What would you do if you had tens or hundreds of millions of bucks in the bank, 14.3 million followers on Twitter, the most powerful and protective legal and public relations team any of us could dream of, and access to celebrities, CEOs, the halls of power, and the rooms where it happens?

Would you tell trans women they are ruining feminism?

Would you sue a newspaper for identifying those tweets as transphobic?

Would you amplify claims that transness is a trend, a sickness, and a danger to our children?

Or would you maybe just… not do any of that?

If I had all that cash, after I donated a buttload of money to front-line social justice and environmental causes, I’d treat myself to pre-cut mango every fucking time I went to Whole Foods. “$23.50? For a bucket of mango chunks? I’ll take seven. No... thirty.”

If I had all those followers, I’d be like, “Hey everyone what character was responsible for your childhood sexual awakening” and see how many people said the fox in Robin Hood.

If I ever found myself in the room where it happens, I’d probably be like, “Hey can I keep this pen?”

But that’s neither here nor there. What is here and there is the question of trans-exclusive radical feminism, as it pertains to JK Rowling, the ostensibly feminist, trans-exclusionary, preeminent cultural heavyweight of our time.

First things first, let’s zip back to the year 2000.

A lot’s changed since 2000 - the rise of jeans, thank God. The fall of boy bands, may their memories be a blessing. And Mel Gibson’s career (although not quite as much as we’d like, to be honest.

But some things haven’t changed. The popularity of the Vans slip-on sneaker, for example. Tom Hanks is still a national treasure. In 2000, bell hooks published Feminism is for Everybody: passionate politics. And guess what! Feminism is still for everybody!

Feminist politics aims to end domination to free us to be who are — to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace.

Feminism is for everybody.

bell hooks

Feminism is for everybody.

If it’s not for everybody, it’s not feminism.

And when I say everybody, I mean everybody.

Feminism is for white women, Black women, Native women, Asian women, multiracial women.

Feminism is for men, too, by the way. You think only women suffer at the hands of men?

Feminism is for nonbinary and gay people, trans people, gender-fluid people, bi people. It’s for disabled people and people who speak languages other than English.

Feminism is for sex workers and their clients and poor people and rich people.

Feminism is for Ivanka and Melania as much as it’s for Michelle and Sasha and Malia (I know, stick with me), and feminism is still for your daughter even if you’re raising her to defer to her future husband, it’s for your son even if you told him boys shouldn’t cry, and feminism is still for your grandma even if she thought MLK was a rabble-rouser and the Voting Rights Act was divisive.

Believe it or not, feminism is even for Donald Fucking Trump and Mitch “Don’t Call Him a Turtle That’s Insulting to Turtles Because Turtles Aren’t Complicit in the Disenfranchisement of Millions of Voters and the Ongoing Abandonment of Working Class Americans to a Pandemic That is Ravaging Both Human Lives and our Economy” McConnell. Also, Ted “Gollum King” Cruz. May their tombstones all be urinals.

Because feminism is the radical notion that misogyny - deep and widespread hatred of and hostility toward women - is toxic to all who experience it, both those who inflict it and those who try to survive it.

Misogyny hurts everybody. White women, Black women, men, queer people, Ivanka, Malia, your grandma, your children, even the Gollum King. Feminism has to drive a fundamental, deep and widespread shift away from the misogyny that both arms and wounds everybody.

Therefore, feminism is for everybody.

Yet millions of women, including one notable wizard enthusiast, believe that feminism is only for “some people” - people like them. They approach feminism as a wall that protects them from people who are not like them, or as a plot of blood-soaked land that’s been taken from them and that they must reclaim and defend.

Behind that wall, guarding the contested territory of “feminism” is where you find your racist white feminists, your Karens, if you will. Right next to them, you’ve got your trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), your feminists who think sex workers should be criminalized (SWERFs), feminists who think pink is evil and all women should lean in, and feminists who promise they’ll get to anti-racism just as soon as they’re done the “real work” of women’s rights, as if patriarchy and white supremacy are two separate issues.

(PS, when Melania’s most common pop culture criticism is that she modeled nude and not that she’s a birther who’s cool with brown babies in cages, that’s how you know patriarchy and white supremacy are the same fucking issue.)

Let’s talk about trans-exclusionary feminism.

It seems to me that trans-exclusionary feminism is misogynistic abuse of women, by women, that is rooted in the deep pain that many women have experienced at the hands of misogynistic men.

That abuse is also rooted in the fear that this one small island of peace (“feminism”) is under siege by people who experienced a portion of their lives being perceived as men, benefiting from that perception, and participating in patriarchy from the yummy end of the lollipop.

(Fun fact! There is no yummy end of the patriarchy lollipop. It’s all poison. You’re either being poisoned or poisoning someone else, an act that actually poisons you, too. Most of us are doing both at the same time, punishing ourselves by punishing others, bearing the punishment they’re doling out to us in return.)

That’s how misogyny keeps women on-task and under-thumb, punishing other women for being women, albeit usually for being “a kind of women” that we don’t agree with or find distasteful.

Now Katie, you might be asking, aren’t you engaging in internalized misogyny?

After all, you’re criticizing JK Rowling, a woman, for being a kind of woman that you don’t agree with or find distasteful.

While I admittedly have a strong instinct to say “No, shut up,” and throw a milkshake at your car, let’s take a minute and marinate in the question.

Do I find Rowling’s persistent, honestly bafflingly persistent, totally uprovoked, bullying assault on transness to be extra hateful because she’s a woman?

Maybe.

It’s possible that I unconsciously held her to a higher moral standard because of her sex. I still catch myself expecting women to be smarter, kinder, and more inclusive than men, which speaks to my privilege as a white, cis, straight, able-bodied, native-born woman. I think I still expect women to be able to connect the dots between the oppression they’ve experienced and the oppression other people experience. I absolutely shouldn’t - that expectation of female moral superiority is an assumption based on an antiquated moral imperative that hurts women in two ways:

1. It shackles women by restricting their choices to a narrow band of “morally correct” actions as defined by--you guessed it--the patriarchy! Sex? Husband good; anyone else DIRTY. Eat foods? Probiotic yogurt good; ice cream SINFUL. Work? Home good; office AMBITIOUS. Children? Have them good; “Nah not for me” YOU ARE MURDERING SOCIETY.

2. It excuses the bigoted behavior of women under the guise that if a woman is doing it, it must be morally correct. This is how, for example, we get the idea that white women were unwilling participants in the enslavement of Black people when the truth is many were enthusiastic defenders of slavery. This is how we get the idea that Melania is a hostage in her household when she’s never even blinked a single morse code SOS, and how we still kind of believe that women who voted for Trump are hostages to their husbands and fathers, too.

Most of the people I criticize for transphobia are cis women because these women identify themselves as feminists, as I do. My circus, my monkeys. Is my internalized misogyny also a factor? I mean, when isn’t it, am I right ladies?

Transphobic cis men can fuck off into the sun as well, of course, but by and large those men don’t call themselves feminists and as such are both more and less dangerous than transphobic radical feminists are. They’re more transparently threatening, but less insidiously invasive.

CW for the next two paragraphs: transphobic violence, suicide

Put in entomological terms: Transphobic cis men are like murder hornets; transphobic radical feminists are like mosquitoes. One looks terrifying and kills fifty people a year, which is a fucking tragedy. (It should be noted that at least 22 trans or non-conforming people have been murdered so far in 2020.)

The other looks harmless and mundane and kills over a million people a year, which is a nearly incomprehensible assault. (“More than half of transgender male teens who participated in the survey reported attempting suicide in their lifetime, while 29.9 percent of transgender female teens said they attempted suicide. Among non-binary youth, 41.8 percent of respondents stated that they had attempted suicide at some point in their lives.” - HRC)

end CW

I don’t think my criticism of Rowling is rooted in her sex. I think I find Rowling’s unabashed, self-righteous bigotry to be particularly hateful because of her social power, particularly her nearly unparalleled influence in the lives of children and adolescents. She wrote a series of books that touched so many millions of kids. She earned millions and millions of dollars selling her books to children and families. And then she told so many millions of kids and grown-up kids that their identities are lies, mental illness, a threat to real (read: pure) women. Hi, may I have all my Harry Potter dollars back please? Quick as you can.

Worst of all, she’s donated millions of dollars to women’s and children’s support networks, but continues to double, triple, and quadruple down on making sure we understand that trans women aren’t included in those networks. It’s very “You can’t sit with us,” Joanne, and honestly, pretty Slytherin of you.

In the words of Raquel Willis:

Trans women are a type of woman, just as women of color, disabled women and Christian women are types of women. Just as you would be bigoted to deny these women their womanhood, so would you be to deny trans women of theirs.

Feminism doesn’t belong to anybody. It belongs to everybody.

If you think you get to choose who’s protected and liberated by feminism, you’re not a feminist. You’re a bigot.

You’re Gandalf with his wizard’s staff in the mines of Moria, all YOU SHALL NOT PASS, except on OPPOSITE DAY because Gandalf would never be like, “Hobbits, you guys are cool, nice vests by the way, but WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH, not you, Legolas. I don’t get your whole thing. What’s up with your CHICK hair? I thought you were a DUDE?”

Feminism is still for everybody. If it’s not for everybody, it’s rebranded misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, fatphobia, classism, ableism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or slut-shaming.

If it’s not for everybody, it’s not fucking feminism.

Because make no mistake: when you exclude trans people from feminism, you are practicing misogyny.

You are excluding and endangering people based on their gender.

You are sharpening the weapon that scarred you, too.

Your pain and humiliation from a lifetime of taking blows from patriarchy may be deep and it may be real and it may be so fucking wrong that you had to learn to live with that inside you.

But god damn it Patricia, put down the knife!

In the words of Audre Lorde:

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Trans-exclusionary feminists often claim that trans women shouldn’t get to call themselves women because they never experienced ::insert woman-type traumatic experience here::.

Look, misogynistic violence and hostility are real and painful. We should talk about these traumas. We should all work to make sure other people never have to experience them!

These traumas are also:

1. Not the only kind of real, painful experiences that we should ALL be working to prevent

2. NOT UNIVERSALLY EXPERIENCED BY ALL CIS WOMEN.

3. and therefore not some kind of secret password to the Feminist Clubhouse.

Among my women friends, here are just a few of the experiences we do not all share:

1. We don’t all menstruate.

2. We don’t all have uteruses.

3. We don’t all have breasts.

4. We don’t all have children.

5. Of those who are parents, we have not all experienced birth.

6. Also we don’t all drink coffee.

7. We aren’t all allergic to shellfish.

8. And we don’t all compost.
   
   

9. We have not all experienced workplace sexual harassment.

10. We have not all experienced intimate partner violence.

11. We have not all been slut shamed.

12. We don’t all wear leggings.

13. We don’t all have freckles.

14. We haven’t all been raped.

15. We don’t all love Taylor Swift.

16. We don’t all hate Taylor Swift.
    
    

17. We didn’t all grow up in healthy families.

18. We weren’t all encouraged to pursue our dreams.

19. We weren’t all shamed in childhood.

20. We’re not all straight.

21. We’re not all monogamous.

22. We’re not all white.

23. We’re not all from New Jersey.

24. We’re not all Gemini vegetarians.

25. We’re not all right-handed.

26. We’re not all middle children.

27. We haven’t all gotten a surprise stranger dick pic via DM.

28. We’re not all brunettes.

29. We didn’t all, like, love Fleabag.

Oh, and I could go on!

I have a friend who was adopted and a friend who was raised by her birth parents and shocker, they’re both women! I have a friend who grew up in Asia and a friend who grew up in Louisiana and, heyo, they’re both women, too!

And I have a friend with a uterus and a friend without a uterus and a friend with a vagina and a friend with (IDK BECAUSE IT’S NONE OF MY FUCKING BUSINESS) AND THEY’RE ALL WOMEN TOO.

I’m not trying to minimize the difference between a cis and trans lived experience to say that those differences are as trivial as whether or not you liked Fleabag. I feel like to do that would be the trans version of color-blindness. HI, it’s 2020, we have closed the chapter on erasing or silencing difference, and we’re roughing out the chapter on recognizing, respecting, and celebrating difference instead.

However, determining a person’s “womanness” based on a single arbitrary part of the complex, holistic story of their lives and identities, is as nonsensical as telling someone they’re not a woman because they don’t have freckles, or aren’t right-handed, or adopted instead of birthing a child.

If there’s one thing we do all share, it’s a bittersweet cocktail of pain and beauty, wounds and scars and strength and potential, mistakes and shame and redemption and joy. We all share that. All the people who feminism is for.

(FYI, bell hooks is eternal, and it’s still “everybody.”)

Listen to the voices of people whose pain might pluck a different string from yours, sing out a slightly different chord, and recognize it as pain neverthefuckingless. Who’s pro-pain? Anyone? In the back? No?

THEN PUT DOWN THE KNIFE, PATRICIA.

If you have ever been a kind of woman who felt like you didn’t belong - big voiced, big boned, wrong color, wrong size, weird hair, weird lifestyle, childless by choice (!!!) or domestic and empowered with it (?!?!?!), “unexpected” as a euphemism for unacceptable in any of the thousands and thousands of ways a woman can be unacceptable just by being authentically herself and challenging expectations - good God, how can you not see and hear yourself in the voices and stories of trans women?

Sarah McBride writes in her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different:

When the boys and girls lined up separately in kindergarten, I’d find myself longing to be in the other line.

Oh, baby girl.

Fuck lines. Fuck em all.

Feminism should be the great eraser.

And Jacob Tobia writes in their memoir, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story,

I’m sharing this with you because I want the world to understand that depriving a child of the ability to express their gender authentically is life threatening.

I’m sharing this with you because I want you to understand that gender policing is not some abstract, intellectual concept; it is a pattern of emotional abuse that came from every direction and singularly robbed me of my childhood.

I’m sharing this with you because I want you to understand that telling a boy not to wear a dress is an act of spiritual murder.

Okay but hear me, and join me, and together we shall pronounce the incantation in our warrior queen voices that deliver a low and slow death by syllables while we never fucking blink:

Do not. Fuck. With the children.

Do not fuck with Jacob. Do not fuck with Sarah. I’m saying that to every person who told Jacob they were shameful and told Sarah she was in the right place when she knew, she knew they were wrong. So yeah, I might be saying it to you.

But listen: I’m saying it to every person who fucked with you, too. Do not fuck with the children.

We’re all children.

Feminism is still for everybody.

In the words of Laverne Cox:

I think transwomen, and transpeople in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you’re supposed to be to live a more authentic life.

What if we stopped seeing feminism as property, a sacred piece of land that we had to go to war to protect, and started to see it as a chance to join a revolution?

What if we allowed Raquel Willis to help us understand that bigotry is bigotry is bigotry and none of it’s feminism? What if we simply agree with bell hooks when she said that feminism is for everybody? And what if we spent the rest of our lives dragging that dream toward reality?

What if we embraced Sarah and Jacob? What if we allowed ourselves to be embraced?

What if we listened to Audre Lorde and didn’t stop until we unshackled everybody? Literally every person from whatever was cutting them as they strained to live? What if we accepted Laverne Cox’s invitation to live as authentically as we can?

I’m really asking.

What if your feminism included everybody?

What would it cost you?

A lot less that 14 million followers.

A lot less than millions of dollars.

A lot less, even, than a carton of mango chunks from Whole Foods.

It would cost you humility. An apology. An admission of ignorance. A commitment to grow. (The same fucking things you’ve been asking men to do for years and you laugh, honestly, it’s so simple, why don’t they just get over themselves?)

And it might cost you the loss of proprietary ownership over feminism, or more accurately, the loss of the illusion of ownership.

Because feminism has always been for everybody.

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