RadFems, Do You Want to Win the US Midterms? | by Esmée Streachailt
The Emergency | Part 2 | A Radical Materialist Feminist Compass for getting our social credit back
We're discredited to our natural progressive allies by TRA propaganda. The political world gets more bizarre by the day. Some radfems are risking further splits among us. And, there's plenty of radfem wheelhouse work to do out there to reset the US. We can meet other progressives over issues that intersect with women's material needs (like safety from state violence, for example) and work on those issues, become known, and use that social credit (established trustworthiness) to create epistemic authority and help shape the future for women. Let's go.
The Political Trap: Credit & Clout
Where in one direction I'm watching radical feminists retreat into political lesbianism, in the other, some of those same radical feminists recommending confrontation with Democrats in this election. I still have shivers from the effects of the "single-issue" women in 2023-24, and it seems to me from a long skim of a lot of radfem social media like women in prison for miscarriages and dying of sepsis in maternity was OK by them, or separated from their children by Stephen Miller’s bounty-hunters, Proud Boy thugs, or just completely disappeared... I just don’t think there is any such thing as a one-dimensional political moment.
Certainly not in an epochal political moment. Certainly not when the regime is desperate to stay in power in order to stay out of prison.
Now, I want to assure my radfem readers (again) that I am as disappointed and frustrated and appalled and insulted and affronted by the ease with which the Democrats, many women’s organizations, and services have been captured by an obviously logically and materially inconsistent male-supremacist ideology. In Gender Identity Ideology, it showed up with a really good sob story (empathy hijacking) and played it for cheap seats. So now the Democrats are afraid of being associated with the mythical "Nazi TERF”. Though, given the current trajectories of some GCs and former GCs…. less mythical now.
Our understandable impatience with the left and Dems to see reason through the veil of money and electability moved some us to desperation. But I don’t think we should remain desperate. I think we need to build social credit.
👇🏻👇🏻 👇🏻 👇🏻 👇🏻
We were already on the political outs when the 3rd Wave and TRAs came along. The rape media is protected speech decision was a major defeat. But these two ideologies did a great job of discrediting us. This discreditation is completely unfair. Our arguments have been consistent for decades, our evidence has been airtight and only increasing in volume for decades, and our goals have always been virtuous, if not always virtuously presented.
Priya Parker and Matt Goldstein
It's really frustrating having no credit when we've tried to be some of the most honest players on the pitch (Dworkin, the pre-GII Davis). Still, facts are what facts are. We are a discredited political movement with a very small following, very little money, few allies, and without agreed paths forward. Some of us, like FiST, support the Equal Rights Amendment; some of us, like WOLF or WDI, do not support the Equal Rights Amendment. Some of us are more committedly independent than others. Some of us have relationships with larger, more mainstream organizations that seem to me to temper public positions on some kinds of issues: like against ICE abuses. I fear lost opportunities to influence, to subvert, to even have a desired historical effect.
The Radical Feminist Stake in Liberal Democracy
Fascists rounding up documented and undocumented, legal and illegal immigrants destroys women’s lives. Their children are taken away from them, or their husbands are taken away from them, or they are taken away from their families. Their homes are destroyed, their lives are destroyed, their communities are destroyed. I don’t mean metaphorically.
And then people disappear. Or their daughters are moved to a new concentration camp where they have a really good chance of coming up pregnant thanks to the rapists in charge of the concentration camp. This is empire turned inward. It is the same state violence people of color have long faced. This is its expansion and normalization. This is some radical feminist shit that needs to be addressed at home just as we must abroad. To stop and get those ICE agents investigated and those girls the support they need would accomplish a few things:
- Weaken or destroy the fascists’ enforcement gang
- Restore these harmed women, girls, and families to a sense of community and belonging
- Then give them their communities back by repatriating the deported
- Show women in countries harmed by US imperialism that we radfems mean business that has meaning for them
Rebuilding shattered immigrant communities? That could be us.
Acting as legal or medical support for teen girls pregnant in US concentration camps? That could be us.
Writing amicus briefs in support of honoring US immigration policy wrt green cards and work visas and naturalization? That could be us.
Working with radical feminists in Africa and Latin America to find the disappeared? That could be us.
Do you feel what I am saying here?
Nicole Ward
Then, let's help think through the immigration policy of the new republic. Earning credit means having something to say to pressing issues other people are affected by. Immigration policy needs clarity around the word ‘woman’, and grounds for refuge, and access to housing, and … We can do that to earn credit, right? Does that diminish our commitment to women and our liberation, to ridding us of the scourge of GII and TRA violence?
This is the sneaky fucking thing Stephen Miller got right: power lies in the details of policy. We need to be welcome in those rooms when the time comes to get into the weeds of policy, and we won’t be if we have no credit.
The party interested in addressing other problems radical feminists have traditionally addressed, paradoxically, are the Democrats. So, showing up to Democratic events with a list of Gender Critical hot-seat questions for the candidates is not the pathway to gaining our credit back. First of all, the only thing the candidate will remember about the one radical feminist they encounter is that she made them feel cornered and embarrassed. Does that win us any influence? Is that the way to useful clout? Has it worked yet?
Now, I am furious that women are imprisoned with men who identify as women. I am incensed that women might be forced to avoid a particular Rape Crisis shelter because that shelter includes men. I am enraged by all of the insults, all of the danger leveled at us, all of the rollback of our very recently achieved cultural position at risk because men are claiming to be women. I am furious that our gay and lesbian and autistic and already traumatized children are being sacrificed to the transition industries or the vanity of narcissistic parents. It is appalling what is happening to our kids.
Kristen M. Budd, Ph.D., Dinesh Napal and Joshua Rovner
However, the Trump Administration, MAGA, the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society—all of those people, Moms for America (for fuck’s sake)—are running pogroms against entire communities of people, including trans people. They're not trying to solve a problem; they're just trying to criminalize a way of being. Pay attention to what I said there: they are criminalizing ways of being human—immigrant, migrant, laborer, female, mother, pregnant, lesbian, gay, queer, trans, female, black, brown, depressed, old, poor. They're criminalizing ways of being human and that should scare the shit out of us. That should move us beyond business as usual.
A Way Forward: Refounding and Credit
This is epochal change we’re confronting. I would love to go to precinct meetings or meet-and-greets with Democratic candidates and ask them hard questions about women in prison, about transitioning children, about women's shelters and domestic violence services, etc. About why, Goddess in Earth!, we have not been able to bring down the number of men who murder women in this country every year. Why, Goddess in Earth!, we have not been able to bring down the number of men who sexually assault women and girls in this country every year? Those numbers are still in the hundreds of thousands annually. We need the tools of the state to do most of that work.
If they win in '26, or if they come back a little bit in '28, or if they win in '30 and then again in '32—whatever it is—they are only one or two elections away from securing a generational fascist, anti-woman, anti-"other," racist, christofascist regime in this country. They can taste it. That 35% of our citizen neighbors want the chance to come for us. I ask you: what kind of radical feminism do you intend to practice in a failed imperial nation with a shattered economy, no industrial base, and a corrupt bunch of christian robber barons making everybody work for them? What kind of radical feminism will we practice there? I have no idea. I’ll probably be defending myself against ‘domestic terrorism charges’ for what I’ve written and advocated in this project.
Our Mission: Path2Freedom provides hope and healing for child survivors of sex trafficking through safe housing and ongoing support for their lifetime.
The many departments of the executive and our economy and university research programs will NOT just reset to 2023 if the Dems win in ‘28. There is actual nation building to do in our own nation. There are so many connections to make as we begin working through the (what is this, the fourth?) refounding of the American project.
Now, I admit I'm one of those women who says we need to leave the patriarchy behind. I have made arguments that we need to move from center to margin, that we need to be building outward, that we need to be connecting on peripheries, that we need to be working with feminists globally in order to network ourselves so that we can strengthen each other in the face of an oncoming patriarchal resurgence like the one we're experiencing in the United States now. But that path does not involve splitting us into finer and finer and finer degrees of "more and less perfect" radical feminism. It does not ask us to abandon the small 'd' democratic project. In fact, it insists that the way out is through, and that the way we can earn back our credit is to hang out with people and do work.
I Don't Want to Win Feminism
I Want to Win Reality
A huge part of doing that, though, is building subversive spaces that underground of sovereign infrastructure. I do not mean following each other on Insta. No, I mean a real net-of-work. Not building our websites on Wordpress. I mean owning our intellectual property. I don’t mean paying each other subscriptions on a corporate website owned by Mark Fucking Andreesen. I mean circular economies that power our work. (More on that in future posts and at TORCH! with Total Woman Victory this October!!)
Women need to be respected in our bodies and persons, oh yes. We don’t need to refer to our rapists as “she” in the infinitely small chance our rapists are brought to trial. Women need more of our rapists brought to trial. Women need food security, and to live through pregnancy and birth, and … We need a lot of really basic, unsexy, doesn’t-quite-get-the-blood-up kind of stuff that we also need a functioning democracy to secure for our sisters. Not the kind of thing that calls for hot-seat questions and viral clips. We need our language to do it. So let’s go do it and get our language in there.
Is that hard? We know how to do hard things. Is that risky? Some of us can take risks.
When working with progressives and conversations come around to The Issue, and they try to reject the word, the demand that is "woman", just tell them, ‘55,000 ads said “Trump is for you, Kamala is for “they/them.” We need to be smarter than that’.
And then let’s show them how to do equality that does not endanger ANYONE. We do know. But we are going to have to earn some credit back, and the only way we're going to do that is to double down on this democratic project we have in front of us, which is building a new America. Most of our organizations are already advocacy orgs that propose policy, offer amicus briefs in civil court cases, and lobby. Like, we have the methods. We just don’t have the clout because we don’t have the credit. Imagine the opportunity we have right there: building a new America out of the wreckage they made of the New Deal and the Great Society—not to put them back together, but to reimagine them as more replete, more robust. There is a new founding at hand, and radical feminists have an opportunity to have a say in that founding if we get involved in it. [No, I don’t expect the left or Dems to just see the radfem light. I’m not new.]
But if we just run around pissing people off, working mostly with the right, splitting our movement into real feminists and real women and those posers benighted by false consciousness, then what should anyone work with us? If we are not visibly standing with women who are being destroyed by this administration — academic women who've lost their jobs many of those in STEM, federal women who've lost their jobs many of them black, women in the military who have been fired for being female and successful, immigrant women, farm hands, moms, cleaners, maids, hairdressers, the people who cook your food, the people who pick your food — if we can't show up with the women in those communities and for the refounding of the United States, no one is ever going to work with us in a way that will genuinely benefit women. And they might be right.
Yep. Max Dashu has a point, we need to rebuild an autonomous women’s movement. That’s what I’m thinking about for TORCH! That’s what will make us effective even if the Dems get a chance to reshape our systems and institutions. But, a working country in which to build that more-networked movement makes it easier. My North Star is bright and clear: living, socially secure, personally safe, thriving women. The hard-long fight against GII is part of that vision.
And still, I don’t plan to go to precinct meetings or meet-&-greets with candidates and ask them if they’re aware I’m not taking my eye off trans-issues. I plan to ask them HOW they plan to rebuild our governments in better forms that are more responsible to the people’s needs. HOW will you secure access to abortion for women? HOW will you finally tax wealth at a rate that will allow the rest of us to survive? PLANS. POLICY. Other PEOPLE they plan to work with to get the Good Work done.
See how that works? That question deals with a vital moral issue and a challenge to our democratic ideals while earning street cred for feminists ON OUR TERMS and not by complying with the -TQ authoritarians. It says we’re focused on women, but we connect on issues y’all other progressives also care about … because they affect women. We need that credit. I’m sorry, but we do. The authoritarians on the left and the right have simply been too effective at running their games [and amassing money] for us to just rock up and make demands from our currently discredited position.
But, as an alternative, if some of y’all are out there creating a radical feminist insurgency and a radfem, grassroots, democracy in a box that we can drop out of a commandeered C-17s all across MAGA country and smack in the middle of the National Mall (a girl can dream), let me know. I’m in.
Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.
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