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Women’s rights organisations advocating for sex-based protections and rights from a second-wave feminist tradition have been systematically mischaracterised in public discourse as ‘right-wing’, ‘reactionary’, ‘regressive’, or sometimes even ‘far-right’ or ‘extremist’. These labels are not merely inaccurate: they represent a form of political erasure of women’s organising that obscures the feminist lineage of our advocacy and misrepresents the nature of our concerns and advocacy.
The majority of women in feminist, women’s rights organisations such as AAWAA are rooted in second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation traditions that emerged from progressive movements of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Our advocacy is grounded in materialist feminist analysis: we recognise sex as a biological fact with material consequences for females living under patriarchy.
Historically, this analysis has driven campaigns against prostitution, sex trafficking, male violence against women and girls, surrogacy, pornography, sexualised advertising, misogyny, everyday sexism, and the denial of abortion rights — amongst other things. These we recognise as forms of systemic exploitation of women’s bodies and reproductive capacity: not matters of individual ‘choice’, but structures and mechanisms that enable and support male violence against women and that perpetuate our oppression as a sex class.
These positions were once widely recognised as core feminist positions. They emerge from the understanding that women exist firstly as a sex class before we exist as individuals or within any other class that includes the category of males. And they emerge from the knowledge that structures that commodify women’s bodies — whether through prostitution, surrogacy, or pornography — license prejudice against and the exploitation of women and girls at both the population and individual levels.
Women advocating for feminist stances on sex-based protections and rights are now routinely characterised as ‘right-wing’, ‘reactionary’, ‘regressive’, ‘extremist’, or aligned with political movements opposed to equality and human rights. These characterisations obscure the feminist lineage of our advocacy and misrepresent the nature of our concerns.
Women who raise concerns about policies that create conflicts between sex and gender identity, or that treat the commodification of women’s bodies as ’empowering’, should not be dismissed as bigots, extremists, hateful, or holders of reactionary politics.
Source: Setting the record straight: The political erasure of our feminist lineage
