In an Afghanistan once again ruled by the Taliban, there exist public executions, floggings, and lashings of alleged criminals. A recent edict has also signalled the resumption of stoning for adultery. The Taliban’s leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, declared:

‘You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles… [But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan.’

It was clear from the start that the Taliban intended to create an Islamic theocracy. Recent developments along that road were inevitable—and also inevitably, Afghanistan’s 14 million women and girls are the ones who have suffered the most for this.

In December 2022, over a year after the Taliban’s re-ascension to power, they brought in a ban on women working in national and international NGOs. In April 2023, women were also banned from working with UN agencies. As Philip Loft of the House of Commons Library noted, ‘For 70% of these women, this was also their family’s main source of income.’ All the while, both the US and the UN continue to provide humanitarian aid to the country. As ProPublica has reported, ‘The U.S. remains the largest donor of aid to Afghanistan, providing a total of about $2.6 billion since the collapse of the previous Afghan government.’ There are credible fears that at least some of this money is being diverted to the Taliban. As US Representative Michael McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated, ‘The U.S. government must work harder to prevent the Taliban from benefiting from humanitarian aid.’

The Taliban’s curtailment of women’s freedom has meant the deprivation of incomes for thousands of families and a reliance on foreign aid. However, this is not the Taliban’s only source of income. Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi MBE, the founder of the European Campaign for Human Rights for the People of Afghanistan, said to me that ‘the Taliban makes a lot of its money from opium production and lithium mining’, the latter of which involves Chinese investment. Although an uncertain industry in Afghanistan, lithium mining is potentially very lucrative, with Foreign Policy reporting in April 2023 that China had signed a deal worth ‘$10 billion for access to lithium deposits’.

The tragedy of the Taliban takeover in August 2021 is hard to overstate. Samira Hamidi, an Afghan women’s rights activist, told me that ‘the catastrophe in the country is getting worse’, and that ‘in the twenty years in between the Taliban’s time in power, most women and girls were trying to work, educate themselves, and build better lives.’ That freedom was denied to them for so long pre-2001, granted for a brief period, and then snatched away again is an open wound, felt within Afghanistan and in the diaspora. This state of affairs is hardly accidental or limited to education. Hamidi also told me that in governmental offices there are ‘signs telling women they are not allowed to enter.’ The systematic exclusion of women and girls from public life is an intentional move away from the ‘democratic principles’ Akhundzada so scornfully mentioned.

Despite this, a small light flickers, and there have been some brave acts of resistance. Hamidi said to me that ‘there were mass protests at the beginning, consisting mainly of women and girls.’ Although the protests have tapered off, ‘there are individual actions from brave individuals including human rights activists, women, and journalists.’ For instance, Ismail Mashal, a journalism professor who ran a private university, ripped up his academic records on live TV, handed out books in public, and refused to discriminate between his female and male students. For his courage and solidarity with the women of Afghanistan, he was met with violence and imprisonment.

Mashal’s stand was particularly notable given the pre-eminence of women in the protests against the Taliban. As a Human Rights Watch report noted in February 2023:

‘Mashal’s sense of justice, solidarity, and dissent provided a ray of hope in a country where peaceful protests are often solely championed by women. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, public protests involving Afghan men standing up for women’s rights have been rare.’

This fact is another aspect of the tragedy: those with the most to lose, women, have made the greatest sacrifices to retain their freedoms, while the lack of solidarity from the other half of the population is one reason for their failure.

The Window of Hope women’s movement, an organisation fighting gender apartheid, recently released a statement:

‘We Afghan women have always raised our voice against the violation of human rights and the systematic suppression and elimination of women since the Taliban took over. Our voice should have been heard. But today, unfortunately, by ignoring the wishes of women and the people of Afghanistan, the process of systematic exclusion of women, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners, extra-legal gang rape trials of prisoners, suppression of ethnic and religious minorities has become a normal thing.’

That last fact is one too often forgotten. Despite claiming the status of an Islamic state, which should in theory not discriminate between different peoples, the Taliban is a deeply racist and sectarian organisation. Primarily populated by Pashtuns, they consider only themselves as ‘proper’ Afghans. Dr Nasimi told me that ‘the Taliban, when they entered Kabul, shot many members of the Tajik and Hazara ethnic groups.’

This is old behaviour recreated in new circumstances. A Human Rights Watch report from November 1998 chronicled the massacre of thousands of Hazara men and boys in the northwestern city of Mazar-i Sharif. This is further supported by a September 2020 written submission from the Hazara Research Collective to the International Relations and Defence Committee within the UK Parliament: ‘Over 8,000 Hazaras were systematically killed by the Taliban in the Mazar-i Sharif massacre of 1998.’

Ethnic and religious hatred is a sign of a disordered and diseased ideology, and this thread of violence connects the Taliban of the 1990s to the Taliban of today. A former government advisor who worked in the government overthrown by the Taliban in 2021 told me that ‘people in Afghanistan are not mentally well, they do not have any position in the country’s social and political life, they are not free to express themselves and all people think of is how to escape the country.’ There is undoubtedly truth in what he says. But, as the words and deeds of Afghanistan’s brave women show, a small light still exists, and one day, it shall burn much more brightly.

Related reading

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

South Asia’s silenced feminists, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

A new pact for atheism in the 21st century, by Leo Igwe

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The post A Small Light: Acts of Resistance in Afghanistan appeared first on The Freethinker.

In 2018, a group of feminists in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, decided to march for gender justice on 8 March, International Women’s Day. They named it Aurat March (Women’s March). Hundreds marched with colourful placards demanding immediate social change in the country. The march kept growing and in subsequent years marches were held in various other cities including Lahore, Islamabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Larkana, Faisalabad, and Sukkur. This year saw hundreds join the seventh Aurat March in several cities across Pakistan. Nevertheless, the march has seen severe backlash over the years, not only from the media and society at large but also from the state.

How did this radical and reviled movement begin? I spoke to classical dancer and social activist Sheema Kermani, who has been involved with the Aurat March Karachi Chapter since its inception. She said that their idea was to show society that women have had enough and that they were ready for change. They had no idea that the Aurat March would turn into such a massive movement:

‘Seven years ago, we did not know how far it would go or whether it would be more than that. We wanted to show our protest and resistance against patriarchy. More importantly, we wanted to show that women in Pakistan were ready for a change.’

The mainstream media mostly ignored the first march, but this is true for all social movements in the beginning. However, as the movement grew, some of the slogans from the march such as mera jism meri marzi (my body, my choice) went viral on the internet and inspired a huge backlash. The march was accused of being against the societal norms, religion, and culture of Pakistani society.

Some opponents of Aurat have tried to place restrictions on the march, claiming that the slogans were immoral and indecent. However, Islamabad High Court dismissed that petition and ordered that the words used in the slogans of the march should be understood based on the intentions of the marchers rather than through the mindset of a certain section of society who opposed the march. Another attempt to ban the march was rejected by the Lahore High Court. Since these cases, the organisers have worked hard to keep the march going every year while handling the backlash and court cases and keeping the marches in line with legal directions—not to mention keeping the marchers safe.

Journalist and feminist Sabahat Zakariya, a regular at Aurat March Lahore Chapter, told me that the march’s biggest achievement was to push people to talk about issues that they would not even normally count as issues:

‘The march did a lot to bring certain intangible ideas to the mainstream. Like [the slogan] khud khana garam karlo (warm your food yourself). It is not a light issue. It is about domestic burdens and who takes work responsibility in the house. These are very important things that need…to be reflected upon.’

The state has also resisted the march. The organisers of several chapters have faced issues with getting permits for the march and have had to deal with security arrangements, route approval, handling court petitions against the march, and filing petitions to seek assistance in carrying out the march. These things take most of their energy and resources, leaving them with limited room for focusing on the march itself. An organiser from the Lahore Chapter told me (on the condition of anonymity):

‘I think people did not understand the march in 2018. We started seeing resistance after the 2019 march, especially at the state level. Every year, the resistance is different. Last year, we were not permitted to arrange the march [in Lahore], though we have been marching for several years. Eventually, the court permitted us.’

The organiser said that some chapters face more difficulties than others. In some cities like Karachi and Lahore, the march is more or less accepted, while in Islamabad the police restrict marchers to a specific area. In some conservative areas of the country, it is entirely impossible to organise a march.

‘I feel the government [and the police] have gotten used to the march. Now we do not see administrative resistance. They have security plans, they know our routes…but society gives us strong resistance. Some file petitions [against the march] every year,’ the Lahore Chapter organiser said. ‘In Islamabad, police give more resistance to marchers. They did not let them march beyond the Press Club [this year]. In Karachi and Lahore, the situation is a bit more lenient. Though we do [still] face some resistance from the police.’

2021 was the toughest year for Aurat organisers and marchers. They had to deal with several blasphemy cases against them. This was when they became more cautious of the media. Many of them would decline to comment or would request anonymity. They were already wary of the mainstream media due to incorrect reporting and its insensitivity towards gender issues and events. The blasphemy accusations increased this wariness. As the Lahore Chapter organiser said,

‘We recognize that more engagement with media will bring harm to the march because they do not have gender sensitivity and skills to cover [the] women’s movement. It is not our goal that the media should cover the march much due to bad experiences. We think it is good to stay [aside] from the media.’

Zakariya is of the opinion that the mainstream media has deliberately not been engaging with the movement. However, she thinks the march has become ‘dull’ because now the marchers are not as bold as they used to be. They are more engaged with the mainstream media critique. They bring with them placards that are more focused on answering media criticisms than on expressing their own views.

Dr Feroza Batool, who researched backlashes to the Aurat March for her doctoral thesis, believes that despite the popularity and impact of the march, it has experienced an intense decline in its momentum, mainly due to the backlash:

‘I feel that the momentum of the Aurat March has decreased. The march was giving space for people to come there and talk about their issues. It was perhaps a big thing for a group that wanted that space to let out their frustration and reflect on their lived experiences through their placards. But there were other people too who, when [they] received backlash, could not handle it and they decided to back off.’

Dr Batool also raised concerns about the movement’s inclusivity and connection to the grassroots. She found in her research that march organisers in several cities started to distance themselves from local organisations and unions working for women’s rights:

‘I feel the open idea of different perspectives on feminism and the environment that was there in the start for everyone started to reduce over time. The march is not very inclusive. The march [has tilted] to the elite circle of feminists in the past few years. It happens to other movements too. A movement starts, people join it, but then some hijack it. I feel those on the forefront of such movements get some rigidity in themselves and they expect that others [should] follow them with the same perspective.’

However, she also said that the march had shaken the patriarchy in the conservative society of Pakistan and that it would keep doing so due to the involvement of youth in the movement. Nonetheless, the march will have to do a lot more to turn into a movement that involves everyone from every segment of society, and it faces a long and difficult struggle to realise its aim of women’s emancipation in Pakistan.

Further reading

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

South Asia’s silenced feminists, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March appeared first on The Freethinker.

Since their earliest origins, Christian cultures have been preoccupied with the temptations of the Devil, and humanity’s susceptibility to them. ‘Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ (James 1: 14-15)

The popularity of Satan, the arch-tempter, may be on the wane, but Police Scotland, in preparing to implement the Scottish Hate Crime Act, have found a contemporary devil to replace him: the Hate Monster. ‘When yer feeling insecure, when ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon [sic].’

Beware, anyone who has ever felt any heated disagreement with someone or something, especially where a ‘protected characteristic’ is involved: you may be possessed by the Hate Monster and anything you say or do, especially on social media, may be used by righteous informers and priests – sorry, police – as evidence of your sinful mind.

As far as the protected characteristic of religion is concerned, the unbeliever may be glad that, under section 9(b) of the Act, expressions of ‘antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult’ are not, on their own, automatically deemed to constitute ‘threatening or abusive’ behaviour, which is the first element in the section 4(2) offence of ‘stirring up hatred’. (The second element of the offence is the intent to ‘stir up hatred against a group of persons’ on the basis of their protected characteristic.)

Yet to advocates of open debate, this carve-out for free expression about religion offers tepid comfort. Not only is it apparently confined to certain categories of expression, but it does not apply to any of the other protected characteristics, including, most controversially, ‘transgender identity’.

As a criterion of judging whether apparently threatening or abusive behaviour is ‘reasonable’ and therefore defensible, section 4(5) invokes the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, including of ‘ideas that offend, shock or disturb’. However, under section 9, while ‘discussion or criticism’ of protected characteristics is not automatically deemed threatening or abusive, antipathy, ridicule and the like presumably would be in the case of any characteristic except religion.

Altogether, the wording of the Act raises several questions about how it will function in practice, and how sections 4 and 9 will relate to each other.

If someone is gauche enough, for instance, to criticise the claim that a man can change into a woman, how is he or she to know whether doing so will be deemed mere discussion or an act that a ‘reasonable’ person would consider threatening or abusive – and if the latter, whether it will itself still be judged ‘reasonable’ on the basis of the ECHR right to freedom of expression, or will be held an unreasonable, impermissible act of stirring up hatred against trans people? Who should decide what is ‘reasonable’ in such fraught debates? You might as well ask a lay court to adjudicate on the relative merits of con- and transubstantiation.

Moreover, if it is a question of intent, how is the court to determine, as a second and distinct test, what the defendant intended the effect of their words to be, other than by the words themselves?

The overall thrust of the ‘stirring-up’ offences is to imply that the expression of disagreement about characteristics specially defined and sanctioned by the Scottish state is always potentially criminal. This is a short step from criminalising thought itself. And that is what the Hate Monster is all about.

The idea that thought can be sinful goes right back to the Old Testament: ‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ (Leviticus 18: 28)

From next week in Scotland, therefore, who knows how mild an expression of doubtful or dissenting views, in particular ‘gender critical’ ones, may be sufficient to saddle a person with a criminal record – or whether most dissenters will be too afraid to speak at all, because they do not want to risk it. No wonder the Act has been so heavily criticised by women’s rights campaigners, as well as free speech advocates more generally.

Of course, if you are inclined to express antipathy to women, no need to worry – biological sex, unlike transgender identity, is not on the protected list.

Section 12 does contain a power for the Ministers to add ‘the characteristic of sex’ to the list. So in theory, if supporters of women’s rights ever won a majority at Holyrood, they could implement this section, and then sit back and watch the police and the courts tearing their hair out as trans women denounced women for misgendering, and women denounced trans women for misogyny.

In the long term, though, slapping more restrictions on speech about ever more categories of protected groups will benefit no one, except perhaps those who happen to be in power for the time being. If we want a society which is not a dictatorship, if we believe in intellectual and moral progress rather than stagnation, then we have to be prepared for give and take: to be offended, insulted, made uncomfortable and even upset by the views of people who disagree with us, even on the most sensitive subjects of all.

As Jonathan Rauch put it, ‘To appeal to a country’s conscience, you need an antagonist.’ If you demonise your antagonists, if you label anyone who disagrees with you an agent of Satan or the Hate Monster, then you as a country are depriving yourselves of the opportunity for moral doubt and conflict, which is the essence of a conscience.

Plato once defined thinking as the soul’s dialogue with itself. Take away a country’s opportunity for dialogue and disagreement, and you might as well kill its soul.

The post From Satan to the Hate Monster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

At the Freethinker, one of our aims has always been to foster a culture of free speech and open debate. It was from this perspective that, as editor in 2022, I first became interested in the debate over the possible meanings of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and the consequences for women, men and transgender people. There was a concern that voices critical of the claims of transgender activism were being suppressed or demonised across much of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia, both in Britain, America, and elsewhere. There was also a concern that transgender activists and their supporters might be putting pressure on public and private institutions to adopt their views unquestioningly.

For these reasons, the Freethinker has so far published four articles exploring objections to the claims of transgender activism: an opinion piece by the gender studies researcher Eliza Mondegreen; two interviews, one with the journalist and campaigner Helen Joyce, and the other with the philosopher Alex Byrne; and a report by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid on the spread of the ideology to South Asia.

It has been difficult to find any defender of at least some of the claims of transgenderism who would be willing to talk to us. We are therefore delighted to publish the below interview with Louise Antony, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (‘UMass’), who describes herself as a ‘socialist intersectionalist feminist’. Over a long and distinguished career, she has published widely on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminist philosophy and atheism. In October last year, she debated Alex Byrne at the Houston Institute on The Ontology of Gender.

I spoke to Professor Antony across the Atlantic via Zoom. Our conversation lasted three hours. Below is a condensed transcript of the interview, which she has read and amended to ensure that it accurately reflects her views.

Readers will observe that, in the gender debate, everything is open to question: language, science, subjective experience, objective fact, culture, nature, relations between the sexes, and what it means to be human. Hardly surprising, then, if this dialogue ends in a state of aporia or bafflement.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

The Freethinker: Which areas of philosophy have you been interested in over the course of your career, and how did you come to the gender debate?

Louise Antony: I started graduate school interested in the philosophy of language. When I went there, I discovered cognitive science. I was at Harvard. MIT is just down the road, and people there, like Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and Ned Block, were diving into the idea that there could be a science of the mind, which was a view that had been in disrepute before the ‘60s. Behaviourism, which I did not find interesting, had, up till then, ruled the day. One of my teachers at Harvard, Willard van Orman Quine, said that we should study knowledge naturalistically: we should ask how we actually have knowledge. (This seemed to me exactly what cognitive science was doing, but ironically Quine never embraced it.) Quine’s philosophical outlook was called ‘naturalism’: it was the idea that philosophical questions are continuous with questions in science. That outlook coloured everything that I became interested in, including language, philosophy of mind, and the relationship between the science of psychology and the other sciences, in particular biology. Throughout my work, I have always wanted the philosophical claims we make to be consistent with and informed by the relevant science.

In the 1990s, I edited a volume of essays with my friend Charlote Witt called A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. That was my entry into feminist philosophy. I also became interested, somewhat serendipitously, in writing about atheism and religion. I edited a book called Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, where I invited philosophers who self-described as atheists to talk about their relationship to religion.

Freethinker: As a woman, have you found that academic philosophy is a tough environment? And if so, has that changed at all over the years?

Louise Antony: From an early age, I was aware that I did things that girls were not supposed to do. One of the things that I got in trouble for was arguing with people. When I first started taking philosophy at Syracuse University, I had no idea what it was. But when I got into the classroom and found it was just arguing about things, I thought, yes. I found myself naturally fitting into the ethos of asking questions, making objections. I loved the norm that when you asked somebody a question or made an objection, they were supposed to say something relevant back to you. Philosophy felt like home to me. That is not every woman’s experience, but it was mine.

That’s not to say it was easy to be a woman in the academy – there was a lot of prejudice against women, and a lot of inappropriate treatment.  There were not many of us – that has changed a little.

Freethinker: How would you define your philosophical conception of feminism as you have developed it over the years?

Louise Antony: Feminists disagree about many fundamental things. What we all have in common, I think, is commitment to the full personhood of women and its social recognition and material support. Where we differ is over the things like the nature of the obstacles that need to be overcome, and what other changes are necessary, such as in the law. That kind of reform is as far as some feminists want to go. I and my socialist feminist friends want to go much further.

Freethinker: So you would describe yourself as a socialist feminist?

Antony: I am a socialist and intersectionalist feminist. The idea is that there are different parameters or vectors of oppression, and your social location is a matter of what point you are at in a multidimensional grid. Parameters include race, disability, economic status, relationship to geopolitics, and being a woman. The thing that women have in common is their occupation of a social role that fundamentallyinvolves the idea that women are for other people: for men, for children, for the elderly and sick, anyone who is in need of care.

Freethinker: What, in your view, is ‘sex’, what is ‘gender’, and how do they relate to each other?

Antony: I am a realist about biological sex. I think it is a robust dimorphism in the human species. There are intersex conditions, where an individual has some of the characteristics typical of one biological sex, but not all of them. The estimates of the occurrence of these conditions seem to range from about one and a half to three per cent. So I do not think the existence of intersex conditions means that we do not have a robust biological phenomenon here. This puts me at odds with many other feminists. However, I do not think that biological sex determines gender, which is a social construction.

In a paper I published in 2020, ‘Feminism Without Metaphysics or a Deflationary Account of Gender’, I drew an analogy between gender and parenthood. I use the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to genders and the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ to refer to sexes. That is just an orthographic rhetorical convenience – the terms are highly contested, and indeed, in ordinary language, they are ambiguous.

I think the existence of the biological dimorphism explains why there are systems of gender – what I call ‘gender regimes’. By that, I mean social roles that are constructed and elaborated differently at different times and places in human history, but that all have the function of trying to discipline people into particular social roles on the basis of actual or presumed biological differences. The analogy with parents is that I call contributing biological material to the development of a child being a ‘progenitor’, a matter of biology, just as being ‘male’ or ‘female’ is a matter of biology. But not all progenitors are parents, and similarly not all male or female people are men or women.

When people ask if biological sex explains gender, my answer is that in a sense, it does, because the fact that we socially divide human beings into men and women, boys and girls is due ultimately to the biological dimorphism. But there is not a deterministic relationship between being biologically male or female and being a man or a woman. There is a lot of social elaboration that is necessary.

Freethinker: Don’t the central cases, whether in being a man or woman, or in being a parent, all have a biological foundation? On this view, the central case of being a parent is a biological parent; the central case of being a man or woman is biological.

Antony: I do not know. Statistically, there are probably more biological parents who are parents in virtue of biological connection to the child than there are other kinds of parents. But in contemporary society, in the United States, for example, there are a lot of adoptive parents, there are a lot of step-parents whom we do not think of as marginal cases of parents. The central cases of parents are individuals who accept and carry out responsibility for the physical well-being of the child, have a secure emotional connection to the child, foster the child’s psychological, intellectual, maybe spiritual development, and so forth. People who fit pretty squarely inside our conception of what it is to be a parent do not need to be biologically connected to the child.

 No one thinks of anonymous sperm donors as fathers. There are cases of a so-called ‘surrogate’ mother that are very difficult. There are cases where she has contributed the egg. There are cases where she is carrying an embryo developed from an egg contributed by some other woman. Is she a mother or not? There have been court cases of so-called surrogate mothers wanting to keep the child. I think that being a parent is not so much about whether you meet the biological condition, but about how much of the total conception of parenthood you fulfil.

In the case of gender, statistically, overwhelmingly, the individuals who are socially women are going to be biologically female. And similarly, the individuals who are socially men are going to be biologically male. I do not know how significant that fact is.

Freethinker: On both these questions – the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and the definition of ‘parent’ – is there not an objection that you are putting the cart before the horse? In the case of parents, would it not be preferable to say that biological parents are, since ancient times, the natural kind, and foster parents, step-parents and so on are caregivers – substitute but not literal parents? This debate about progenitors versus parents, biological versus socially constructed men and women, is this only even possible nowadays because of where we are scientifically?

Antony: The donation of an egg to another woman who is going to carry a child is certainly a new thing. But adoption is an old institution. There are a lot of societies that institutionalise the bringing of a non-biological child into, say, a royal family. There has also been a widespread practice among women of getting pregnant by another man when their husband is impotent or sterile, without acknowledging this. So in a sense, sperm donation has been going on for a long time.

There is much that is very new to our species, technologically speaking, which is tremendously important in shaping our social life. But even if many of these questions only arise because of recent technological advances, what would follow from that about gender and sex?

Freethinker: One might think that what we mean by a man or woman, or a parent, is very old. Do innovations in science mean that we need to fundamentally revise central concepts like these? Or instead, do the possibilities of sperm donation and surrogacy, or of using surgery and medicines to become more like the opposite sex, not change the meaning of our central concepts, but simply expand their range?

Antony: In philosophical terms, I think concepts are primitive in the sense of being the smallest unit of thought. On this view, a concept like ‘dog’ gets connected in thought to dogs in the world by some process. I have spent a lot of my career trying to figure out what this process is. It has something to do with the causal relations between dogs and a tokening of that primitive element of thought, dog. Words then get their meaning by being attached to these concepts.

Now, what is it that ‘man’, as a concept in my mind, gets connected to in the world? That relation is fixed independently of what I think or believe about men, or what I want men to be. It just means that when I think a thought in terms of ‘man’, it is going to have a certain set of truth conditions in the world. That does not have any bearing on who that term should or does apply to in a public language which we share.

Whatever my concept of man is, when I talk with you, a kind of negotiation can go on between us about what we want that term to pick out. And this negotiation can be very explicit, as it is when we make laws like which people are going to be allowed into a bathroom when the sign says ‘men’.

What you are calling a concept, I would call a conception: a body of ideas, beliefs, emotional stuff – a big mess. There are some beliefs that are central to that conception, and there are some that are peripheral and that get changed all the time. Every time you change your mind about something, you are changing the conception associated with the component concepts.

Take the concept of flying. For the vast majority of our history on the planet, human beings could not fly. Can we fly now? We can get in airplanes and travel through the air. Is that ‘flying’? Does it matter? It does if you are writing legislation on flight safety. There has to be a legal use for the term ‘flight’ or ‘flying’ that covers that.

The whole debate over the concept of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is misspent philosophical energy. What we should be figuring out is, do we want people to be able to use bathrooms that align with their sense of who they are? Do we want individuals who have gone through male puberty to play at an elite level in women’s sports? These are the questions that people really have about transgendered individuals.

Freethinker: That sounds like a practical answer. In the UK, there is an organisation called Sex Matters. According to their website, their aim is ‘to promote clarity about sex in law, policy and language in order to protect everybody’s rights.’ In other words, as far as I understand it, their position is that there are some areas of life where, regardless of what ‘gender’ may be, it is sex that matters – for instance as to whether biological males should be allowed in women’s prisons.

Antony: What do you mean by a ‘biological male’? I do not mean to say that ‘you can’t define “male” so we don’t have to talk about it’. But it is important to recognise that many trans individuals have altered their biology in important ways. If you have got an individual who has XY chromosomes, has had their penis removed and fashioned into a vagina – ‘fashioned’ is a bad word, I’m sorry, reconstructed as a vagina with a clitoris – has had their testes removed so they are no longer producing the same level of endogenous testosterone that they had been, is taking hormones, has developed visible breasts… Is this a man?

Freethinker: Certainly there are extreme cases of people who try to alter their physical condition.

Antony: They do not just try, they are successful.

Freethinker: Would you say that a man who had undergone these changes had in fact become a biological female?

Antony: I think that biological categories are fuzzy in general.

Freethinker: You did say that sex is real.

Antony: Sex is real. In nature, you can sometimes give definitions and characterisations of categories. But in biology, the category of ‘species’ does not have clean boundaries. Does that mean that there is a big issue about what is and is not a dog? In fact, there is a division of expert opinion about whether wolves and dogs are members of the same species or members of different species. Because when you have creatures that are at the boundaries of fuzzy categories like ‘species’, the criteria will not classify them clearly one way or the other.

Trans individuals, especially if they have undergone medical or surgical alterations, are at the boundary of the male-female categorisation system, just as intersex individuals are. For example, the runner Caster Semenya has never thought of herself as anything other than a woman, but in fact, she is an XY individual with very, very severe androgen insensitivity. Is Semenya a male or a female?

Freethinker: These are questions of biological categories. Semenya may well be right at the boundary. But are we talking about sex or about gender? You have mentioned people who go through some sort of biological change or have a specific biological condition. Should we make a distinction between asking, (a), whether a man who has had his penis cut off and so forth should be allowed in a women’s prison, and (b), whether a man who identifies as a woman but has not undergone any medical treatment should be so allowed? In all these areas – prisons, sports, et cetera – is it a matter of biological sex or is it a matter of gender self-identification?

Antony: It might vary from question to question. It depends on the particularities of the biological differences. On the question of whether trans individuals should be allowed to compete in sports categories according to their identity, the empirical evidence seems to vary between studies. Some say they should, others say it is dangerous for biological males to compete with biological females. But there are lots of things to take into account when we look at the particular case of trans individuals in sports.

Freethinker: Is there not a biological asymmetry here: unlike trans women in women’s sports, surely no one ever worries about trans men competing in men’s sports, because it is clear that they will never win?

Antony: It is not true that trans men never win. They do sometimes. Trans women do not always win in their categories – although they often do. Caster Semenya does not win every time she runs, but she wins a lot of the time. Just looking at her, you can see that she has more well-defined muscles than biologically paradigmatic women generally have.

One of the things that needs to be asked when addressing the sports question is safety. I do not take seriously the idea that having trans women or cis men competing in a different category from cis women arises from concerns about the latter’s safety. If people were concerned about the well-being of athletes, American football would not exist.

Sports categorisations are supposed to put people who are physically alike into the same category, so that the only determinant of the winner is talent and effort. But what happens in elite sports is that they select for freaks. If you are a man above seven feet tall in the United States, your chances are apparently one in seven of becoming an NBA basketball player.

Freethinker: Certainly some men are stronger than others, some women are stronger than others. But is it not the case that in general, men are just, as a matter of biological fact, stronger than women – by quite a considerable margin?

Antony: Who cares? What is the point of citing the average? My husband is exactly my height. He is below average height for males. I am probably a little stronger than the average woman of my age and height because I have a personal trainer who helps me to gain strength. The interesting questions are, what needs to be done, who can do it? If I need help getting something from a tall shelf in Whole Foods, I look for a tall person: I look along the parameter that is actually relevant to the task.

Freethinker: Wouldn’t a logical consequence of this position be that there is no point in having women’s sports at all, because women are almost never going to beat men? Why not just throw open women’s sports to all men?

Antony: Take boxing, where there are weight categories. The point of categorisation is to try to equalise for fixed physical conditions, so that winning reflects inherent talent and effort. In women’s sports and men’s sports, it is not just that men are bigger or stronger, it is that their physical talents are distributed in different ways. In basketball, upper body strength is an important feature. Even very tall women are not going to be able to compete at the most elite levels, are probably not going to shoot as well, or as far as the men at top levels. Sports categories are proxy indicators because you cannot really get into the precise physiological details.

In an ideal world, there might be exceptional tall women who would compete in an NBA height-based category alongside shorter men. The system that we have now excludes a lot of men from elite competition, when they could win if they played against women. The whole system of elite sports is going to leave out most of both of the populations of men and women.  A different category system would be more inclusive in many ways.

Freethinker: In which categories, if any, do you think biological differences between men and women matter, and how far? There are so many areas we could talk about: not only prisons, but medical statistics, women’s charities and refuges, whether trans women make appropriate representatives for women, trans women who want to date lesbians, and so on. Are there any areas where biological differences ought to be the starting point?

Antony: I do not want to say in a blanket way that trans women should be excluded from any of these designated women’s spaces. I am open to the possibility that there might be specific reasons why trans women should be excluded, but not qua trans women. If there is a support group for people who have suffered miscarriages, that is not open to all women to begin with, only to those who have had miscarriages. A trans man who suffered a miscarriage should be allowed in that space.

We have to look at why the space is designated as a women’s space, what the specific nature of the gathering is such that designating it a women’s space is a good proxy for the specifically pertinent characteristic of the space.

The cases that I struggle with are those where the space is a women’s space because of the presumption that women have been exposed to certain kinds of socialisation and social pressures. Women in academia suffer – from people not recognising them when they raise their hands at meetings, for instance. This is low-grade suffering, but not getting credit for contributions, having one’s published work neglected and so forth, can have a large impact on one’s career. Women like to get together and discuss what they can do about it.

From what I have read of the experiences of trans women in philosophy, they discover that they are not getting called on as much as they used to before they transitioned. And so they are beginning to understand in a different way what it is to be a woman in the field. But I think there might be spaces where trans women should be quiet and allow the experiences of women who have grown as women, have gone into the profession and been socialised as women, to take centre stage.

Freethinker: It is interesting that you might see the case for giving women more space in issues where they have suffered from discriminatory social, rather than biological, pressures. But returning to biology, as a woman, would you not agree that when you have a child, it completely changes you (speaking as someone who has also been through it) – and in a way that only someone who is biologically female can be changed? There are scientific studies on the way the brain changes during pregnancy.

Antony: The study that you refer to was very small – which is one of the many problems with brain imaging studies. I do think that pregnancy was a singular, extraordinary experience for me, but it is different for different people.  All experiences ‘change our brains’.

Freethinker: Would you agree that it is an experience that a man cannot have?

Antony: I have several female women friends who have not been able to become pregnant for one reason or another. Yes, pregnancy is a singular experience, and some people who cannot have that experience are very sad about that.  But why do we have to pick it out by proxy and say it is a woman’s experience? When you have a child, you stop being the main character in the story of your life. That is a profound change – whether you adopted the child or had the child biologically. But I am the same person I was before my pregnancies. My personality is the same. I have learned things from having children, but we learn things from a lot of the experiences that we have. I find it romantic and unnuanced to say in a blanket way that the biological fact of having  a child changes you in some uniform way.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that there are clear, obvious biological changes to your body once you have a child? The shape of your pelvis changes, your hair falls out, and so on. And I am not a scientist, but perhaps women in general also bond with their own child in a special, biologically grounded way, as mothers.

Antony: The literature on the biology of childbirth and motherhood is partisan. People have axes to grind. But women successfully raise children under all sorts of adverse circumstances, and women fuck up their children under all sorts of propitious circumstances. This single biological parameter does not provide much information about the quality of your connection to your child, or the nature of the way you relate to them.

Freethinker: Nevertheless, would you accept that bearing a child does make a difference to a woman, and is one experience that a woman can have and a man cannot?

Antony: It is true. I would like to have a penis, because I think there are some experiences that men can have that I would be interested in having. So what? Of course pregnancy and childbirth change you, but there is very little you can say in a general, uniform way about this change, except for the things that have to do with the social implications of being a parent – which are eminently changeable, and that affect adoptive and step-parents as well.

Freethinker: You might also say, as some feminists have been saying for a long time, that being a woman should in general not matter. Biological considerations aside, women should be able to do everything that men can do. Why not?

Antony: I do not want to frame my aspirations for women in terms of something relative to men. I want people to be able to flourish – that is the goal of feminism.

As a socialist feminist, I think there are things that we can do socially that we cannot do individually, or not do as well. Many of the things women have traditionally done – caring for children, educating children, caring for the sick and the elderly – these are responsibilities that ought to be borne socially. Social support for these things will help more children flourish, and will enable women to flourish in more ways.

Freethinker: What about other areas where biology might be said to be relevant to the way in which women and men are treated? For example, in prisons – where women might not want biological males to be there because they say they have flashbacks to a man who raped them. If, on the other hand, trans women are likely to be ill-treated in men’s prisons, why not have a third category of prisons, or prison facilities, for transgender people?

Antony: We’re going to build separate prisons for trans offenders? That is not going to happen. But it is not clear that we have to have what we think of as women’s prisons and men’s prisons. The particularities matter. You cannot just say there is a woman who is going to feel triggered if she sees a penis. That is not the end of the story – it is an element of what we have to consider.

Freethinker: Is it fair on biological women to allow trans women in women’s prisons?

Antony: This is going to sound like I am anti-woke, but I do think that talk of triggering has gotten out of hand. People can be triggered by stuff that is not systematic. If there was a spider in my prison cell, I would go nuts.

Freethinker: Do you think that biological women should ever have the right to a space which excludes biological men?

Antony: Not a fundamental right and not a right per se. Do you think people in general have a right to not be exposed to experiences that are triggering for them?

Freethinker: I would agree with you that there should be no blanket right, though I would have thought that there should be room for protection against triggering in cases, for example, of clear psychological trauma. But in the case of trans women in women’s prisons, might they not also pose the additional risk to women of actual physical harm?

Antony: I know of no evidence that cis women are more vulnerable to sexual violence, either in restrooms or in prisons, by the presence of a transgender woman. If you are a cis male rapist and you are after cis women, what better place to go than a women’s bathroom where there are likely not to be any other cis men? If it were a gender neutral bathroom, there would be a chance that there would be other cis men there to deter you from realising your intentions. A woman’s actual safety is not secured by having women-only bathrooms.  A cis-woman colleague of mine was assaulted in a ‘women’s room’ in our university building.

If you put a trans woman into a male prison, what is going to happen to her? She is going to be brutally assaulted and possibly killed, certainly raped, by some cis men in that prison. That is perfectly predictable. So why would you add to the already existing problem of rape and assault in male prisons by putting someone there who identifies as a woman?

Freethinker: But then, on the other hand, they might be a real threat to women if they went into a women’s prison. As in the case of Isla Bryson, who was convicted for raping two women as a man, and then transitioned during the trial; or the case of the violent offender, Tiffany Scott, who transitioned from man to woman during a life sentence and applied to be transferred to a women’s prison.

Antony: Did these individuals rape anyone once in prison?

Freethinker: No. In the event, Bryson was not in the women’s prison estate for very long, and Scott’s transfer was blocked. Scott had been previously been convicted of violent offences while in a men’s prison. Both Isla Bryson and Tiffany Scott also retain male genitalia. In any case, is the problem not that someone’s rights are at risk either way round?

Antony: I do not accept the assumption that a trans woman is more likely to commit a violent assault than a cis woman. Cis women commit battery and rape, too.

Freethinker: Although it seems well established that biological women in general commit a much small percentage of violent crimes than biological men. In any case, with a pre-operative trans woman, who still had male genitalia, would you accept that such a person would, in general, present a greater risk in a women’s prison than another woman?

Antony: Suppose I grant that such a person would be physically capable of raping a woman: still, how do we know when a person is sincerely claiming a gender identity that does not accord with their current physical properties? I would like to see some evidence that cis men dishonestly claiming identity as a woman is a serious concern. There is, in at least some people’s minds, an exaggerated likelihood that a biological male is going to the trouble of really pretending to be someone who identifies as a woman for the sake of winning some athletic competition or serving their time in a women’s prison. If you have someone who has been living as a woman and enduring the difficulty and opprobrium that that still brings with it in our societies, and they are doing it for a significant amount of time, that is good evidence that they sincerely have a different gender identity.

Trans women are people. To put a person into an environment where they are likely to suffer severe degrees of physical abuse is a serious harm. There is no conservative, harm-free alternative here. For a person who has the gender identity of a woman but the biological characteristics of a male, the question is whether the possibility that that person is going to cause severe psychic or physical distress to some women incarcerated in the same place, high enough to justify putting that person into a male prison – an environment where there is a high probability that they are going to suffer severe physical harm.

Freethinker: So is it a matter of weighing the risk to the trans person versus the risk to the women?

Antony: You say ‘risk to the women’. We need to consider all persons. I am not a utilitarian, but I do think it matters what the consequences of our actions are, morally speaking. And when you look at the consequences, you have got to look at not just the possibilities, but the probabilities. I would bet that most women prisoners are far more concerned about being raped by the guards than by a transgender woman. (See this article.)

Freethinker: Another problem with failing to distinguish between trans women and women on biological grounds arguably comes in scientific research and the compilation of medical data. Would it not be problematic if a trans woman was labelled female on the medical record, and then their data was used to contribute to a picture of how diseases affect women’s bodies? Would doing so not risk skewing the data – if you accept that women’s bodies are biologically different from men’s and have, to some extent, different susceptibilities to different diseases?

Antony: Maybe medical science should ask more directly about the conditions that they are concerned about. If you are an XX individual, there are certain regularities that are captured when we taxonomise in terms of men and women, whether those medical regularities are the result of innate biological differences or the differences that result from being socialised as men or women. Take, for instance, the appalling difference in the rate of maternal mortality between black and white women in the US. Is that the result of some biological similarity among black women versus white women, or is it the result of the social conditions under which black and white women typically give birth?

There are a lot of people who are uncontroversially women or uncontroversially men who are biologically atypical – and their data goes into the samples. That is why we have statistics to find central tendencies and to try to tease out causally relevant factors.

Freethinker: But men, for instance, can get prostate cancer. Women can’t.

Antony: That’s right.

Freethinker: Women can get endometriosis. Men cannot get endometriosis because they do not have a womb.

Antony: In this case, people without wombs cannot get endometriosis – including women who do not have wombs.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that people with XX chromosomes, which are found in every cell of the body, have different genetic susceptibilities to certain diseases and conditions from those with XY chromosomes? Women are more susceptible to breast cancer than men, for example.

Antony: Maybe so. But there is a much higher mortality rate for men who have breast cancer than women, partly because it is standardly believed that men cannot get breast cancer. It is clear that the parameter for effective medical intervention is being susceptible to breast cancer.

Freethinker: But how would we even know that biological men could get breast cancer in the first place, or that they had a higher mortality rate, if patients were simply able to designate themselves ‘male’ or ‘female’ on medical forms regardless of their biological sex? Wouldn’t the statistics get muddled?

Antony: Hang on. If somebody comes to the hospital with a lump that may be a sign of cancer, the diagnostic procedures are the same. Classifying them as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ does not add any information to the clinical situation.

Freethinker: But would it not add information for the future, for people down the line who wanted to know what percentage of biological males and females get breast cancer, whether one sex was more susceptible than the other?

Antony: Look, there are generalisations. It makes sense to put information about menstruation in places where girls are going to see it, despite the fact that some of those girls are going to be amenorrhoeic. There might be some androgen insensitive XY individuals among the girls. There may be some atypical XX individuals who are in the boys’ room. It is very difficult to craft generalisations in precise terms.

Freethinker: In statistical science, the way you make patterns is by amassing data. The patterns help you to make diagnostic predictions, even if they are not always accurate for all patients, who may differ amongst themselves. But even to compose the general pattern, don’t you need to have some parameters – some truth basis, such as knowing whether it represents males or females or both?

Antony: I was with you up to ‘truth basis’. What I am challenging is the claim that, for medical purposes, the proxy classifications, man and woman, are preferable characterisations. Take information about endometriosis. Why shouldn’t the pamphlets in the doctor’s office say, ‘If you have a womb, read this pamphlet’?

Freethinker: How about, ‘If you are a biological female, read this pamphlet.’ Wouldn’t that be the same thing?

Antony: Why not just say, ‘If you have a womb’? That is the specific circumstance where you need to be concerned about endometriosis. Why is it better to say ‘biological female’?

Freethinker: Because biological females may not all have a womb, but they almost all do. Even if they do not, their body still has most of the same features as other females. Would you not agree that biological males and females involve two types of body with some broad differences and which to some extent behave in different ways?

Antony: I agree that there is a robust sexual dimorphism in the human species, but it does not follow from that that we cannot do better than using the proxy categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ for scientific purposes.

Freethinker: If you believe in sexual dimorphism, why not just use ‘male’ and ‘female’?

Antony: Because when we get down to specific conditions like endometriosis, we can do better even than male and female, because there are borderline cases and furthermore because there are trans cases. Those pamphlets on endometriosis might be picked up by a trans man with a womb.

Freethinker: Why not say ‘biological female’, then, since trans men are biological females?

Antony: Because the thing that I said is more informative and does not involve having to take a stand on this issue about the biological female.

Freethinker: Do you think that trans men are biological females or not?

Antony: I do not think they are biologically female. ‘Biologically female’ is a biological category that has fuzzy borders. Trans men are in the fuzzy border region.

Freethinker: What about trans men who are clearly biologically female – as presumably some of them are, especially, say, if they are pregnant and stop taking testosterone supplements and so forth?

Antony: I do not see the usefulness of the term ‘biologically female’. There are some lasting changes from having taken the masculinising hormones. What are we adding in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that a trans man who stops taking masculinising hormones in order to become pregnant is biologically female?

Freethinker: Isn’t it the truth?

Antony: I do not know if it is the truth, because you have not really told me what is required to be biologically male. My point is, what are we gaining either in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that we take those who are in the border and classifying them one way or the other? What is gained by saying, he is really a woman or she is really a man?

Freethinker: I was using the terms ‘biologically male’ or ‘biologically female’, rather than ‘man’ or ‘woman’, at this point.

Antony: But what you seem to be pressing on is a case where someone does not fit the full criteria for being biologically male or biologically female and insisting that I classify them on the basis of one of the determinants of being biologically male or biologically female.

Freethinker: You yourself have been talking about XX and XY individuals, rather than biological males and females. Is it not the case that an XX person cannot change all the chromosomes in their body to become XY, or vice versa? So in the great majority of cases, except for those very rare instances on the border, is there not a fairly clear sense in which someone is immutably either XY or XX?

Antony: I agree there is this classification. It covers, as I am prepared to concede, 98.5 per cent of the human race. But why insist that we apply the classification to the ones who do not fit the complete profile? Why do we have to decide whether somebody is biologically male or female? Even if the vast majority of human beings can readily be so classified.  There are individuals who look morphologically like XX females who have an XY karyotype.

Freethinker: One final question. For you as a socialist intersectionalist feminist, what is fundamentally at the heart of this debate about sex and gender?

Antony: I am a gender eliminativist. I believe that gender is real, but I think it should not be. People should be allowed to flourish in all sorts of different ways, depending on their different aptitudes, proclivities, characteristics and so forth. It is a fundamental injustice to try to package people into these socially preformed categories of man and woman, boy and girl. The elimination of that kind of categorisation is very important to me. As a feminist, I think that anyone who is being gender transgressive is putting us on the right road. So I want to give absolute support to trans people.

The post On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony appeared first on The Freethinker.

On 26 September 2023, the X handle of Pakistan’s Aurat March tweeted: ‘It’s important to keep in mind that menstruation is a biological process & biology is different from gender (which is socially constructed). Not all those who have a uterus are women & not all women have a uterus. Reducing a woman down to a uterus is misogynistic.’

Aurat March, or ‘Women’s March’, is an umbrella group led by feminist activists, which organises demonstrations across Pakistan’s major cities on International Women’s Day, and engages in other forms of rights activism across the rest of the year. Aurat March’s tweet sparked the customary backlash against the group in Pakistan, but also led to more constructive critiques from certain quarters, including a BBC Urdu article. The article cited concerns raised by certain women over Aurat March’s tweet on the grounds that it erased the biological reality of women, while also quoting the Aurat March organiser’s defence of their message.

Aurat March’s message echoed the claims of gender identity ideology, which are at present the subject of bitter disagreement in the West. The ideology claims that a person’s gender, unlike the biological sex they are born with, is down to that person’s own feelings and hence entirely subjective and a matter of self-identification: as Aurat March’s tweet puts it, that gender is ‘socially constructed’.

While evidence of gender dysphoria, and individuals identifying outside the male and female binary, can be found across human history, consolidated transgenderism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. Western gender identity ideology differs from clinically diagnosable variance, or the earmarking of a third gender used to categorise individuals who do not fit the binary across the world. Instead, it seeks to synonymise those born in a particular sex with those identifying as such from the opposite sex, while paradoxically allotting them separate ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ labels respectively. Perhaps its most contentious assertion remains that ‘trans women are women’, which is the essence of the above-cited tweet by Aurat March and of narratives upheld by many women’s rights organisations in the region, such as Feminism In India.

It should be self-explanatory why ‘trans men are men’ never became the transgender rallying cry: quite simply, biological men are less likely to be concerned about invasion of their spaces. As the philosopher Alex Byrne put it in an interview for the Freethinker, ‘Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate.’

On the flipside, regardless of where one stands on the gender debate, modern-day transgenderism quite evidently clashes with hard-earned sex-based rights that women activists have toiled for over the past century. In the West, concerns over female physical and reproductive integrity, and the desire to retain women-only spaces, have transformed bathrooms, prisons, and sports competitions into gender ideology battlegrounds. But while the simmering debate over the clash between transgenderism and sex-based rights is founded over a largely egalitarian bedrock in the West, the thoughtless imitation of gender identity ideology has much more perilous repercussions in the Indian subcontinent, with its predominantly patriarchal culture.

Attitudes to women and the opportunities available to them differ between the South Asian states. However, as a regional bloc, these states are among the lowest ranked on global gender indices. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023, six of the seven SAARC states, namely India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, ranked lower than 100 in the 146-country rankings; India did so despite staking a credible claim to being a global power. Across South Asia, institutionalised gender disparity, upheld by state-backed radical religionism, as well as skewed cultural norms, and ethnic, racial, or casteist divides, has made it more critical than ever for local feminists to take up a united front against the patriarchal forces which are still very much alive. However, the influx of gender identity ideology has polarised subcontinental feminism to a point where, in a bitter irony, violent misogynists have a clearer understanding of who or what a woman is than organisations dedicated to safeguarding women.

I spoke with over 100 feminist activists across the Indian subcontinent to discuss the influence of gender identity ideology on South Asian women’s rights movements. The investigations have unveiled ominous patterns. Most activists in leadership positions tended to be proponents of gender identity ideology: this reflects the almost unanimous espousal of this ideology across major feminist organisations in the region. For instance, veteran Indian women’s rights activist Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house, insists ‘trans women are essential to Indian feminism’.

Many gender critical feminists whom I spoke to preferred to remain anonymous, fearing backlash within their organisations and movements. What was also evident was the urban-rural divide in the endorsement of narratives, with many from smaller towns critiquing the predominantly Western-educated feminist leaders for enforcing ‘foreign ideas’ that were detached from the ground realities of these countries.

In fact, it is simply not possible to initiate an egalitarian debate on gender identity in traditional rural communities like those scattered across southern Asia. In these communities, there is institutionalised gender inequality. Their religionist laws render women insignificant or unequal in familial matters, or half as worthy as men in legal matters. Indeed, the entire course of your life may be predetermined if you are born female. In such communities, women are second-class citizens. Given this codification of gender disparity, the idea of campaigning for the right of men to identify and be legally treated as women would simply be met with incredulity.

On the other hand, in the current legal landscape, there are good reasons why women might want to identify as men: so as to receive better treatment. Many gender critical feminists I spoke to insist that this is happening already. The Indian film maker Vaishnavi Sundar covered the topic in a 2021 documentary on the effect of gender identity on women and girls, especially in developing countries, entitled Dysphoric: Fleeing Womanhood Like a House on Fire. Some feminists I spoke to in Bangladesh also said that women are being encouraged by sexist Islamic inheritance laws to identify as men, given the sharia provisions tilted in men’s favour. Of course, there are then complications when trans people want to detransition – but that is another story.

This does not mean that an idea or ideology should be rejected in south Asian countries simply because it has its origins in the West. Doing so would simply pander to the hypernationalist or religionist rhetoric that labels all foreign ideologies that differ from a local community’s values as a conspiracy that aims to destroy their religious or cultural beliefs.

This consideration has led to a dilemma for gender critical feminists in South Asia, who want to challenge the sweeping enforcement of Western gender identity ideology, while at the same time being determined not to ally themselves with religionist bigots who advocate violence against marginalised communities at home. Making dissent even more complicated is the fact that even those South Asian feminists who have criticised the gender ideology pervading left-leaning Western media have used a religious or cultural relativist rationale to justify their position. For instance, they have deployed oxymoronic terms like ‘Islamic feminism’ to advocate for movements more palatable to the masses. Yet the idea that a religion that is explicitly misogynistic by modern standards could be inherently feminist is ludicrous.

Put simply, gender equality is widely considered an unpalatable foreign idea in South Asia. When faced with two unpalatable foreign ideas that conflict with each other – gender equality and gender identity ideology – feminists, in their efforts to resist hyperconservative backlash, are truly between a rock and a hard place.

My investigations have further exposed the role played by the plight of South Asia’s hijra or khawaja sara community in the acceptance of the prevalent transgender ideology in progressive circles. The hijra have been institutionalised as the ‘third gender’.

In South Asia, the ‘third gender’ has historically denoted intersex individuals and eunuchs, and has therefore been grounded in biological reality. However, both historically and today, many biological men and some women have also identified as the third gender, which also overlapped with homosexuality. In short, the ‘third gender’ has been used as a broader umbrella term to incorporate all identities that did not align with the heterosexual male or female. Critically, however, it has never clashed with sex-based rights or gender critical feminism, since it has not attempted to impinge on the categories of male and female gender. In contrast, Western transgender ideology negates this idea of a third gender, insisting on self-identification even for the determination of who a man or woman is. Yet having a third category actually helps to address many of the conflicts within genders and movements, not least because the hijra or khawaja sara community do not stake a claim to women’s spaces.

Surprisingly, numerous local feminists interviewed for the piece were unaware of western transgender ideology; instead, they equated the term ‘transgender’ with the indigenous hijra or khawaja sara. This tendency to identify the foreign concept with the local one also explains the passage of transgender rights legislations in some South Asian countries, even though homosexuality is still criminalised or violently punished in those countries, and many crimes of conscience are still punishable by death. In Pakistan, for instance, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 was passed as a codification of the fundamental rights of the hijra community as a third gender. However, its phrasing, which endorses the right for anyone to identify as a man or woman, regardless of their biological identity, led to it being struck down by the Federal Shariat Court as ‘un-Islamic’ on the grounds that it ‘promotes homosexuality’, which is criminalised in Pakistan.   

For many South Asian liberals, to question transgender ideology would simply be to endorse the brutalities and discrimination that LGBT people of all kinds continue to face in South Asia, ranging from taboos surrounding their existence to gruesome murders. In the light of the physical threats faced by the local transgender or khawaja sara community, even gender critical feminists have been forced to reconsider their critique of transgenderism.

In this turbulent context, it is easy to view Western transgender ideology as simply another cause that is trampled on by local prejudice, along with homophobia and misogyny. However, in reality, doing so can muddy the waters still further.  

Many activists, especially those outside South Asian urban centres, insist that the ideological polarisation imported from the Western culture wars needs to be countered by movements that are clear and cognisant of the differences that shape communities in the Indian subcontinent, and which channel their activism accordingly.

‘The gender debate has indeed polarised not only the West but [societies] all over the world. The conflation of the hijra community with the transgender identity [is a] complex issue. It is crucial for organisations to recognise and address the unique challenges faced by the hijra community [and] emphasise the importance of nuanced understanding,’ says Dr SN Sharma, the CEO of the Rajasthan Samgrah Kalyan Sansthan, a human rights organisation based in Ajmer, India, which is dedicated to supporting the marginalised.

In a 2017 BBC documentary, Inside Transgender Pakistan, members of the khawaja sara community expressed their condemnation of western transgenderism as a threat to their right to identify as the third gender. Today, that hard-won identity is being labelled ‘problematic’ in progressive circles in South Asia itself, from Nepal to Bangladesh. Prominent hijra activists in the Indian subcontinent now are echoing western transgender narratives. One explanation for this, which is perhaps pragmatic rather than idealistic, is the growing support for transgender rights as a whole among non-governmental organisations, which often rely on Western funds for their sustenance. The funding and its concomitant influence from the West are a critical factor for such organisations in the region, especially those geared towards fighting for human rights. This necessary influence inevitably aligns the activism compass of feminist movements to the West as well.

This alignment with human rights values in the Western tradition largely results in important work being done on the rights front. Yet at the same time, it inadvertently puts the urban Western-educated elite at the helm of local progressive movements. Many working class feminists and senior women’s rights figures whom I spoke to underlined the fact that, in the past, rights activism was often voluntarily undertaken by women in parallel with full-time jobs or family lives. Today, however, rights activism has become an entire profession and a livelihood for many individuals. This situation reaffirms the stranglehold of the elite over human rights in India, Pakistan and elsewhere. These urban, Western-educated leaders face little challenge from less Westernised subordinates, often from smaller towns, who are unwilling to challenge narratives dictated from the top, out of fear that it might jeopardise their own position – and employment.

‘Not only narratives, they also promote fellow feminists from their urban inner elite circle,’ journalist and activist Tehreem Azeem, who has worked for numerous rights organisations, told me. ‘They are Western-educated and follow woke ideas and this reflects in their narratives, especially on social media. We often don’t know who is making organisational decisions, you are not allowed to enter that circle.’

This takeover of the Westernised elite results in indigenous rights movements even echoes Western language, often quite literally. One prominent example is that many feminist organisations across the subcontinent ask participants at events and trainings to list their preferred pronouns in the English language. This, many feminists from smaller towns insist, is a regular practice even in rural areas where English is not as commonly understood.

‘In many workshops and conferences they would ask participants to introduce themselves and then share their pronouns, which I always felt was extremely bizarre, given the context of our setting,’ says Azeem. ‘Even if you are importing something from the West, you can try to bring it in the local context.’

More than the categorisation of preferred pronouns, the fact that this exercise is done almost exclusively in the English language is perhaps the biggest giveaway in identifying the disconnect between the values of the human rights elite and the masses. The most commonly spoken languages across the Indian subcontinent, including over a hundred regional languages and Hindi and Urdu (the most widely understood), are intrinsically gendered and devoid of gender neutral pronouns and phrases once conjugated with the subject. Those displaying English language pronouns, especially those who are not transgender themselves, seem less invested in founding ungendered language at home than they are in finding commonality and acceptance within elite Western circles.

Many feminist workers told me that the leaderships of their rights organisations feel a need to align themselves with foreign narratives, because a large proportion of the funds for such groups comes from Western countries. Some workers said that it is pressure from Western donors that compels local organisations to align their narratives accordingly. Others argued that even though the foreign funders never explicitly dictate the ideology of local groups, there remains competition among organisations within the same country to win Western grants: this pushes a need to find connectivity and validation among them, not least by speaking their language and swallowing their values whole. Furthermore, the South Asian political left is virtually camped in Western institutes: they are educated in the West, have lived there, and spend a considerable amount of time in Western leftist circles.

This inevitably results in an inflow of West-centred arguments. Ironically, many of the postcolonial narratives are churned out by universities based in former colonising countries such as the UK, and readopted by the university-educated elite in their former colonies. 

People in South Asia who condemn feminist organisations from the outside, such as influential  figures like Jagadish Vasudev or Zakir Naik, predominantly come from a position of opposing women’s rights movements as a whole, preferring to enforce patriarchal norms. A different type of challenge to feminist organisations is posed by dissenters within their own ranks.

In India and Pakistan, as in the UK and the US, gender critical feminists who advocate sex-based rights are targeted – and with the same weapons. ‘Terf’, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, is now a slur being deployed to silence gender critical voices in South Asia.

These types of allegations were, for instance, also made against one of the Indian subcontinent’s most prominent feminist activists, Kamla Bhasin. Bahsin, an activist, author and social scientist who passed away in 2021, had decades of women’s rights work under her belt, the last 20 years of which saw her found Sangat, a network of South Asian feminists.

I spoke to thirteen members of Sangat about the allegations that Bhasin faced months before she passed away. Bhasin was accused by various feminist groups, including Feminism In India, of being a ‘transphobe’, because she was critical of the gender identity narrative and endorsed a biological definition of ‘woman’. For these members of Sangat, the treatment of Bhasin was a reminder that even half a century of women’s rights advocacy was not enough for one of its leading activists to be given the space to dissent against gender identity ideology. Most of the Sangat graduates whom I spoke to believed that while disagreements with some of Bhasin’s views have always existed among the network, the unified public backlash against her over her gender critical views came as a shock. This backlash further silenced many feminists into acquiescence over the general direction of the movement.

Even so, many South Asian feminist voices still decide to go public with their dissenting views on gender identity ideology, often at personal cost. Among these is Thulasi Muttulingam, the founder of Humans of Northern Sri Lanka. ‘The wider networks of feminists – it’s a small country and we know each other [and] have networked together on various issues – have cancelled me,’ she says. The backlash, she stresses, came three years ago when she first began questioning the animosity against JK Rowling over her gender critical views. Muttulingam, a member of women’s rights organisation Vallamai, says her women’s day speech was boycotted this year, because she chose the theme of transgenderism and sex-based rights. ‘It was the Social Scientists Study circle and their monthly meetings are usually well attended,’ she said. The poor attendance ‘told me how much the liberals were scared off by the topic. Then a network of diaspora and Tamil feminists held a Zoom meeting to misrepresent what I said and denounced me as a bigot [and] transphobe.’

Natasha Noreen, the founder of Feminism Pakistan, saw a similar backlash when she shared gender critical views on her Facebook page which endorsed Rowling’s position on womanhood and insisted that biological men cannot become women simply by identifying as such.

‘The cancellation campaign began. Activists from Islamabad and Lahore started bashing me,’ she said. ‘I was invited to an online session, where I was told it was going to be a neutral talk, while four other participants and the host all were on one side just humiliating me.’ Noreen, like others critical of transgenderism and its denial of sex-based spaces for women, has been removed from social, professional, and activist groups.  ‘Fellow [women’s rights] activists have stopped talking to me. Pakistani feminists were my tribe, my people.’

Vaishnavi Sundar, meanwhile, was not just cancelled in India but also in the US, where the scheduled New York screening of her documentary on workplace harassment, ‘But What Was She Wearing’ was stopped owing to her views on pre-operative trans women. ‘Why are you cancelling an Indian woman [in America] for something she tweeted on her private Twitter? I just wanted to preserve women-only spaces,’ she told me. Since then Sundar has been blocked out of many feminist initiatives and groups and has had to focus on working independently. ‘People just stopped responding, stopped talking, stopped doing a lot of things that they used to before,’ she said. ‘I used to be one of those go-to people on things concerning women. Because I’ve researched on this for so long. It’s as if I made this observation on the trans ideology and suddenly my expertise and my films don’t matter anymore, because I have committed the cardinal sin of saying trans women are not women.’

It is important to underline here that many of these South Asian feminist voices cancelled as ‘transphobes’ have been long advocates of gay rights and the rights of the traditional hijra community in South Asia. Much of the critique of modern transgenderism made by such gender critical feminists aims to distinguish biological sex, and to use that scientific reality to reaffirm the importance of women-only spaces. It is certainly not intended to support the persecution of individuals.  

Wherever one stands on the divide between Western transgender activists and gender critical feminists, there are two irrefutable and vital facts that need to be taken into consideration. First, that there is a clash between advocates of gender identity ideology on the one hand, and, on the other, advocates not just of sex-based, but also of gay rights, and those defining their sex or sexuality based on the human anatomy. The second fact, especially critical to the Indian subcontinent, is that modern transgender ideology is very novel to the region, where individuals not considered male or female have historically been assigned to a third, broader gender.

Faced with these realities, the silencing of gender critical feminists, especially among the urban women’s rights groups, is bound to be detrimental not just to women’s rights, but to the well-being of all groups that these organisations are claiming to protect.

This point cannot be stressed enough. The proponents of gender neutral language on issues that overwhelmingly concern the female sex insist that all historically considered ‘women’s issues’ are no longer in fact women’s issues. If their approach is adopted without question, then for all practical purposes there is no exclusive women’s rights movement, and in turn no feminism.

What exclusive women’s issue would Feminism In India be concerned with, if feminism is redefined to concern every type of person except the cisgendered heterosexual male? Why would ‘Aurat March’ continue to use the ‘Aurat’ prefix and not call itself Insaan, or ‘Human’, march? This type of attitude from Western transgender activists and ‘allies’ has made it all too easy for patriarchal, conservative and misogynistic detractors of feminism, especially in South Asia, to insist that there is no such thing as exclusively women’s rights. Feminist groups in the Indian subcontinent are practically making the same argument as their conservative opponents – ostensibly in the name of progress.  

Local movements that had begun to put forth the notion that a woman should not be limited by her anatomy are now upholding the idea that a woman is not defined by any particular anatomy at all. Similarly, where the purpose of challenging gender was to oppose gender roles and stereotypes, now those who purport to challenge gender stereotypes either use those very stereotypes as evidence of transgenderism, or try to eradicate or deny the idea of gender altogether.

Tasaffy Hossain, the founder of the Bangladesh-based organisation Bonhishikha, which uses the tagline ‘unlearn gender’, argues that much of the conversation in South Asia on transgender rights is still based on the realities of the West, and that it is critical to uphold the concerns of all groups and all identities in the region. ‘There is the issue of what feels safe for whom, what is triggering for whom, which is a deeper conversation. Cis women would have a different concept of what is safety to them. Trans women would have a different idea of what is safe to them. Even within the queer spaces we have seen, it’s not always safe just because everyone is queer,’ she told me.

Hossain echoes pretty much every South Asian women and gender rights organisation, those advocating gender identity ideology and its critics, when she says that ‘not enough conversation has been had’ over these concerns. However, many of those leading feminist organisations in the Indian subcontinent, who lament the lack of such conversations, have done little to allow an equal opportunity to share opposing ideas within feminist circles, and have in fact predetermined the conclusion of discussions that are yet to be openly had.

The failure to acknowledge the distinguishing characteristics of different identities, and in turn the exclusivity of their concerns, is creating rifts within minority movements that have only just begun to reverberate at the grassroots level. This is only emboldening the misogynistic forces within South Asia, such as religionist groups and ultra-conservative politicians, who are successfully exploiting the gaping hole between insufficiently dissected gender ideas and the depressingly patriarchal, religious-supremacist realities on the ground.

To counter the regressive forces that are targeting marginalised communities in the Indian subcontinent, it is important that South Asian rights movements embrace the dissenters within their communities, and appreciate the distinctions that they want to make. This is the only way that they will be able to address their different concerns, which are grounded in the unique realities of individuals, subgroups and the region as a whole. Similarly, it is time for Western advocates of gender identity ideology to acknowledge the negative impact which their ideology is having on the rights of violently marginalised people across the world, such as the women and hijra in the Indian subcontinent. For the problem with absolutist ideologies is that they are theoretical and totalitarian – and as such, they always risk becoming inhumane.  

The post South Asia’s silenced feminists appeared first on The Freethinker.

I spoke to Pragna via Zoom, to find out more about her story, motivations, personal challenges, attitude towards religion, and the changing nature of the problems facing women of minority backgrounds since she first became involved with SBS in the early 1980s.

Freethinker: What motivated you to become involved in campaigning for minority women’s rights?

Pragna Patel: I grew up in a traditional Indian family where women were expected to conform to strict gender roles and patriarchal norms – where they were expected to get married, to have their marriage partners chosen for them, to stay in the home and look after children and in-laws. These were all mapped-out routes for women that nobody questioned. I remember all the women around me who followed these paths unquestioningly. I always felt curious about why that was the only route open to women.

In my family, men would talk politics at events, while the women would be in the background serving the men. I was expected to be in the kitchen helping out, but I much preferred listening to the sometimes heated political debates that the men were having.

These things led me to question why women were relegated to certain roles. I felt it was unjust, not quite knowing why, and also that I did not want to go down that path. I do not think I recognised then that I was questioning the patriarchal order around me. When I was growing up, if you questioned the status quo, even in a mild way, you were told, ‘That is our religion and our culture, and that is the way things are.’ Religion and culture were always leaned upon to explain why there was such division between men and women. My work for women’s rights originated with that gut feeling of there being something more for women than these traditional roles.

My father was born in Kenya and I was born there too, but my family were Indian in origin. My mother is from India, and she was expected to live wherever her husband lived. And so she moved to Kenya after her marriage. We came to the UK in 1965, just as many African countries were in the grip of nationalism, independent movements and a wider Africanisation policy. This left many Asians who had been brought to Africa by the British in a precarious position. My father decided that, before things got worse in Kenya, he should look for a better life for us. He had a British passport, so he came here as an economic migrant.

I came to the UK at the age of five, in December. I still remember vividly coming down the stairs of the plane and everybody staring – I did not know why. I now realise that there were two reasons. One, there were not that many Asians at the time, so we must have stood out. Two, I was not prepared for the English weather – I was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress.

My formative years were shaped by experiences of racism in school. Even at primary school, children would constantly be telling us to go home, to go back where we came from. Being called ‘Pakkies’ was normal, being told that we smelt of curry or were smelly. Racist banter and name-calling was very much there. Nobody did anything about it in those days, mainly because racism just was not acknowledged. When I went to secondary school, from when I was about 14 onwards, the racism was far more menacing. Even in the playground, the name calling was more vicious. My parents faced much worse racism – discrimination in trying to get employment, housing and so on.

So you always felt an outsider. I also think that teachers never acknowledged that even if you were different, your identity mattered as much and was as valid as any white English identity, and that your background was as interesting as a white English background.

Freethinker: What did you do when you left school?

Patel: I went to a college of higher education in Liverpool. I did not get brilliant grades at A-level, partly because it was a time when I went through a very traumatic experience of almost being forced into a marriage – something which was also not recognised in those days, and which I rebelled against. From when I was 16 to 17, there was a war of attrition between me and my parents. They did not mean to do me harm: they thought that was the right way and I was just rebelling. But the struggle took up a year and a lot of my energy and time.

Anyway, I scraped through and managed to get away as far as I could, which was Liverpool. I studied English literature and sociology. Becoming involved in student politics, I began to understand my formative experiences of patriarchal oppression, sexism and racism. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when I was in the sixth form, I had heard about the racial uprisings that led to the death of Blair Peach and to the arrest of hundreds of community activists and members who were challenging the presence of the National Front in Southall. Although I was not there personally, these events left an indelible mark in my mind.

So when I was at college, I got involved in student activism, going to places like Manchester and joining anti-deportation demonstrations. Campaigning with other Asian students and young men and women was a real eye-opener for me, because up until that point, I had not realised that you could resist. I had grown up feeling that, as far as racism was concerned, it was about tolerating it and being a perpetual victim, whether you liked it or not. The civil rights movement in America was also a revelation to me.

Freethinker: What did you do after college?

Patel: During the holidays I would be back in Southall, where my family lived. I saw a group of young Asian women, about my age, who were part of those anti-racist mobilisations in 1979, who were selling black feminist magazines on the high road in Southall, and were calling themselves the Southall Black Sisters. I was motivated by their stance as anti-racist feminists. So I joined the group. When I finished College, I realised that I wanted to come back to Southall and work on women’s rights.  

SBS were a mixture of women from many minority backgrounds. There were some African Caribbean, some Asian, some Middle Eastern. They adopted the term ‘black’, as did many Asian activists at the time, to signify a common struggle against racism, common histories of colonialism and imperialism, and to reflect a growing feminist consciousness amongst black women. It was a time when anti-racist and feminist activism was gathering momentum. Women’s groups were setting up all over the country.

Freethinker: When you did eventually marry, was it arranged?

Patel: No – it was an absolute choice. I married someone who I was working with. There is no way that I would have carried out a whole year of civil disobedience and then gone back to just being compliant.

Freethinker: How has your work, and the nature of the challenges that you have faced, changed over the course of your career?

Patel: Around the time when I joined SBS, all the founding members left. I resuscitated the group and then set up the advocacy centre in Ealing. I began to realise that the issue that most women presented us with was violence – domestic abuse or other forms of gender-related violence such as forced marriage, honour-based killings, honour-based violence, suicide driven by domestic abuse, abusive men killing women.

In those days multiculturalism as a policy had just become dominant in state institutions. But the way that they interpreted it was basically to leave minority communities to resolve their own affairs internally without state intervention, because they felt that intervention would mean being insensitive to culture and religious values, or even being racist. We were constantly banging on the door of the police and social services saying, ‘You must intervene – this is not about cultural sensitivity, this is about a risk to women’s and children’s lives.’

One of the positive changes since then is that through our campaigning work and our refusal to back down in the face of non-intervention by the state, we have finally managed to force a change in the way in which the authorities deal with issues like domestic abuse or forced marriage. We have forced them to realise that intervening in these issues is not so much about safeguarding cultural identity as about safeguarding women’s and children’s lives – to recognise that these culturally specific forms of gender-based violence are actually abuses of women’s human rights. That is a huge achievement.

Freethinker: So the authorities are now more willing to intervene in these matters?

Patel: Absolutely. We now have statutory guidance on honour-based violence, on female genital mutilation, and on other forms of gender-based harms.

We have also made considerable progress in the way in which the immigration authorities respond to women who are subject to abuse and who have insecure immigration status. That is an even bigger mountain to climb, because we are going through a period of extreme anti-immigration policies.

There are two areas that are particularly challenging now. One is neoliberalism and the shrinking of the welfare state, because women, in order to achieve rights, need the welfare state – we need access to legal aid, lawyers, justice, protection through the courts. The other area is the rise of religious fundamentalism.

Freethinker: How important is secularism to your campaigning?

Patel: Starting out in the ’80s, we were all secularists. We did not even need to call ourselves secular. It was taken for granted because our organisations were based on secular values. For example, the term ‘black’ was a secular term. It signified common histories of racism and resistance to colonialism and imperialism. It allowed unity across different minority groups.

Now, sadly, the fragmentation of identities in minority groups has meant that we no longer mobilise around these kind of expansive, inclusive terms. We have become more parochial and inward-looking. We coalesce around faith identities, becoming Sikh, Muslim or Hindu communities. This has had a huge impact on feminist mobilisations within minority communities. In the past, we could be of Sikh, Hindu, Muslim backgrounds and still come together, recognising our shared experiences as women. Now that kind of fragmentation of identity focuses much more on the differences. Even though we share the same cultural landscape of South Asia, the same language, food and so on, the groups are mushrooming up all over the place, calling themselves Sikh Women’s Groups, Sikh Women’s Aid, Muslim Women’s Network, Muslim Women’s Centre, Hindu Women. That has fragmented our solidarity, and made it more difficult to come together and show support.

Freethinker: Why do you think this happened? This fragmentation and increasing emphasis on religious divisions at the expense of shared culture?           

Patel: There are several processes at work here. We are in the grip of identity politics, which I find to be incredibly regressive. Back in the ’80s, we began by calling ourselves ‘black’. In a sense, that too was identity politics, but it was always invested with values and with politics that were far more outward-looking, inclusive, and more focused on solidarity. The end game was to make connections with other groups who faced other forms of oppression but were part of the wider struggle for social justice and equality.

We have lost that progressive political foundation. The rise of religious fundamentalism has not helped, because it has shaped the way communities organise themselves. It has enabled faith-based leaders to monopolise resources, to speak on behalf of communities and to claim to represent them, always with a very patriarchal agenda as far as women are concerned. Instead of seeing identity politics as a springboard to solidarity, we are now seeing it as an end in itself. Dominant fundamentalist leaderships are demanding resources on behalf of so-called faith communities and claiming to speak for them, but are not acting in the interests of women, children or other oppressed minorities-within-minorities.

Freethinker: Identity politics is a complex issue because it depends on which perspective you look at it from – left-wing, right-wing, religious, etc. How do all these different aspects fit together?

Patel: We are seeing a dogmatism that has set in on both sides. I think that there is a serious problem with the Left, if we are not able to criticise faith identities internally, or to criticise religion or cultural aspects that actually oppress sexual minorities or women. Both Left and Right, I think, are in the grip of a frightening authoritarianism. We have to assert that our politics is a secular feminist politics, because labelling ourselves as ‘faith communities’ begs the question of whose faith, who is entitled to interpret that faith, and whether that faith serves the interests of those who are powerless within minority communities.

Those of us who consider ourselves on the Left have seen a descent into dogmatism and a politics of identity that actually prevents us from developing a politics of solidarity. In the ‘80s, our politics of resistance was more hopeful and inclusive, because it was focused on forging solidarity with other oppressed groups.

Freethinker: When I interviewed Maryam Namazie, who is a communist, she said that one of the problems with the Left is that they want recognition for minorities, but that leads them to go too far. She suggested that there was a tendency for those on the extreme left to get into bed with fundamentalist Islamists, because they identify with their goal of revolution. Yet political Islamism, she argued, is actually fascist.

Patel: Yes. The problem with the Left is that it wants to decry the fascists on the outside, but will not decry the fascists on the inside. If we want to resist authoritarian politics, we have to resist the authoritarianism from above as well as from below.

We need to point out the fascist tendencies in our own communities, where they get mistaken as progressive because they are vaguely about resisting the state, about resisting white fascism or racism. Hindu fundamentalism has monopolised the so-called ‘Hindu voice’, Islamism has monopolised the so-called ‘Muslim voice’, and so on. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism share the same tactics and agenda, and they mirror each other, as do Jewish fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism on the global scale. All these fundamentalist forces actually work together, because they have common enemies and a common agenda.

On the international human rights stage, all these fundamentalists come together to undermine the safeguards and standards that have evolved around women’s reproductive and other rights. They want to enter reservations if they happen to be fundamentalist regimes, and want to dilute the rights that women have gained through years of struggle, such as the right to abortion, to access information about abortion, to say no to a forced marriage, and so on. The religious fundamentalists do mirror each other, even if they publicly decry each other as enemies.

That is something that we within the Left are failing to recognise. These are political movements using religion for political ends, not authentic cultural or religious forces. They have a regressive illiberal agenda, and a misogynist agenda when it comes to women. Many of the demands that they make in the name of ‘respect for religion and culture’ are about controlling women: controlling women’s desires, their minds and bodies. Take demands for gender-segregated schools or public spaces, or the demand for religious laws such as sharia to govern family relationships.

It is hard to see how such demands could be progressive in any real sense. Rather, they are a threat to black feminists, who have campaigned for three decades or more to get the state to acknowledge abuses against minorities as abuses of human rights. Yet there are very few minority women who will speak out – because they have been browbeaten into believing that to speak out is somehow to paint minority communities as barbaric or backward, or to give more power to the state.

We do have to challenge the fascism of regimes, such as the Hungarian or Polish regime, or the US under Trump. We have to challenge the kind of jingoism and nationalism that has been disguised in the Brexit debates, and the racism of the immigration system. But we also have to challenge illiberal politics and the culture of authoritarianism within the Left.

Freethinker: You stood down as Director of SBS in January 2022. What are your plans now?

Patel: I am still adjusting to life on the outside, but in the meantime, I am working with many women’s groups on a range of projects, including Centre for Women’s Justice on the issue of access to justice. I am also active with Maryam Namazie in One Law for All and in Feminist Dissent, because I believe the struggle against religious fundamentalism is one of the major feminist issues of our time.

Freethinker: Do you have any religious beliefs?

Patel: No. My parents are of Hindu background, but they themselves were not particularly religious. I have always resisted religion, because I have found it to be patriarchal and restrictive in terms of my rights as a girl and as a woman. The rise of Hindu nationalism amongst the Indian diaspora is a chilling development and a warning sign of fascism that is already in our midst.

Freethinker: Do you have any message for readers of the Freethinker about what should be important for us as a society, whatever background we come from, and how we can work together to improve things for all of us?

Patel: We have to foster a culture of public and civic good based on human rights principles. We have to safeguard human rights law and the associated culture of human rights, because it is under threat at this very moment. We must do so with kindness, care and empathy for each other – we have lost these qualities. We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity.

The post ‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel appeared first on The Freethinker.