). The narrow path I want to seek here has three characteristics: It addresses our social discreditation; It honors the need for single-issue advocacy organizations; It addresses the wider political moment, rife with threat to women from every quarter beyond Gender Identity Ideology (GII). The classic intersections of women’s oppressions are intensifying, especially for women of color who are also immigrants. This interview with a **31 year resident** of Florida of Haitian origin describes the trap these 360,000 people are in. Cut off from their jobs by the rescinding of their TPS status, **rendered illegal**. Bills still to pay. Children in terror. Many Haitians work in the care industries, so their deportation will harm our children, our sick, our elderly (most of whom are women) as there is no one to replace them. This is an issue of direct harm happening on the intersections of race, class, sex, and age. This shit, supported by 35% of our citizen neighbors, is our business. The A and B blocks of this *Runaway Country* episode are necessary viewing. ## **Mirror World Politics** So, there's two things that warp our politics right now: one is the radical trans rights movement, and the other is MAGA (and of course the insanity of our economy). They both have this sort of "mirror world" quality to them that Jane Clare Jones has written about on several occasions. They are both perverse reactions to the commodification of gender and the wealth-extraction machines of consumerist neoliberalism. Women and radical feminists are in, I think, the toughest political position we've been in for decades. Rights aren't abstract. **Rights secure access to material resources**: education, savings accounts, employment, the vote, housing, public services, health care. These resources are under threat and being dismantled at breathtaking speeds by the fascist regime and their cronies. Try being a feminist (or just a woman) in a ****generationally secure christofascist, authoritarian, economically shattered, and geopolitically failing imperial nation.** We are not prepared for this. We should be. That preparation can enable far more effective networking and political action should we get lucky. It would be a shame to waste this chance to tack. The Dems have stopped talking about “the most vulnerable” demographic. That’s a good sign that, while not reaching for actual courage, they are registering the political temperature more clearly. We can use that. I’m going to say this a few times for a few different reasons, but the Trump team ran 55,000 anti-trans tv ads in 2024\. Fifty-five *thousand*. And it worked. ## **The Destruction of Progressive Projects** That ad campaign got votes, but the real project for patriarchy 2.0 (MAGA) is to **dismantle everything that the (moderately populist/socialist) New Deal and the Great Society created**: the education system, unemployment assistance, social security, Medicare the university system, civil rights, the two big progressive projects of the 20th century, have finally been destroyed by the enemies they've had all along: white rich men and their fan girls. The **Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has succeeded**. SCOTUS and Congressional Republicans, the Fourth Estate, and most regular people are cowed by both the tyrant administration and its citizen mobs. So. We're not in a position that feminism is familiar with. The state some of us wanted to see dismantled for being a mechanism of male supremacy has been trimmed of all its biophilic and pro-social elements and is leaning into its violence, its glee at suffering. **The US is not having a constitutional crisis. We're have scores of them. The US is having an existential crisis. The US is at the moment of a new founding**. *The right knows it*. Some Dems and Socialist Democrats know it too. We should know it, we should grab onto it. I know that working with the left has a long, sad, hostile history. I’m not new. I don’t mean working with them *expecting* to get our issues addressed. Not yet. Remember, we have no credit with them anyway. Remember, the fash think we’re ****underbabied**. They have a **plan* for that. Remember, teen girls trapped in the Dilley \[Correction: **AND* San Benito\] are pregnant and being mistreated ([and possibly trafficked](https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/inside-dilley-ice-camp-alleged-blue-butterfly-zones-keep-young-girls-isolated-for-unknown-reasons/ar-AA1WUjsy?ref=medusarising.org)) right now. For the next while, I feel we should give more attention to these wider issues and to the refounding project this country must undertake. Building a state with stronger moral commitments to rights for people, more secure liberties, and a realistic approach to economics and geopolitics—goes far beyond what the previous iterations ever achieved. Some of us are reaching across the aisle *but* only on the one issue and only in one direction. If you’re a single issue organization, by mission or by long-term focus, that’s your job. But is that how we should vote? All three of the major radfem US organizations have encouraged single-issue voting in three recent election cycles thanks to two things: the weaponization of GII issues by both left and right, and by a tactical decision to carefully hew away from issues than could tag them as aligned with one party or the other. And, as the landscape stands now: MAGA/GOP full-throatedly stand against reproductive autonomy for women and for a clear definition of ‘woman’ in law; while the Democrats mostly stand for reproductive rights for women and at their bravest just don’t talk about GII and trans rights anymore. That is a small shift in our favor on GII that could become a bigger shift on female reproductive sovereignty. And certainly, we should work to the left on the many other issues that directly impact women’s rights and liberties? At least to discuss them and maybe showcase organizations doing good work on them? Even if the bid for credit is purely tactical, it would bear more fruit for us is my bet. Again, my goal here is credit. It’s most securely earned with sincerity. Because the *issues* aren’t partisan. Partisans take positions *by party*. None of us have to do that. Heck, my objections to MAGA and current fascists in power isn’t partisan, it’s moral. This shit is evil, brutal, greedy, rapacious (literally), devastating to both human lives and the fabric of the republic. **The future this Dark North Star leads to is the whole opposite of women’s liberation**. ### Conscious Uncoupling The pressures and uncanniness are intense. So, some radical feminists are moving toward a greater separatism. I feel it. Why keep participating in … THIS? Well. There are reasons to. Most of the work radfem groups currently do is classically liberal in scope. We keep proposing Equal Rights for All acts and writing SCOTUS briefs, supporting the ERA and proposing questions for candidates. **We are not currently Mary Daly’s 'Wyrd Women,' creating our own values and culture** **in the Fourth Spiral Galaxy**. The backlash has so completely succeeded in undermining feminist generational work that many of us are working with radical theory, but doing liberal work. This project included. So, what does a smart political movement do when it can’t move forward and it has nowhere to run? It can try to run anyway, or it can **subvert that bad hegemony**. When the anti-abortion activists were on the political outside, they made friends. They put chapters on campuses that didn’t obviously have anything to do with abortion and they hung out and befriended new people. And over time, brought them into the cause. They had pizza night and worked on community projects and … *talked*. They gave time to do other kinds of work to make their work possible between the lines. You feel me? They didn’t compromise their values, but they did engage, and engage, and engage. \[I am aware most college campuses are closed to us. Those are not the only possible spaces in which to engage. Creativity is the best skill of the rebel as much as the criminal.\] ## **The Fractures, Again** The anti-reproductive health care set held to their convictions, but didn’t separate themselves from the wider national political project. \[Yes, they had a welcoming home in a political party.\] They made friends, and they subverted feminist efforts. They built ‘[crisis pregnancy centers](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9189146/?ref=medusarising.org)’ that diverted (especially) young and economically insecure women away from abortion services. They used all the tactics: misleading marketing, false claims of expertise (as health professionals), coercion and stigma (guilt tripping), private data collection and surveillance, and fraudulent allocation of public funds. And now, Goddess in Earth!, they’re fully tax payer funded by the Trump MAGA regime. So, I understand the exhausted frustration leading to a narrowing of scope and desire to withdraw. You can become a lesbian. You can become a socialist. You can become all kinds of things. – Sheila Jeffries @ [I Wish I Was A Lesbian on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt8Y8kAYipw&ref=medusarising.org) Recently this separatist impulse is pushing toward a ‘new’ political lesbianism (PL). Here, I want to say to Angela C Wild: I am so [proud of you for editing this book](https://www.book2look.com/book/7nNEKk3VJx?ref=medusarising.org). A book is a very hard thing to create, and an anthology of really smart feminist writers—so many with deep history in the movement and huge personalities—is a really difficult thing to pull off. So, BRAVA to You!!! I’m delighted for this book because I think this question about ‘institutional heterosexuality’ and a ‘dissident lesbianism’ comes up just about every time feminists cannot afford to lose allies or solidarity. I do *not* think that limiting allies or splitting solidarities are the goals of the women in the anthology. I think this is an impulse in the historical flows that, like a kind of riptide, arrives when the conditions are right. And, they are Right. | Recent Discussions[Edition 123: Political Lesbianism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vswUgaiWrnA&ref=medusarising.org)[Political Lesbianism, published by Onlywomen Press discussed by Anna Prats and Sheila Jeffreys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrov9It3w-Y&t=4s&ref=medusarising.org)[I Wish I Was a Lesbian - THE BOOK! - Interview with Editor Angela C. Wild](https://youtu.be/pTDd87vvUHc?si=nQqJAO1TCBXrlVyI&ref=medusarising.org) | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | I sense a challenge for us in some of the theses argued or implied in this book. I'm concerned about it only because it's been so enthusiastically adopted by a couple of major US American feminist organizations and we’re in a kind of political straits here that leaves no room for navigational error. **It’s win or live in Stephen Miller’s whitest, happiest, and most violent dream world**. [I Wish I Was a Lesbian: Women’s Lives Beyond Heterosexuality | Feminist Essays — Spinifex PressWhat if heterosexuality isn’t innate, but socially enforced? I Wish I Was a Lesbian by Angela C Wild brings together lesbian feminists, political lesbians and women rejecting compulsory heterosexuality. Through essays, memoir, theory and art, this bold anthology challenges “born-that-way” narratives![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/icon/favicon-6e798902-5308-4402-9987-4a245002541d.ico)Spinifex Press![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/thumbnail/9781922964304-99e03484-a989-48e0-a1dd-790bf5778af2.jpg)](https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781922964304?ref=medusarising.org) I am concerned that we did this before and it led to fracturing a movement that was stronger then but became easier to overpower, to discredit. For all the cautions and caveats some authors lean on — this isn’t the old PL, it's the new PL and it's more relaxed and gentle because most women really are lesbians once given enough liberty to be genuine — living people are notoriously bad at heeding the subtleties of cultural political analysis. But, this is not the old PL that became a hardened identity politics, "pure," more hard-edged, more militant, more **disciplined** form of radical feminism that completely rejected association with men. This new position effectively gatekeeps 'regular' radfems: if you associate with men—whether married, working alongside them, or simply existing in a male-dominated public sphere—you cannot be a 'real' radfem. I’m mocking the rigidity of this position because it is politically untenable. We can’t afford more fractures. We live in extremely identitarian times. Both the violent TRA men and the violent MAGA men are committed to extremely identitarian projects. ****But sex is not politics. Sexuality can be neither institutional nor dissident. Sex is biology, right? Sexuality is biology. We are our bodies, right?** If becoming lesbian is just a choice like any other political choice, why make it now? Why make that free choice right when patriarchy would love us further split and weaker? People who are not used to organizing their work, friendships, or romantic and sexual lives under the influence of nuanced political analysis tend to fall into identity politics, making special claims of superiority or victimhood (usually both). They often slip into making claims to be the true heart of a movement. In the claims that most women are ‘really’ lesbians once given the liberty to find their own way hides the stigma that any woman who hasn’t declared for the lesbian party is living in false consciousness or is a traitor and should not be trusted in either case. Or, just ‘not a real feminist’. Like, OK. Will we arrive here again? We can hope not. But I live in a country where hope is not cutting it anymore. ## Are We Materialists or Not? **We mustn't make our bodies and our desires into political identities**. That’s what TRAs do. Heterosexuality is a biological reproductive function (nature). It becomes an a norm, when **disciplined** (socially/violently enforced) as an element of patriarchy (social order). #### *A bit of historical materialism* When Adrienne Rich was growing up in the US, lesbians could legally be committed to psychiatric hospitals, lobotomized, or imprisoned. She chose the word COMPULSORY to describe an attitude about heterosexuality on purpose. **Closeting inside a dual-sex marriage to avoid state torture isn't a sexuality. It's painful compliance**. Rich herself offered clues to rethinking her famous essay when she republished it in the *Journal of Women's History* in 2003: > There has recently been an intensified debate on female sexuality among feminists and lesbians, with lines often furiously and bitterly drawn, with sadomasochism and pornography as key words which are variously defined according to who is talking. The depth of women’s rage and fear regarding sexuality and its relation to power and pain is real, even when the dialogue sounds simplistic, self-righteous, or like parallel monologues. > Because of all these developments, there are parts of this essay that I would word differently, qualify, or expand if I were writing it today. But I continue to think that heterosexual feminists will draw political strength for change from taking a critical stance toward the ideology which demands heterosexuality, and that lesbians cannot assume that we are untouched by that ideology and the institutions founded upon it. What else was going on in 2003? Oh, yes, the shift from Women's Studies to Gender Studies and the many new genders and sexualities that came with the Sex Positivity. I have always found it refreshing when a theorist revisists their younger self's work with new eyes and changed experience. We might note – as I often do in another context – that an adjective placed before a noun does not only serve to define the noun, but can indicate *a type* of that noun. "Honey badger." "Lesser flamingo." "Rotten fruit." "Anti-social behavior." "Toxic masculinity." "Compulsory heterosexuality." This subtly of the English language is one reason that feminists shifted to using the term "heteronormativity" to describe the complex of attitudes, practices, traditions, and laws that make up our cultural biases. Heteronormativity is an element of gender normativity, and one that most feminists today loudly critique and roundly reject. This is exactly what Rich wanted her sister hetero feminists to do in our analysis of the patriarchal world and its literatures. #### *Back to the sexual materialism* The reproductive function can be separated from love, attachment, or care. Everything about patriarchal reversals of sexuality demonstrates that. Hetero*normativity*, however, is a cultural layer on top of the biology of reproduction just like gender is a cultural layer on top of the biology of maleness and femaleness. And even that isn’t an institution. The sexual norm is part of the gendered norms which are the building blocks of identities, and **bodies don’t have identities**. Right? Gender isn’t an *institution*, it’s a collection of socially enforced stereotypes. Right? Bodies have attractions and affections. When we talk about hetero*sexuality* as a political institution (like the parliamentary system?) against which lesbianism is dissident (like punks against neoliberal austerities?), we are setting up a conflict between kinds of women. (We are also trimming quite close to the ‘dissident sexualities’ and ‘dissident genders’ discourse of much academic Gender Studies.) It’s *the NORM*, not the sex, that *is the problem*. The norm is made of two factors: all the cultural pressure to conform to not only heterosexual pair bonding in a (let’s face it) pretty puritan and limited set of modal expressions, AND sheer numbers. There are more human heterosexuals because evolution tends to favor successful reproduction strategies to get more evolution. In all mammal species that is heterosexual reproduction, whether that’s a momentary or life-long pairing. That animal arrangement has nothing *necessary* to do with the narrow and violent sexual expressions of patriarchy. Liberating women (and men) from this **narrow and violent normativity at the root of patriarchy**, is not a matter of creating a new political position – it is a matter of being **very welcoming and celebratory of all healthy non-reproductive human sexuality, affection, attachment, and friendship**. The trick is to get **beyond these disciplines** of the body. That’s **where the liberation is**. That animal arrangement has characteristics that patriarchy *deforms* to its political advantage. But let’s not confuse the nefarious creativity of people committed to a project of violent domination with the mechanics of evolutionary endurance. The second concern I have is one that A’Ja Lyons and I share for different reasons. I'm afraid for the experience—the embodied, romantic, sexual, platonic, cultural lineage–of being a lesbian could simply become another political position that *any* woman can stand in, can even appropriate. **Political positions are inherently controversial, contested, and combative**. Politics is combat by other means in patriarchy. I don't want the embodied experience of being-lesbian to become just another site of identity. I don’t want that in the very same way that I’m furious that ‘woman’ has been made just another site of identity. What even would be the difference between “political lesbianism” and just "queerness"? They’re both identities, mostly about ideology and style choices, but not ways of being human animals. The harm, after all, happens in the body. We can’t walk away from the truths of our bodies. We can walk away from a politics in a heartbeat. --- *Next up, a new Gorgon Posse podcast with A'Ja on this very topic, on* [*YouTube*](https://www.youtube.com/@MedusaRisingOrg/videos?ref=medusarising.org) *and* [*Podbean*](https://gorgonposse.podbean.com/?ref=medusarising.org)*. Then, part two of this analysis of the dangers of risking further fracture within US or other national feminism in this firmly identitarian and increasingly fascist political moment in the WEIRD countries.* --- **Esmée Streachailt** is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising. Reach out anytime for any reason: [info@medusarising.org](mailto:info@medusarising.org). 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