Category: FIST 13 Principles

FIST Endorses HR 1015 and SB 1147

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Feminists in Struggle has voted to endorse two bills in the U.S. Congress: HR 1015, the Prison Rape Prevention Act of 2025, and S1147, the Defining Male and Female Act of 2025. Both of these bills, though brought by Republicans, Congresswoman Nancy Mace and Senator Roger Marshall respectively, conform to FIST’s principles of working to preserve separate spaces for women, and ending the conflation of gender ‘identity’ and sex.

Female prisoners are suffering greatly in states run by Democrats, like California, Washington, and Illinois, which have allowed male inmates, many of whom are sex offenders, to self-ID their way into the women’s prisons. These men are raping, impregnating, and brutalizing the women, and it is the women who are the ones being disciplined if they lodge complaints. This outrageous injustice must end.

We ask anyone who cares about the rights of women and who acknowledges the scientific, material reality of sex to urge their representatives to support both HR 1015 and S 1147. We cannot allow the cruel and unusual punishment of women in our jails or the pernicious sex denialism of gender ideology to continue to rob women and girls of their identity as an immutable sex class. Femaleness is not a costume. It is a biological, unchangeable fact.

For more information, see Keep Prisons Single Sex and Kara Dansky’s The Abolition of Sex.

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A shortened version of the following piece was submitted to the New York Times in response to a Guest Essay on its Opinion Page.
by Kathy Scarbrough and Carol Hanisch

Christine Emba’s New York Times opinion piece, “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness” (5/19/25), takes a courageous public stand in these times when pornography is everywhere. It is a good thing that more people are seeing the cracks in the wall of pro-porn sentiment, but they also need to be aware that those cracks started a long time ago and feminists have worked continuously to widen those crevices and collapse the wall. 

For example, both Feminists in Struggle (FIST) and Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) have as one of their organizational principles that the groups work “for the abolition of prostitution and pornography.” Women’s Declaration International (including its branch in the U.S.) is also anti-porn. Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement and other forerunners of FIST, WoLF and WDI have had pro-woman positions on pornography continuously since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Gail Dines, the feminist author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010) and Robert Jensen author of the pro-feminist book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007) both lecture nationally and internationally. In 2021 Carol Hanisch called out the hypocrisy of Jacobin — a publication that claims to be a leading voice of the Left — for publishing a plea from a producer on the social media site OnlyFans not to ban porn because it would hurt business. Hanisch lampooned Jacobin’s “concern” for the involved “sex workers” and “producers” by asking questions like “When you run articles about cutting the military budget, do you ever run a plea by a soldier or bomb-maker on keeping the military machine going because it would otherwise send 720,000 civilians and 2.2 military personnel to the unemployment lines?“

Though Ms. Emba mentions the religious Right also has positions against pornography, she doesn’t distinguish their stance from the feminist one. The Right and feminists come to opposition to porn from different concerns (though women on the Right may well also oppose it for the same feminist reasons we do). Many on the Right have religious views against any non-marital sex and masturbation, and have no qualms about putting women “in their place”. Anti-porn feminists, like those discussed here, are in favor of consensual sex between equal partners and argue that porn degrades women and encourages men to treat us as nothing more than objects for their own pleasure. Ms. Emba also neglects to mention that when people on the Left criticize porn from a feminist position it often means being shunned and smeared as Right-wingers.

Perhaps Ms. Elba is not aware of much of this because those who still struggle for women’s liberation have been mostly ignored and denied a public megaphone, but we are still here and we are still opposing pornography with no delusions about its many harms.

 

FIST on Joy of Resistance, WBAI Tonight!

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Feminists in Struggle’s Ann Menasche will be interviewed on WBAI Radio’s Joy of Resistance show, 99.5 fm, tonight at 9 pm EST (6 pm PST) to discuss the Biden executive order on January 20th, collapsing gender identity with women’s sex-based rights, and to discuss the Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act, the changes FIST would like to see made to the Equality Act, legislation passed by the House in 2019 (but not the Senate) that is likely to be reintroduced this year and considered high on the Biden agenda.

The write-up of the JOR show states that:

“Last week, the Women’s Liberation Front, put out a press release that was carried on the AP newswire entitled “Biden Executive Order on Gender Identity Will Eviscerate Women’s Rights”; the group Feminists in Struggle (FIST) issued a similar statement and The Women’s Human Rights Campaign started a letter-writing campaign in protest of this EO.”

The Joy of Resistance summary acknowledges that these groups are all considered left of center, with Feminists in Struggle strongly identified with the Left.  This is a refreshingly accurate characterization in view of attempts by many transactivists to smear any group that speaks out about gender ideology or the erasure of women as “right-wing” or even as “hate” groups.  FIST denounces such mischaracterizations, and has spelled out our distinction from the Right in our Principles, particularly in #12.

We greatly appreciate the Joy of Resistance show on WBAI, which features feminist content, and we recommend anyone who cares about the liberation of women listen tonight, and every Monday, at 9 pm EST (6 pm PST).  Please tune in!

There is also a demonstration in protest of this executive order planned on March 8 in front of the White House, and FIST members plan to be in attendance.  Join us!

ORDER FIST MERCHANDISE FOR WOMEN’S MARCH!

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We now have FIST merchandise available just in time for the Women’s Marches on January 18th!  Order your  t-shirt, download and print the FIST BANNER, and download the FAEA brochure, which can be printed and distributed!  The brochure includes our 13 principles, links to our website and social media, and explains our Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act.

WLRN Debate Between WoLF and FIST

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Ann Menasche of Feminists in Struggle (FIST) and Kara Dansky of WoLF (Women’s Liberation Front) debate strategy regarding relationship with rightwing media and organizations on Women’s Liberation Radio News.  Click here to listen: Debate between FIST and Wolf on WLRN The discussion between Ann and Kara starts at 37:06 and goes to 1:22:36 of the full podcast.

Also featured on this podcast at 24:00 minutes is Julia Beck of WoLF testifying before Congress regarding the Equality Act and how it will eliminate sex-based rights and enable the continuation of discrimination based on biology, and Doriane Lambelet Coleman who spoke mainly to the chilling effects the Equality Act would have on women’s sports if passed.  Included in the podcast is some feminist music and news as well.

Feminists in Struggle 13 Principles

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Feminists in Struggle (“FIST”) is a national female-only radical feminist network, democratically run, and composed of individuals born female and affiliated female-only feminist organizations.  We aim to bring together women from diverse radical and revolutionary feminist traditions. FIST welcomes women of every racial, ethnic, and class background, all ages and abilities/disabilities, whether lesbian, heterosexual or bisexual, who share a common set of feminist principles (see below). We are committed to organizing a serious fight-back against the attacks on our rights from multiple quarters.

  1. We affirm that women and girls are oppressed based on our biological sex, i.e., the female capacity to bear and birth children. 
  2. We fight for all females, not just the privileged few, and oppose not just male supremacy but also white supremacy and class hierarchy.  
  3. We are gender role abolitionists seeking an end to socially-imposed roles based on sex that enforce male supremacy.
  4. We demand an end to all forms of discrimination and harassment based on sex, including the wage gap and de-facto job segregation. Pass the Equal Rights Amendment now! 
  5. We fight to end racism and the system of white supremacy that oppresses women of color. 
  6. We struggle against all forms of male violence against women whether it takes place in the home, on the street, at work, or in colleges or universities. 
  7. We work for the abolition of prostitution and pornography; we support the criminalization of traffickers, pimps, and sex buyers and the decriminalization of prostituted women and girls (“Nordic Model”).
  8. We support complete sovereignty over our bodies and reproductive lives, including free unimpeded access to safe, legal abortion and birth control and no forced sterilization.
  9. We defend our fundamental right to female-only spaces, programs and organizations that allow us to collectively resist our sex-based oppression against serious challenges by forces within the transgender movement.
  10. We call for free childcare, paid parental leave, and other community supports needed to end the double day and empower women to live independent lives. Fund human needs, not war.  
  11. We demand an end to discrimination and stigma against lesbians and other women who have intimate relationships with women. 
  12. We reject any alliances or collaboration with the male supremacist religious Right or the white supremacist, anti-immigrant Right.  
  13. While the mission of FIST is to build a women’s liberation movement to oppose that which oppresses women because of male supremacy, we recognize the existential threat that the capitalist-induced climate crisis and risk of nuclear war pose not only to the possibility of women’s liberation, but to the whole of humanity, and life on this planet.

For the full unabridged principles, see the “Principles” page. https://feministstruggle.org/principles/