Living in the decadent phase of North American feminism

Is it time for the new grassroots, new thinkers, new awareness that we are embodied

When a movement becomes a state religion and a selling feature, is its corruption not inevitable?

Women’s liberation movement in North America became feminism became academic became part of education training and social work curricula became an item in international non- and governmental bodies’ agendas became a misery industry became what sells papers (#MeToo) became an occasion for the Trudeau Jr. photo-ops became self-ID – surely we’re now witnessing its decadent phase?

You could chart this trajectory with the gay liberation movement, and probably with many others “equity-seeking” (appalling) groups. If you’ve become an equity-seeking group that petitions for equity/cash please, get the hell out.

I am trying to understand why the self-ID captured so many feminist and lgbt organizations so fast. It probably came from the academe, but why did it take so well?

In 2021 a group of nominally feminist social service organizations and NGOs in Canada joined together to condemn a group of women, call them a name that is usually accompanied online with disdain and even threats, and to declare that there is no room for those women in our ranks. It’s a fascinating bin of conceptual debris I mean progressive keyword bingo, the letter, and about 40 different executives in these organizations found no problem with it and signed it. Are you a TERF or have you ever spoken to one? You may be a TERF if you’ve criticised Bill C-16, the bill that made any declarations of cross-sex identification in any context whatsoever protected by human rights laws, including Jessica Yaniv’s. (Don’t make me link to that; I think he’s still dragging those cosmeticians though para-legal courts.) You may be a TERF if you’re a psychotherapist who won’t immediately affirm opposite sex identification in children. You may be a TERF if you are sceptical about the assertion that before the age of colonialism, nobody knew how to make babies. “TERF advocacy is guided by a fundamental desire to reinforce a colonial gender binary”, you see. Which colonialism would that be, the Brits in India, the Russian colonialism of its environs, the Ottoman empire, Persia at its most powerful, the Aztecs chasing out an even older indigenous population? Ah right. The North American colonization, because that’s the only part of the world that exists.

If your feminism does not centre men(‘s fantasies), it’s not feminism. “Trans people are a driving force in our feminist movements” says the letter, and that’s because women centering women, and women having their own things, is not good enough.

Nevermind that most social service orgs for women in Toronto already work on the principle of self-ID. Some years ago a shelter for women recovering from addiction was in the news because a dude who had had no gender reassignment of any kind ended up there and the woman complaining about it got flak. What prompted the you-should-be-ashamed letter was probably the creation of caWsbar and their daring to put an ad in a regional paper in Ontario or have a public event. CaWsbar is as far as I can tell a completely grassroots organization that advocates for keeping women’s prisons, sports, rape shelters, hospital wards - single sex. That hateful thing that was the law until five minutes ago. To get the media attention, they take cues from the Posie Parker type activism in the UK. [A stay-at-home mom whom the latest generation of transactivism turned into a feminist, PP rose to prominence when she paid for a billboard that says Woman: Adult human female, which upset all the right people and quickly got removed by the billboard company. A founding member of CaWsbar paid for a billboard in Vancouver that says I heart JK Rowling, and it too got removed immediately as “insensitive” and hate-speech-y, garnering caWsbar a lot of media in the process.]

When the Jean Tweed hoopla happened, it became obvious how many social service organizations had actually already switched to self-ID. One of the few exceptions is the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, which made legal history, and continues to be attacked for keeping single-sex. It’s not entirely clear if the BC Supreme Court and the SC of Canada of today would decide they are within their rights to do so should somebody else restart the litigation process.

The Elizabeth Fry Societies too signed the Are-You-a-Terf? letter. The Association whose focus used to be women in prison now focuses on the “issues that impact criminalized women and gender-diverse people”. Oxfam Canada is there. Amnesty International Canada. Planned Parenthood Toronto. The countless Ys. Stable, well-funded, well-branded organizations, all crossed over to the decadent phase of women’s rights. It was probably inevitable.

There are some notable exceptions. Canadian Women’s Foundation wasn’t among the signatories, and its website still talks about women and girls, and not one instance of ‘female-identifying’. I think the late composer Ann Southam, who bequeathed the CWF literal millions, would be proud. (Some of the newly added content on the website talks of “women, girls and gender-diverse people…” is this vocab, as well as the “gender-based violence”, coming from the same group of EDI consultants that train everyone now? I wonder if the “gender-diverse people” is a way to tell women who decide they are “non-binary” that this is a place for them too, in which case, fine.)

Another one of the places with roots deep in the second wave did not sign the TERF letter, but judging by its website, it too is adopting self-ID, at least ostensibly. Nellie’s was founded (by June Callwood etc) as a shelter for women fleeing domestic violence. I’ve recently come across a job ad of theirs that tells me they too – or at least this aspect of their operation – have been mission-captured. 

This is an ad for someone to work in collaboration with the CAWI, a civic engagement association that advocates for city planning and services tailored more than they currently are to women’s needs. A fine idea. But why would decolonization of a workplace, decolonization of anything be in this job description? You are a shelter for women escaping partner violence. What the hell?

And of course, while I have no proof that Nelllie’s itself is 100%  on board, this ad shouts self-ID. The job is open to anybody who’s ever as much as seen a woman. I wonder why it’s still there on the website long after the deadline…

If you’re dealing with anything to do with the City of Toronto, you’ll likely get emails from the staff that contain pronouns in email signatures. This City staff ideological enthusiasm clearly bubbled over to the City’s arms-length bodies and agencies, because when I get an email from a friend who works at the Toronto Arts Council, the pronouns are there. It’s provincial I expect too. I talked to an employment specialist from an Ontario-funded agency a couple of months ago, and the pronouns were in her signature. A professor from the U of T, a professor from Dalhousie: pronouns in signature. Do all these well-meaning people believe that sex is assigned at birth by a committee, hard to discern in real life unless you state it, needs to be reminded of in every email? Do they all think that trans people believe that pronouns in bios make any significant difference to their lives?

I’ve been emailing recently with an editor of the Ms Magazine’s website and realized that they too now have pronouns in their signatures. Ms Magazine! My piece, which should come out during the Women’s History Month a.k.a March, is about why I became a feminist at the age of 11, in a far away communist country where technically women and men were equal. The founder of Ms Magazine has a cameo in that story. If somebody had told me in my teens that I would move to NA and in my middle age witness a feminism that believes that you can step in or out of the female sex if there’s enough will and financial resources, I would have been not a little surprised. An alien – or my teen self -- landing in our present time and our highly American Canada and Toronto would discover that the most representative figure of the current state of women’s rights activism and lesbian rights activism is most likely a young gender non-conforming woman (they/them) fundraising for her top surgery on Patreon. And in equal measure those older women and men who run established ‘feminist’ and lgbt organizations who cheer her decision as necessary and reasonable.

I couldn’t of course have said this in that Ms piece. It would never have been published. That too would have come as a surprise to my time-travelling teen self.