The Betrayals of Modern Feminism
Modern feminism has abandoned the women it claims to defend, sacrificing their rights and freedoms to the demands of progressive ideology.
On paper, I should be a feminist. I have spent my entire adult life fighting for the rights of women, particularly women and girls in the Muslim world. This work cost my friend Theo van Gogh his life and is why I still live under threat today. My career has been possible only because I made it out of the Muslim world and built a life in a society that guarantees women the same rights and freedoms as men. I’m able to live as I do today in no small part thanks to the achievements of Western feminism—by rights, I should be one of its loudest champions.
But I am not. While I am grateful for the historical achievements of feminism, I find little in mainstream modern feminism with which I can sympathize or identify. If being a “feminist” simply meant believing in the moral and legal equality of women with men, I could happily sign on. But that sensible and broadly appealing concept no longer describes the feminist movement today.
The battles that animated feminists in the past have largely been won. In every Western nation, women stand equal to men before the law: a woman can vote, own property, access credit, enter any profession she chooses, rise to the highest levels of education and public office, and marry and divorce at will. Women outnumber men at universities across the West, and popular culture is saturated with feminist language and talking points. By every metric, feminism has been one of the most politically successful movements in modern history.
Perhaps as a result of its success, contemporary feminism has an identity crisis. Those who self-identify as feminists are frequently at odds with each other. I won’t try to adjudicate these internal quarrels here, except to note with gratitude the hard work of talented thinkers attempting to reclaim the label “feminist” for sane and worthy ends—gender-critical feminists, “reactionary” feminists, and so on. My complaint is with mainstream feminism, by which I mean modern liberal feminism. For decades, mainstream feminism has aligned itself with causes that directly undermine the rights and freedoms of real women. The betrayals are legion—and I will have more to say about them in the coming months—but two are particularly egregious.
The first betrayal is the feminist embrace of trans ideology. Mainstream feminists today cannot even agree on what a woman is, and influential feminists earnestly insist that an adult male with XY chromosomes and male genitalia can be a woman. Incredibly, this isn’t a fringe position in feminist circles. The National Women’s Law Center is one of the most influential women’s rights organizations in America, and it now proclaims that “trans women and girls… ARE women and girls.” Its official platform maintains that anyone who wants to call herself a feminist must embrace trans women as women, and claims that policies excluding men from women’s sports and locker rooms “endanger” women. This isn’t an anomaly. Back in 2013, a number of prominent feminists—among them Jill Filipovic, Jessica Valenti, and Laurie Penny—signed the widely circulated “Statement of Trans-Inclusive Feminism and Womanism.” The statement defended the inclusion of trans women in “all women’s spaces”—including, explicitly, women’s shelters and women’s bathrooms. For well over a decade, mainstream feminists have insisted, against all reason, that there is no conflict between the rights of women and the preferences of trans-identifying men.