Feminism, time to move on
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There are several reasons why it’s time to move on from feminism. First and foremost are the barriers placed between it and rational thought due to its incoherence. Other reasons include the achievement of equality in law and pay for women; women forming the majority of university staff and students; the failure of feminism to even address rape gangs in the UK and ultra-misogynistic Islamic societies, including terrorist-organisation-run regimes; the end of the pretense that feminism is about equality as boys fall behind in education and employment, while nothing done is to even research the cause let alone propose solutions.
This incoherence is down to a lack of purpose as the early aims of feminism have been achieved. The vehicle has long since reached its destination and all that remains is the contest to see who gets to drive it towards their own personal aim. Nowhere is this clearer than in wokeism, in particular its trans-genderist branch, which feminism spawned. A few years ago, the SNP ‘s Mhairi Black gave a speech supporting trans women and vilifying gender critical feminists, she was applauded. She later likened gender critics to white supremacists (https://tinyurl.com/2hht5kya). When Kathleen Stock took a stance against trans-genderism, she was abandoned by her feminist colleagues at Sussex University and elsewhere. And all the gender critical feminists have in their arsenal is to call one of those Scottish, lesbian, women, feminists a misogynist. That is identity politics gone full circle into the realm of ultra-incoherence.
Intersectional feminism is the majority form of feminism. It valorises victimhood. It gave birth to identity politics, aka wokeism. And it is the woke who support the trans-gender movement; without wokeism the trans movement would not have succeeded as it has because it was by playing the victim card that the trans-movement gained its socially acceptable status. It was also feminism that effectively shut down all male-only spaces. So when men (especially trans-men), say they have a right to enter women's spaces, you can't prevent them without them calling you sexist, they get to play the victim card and to claim to be oppressed. On this they thrive. The denial of this reality of feminism is as problematic as the denial of reality by the trans-gender movement itself.
Feminism and Transgenderism.
YouGov’s comprehensive polling, conducted 19-20th May 2022 found much greater tolerance among women for trans nonsense than men. 68% of men compared to only 55% of women were opposed to transwomen participating in female sporting activities. 50% of men compared to 37% of women were opposed to allowing transwomen into female changing rooms. 48% of men compared to 34% of women opposed the use of female lavatories by transwomen. Most strikingly, perhaps, was that only 30% of women opposed biological males being admitted to women’s refuges compared to 43% of men. The polling is of UK citizens.
Support for transgenderism mainly comes from women and it’s near certain they are feminists. Barrister Charlotte Proudman claims that radical feminism “has been co-opted by a few powerful transphobes who do not represent radical feminist ideology” and mentions feminists like Professor Catharine MacKinnon, Shon Faye and the late author, Andrea Dworkin as amongst the majority of feminist trans allies (https://tinyurl.com/5624mem5). She writes that the argument that sex is a real immutable characteristic and gender is sex-based is a “superficially attractive but simplistic argument”. For her, patriarchy has pitted cis women against trans people.
Mary Harrington (https://tinyurl.com/3kznbzwf), who inexplicably still calls herself a feminist despite constantly criticising feminism, exposes the roots of the transgender movement in feminism’s claim that biology is the only difference between men and women, that male and female are a social constructs. Thus, a surgical sex change results in, hey presto, a real sex change. It also means that, of course, to deny a man who identifies as a woman entrance to women’s spaces is sexist, thus undoing any ethical defence against this intrusion.
The trans movement has its origins in the dogmatic assertion by feminists that differences between males and females are social constructs of an oppressive patriarchy. The trans movement just extended the dogma by adding in some postmodernist philosophy to assert that male and female themselves are social constructs. Third and fourth wave feminists view supporting trans rights as an integral part of intersectional feminism.
This is so in academia, where the likes of Judith Butler assert that gender “is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follows, which continue to “assign” gender to us. The powers that do that are part of an apparatus of gender that assigns and reassigns norms to bodies, organises them socially, but also animates them in directions contrary to those norms (https://tinyurl.com/bdhnphpa).
Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.”
Butler continues: “The anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement, insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained, and that gender is a destructive fiction, taking down both “man” and “civilization” and “God”. Anti-gender politics have been bolstered by the Vatican and the more conservative evangelical and apostolic churches on several continents, but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.
This movement is at once anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, opposing both reproductive freedom and trans rights. It seeks to censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education – a topic so important for young people to discuss. And to reverse major legal and legislative successes for sexual freedom, gender equality and laws against gender discrimination and sexual violence.”
The influence of such academics is seen amongst students. A 2018 YouGov poll found that in Britain, the statement that ‘transgender women are not 'real' women is offensive’ found agreement with 58% of male students and 78% of female. Other polls have shown consistently higher approval of censorship amongst female students than male (https://tinyurl.com/y2fer6yy).
Away from the ivory towers in the more down to earth world of comedy, Mary Beth Barone presents the feminist majority view of gender critical feminists, or what she calls ‘TERFS’ as she expresses her contempt for them (27-29 minutes: https://tinyurl.com/2wehdd3f ). To a degree, transgenderism can be seen as an internecine feminist war. But the considerable majority of feminists side with the likes of Judith Butler and Mhairi Black, and against Kathleen Stock and Mary Harrington. Gender critical feminists who take issue with this summation would do well to remember the hundreds of pussy hat marches that began straight after Trump’s inauguration against the man who recently ended the abuse of men participating in women’s sport.
This is important because without acknowledging the root of the problem, you can’t find the cure. And although the cure in nature is often found close to the cause, feminism is not going to be the cure for identity politics. Whether Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ or not is disputed, but since her work it has been closely associated with feminism. Feminism is identity politics, and it all started with feminism.
Feminism and Identity Politics / Wokeism.
Cancel culture, a pernicious characteristic of wokeism, came into being, according to ex-feminist Janice Fiamengo, in 2012 when Warren Farrell was prevented from speaking at the University of Toronto (37 minutes https://tinyurl.com/524jt8nt ). Another former feminist, Cassie Jaye talks of the refusal to debate, the targeting of individuals, and the groupthink of feminism ( https://tinyurl.com/4neebjzm ).
Reflecting on the remarkable hoax paper ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’ that he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay describes as “feminist theory, gender studies … all these kind of woke, postmodern journals” (https://tinyurl.com/4f7c7rh8) as he explains the crisis of academic merit in universities. Critical theory and its associated disciplines have contributed to this crisis, but all stem from feminist intersectionality.
So, what is the point of feminism in 2025? This question usually elicits an aggressively indignant response along the lines of ‘anybody who cares about equality and thinks that women shouldn’t be men’s property must call themselves a feminist’. This is a disingenuous blocking strategy designed to attack the person, reduce discussion to an accusation rather than engage in critical debate to improve understanding. And this is the curse that feminism has put upon academia.
Of course, that is not the response of all feminists, or representative of all feminism’s forms. There are those like Camille Paglia with her ‘amazon feminism’ who seem to stand against feminism as much as for it. Her supporters and their like use the defence against the most misandrist feminisms that their feminism is not sexist or hateful. But if feminism can be all things to all women, then it is nothing. It has no meaning; it cannot be defined. It is merely a word upon which meaning can be ascribed according to the user. Even aiming to scrounge off men in return for sex can be called feminism: “Feminists, gold-diggers... or both? The women giving up work to live off their boyfriends”: How do you smash the patriarchy? According to a growing online movement, the answer is to manipulate men for money (https://tinyurl.com/299755zk ).
It seems, as sometimes claimed, that feminism provided support for women entering the workforce in the 1950s and 60s and up against a brutish masculine culture in a male-dominated environment. Women’s groups of one form or another have no doubt been essential in every society throughout history and probably always will be to oppose the worst attributes of men. But today, feminism’s formless incoherence is no longer appropriate. Even looking to history provides little explanation. If we include the suffragettes as feminists, and maybe the suffragists too, as feminists sometimes claim we should, then it’s only fair to cast the net wide in all directions and include all women’s groups.
This includes the feminists who agreed that male “carnality was the cause of racial impurity and had to be curbed in the interests of all. The social purity feminist Ellice Hopkins wrote that ‘all history teaches us that the welfare and very life of a nation is determined by moral causes; and that it is the pure races – the races that respect their women and guard them jealously from defilement – that are the tough, prolific and ascendant races’.” Phillips (2004 p.261). It includes the widespread support for eugenics amongst feminists, including Marie Stopes, who disowned her own son because he failed to meet her strict standards of breeding by marrying a woman she believed, mistakenly, had a congenital short-sightedness.
In the First World War, it includes the women handing out white flowers to conscientious objectors, and it includes the majority who believed that the spiritual crusade they represented was intimately bound up with imperialist beliefs about the superiority of the British Empire and the assertion of its values over lesser breeds” Phillips (2004 p292). And it includes the women’s groups who took this a little further in 1930s Germany with their support for the National Socialists (Allen, A.T 2000).
Of course, none of the above examples were universal amongst feminists, and neither is the misandry or the call for the destruction of the family. Even within the celebrated women’s suffrage campaigning Pankhurst family of England conflicts arose and Christabel Pankhurst expelled her sister Sylvia from the WSPU in 1913 for being insufficiently focused on the vote as the sole political goal, while a schism both within the family and in broader feminist disagreements erupted over the cause of WWI and related issues like Irish home rule. The Sinn Feiner Countess Markievicz was the first woman elected to the British Parliament, but imprisonment prevented her taking up her seat. So, in 1919 Nancy Astor, MP for the Conservative Party, which opposed home rule, became the first woman in the House of Commons.
But if the aim for universal suffrage, after a fashion, held together the disparateness and incoherence of feminism, it has been attained and left no clear objective. Whether feminism would have made equal pay a primary aim, had the women workers of the Dagenham Ford car plant not achieved it by themselves can’t be assessed. But the raped and abused working class victims of Muslim grooming gangs were of little interest to feminists. This tallies with the feminist silence and apparent complete lack of concern for women in ultra- misogynistic countries. Sweden’s self-styled ‘world’s first feminist government’ even sent a delegation of seven women to meet Iran’s President Rouhani, where they deferred to the gender apartheid by donning the legally required hijab (https://tinyurl.com/yx2je55j ).
There was silence from Western feminists, likewise, when Saudi Arabia and Iran were elected to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women in 2018 and 2022, and when Saudi Arabia was appointed as the chair of the Commission, the UN's principal global intergovernmental body dedicated to promoting gender equality and empowering women in 2024. Silence from the narcissistic, pussy-hat-wearing marchers; the world’s most privileged women ever, who sought to cast themselves as victims of the man who eventually ended the destruction of women’s sport and protected women’s spaces from men pretending to be women as feminism formed the basis for the rise of transgenderism. And silence as the Me-Too movement’s call to ‘believe her’ was not extended to the Israeli rape victims of Islamic extremists.
Clearly, a large proportion of feminists do not hold egalitarian principles, and their feminism is harmful to society. These problems, as much as anything, define feminism today. And while it can be argued that they don’t define each of the myriad feminisms, it is what unifies them. In the novel Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter, a young Jewish boy in 1930s Germany is sympathetically informed by the Hitler Youth leader that he is not permitted to attend. Not all Nazis were antisemitic, many just went along with it thinking it might benefit them.
So, what is feminism for today? Well, in a sense, it’s what it’s always been for: status. Steinbach’s Women in England is littered with comments about social class. And while even in the days when women’s status was legally inferior to men, the insult felt by upper class women 1884 when working class men were enfranchised (Steinbach. 2003) remains typical of the class snobbery and status seeking nature of feminism. Except that today, with the achievement of full equality for women, it is pretty much all that remains. Feminism was formerly a means of equalising status and wealth for women. Now it is little more than a means of gaining status and wealth for the sake of status and wealth under the guise of social responsibility.
In the 1870s, brutish male students at Edinburgh University physically barred women from the anatomy room. Today, women doctors and women students outnumber men in Britain. Regarding feminist claims of equality and social justice for all, there is no call for funding or research into the crisis in boys’ education as feminism’s march through the universities falls in step with destruction of academic freedom. And the discrimination against Asian students in Ivy League Universities has, likewise, met with feminist silence.
Conclusion - Women’s Groups.
It’s time for feminists to accept that nothing is permanent, to let it go. Humans have a seemingly innate quality to corrupt everything, usually for power and status, sometimes just for money. There are recent studies that describe how status motivates us like nothing else. Will Storr, Rob Henderson and David Pinsof are some of the modern writers exploring this. Understanding why people crave power seems important. Whether or not these writers come to be seen as pioneers discovering an important realm of psychological awareness, we need to move away from woke-feminism telling everyone that they are morally superior in their destructive rampage for significance.
Erin Pizzey, founder of the world’s first refuge for battered women, wrote, “I found it a struggle to get well-meaning people to realize that they could not come into the refuge to work and think they were in a position of power.” Supporting the downtrodden and oppressed always affords an opportunity to gain status. Pizzey’s struggle with aggressive left-wing feminists who cared far more about their ideology than the battered women at the refuge was merely one instance amongst many of the socialist religion losing its way. It should have ended nearly a hundred years ago when Karl Popper exposed Marx’s dialectical misunderstanding of what science is. But at least in Marx’s time socialism supported the working classes, and championed labour’s struggle against capital. For Marx, this was about raising up the working classes to take over the means of production and essentially take over society. Wokeism, intersectionality, neo-Marxism, postmodernism, identity politics, call it what you will, took this idea of the underdog, of the victim and sent it into hyperdrive. But it was no longer the working classes against the bourgeoisie. It was every identity against every identity in the struggle for victim status. The original underdog, the oppressed proletariat frayed into many strands and the victim was fetishized. The first of these strands was feminism and a new binary of women versus men formed in politics.
As Christianity, with its notions of the meek inheriting the Earth fortifying the position of victim, waned, it infused this notion onto its grotesque substitute, wokeism. Feminism above all fed from this. Other victim groups: persecuted racial minorities, homosexuals, immigrants, the handicapped and more recently the transgender, also fed from the same Christian legacy and cohered to form identity politics.
Allied to this is the new corporate moralism. This is described brilliantly by Vivek Ramaswamy in his book Woke Inc. as the worst of the left and the worst of the right combined to form identity politics. But feminism, above all these groups, is the main tributary. Feminism couldn’t be anything else but a part of identity politics in an age when women’s battles (equal rights, the vote, equal pay for equal work) have been won.
There is no purpose to feminism. There is a need for women’s groups to defend women against the worst of men’s brutishness, and there always will be. But that is not what feminism does today. Feminism didn’t care about the thousands of victims of Muslim grooming gangs in the UK; Sweden’s feminist government kowtowed in headscarves to the Iranian regime; feminism doesn’t give a damn about low status women anywhere, especially in the developing world. Whatever feminism is nowadays (and that is not entirely clear), it is not a means by which women seek justice or equality. Having lost whatever purpose it once had, feminism can only now exist in opposition to men. It can only be defined in opposition to men. But as it no longer cares about women, it can only be a form of identity politics. It is no coincidence that the exposure of postmodern hypocrisy by Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian found such fertile ground in feminist journals, feminism being the mother of woke ideology.
The feminist binary of women good, men bad has degraded critical thinking especially amongst young female students to the extent that a majority believe in curtailing academic freedom according to YouGov. In the UK, this is symptomatic of the rot of institutions generally – from the National Health Service to the police and army, throughout educational institutions, the Civil Service and the justice system – in short of the country’s general crisis. No doubt it’s similar in other Western countries. Joel Kotkin (2020) writes that in the USA, “universities appear to be nurturing a generation of activists who more resemble Bible-thumping preachers than open-minded intellectuals”.
Women’s groups of some sort, no doubt, have always and will always be necessary due to the physical strength of men and the propensity for brutishness. But feminism has grown to encompass pretty much all women’s groups both historically, as described above and today. And its toxicity has also destroyed men’s groups, which are also necessary, perhaps less so than women’s groups, for the establishment of social norms, responsibilities and rights.
It's time to end the wokeist-feminist indulgence in primitive tribalism and for adults to take responsibility for their societies, rather than relying on vague concepts of identities to kick others down rather than raising themselves up. A restoration of critical rationalist ideals is possible and necessary. But it first requires the recognition of its biggest barrier and the cause of its retreat in the first place. A good place to start this is to end the denial and recognise the feminist responsibility for transgenderism.
References.
Allen, A.T. (2000) Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective. German Studies Review, 23(3), p.477. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1432830.
Author (28 July, 2022) ‘Being a radical feminist means being a trans ally at the same time’, The Independent. Available at: [URL] (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
Butler, J. (2021) ‘Judith Butler: interview on gender’, The Guardian, 7 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
CARE (2023) 'SNP Mhairi Black likens gender critics to white supremacists'. Available at: https://care.org.uk/news/2023/08/snp-deputy-likens-gender-critics-to-white-supremacists (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
Kotkin, J. (2020) The coming of neo-feudalism: A warning to the global middle class. New York: Encounter Books.
Phillips M., The Ascent of Woman. Abacus 2004 UK.
Pizzey, E. (2013) This Way To The Revolution: A Memoir. New York: Peter Owen Publishers.
Sanghani, R. (2023) 'The women who aim to live like a princess – with a rich boyfriend paying for it', The Telegraph, 23 August. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/new-feminism-thewizardliz-sheraseven-living-off-boyfriend/ (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
Steinbach, S. (2013) Women in England 1760–1914. Hachette UK.
UN Watch (2017) 'Walk of shame: Sweden's "first feminist government" don hijabs in Iran'. Available at: https://unwatch.org/walk-shame-swedens-first-feminist-government-don-hijabs-iran/ (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
YouGov (2022) Free speech: students survey. Available at: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/pizjwl3whi/free%20speech%20-%20students.pdf (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
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YouTube (2024) MEETING THE ENEMY A feminist comes to terms with the Men's Rights movement | Cassie Jaye | TEDxMarin. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMuzhQXJoY (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
YouTube (2024) My Latest Chat with Dr. Janice Fiamengo, Anti-Feminism Pro-Male Crusader (THE SAAD TRUTH_1346). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctt7Eq9UhNY (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
YouTube (2024) The Marxist Roots of DEI - Session 3: Inclusion | James Lindsay. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsX8zPuSVRk&list=TLPQMDgwNzIwMjPAw5fNTvyywg&index=3 (Accessed: 4 April 2025).
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