Feminists in Struggle

FIST’s decision-making body, the Feminist Assembly, has voted to reorganize FIST so that all dues paying members are automatically brought into the Feminist Assembly with full voting rights.  It will take some months as we transition to this new system with one class of members instead of two, but it is a great time to join FIST or pay up on your dues.  We will also begin planning for our long-delayed national conference to take place in the late spring of 2024.

As the only membership-run multi-issue radical feminist organization in the U.S., we are excited to be taking this next step in our grassroots organizing. JOIN US!

By Ann E Menasche

This opinion is solely that of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Feminists in Struggle.

On September 15 to 17, 2023, I attended the WDI USA national conference. “Accelerating the Women’s Liberation Movement” along with 100 of my sisters (including several FIST members).  I stayed an extra day to participate in a non-violent direct action in front of San Francisco’s City Hall.  I was one among twenty women dressed in white participating in the action that had as its focus the rights of lesbians.

The conference was inspiring, the women speakers and attendees a fascinating, thoughtful bunch.

But my experiences with the Trans Rights Activist protesters were deeply surreal and even frightening. Outside the conference and at Monday’s demonstration, masked men, some in drag, others with black masks and “antifa” garb, repeatedly hurled ear-splitting yells at us, called us “fascists” and threatened us with death for the “crime” of our feminism.  Signs read, “Millions of dead TERFs”, and “I eat TERFS for breakfast” while the crowd chanted “no TERFs, no KKK, no fascist USA”, “no TERFs on our turf.” and of course the ubiquitous “F*** TERFS!”

In the midst of this mayhem, there were calls for “Revolution”, and there was one sign at the Hotel supporting abortion rights (there was no disagreement between the two sides here). A few TRA protesters near the hotel ended up scaling a locked gate separating the Hilton from a Chinatown Park, punching a hotel manager in the face, defacing the sign in front of the Hilton with various obscenities and chasing down Meagan Murphy and de-transitioner K Yang, who were lucky to escape unharmed. Later, the TRAs sprayed graffiti in front of the entrance to a building hosting a feminist art show featuring the art of de-transitioning women that many of us had attended earlier that evening.

At Monday’s demonstration at City Hall, the TRA counterdemonstration drowned us out so we couldn’t hear the speakers, even though the organizers of our event had obtained rally and sound permits ahead of time.   As time went on, TRAs got more and more riled up and police had to set down a second barricade next to the first.  Meanwhile, we women remained completely peaceful and orderly as we had been trained to do. When we called our rally to a close, we all escaped quickly into two rented U-Haul’s as we had planned, to ensure that we would get safely back to the hotel. We did not want to risk assault while waiting to order Ubers or catch the BART.  Though we laughed about it in the van as the TRAs wondered how we had managed to disappear so quickly, part of it wasn’t funny at all.  The TRAs had reduced us to the status of a bunch of criminals escaping a crime scene, though we were guilty of nothing more than exercising our rights of freedom of speech.

I’m not crazy about police.  San Francisco cops have a sordid history of rioting, and beating up patrons at gay bars, and Black citizens for minor or non-existence infractions.  I doubt it’s all better now, especially regarding the treatment of the disproportionately Black unhoused population.   But if it wasn’t for the police and hotel security guards providing basic protections, on top of our own detailed planning, and sheer luck, some of us could have been seriously injured or even killed.

All this in the very heart of San Francisco.  What happened to the City I had lived in, organized in, and loved for so many decades?  The same City that was a cultural hub of the lesbian community, dotted with women’s coffeehouses, bookstores and bars, the City where 5,000 women marched at the head of Lesbian and Gay Pride in 1977, the City that year after year held International Women’s Day protests in Golden Gate Park called Day in the Park for Women’s Rights? The same City, the same location where I had marched along with 30,000 women and male supporters for abortion rights during the March for Women’s Lives in the 1980’s and joined with Holly Near and Judy Fjell who led feminist songs from the stage? The same City where I had founded a lesbian feminist organization, Lesbian Uprising, that lasted into the 1990’s, and worked in coalition with Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and others?   The same City where hundreds of thousands of folks on the Left, when “Left” meant something, marched together up Market Street to the Civic Center to protest imperialist war, whether in Vietnam, Nicaragua, or Iraq?

And what happened to that Left?  For all the faults or contradictions of our male comrades, once the Second Wave had kicked in for a few years, blatant misogyny was no longer fashionable among either men or women in this milieu, until now. Virtually everyone who was a progressive, socialist, anti-war activist and/or involved in organized labor understood that the struggle for women’s rights/women’s liberation, was on OUR side/the workers’ side of the picket-line.  The Labor movement helped fund women’s rights protests just so they would have an opportunity to express their solidarity with the feminist movement.  They considered it an honor.

Not so for the TRAs in the U.S. and elsewhere. Nor for much of the current labor movement for that matter, which in Canada opposes parents who don’t want their (mostly female, mostly lesbian) teenagers sterilized and mutilated.  Feminists. along with parents having legitimate concerns of child safety, have somehow, in the minds of the TRAS, metamorphosized into the “enemy.”

The TRAs’ delusions thus go far beyond thinking men can be women, some women have penises, and men can be lesbians.  They also are deluded into thinking that they are being “progressive,” even revolutionary, by gathering a group of men together, yelling obscenities at women and threatening them with violence for peacefully protesting or attending a conference together. And worse, they think that women rallying for women’s rights as a sex (always the subject of feminism from the time of the First Wave) and talking about the rights of lesbians as a sexual orientation, are “fascists.”

This is the most dangerous of delusions, as the truth is just the opposite. In every place that fascism has come to power, it has restored the rule of the father, and destroyed feminism.  Feminist organizations were dissolved during the period between the two world wars in fascist Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal and their members forced into hiding or exile.  European Feminisms in the Face of Fascisms | EHNE  In Nazi Germany, “[w]omen experienced the rapid erosion of their rights in every sphere…Women were told to give up their jobs for men…Independent women were ruthlessly attacked and driven out of the public domain. Many feminists were jailed and some paid with their lives.” Feminism-under-Fascism

So please, boys, open up your history books before hurling epithets whose meaning you know nothing about.   I’m not sure what you were taught in school besides pronouns, but better late than never.

The next time you are tempted to call a group of independent minded feminists who refuse to defer to you, “fascists” a little soul searching first would be in order.  Threatening women in an attempt to silence us is not progressive.

by Javiera Sobarzo-Zepeda

This opinion is solely that of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Feminists in Struggle.

On September 15-18 I attended the second annual WDI conference held in San Francisco CA.

It was a great conference with many topics ranging from reproductive technology, desisted and de transitioned women, women’s studies and academia, the rise of queer policies and the effects on our politics, consciousness raising circles, the work WDI has done in legislation, feminist language and many more. I also participated in the non-violent direct action, which was an experience all its own. We were yelled at and taunted, but we persevered.

I got involved in the radical feminist movement this past year, joining WDI and FIST. I grew up on the west coast in a liberal and progressive area and I was in the camp of “transwomen are women” and “sex work is work” for many years, without thinking much about what these sayings actually meant. It wasn’t until I became a mom to a daughter that these mantras began to unravel for me. I want her to grow up in a safe world that honors her for who she is and respects her body as her own.

This conference was the first conference I have been to where I was with other likeminded women. As a baby radical feminist,I found it inspiring to hear from women who have been in this fight for female sovereignty. I feel a renewed strength to stay in this for my daughter. It was encouraging to see other women my age as well, I am in my early 30s, I think a lot of my generation is starting to see through the veil. We want to protect our children, our friends children from these manipulative forces.

I am looking forward and have great hope for what is to come. Women are waking up. We are speaking and being heard. I know we will find a way and it may look different, but through community and working together, we will preserve female sovereignty.

Tickets are on sale now for $5.00 for this special event on Saturday, October 7, 11:00 a.m. Pacific time, 2:00 p.m. on zoom, when Shannon will talk about her recently published book, “18 Months: A Memoir of a Marraige Lost to Gender Identity.”

Reserve your tickets below:

FEMINIST BOOK TALK: A MARRIAGE LOST TO GENDER IDENTITY Tickets, Sat, Oct 7, 2023 at 11:00 AM | Eventbrite

Shannon is a writer, cultural critic, and IT professional who lives for travel, good food and summer music festivals. Her book tells the story of the dissolution of her    fifteen-year mariage when her partner began to identify as transgender. She is also a member of Feminists in Struggle. Find her Substack at            https://shannonthrace.substack.com

Shannon’s book can be purchased through Amazon, Barnes and Noble. and other sources on the internet.

This is a women-only event.  You won’t want to miss it!  Please join us!

It is easy to lose track of the ultimate goal of women’s liberation – the end to sex-based oppression of half the human race born female – by focusing exclusively on our defensive battles. There are many such battles taxing our spirits. In the wake of our loss of abortion rights last year, we have seen the passage of one horrific state law after another placing women’s liberty, health, and very lives at risk.

And of course, there is the defensive fight against a pernicious worldwide ideology that denies the existence of sex, allowing males into women’s spaces and programs, and depriving us of privacy, safety, and opportunity and even the language needed to talk about ourselves and assert our rights. We are also seeing the tragedy of a whole generation of girls (future feminists, future lesbians) desperately attempting to escape their womanhood by doing great harm to their female bodies through submitting to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.

Despite these challenges, we must maintain our broader vision. We women have still not achieved equality in the workplace, under law or in the rest of society, and winning our current defensive battles will not by themselves get us there.

We are coming upon the 100^th centennial of the Equal Rights Amendment, written by suffragist Alice Paul in 1923, that would finally guarantee equality based on sex in the U.S. Constitution. The ERA does not solve all problems but is a vital tool to move us forward once again.

Feminist lawyer Wendy Murphy recently spoke at Seneca Falls in celebration of this centennial in the presence of the great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Coline Jenkins:

“For the entirety of women’s 247 years in this country – a country that dares to declare itself the greatest democracy on earth – women have been denied basic legal equality of rights and no laws must be enforced equally when applied to women because without the ERA women are not constitutionally entitled to equal treatment under the law.”

“Neither party truly supports the ERA,” Wendy added. She also extolled the independence of Ms. Paul from both parties. something she claims we need now more than ever, as we have a Democratic President that refuses to instruct the archivist to publish the ERA.

So, no matter how hard things get, sisters, let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

This opinion piece is from an individual FIST member and does not necessarily represent the views of the organization as a whole.  However, FIST is on record in support of affirmative action.

The Supreme Court decision this past June in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard,  finding race based affirmative action in college admissions an unconstitutional violation of equal protection https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf, not only struck a blow to Black people trying to break free from centuries of oppression and racist policies. It is also an impediment to women’s advancement as a sex in our own struggle against male supremacy.

Race blindness, like sex blindness, is an exceedingly bad idea when discrimination and/ or the institutionalized remnants of past discrimination still exist.  Discriminatory intent is hard to prove but if all the staff at the local car repair shop is all white and male, chances are that sexism and racism played a determinate role. And race or sex conscious remedies are necessary.

Like in the case of abortion rights, affirmative action wasn’t gotten rid of all at once but was slowly eroded by the courts until the recent death blow was struck.  The Bakke decision in 1978 marked the beginnings of this downward spiral.  https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/regents_of_the_university_of_california_v_bakke_(1978)

Though most women now work in the paid labor market and women have broken into certain professions, like law and medicine, previously mostly barred to them, the workforce remains highly sex segregated.  There are still “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs” even if advertisements that spelled this out have been banned for decades under civil rights laws.  Women, though highly educated, are still relegated to lower paid, lower status positions, including even within the same field or profession.  Women lawyers, for example, are concentrated in the non-profit world or work for the government (with the few men there disproportionately found in top management) and are rarely owners or partners of successful private law firms.  Moreover, fields where most women work are underpaid and undervalued, despite the level of skill and education required or the importance of the work to society.  Nursing and teaching come to mind.

Women of all colors benefited from affirmative action especially when it was more robust in the early years, i.e., at a time when it included quotas and/or goals and timetables.   For example, women broke into the trades in the 1970’s, the first time since the government implemented its own affirmative action program bringing women into the war industry during World War II.   For a fascinating documentary of this period, I recommend “the Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081053/

So, in the 1970’s and into the 1980’s women worked as car mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, engineers, and construction workers. However, by the 1980’s, women were forced out of the trades, not because they weren’t interested in the work or too weak or lacking in the skills needed to do the job well, but due to the hostility of male co-workers and managers who engaged in severe sexual harassment and violence against the female newcomers. See https://socialchangenyu.com/review/toward-gender-equality-affirmative-action-comparable-worth-and-the-womens-movement/

Affirmative action’s impact on women’s status in the workplace was limited because it wasn’t strong enough.  The number of women brought into male fields was small and the women were left isolated and far more vulnerable to harassment.  If women had been recruited in large numbers or ideas such as all-women teams implemented, women would likely have stayed.

Affirmative action is a vital measure for achieving equality for both people of color and women of all colors.  We need to create a movement strong enough to bring it back.

FIST presents a zoom forum on violence against women focusing on the issues of pornography and prostitution. 

Forum is Saturday, July 15th, 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time, 4:00 p.m. Eastern

Tickets are $5 and can be purchased here:PROSTITUTION, PORNOGRAPY, and MALE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN Tickets, Sat, Jul 15, 2023 at 1:00 PM | Eventbrite

SPEAKERS:

`1) GAIL DINES is a Professor Emerita, researcher and radical feminist activist. She has been organizing against the porn industry for over thirty years and refuses to allow these sexual predators free reign to reduce women to an oppressed sex-class. Her latest book, Pornland, How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality, has been translated into 5 languages, and she was recently named one of the topo ten most influential women sociologists in the world by Academic Influence. Gail is in shock that a radical feminist is on such a list!

(2) MEREDITH KERSHAW is an Australian-born attorney, living in New Jersey, with experience practicing law in Australia and New York. She is deeply interested in protecting the human rights of women and girls, having served as a federal prosecutor for the Australian Prosecution Service specializing in the prosecution of crimes involving human exploitation particularly child pornography offenses. Meredith is an advocate for the Equality Model a holistic, legal approach to addressing prostitution, and authored a report published by New Yorkers for the Equality model entitled “Is Decriminalization of the Sex Trade the Answer? Debunking the ADLU’s Report.” Meredith is a commercial litigator with boutique law firm Wasserman Grubin & Rogers, LLP in New York and will commence a Master of Laws at Columbia University in fall 22023.

FIST’s Feminist Forums series are interactive and organizing events. At our forums, women have an opportunity not only to hear interesting speakers on a variety of feminist topics but to meet each other, make comments, ask questions of the presenters and discuss feminist politics together. We also usually tape the events so they may be viewed later. Women in attendance are free to shut off their cameras and mute themselves, should they prefer to do so. If you prefer to remain anonymous within the group, or plan to sign in under a different name from the name you have used for registration and purchase of your ticket, please contact the organizer prior to the event. Thanks.

While some of our events are open to both men and women, THIS IS A FEMALE ONLY EVENT. We ask that our male allies respect our right to meet together as women.

San Diego FIST members participated in a peaceful rally of about 75 people in San Diego on May 6th at the Pediatric Endocrine Society’s Annual Conference against the medical transition of minors and for evidence-based care.  The rally was sponsored by a coalition of groups, including Our Duty, a non-partisan organization of parents, which played a leadership role. https://ourduty.group.  One of the central organizer of Our Duty in California, Erin Friday, a Democrat, chaired the rally. There were several female de-transitioners that gave powerful presentations about their experiences as teens being rushed into transition and suffering severe and permanent physical harms.  They announced a new organization called Detrans Help.  Other speakers scanned the political spectrum including several lesbians.  No counter-protesters showed up.

The range of speakers and the messages presented – uniformly pro-gay and pro gender non-conformity – made it clear that this is not fundamentally a Right-wing movement.  Rather, polls have shown that a majority of Americans of all political persuasions are sympathetic to these views. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3991685-majority-of-americans-oppose-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-trans-women-participating-in-sports-poll/.

Ann Menasche from FIST was one of the speakers.

Here are excerpts from Ann’s speech:

“I represent here today a small national multi-issue radical feminist organization solidly on the Left called Feminists in Struggle. I, myself, am a lesbian, a feminist, a socialist, a Green, a civil rights lawyer, and a life-long activist. I am proud to join with all of you today, parents, de-transitioners, others from the gay community, heterosexuals, people with a range of political views, to proclaim in one voice that no child is born in the wrong body!  This atrocity of sterilizing and mutilating children and teens who are gender non-conforming, gay, autistic, traumatized, or otherwise different, in the name of what is euphemistically called “gender affirming care”, must end…

There is nothing wrong with these children’s bodies…that needs to be “fixed” by experimental so-called treatments like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and cosmetic surgeries – the removal or mutilation of healthy body parts.  Feminine boys, and masculine girls, and same sex attracted teens are fine just as they are.  Bodies & roles do not need to “match.” Allow these children to grow and develop with their bodies intact. And tell the truth to young adults that these “treatments” cause serious permanent harms and do not cure gender unhappiness or anything else.

Children of both sexes need to be freed not from their bodies, but from gender roles and stereotypes that put them into boxes based on their sex, preventing them from freely exploring their interests and expressing their personalities…Young same sex attracted people need to be freed, not from their healthy sexed bodies, but from homophobia….Girls need to be freed from sexism that demeans them and their developing bodies as sex objects, that subjects them to male sexual and physical violence, and still, even today, places obstacles in their path to following their dreams because of their sex…

For all the spirited girls out there, for all the misfits like I was, for all the tomboys, for all the future pioneers, scientists, athletes, doctors, lawyers, thinkers, writers, artists, carpenters, mechanics, engineers, leaders who were born female, for the lesbians, for all the future feminists and visionaries, for all the amazing mothers of past, present and future generations, for the memory of my own rebellious and loving tomboy mother who as a child used to run across rooftops tearing her dresses, FOR ALL OF THEM, let’s put an end to this atrocity.  STOP CHILD TRANSITION!  NO ONE IS BORN IN THE WRONG BODY!”