Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith. You can read Part 1 here.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Jensen: Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?
Keith: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.
You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.
That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.
The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.
It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.
J: It’s a functional problem.
K: That’s why it always ends up militarized. That’s one big reason. Another reason is, as you mentioned, human slavery. This is backbreaking labor. Hunter-gatherers tend to work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week to provide for their basic resources, and the rest of the time they do spiritual activities, art, naps apparently are very important, and also gossip. So that’s what they love to do, and they’ve got a lot of free time to do it.
You can contrast that with farmers: it’s just neverending, from dawn to dusk. For anyone to have leisure time in an agricultural society, they have to have slaves. To put a real number on it, by the year 1800—a lot of people demarcate that as the beginning of the fossil fuel age—fully three-quarters of the human beings alive on this planet, three-quarters of them, were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom. That’s what it requires.
J: It was mainly agricultural, right?
K: Yes. We’ve forgotten how much work is involved because we’ve been using machines now to do that work. I can guarantee that when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly what kind of work this is.
Once you have that number of the population living in slavery, you need someone to keep them there, and those people are called soldiers. When they go out into the hinterlands, into the colonies, to get those resources that everybody now needs, one of those resources is always going to be other human beings.
We talk about Athens, the great birthplace of modern democracy. Ninety percent of the population of Athens were slaves. That carries through until the year 1800. So that’s number two, slavery.
The other problem with agriculture is it creates a surplus. That’s how the whole thing keeps going. You have to make enough so that you have some surplus. Hunter-gatherers can just move on a little bit and there’s more food to eat, but with the agriculturalists, of course, starvation is always one season away, so there’s always this surplus. The thing is, if you can store it, you can steal it, so you always have to have somebody to guard the food stores. And again, those people are called soldiers.
J: In the first cities—I learned this from Lewis Mumford—the first cities did not have walls around the outside to protect them from so-called raiders. They actually had walls around the granary to make sure that the king was able to keep control of the food supplies because it was only through keeping control of the food supplies that he was able to keep control of the labor force.
K: Yes, so you see this makes a really vicious little circle. Another point to keep in mind is if you can picture one of those great big naval ships that the British Navy or whoever used to conquer various colonies, it can take 600 old-growth trees just to make one of those ships.
War is really resource-intensive. And it ends. A lot of things you might produce create value in this society, and the value can keep either building or at least transferring, but with things that revolve around war, it just dead-ends right there because it’s only got one purpose. And when it’s over, everybody’s dead and that’s sort of the end of it.
Those ships—entire forests of the world were pulled down to make ships just for war. And this is true everywhere. It’s not just the British Navy. It’s all of them. That’s what was required to build those great big fighting vessels.
So you’ve destroyed your forest to live in this energy-intensive way, and you’ve poured a whole bunch of resources particularly into your military, not in defeating people but into the military, and now around again in the vicious circle, you have to go out and conquer the people living in the region next to you so you can take their forest to make more ships to conquer more people.
This is the temporary advantage that agricultural societies have. Because they’re willing to destroy their forests, they can build these great big ships. They can do all this smelting of iron and make these incredible weapons, which are a lot harder than just wooden spears. So they’ve got this superior military force because it’s all draw-down.
Then you’re stuck in this position where you then have to conquer. You have to use that military to go out and get more resources because you’ve used up yours. But it gives you that temporary advantage over the people who aren’t willing to destroy their forests.
If you’re the people who aren’t willing, now you’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either become militaristic and devote your forest to making an army—you kill your land—or you stand on principle and you’re killed and they take it. This is why war spreads. The gentle, peaceful matrilineal people that we all love to romanticize, and in our dreams that’s where we go, this is what happens. This is what they’re up against every time.
It’s a double bind. There’s not really any way out, and that’s why we’re in the state we’re in.
J: Since the problems are functional, as opposed to just something we can change by being nicer people, why are you telling us this? That’s one question. Another question is what do you want people to do with this information?
K: The reason I’m telling everybody is because I want to be hated. [Pause.] That’s supposed to be a joke.
The reason I’m telling everybody is because I feel like the people who care the most—and by that I mean radical environmentalists, radical feminists, people who are profoundly committed to the planet, to justice, to a better way—by and large do not understand the depth of the problem. And if we don’t address the actual problem, we’re never going to come up with solutions. That seems kind of obvious.
Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to these issues don’t understand that it all goes back to agriculture, that that’s the original activity that started us down this path of destruction. That’s the primary destruction. Eventually, global warming will outweigh that, but to date, it’s still the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Because that’s what it is. It’s not like agriculture on a bad day, agriculture done really badly. No, this is what it is. You pull down the forest. You rip up the prairie. You destroy those biotic communities, and you replace them with this monocrop for humans, for as long as it will last. That’s the problem.
Then once you start doing that, you’re stuck with this militaristic cycle because you’ve got to keep doing it again and again. When you’ve destroyed your own, you have to go out and get someone else’s. Militarism isn’t just, “Oh gosh, we happen to be warlike. We have a bad story in a book we consider holy. We’d better tell new stories.” I’m a writer. I’m all for new stories, but that’s not going to change this.
The problem is we have a way of life based on draw-down. Materially speaking, we’ve used it all up. And we need to face that. That’s why I’m trying to get people to understand this. It’s not because I actually want them to hate me although a lot of them end up hating me. I guess that’s just the way it goes when you go up against people’s beliefs.
We really have to get the basic wound that’s been done, the basic damage. This has got to be at the forefront of our consciousness as activists and environmentalists and feminists. We’re never going to be able to face it otherwise.
J: I want to comment on the whole hating you thing. What you’re saying is not actually new. Basically, every generation, there have been a number of people who say agriculture is destructive—can you just list a few of the people who have talked about this? There’s Jared Diamond and Richard Manning with Against the Grain, and how about Edward Hyams? Talk about a few of those precedents.
K: What you’re saying is absolutely right. Every generation there’s somebody who says the same thing, and you can go all the way back to ancient Greece to some of the earliest written texts that we have anywhere in the world, and you’ve got Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all mentioning the fact that the world was being destroyed, that the rivers were being flooded with this mud and silt, and so there were no more fish, and all the soil was washing down off the mountains.
In fact, some of the ports of the ancient Roman Empire had to be moved ten kilometers—ten kilometers—because so much silt ran off the mountains and clogged the harbors that they kept having to move, just literally move the cities, to a new spot where the ships could actually dock. This was all commented on. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that nobody knew how to stop it.
Then you have people like George Hill in the nineteenth century, then Edward Hyams in 1930, 1940, and more recently, you have David Montgomery and his book Soil, which is absolutely fabulous. Jared Diamond basically won a Pulitzer Prize for saying more or less the same thing. Richard Manning has this great quote that I love. I’d like to read this. It’s just a few sentences:
“No biologist or anyone else for that matter could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it.”
That’s it right there. It’s a war against the natural world.
No, I have nothing to say that’s particularly original. I think I put it together in my own way, but none of this is new information. It’s not getting to the people who care the most, and that’s why I feel impassioned about this.
J: So what do you want people to do on two levels, both the personal level and the social level?
K: I think that the social level is heads and shoulders, far and way above, way more important than anything that anybody can do in their personal lives. And I really want to emphasize that, because there are no personal solutions to political problems, and we should know that.
The problem is that a lot of the environmental movement—we’ve kind of been sold this idea that if we just make different consumer choices, we can somehow buy our way out of these massive, global political problems. We can’t. There’s no set of things you can buy that’s going to make a damn bit of difference on any of this. This is not a problem that you can address in your personal life and really have that make anything but a nano-difference. These are really just horrendous systems of power that we are going to have to challenge.
J: Can you say what you were going to say, but in addition can you give a three-minute liberal/radical distinction? Is that possible?
K: There are two main differences between liberals and radicals. The first is that liberals are idealist, and what that means is that liberals tend to think that social reality is an idea. It’s a mental event. And therefore, the way to make social change is education. You change people’s minds. And social change happens because people have some kind of consciousness transformation, or a personal epiphany, or even a spiritual revelation, but that’s how social change happens. It’s one by one and it’s through education or rational argument because it’s a rational problem, right? It’s just a mental event.
J: If we recognize that agriculture is destructive, then we’ll stop it.
K: Yes. Somehow if we just get the information to people, it will somehow just happen. It’s very different on the radical side because radicals think that material conditions are primary, that society is not made up of ideas, it’s made up of material conditions and material institutions that create those conditions. The way you change things is by taking power away from the powerful and redistributing that to the dispossessed. That involves struggle.
Down the line, you have to make decisions how you’re going to wage such struggle, whether it’s violent or nonviolent. All that is really important, and often very ethically grueling to come to grips with, but that’s a much later discussion.
The thing to recognize is this requires force. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s not a mistake. The powerful aren’t there because the rest of us aren’t educated. They’re there because they have power, and they’re not going to give it up willingly.
You need to use some level of force, whether that’s nonviolent, whether it’s boycotts, whether it’s sit-ins—there are plenty of nonviolent ways that have worked, so it’s not about violence and nonviolence.
It’s simply to recognize that this is not a mistake or a misunderstanding because it’s not a mental event. It’s about material systems of power that have got to be changed, that have to be confronted and brought down. That’s idealism versus materialism.
The other big difference between liberals and radicals is the basic social unit. For liberals it’s always the individual. The individual is sacrosanct. It’s always the individual against society. And again, this leaves you with a strategy of sort of one on one. You’re going to change people one by one, and that’s how you change society.
For radicals, again, this is totally different. We understand that society is actually made of groups of people—so it’s always a class condition, whether it’s economic class, whether it’s a sex caste system of gender, whether it’s a racial caste system. These are groups of people, and some of those groups have power over other groups.
So it’s not about you as an individual. The bad things that happen to me aren’t because my name is Lierre and I have blue eyes and I like reading. The bad things that happen to me are because I’m a woman, because of the different class positions that I hold. Those are the things that happen to people who are in my position. Nothing to do with me as an individual.
Social change happens when the dispossessed come together and make common cause. The solution is really written into the problem. Groups of people have power, but the dispossessed can come together and fight for themselves to change that. There’s always hope in that condition.
That’s the difference between liberals and radicals, and the problem with a lot of the environmentalists of course is that they’ve completely taken up this liberalism. So it’s only going to change by education, and you’re only going to do it one on one. What has dropped out completely from of the conversation is that there are people in power, they’re making money, they control armies, and they’re in control of things like Exxon/Mobil. They are gutting the planet for their personal profit. They’ve got names and addresses, as Utah Phillips very famously said. We know where they live, and we can see how their power is organized.
Our job is to take that apart. It’s to take down those institutions in whatever way we can and redistribute the power so that we all have some say in the material conditions of our lives.
What do I want people to do? In really broad strokes I actually think that there’s still a lot of hope because the things that we need to do to solve these problems are actually things that we should be doing anyway if we care about justice. To get justice for people is also the only way we’re going to save this planet. It’s not human race vs. planet. I think it gets set up that way in people’s minds. It’s not. It’s actually quite the opposite.
So, to get down to brass tacks, the number one thing you can do to drop the birth rate is teach a girl to read. That’s a really profound statement. When women have even that much more power over their lives, it means they have a little more control over the uses to which men put our bodies, and that’s sexually, reproductively, economically. The number one thing that drops the birth rate across the globe is teaching a girl to read. And we should care about that because we care about girls.
As it turns out, it’s one of the main things we’re going to have to do to save the planet. Right now somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of all children that are born are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give women control over their bodies and the birth rate drops. That’s happened in 32 countries. We now have negative or zero population growth in 32 countries. This is not the human rights horrors of China or places like that where they’ve instituted these draconian and misogynist laws. This is simply giving women power over their lives. And that’s what happens when women have a little education and a little bit of power, over and over.
The number one thing that we have to do is empower girls, and that means confronting a system of power that’s called patriarchy. We’re all going to have to be feminists. Gosh, what a shame.
The other thing that drops the birth rate is when you increase people’s standard of living. People end up having lots of children when they’re very, very poor. So if you raise the standard of living, the birth rate drops, very quickly in fact. Often in a generation you can see this happen.
The reason that people are poor is not because they’re stupid. It’s because the rich are stealing from them. And that is a global system called capitalism. So we’re going to have to be against capitalism, and we’re going to have to do something about patriarchy. That is the only way that we’re going to save this planet.
Again, it’s not humans vs. planet earth. If you care about human rights, that is the only thing that’s really going to save this situation.
My goal is, over the next two or three generations, we could very easily, by simply caring about women and girls and giving them some rights over their lives, some decision-making power, we could drop the birth rate dramatically and then we could let the planet repair. We could be part of that repair. It’s actually not that hard, because the grasses and the forests want to come back. If we simply get out of the way, they will.
I’ll end with one final bit of information, and that’s really about grasslands. If we were to take 80 percent of the trashed out grasslands around the planet, which have been destroyed by agriculture and return them to the grasslands that they would like to be, within 15 years we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We could stop global warming in its tracks.
Because it’s not us doing it. It’s the plants that are doing it. It’s those incredible grasses that would do it for us. Because life wants to live. And they will do that. The one thing they are really good at is building soil. That’s what prairies do. The basic component of soil is carbon, so they’ll suck it out of the air and they’ll store it once more in the ground, and that could be the end of global warming.
But we’ve got to stop being these monsters and destroyers. A lot of times people make this argument that this is human nature. My response is that it’s not. We were on this planet for over two million years and we didn’t destroy anything. In fact, you can look at the first art that we ever made, and to me it’s a celebration. You have the mega-fauna and the mega-females. Those were our first art projects, these giant animals and these giant women. To me that says that in our bodies, in our brains, in our bones, we have that awe and that thanksgiving, that we were trying to say thank you for our lives and for our homes, and so that was what we celebrated.
I don’t think it’s that far from us still. I think we could repair this planet and remember how to participate rather than dominate.
Last week, a 60-year-old woman was beaten up at Speaker’s Corner by several men. She was there with a group of women, who had chosen the historic corner of Hyde Park as a meeting place, before heading off to a talk called, “What is Gender.” The men who punched and kicked Maria MacLachlan had come to protest the women on account of their interest in feminism and in discussing the way new conversations and legislation around “gender identity” could impact the women’s movement and women’s rights. The protestors did not frame their anger and inflammatory rhetoric in this way, though. Instead, they labelled the women “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) — a word that has come to signify a modern witch: to be silenced, threatened, harassed, punched, and — yes — killed.
The idea that feminists who question the notion of “gender identity” should be beaten and murdered has very rapidly become accepted by self-described leftists. We’re not just talking about Twitter eggs, here. Men with large platforms who are publicly associated with Antifa and groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have amplified the “punch TERFs” and “TERFs get the guillotine” message proudly, with the support of their comrades. In reference to The Handmaid’s Tale, many have taken to saying “TERFs get the wall.”
The comparison is a surprisingly (and frighteningly) truthful admission in terms of the intent of these men. “The wall” in The Handmaid’s Tale is where executed bodies are hung, often with placards around their necks that read “Gender Treachery.” The dead bodies serve as a warning to others: do not rebel, do not fight back, do not reject the patriarchal order of things. And this is precisely what these men who use the term “TERF” are saying to women: obey our rule or you will be punished.
Rather than condemning the violence at Speaker’s Corner, numerous trans activists and self-identified leftist men have celebrated and encouraged it.
While some will claim the word “TERF” is neutral, it’s use demonstrates the opposite. It is not a word that women have claimed for themselves — like “slut,” “cunt,” or “bitch,” “TERF” is a word imposed on women to shut them up, bully them, condemn them, smear them, humiliate them, and dismiss them. But more than that: it is a threat. If I think about the times in my life I have been called these words — cunt, bitch, slut — by a man, I have almost always felt the threat of violence behind them. The spitting rage behind those words — the desire to follow through with a punch — is too often present. I have always known these words are used against me as an explicit reminder: you are subordinate. No matter how confident, tough, self-assured, strong, or brave a woman is, these words still put her in her place.
The term, “TERF,” is itself is an intentional manipulation, intended to reframe feminist ideas and activism as “exclusionary,” rather than foundational to the women’s liberation movement. In other words, it is an attack on women-centered political organizing and the basic theory that underpins feminist analysis of patriarchy.
For example, those of us called “TERF” are labelled as such for numerous crimes, including:
Understanding that women are members of an oppressed class of people (a sex class or caste, as feminists like Kate Millett and Sheila Jeffreys have called it)
Challenging the notion of innate or internal gender
Having conversations about “gender identity”
Questioning whether or not children should begin the process of transitioning
Associating with or defending women who have been labelled “TERF”
Understanding that the root of women’s oppression and male supremacy is in biological sex
Understanding that gender is imposed, and is oppressive/exists to create a hierarchy between men and women.
Questioning dogma and mantras like “transwomen are women”
Supporting woman-only space
Disputing an ideology that claims “male” and “female” are not a material reality
These things are not only not criminal, but are at the root of feminism. In other words, in order to understand how patriarchy works, you must first understand who is a member of the dominant class and who is a member of the subordinate class. You must understand that male violence against women is systemic. You must understand that women are not inherently “feminine,” and that men are not inherently “masculine.” You must be willing to have critical conversations and ask challenging questions about the status quo, about dominant ideology, and about political discourse. You must understand that patriarchy began as a means to control women’s reproductive capacity, and that, therefore, women’s biology is very much central to their status as “less than.” You must understand that feminism is a woman-centered movement, and that women have the right to meet and to organize amongst themselves, without members of the oppressor class (men), to advocate toward their own liberation.
What people are saying when they say “TERF” is “feminist.” It is “uppity woman.” What they mean when they say “exclusionary” is not, as is often claimed, “exclusive of trans-identified people,” but “exclusive of males.” Gender non-conformity is welcomed in feminism — feminism is about not conforming to gender norms. If we were interested in conforming, we would, as is often suggested to us, sit down and shut up.
While “TERF” has always been a slur, what has become clear of late is that it is no longer just that: it is hate speech.
Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist and professor in language and communication at Oxford, explains that there are key questions we must ask to determine whether a term constitutes a slur, such as:
Has the term been imposed or has it been adopted voluntarily by the group the term has been applied to?
Is the word commonly understood to convey hatred or contempt?
Does the word have a neutral counterpart which denotes the same group without conveying hatred/contempt?
Do the people the word is applied to regard it as a slur?
Considering the answers to these questions — that, yes, the term has been imposed on feminists, it is always understood as pejorative, it does have a neutral counterpart (i.e. one could just use the term “feminist”), and feminists have consistently stated that the term is a slur — “TERF” is undoubtedly that. Considering that women are the primary target of this slur and that it is commonly attached to threats of (and, as of late, real-life) violence, there is something more we must now contend with.
Following the violent incident at Speaker’s Corner (which was no accident — one of the perpetrators had publicly expressed his intention to “fuck some terfs up”), I have received hundreds of death threats from men online. I’m not alone, either. Any woman who challenged men’s celebration or defense of the violence at Speaker’s Corner became a target. All of these threats have been attached to the term, “TERF.” Feminists have been labelled in this way specifically to dehumanizethem, to spread outrageouslies about their politics (claiming feminists want to kill trans-identified people or that they advocate genocide), to reframe them as oppressorsof males who identify as gender non-conforming, and to paint them, generally, as evil witches, therefore deserving of violence.
Proliferating lies about and dehumanizing an oppressed group of people in order to justify abuse is a longtime strategy of racists and xenophobes. Hitler used these tools to commit genocide against the Jews. Indeed, propaganda was a key tool of the Nazis in their efforts to spread antisemitism, quell dissent, and turn people against one another. German newspapers printed cartoons and ads depicting antisemitic images and messages.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” was Hilter’s guiding mantra. He trusted that people wouldn’t think for themselves and would simply act out of fear or intellectual laziness, jumping on bandwagons without thoroughly questioning the purpose and foundation of those bandwagons. The Holocaust was successful because the public went along with it — because individuals believed the myths and lies proliferated by the Nazis, and because they didn’t stand up, think critically, or push back.
While hate speech laws differ from place to place (and can be blurry), as a general rule, making statements intended to expose people to hatred or violence, or that advocate genocide, constitute hate speech.
Because feminists who challenge gender identity ideology are often (strategically) accused of advocating genocide, let’s be clear: “genocide” does not mean arguing that biological sex is a real thing, challenging the idea that femininity and masculinity are innate, or suggesting certain spaces should be for women and girls alone. What genocide does mean is: killing members of an identifiable group or deliberately inflicting conditions of life aimed to bring about the physical destruction of an identifiable group.
In other words, suggesting that feminists should all be destroyed, fired from their jobs, forced into homelessness, harassed, silenced, removed from society, abused, and sent to the Gulag.
Under the law, advocating or promoting genocide is an indictable offence. Likewise, those who promote hatred against an identifiable group or communicate statements in public that incite hatred or violence against an identifiable group that are likely to lead to a breach of the peace (i.e. for example: what happened at Speaker’s Corner) are guilty of an indictable offence.
But these laws are hard to enforce. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. We should not be charging people willy-nilly for things they say on Twitter. What we most certainly should be doing is holding men to account for inciting violence against women and holding media and other institutions to account for normalizing hate speech.
So, beyond the law, let’s talk about accountability. When the media normalizes hate speech, they become culpable. A publication would not use the n-word to describe a black person or the word “kike” to describe a Jewish person. This is because we know that these terms reinforce racism and justify discrimination and/or abuse against particular groups of people who have been historically and systemically oppressed. When the media, institutions, and authorities become aware that a particular term is being used to incite violence against women, it is their responsibility to condemn or simply refrain from encouraging the use of that language.
The fact that the vast majority of those connecting the word “TERF” to threats of violence, death, and genocide are men is notable. The word has been offered up to those who identify as leftists, who have been, on some level, prevented from making misogynistic statements publicly or otherwise advocating violence against women. Their “progressive” credentials meant that they had to maintain a facade of political correctness. But because women labelled “TERF” have been compared to Nazis and bigots, and because trans activism claims to be allied with the interests of the marginalized (despite its overt anti-feminism and individualist ideology), these leftist men have a socially acceptable excuse. Indeed, they seem to revel in it. It’s as if they were given the green light to scream “bitch” (or perhaps “witch” would be more accurate, considering the targeting of specific unruly women to “punch”… or burn…) over and over again, cheered on by their comrades.
If “TERF” were a term that conveyed something purposeful, accurate, or useful, beyond simply smearing, silencing, insulting, discriminating against, or inciting violence, it could perhaps be considered neutral or harmless. But because the term itself is politically dishonest and misrepresentative, and because its intent is to vilify, disparage, and intimidate, as well as to incite and justify violence against women, it is dangerous and indeed qualifies as a form of hate speech. While women have tried to point out that this would be the end result of “TERF” before, they were, as usual, dismissed. We now have undeniable proof that painting women with this brush leads to real, physical violence. If you didn’t believe us before, you now have no excuse.
Featured image: Jollene Levid (Photo: AF3IRM LA Coordinator Roxanna Avila). National chairperson of AF3IRM, Jollene Levid, speaks with Meghan Murphy about rise of white nationalism in the US, how the alt-right is connected to male supremacy, and what movements can do to better address violence against women of colour.
While the rise in white nationalist activity in the U.S. (and the recent death of a woman named Heather Heyer, who was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of people protesting a white supremacist rally) has sparked discussions, anger, and protests against the alt-right and the white supremacist movement, what has been discussed less is the role of male supremacy. Male violence against women of colour is too-often ignored both in the media and by leftist groups. In order to discuss the connections between misogyny and racism, and what the feminist movement and other progressive movements can do to better address those connections and that violence, I spoke with activist and feminist Jollene Levid.
Jollene Levid is a second generation Filipina-American union organizer and social worker from Los Angeles. For the past 15 years, she has been involved in AF3IRM, an anti-imperialist, transnational feminist organization with 10 chapters across the US. AF3IRM fights for im/migrant women’s rights, and against trafficking and militarism. Jollene is the Founding Chairperson, and currently serves on AF3IRM’s International Committee.
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Meghan Murphy: While the fact of racism as a direct motivation for what happened recently in Charlottesville is a clear, what’s been discussed less, in terms of the rise of the alt-right and (public) white nationalist activity, is male supremacy. Do you see patriarchy and misogyny as connected to the incident in Charlottesville and the rise of the alt-right more broadly?
Jollene Levid: It is no coincidence that the faces of the Charlottesville white terrorists are men. I think that this is an important thing to pause and think about. I think it’s also important to think about the fact that in the few centuries that the US has existed as a country, white supremacy’s spokespeople have always been white men… Bedsheet or no bedsheet.
What we learned in AF3IRM through the study of the history of patriarchy itself is that the first place that a man learns about subjugation of women is in the home. It is programmed, it is structural, and it is no surprise that the alt-right espouse male supremacy just as vehemently as white supremacy.
M: Websites and online forums like 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit have provided a way for Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) to congregate and increase their presence in public discourse, as well as to recruit and build their numbers — do you see this bolstering of MRA activity and discourse as connected to the white nationalist movement?
J: Yes. This is an important moment we are living in. When we take a step back and think about US history and stages in which there is a sharp economic turn – Reconstruction Era, the Great Depression, the 1970s — we see the same trends amongst white men who see themselves as “attacked” or “disenfranchised.” That trend is to increase xenophobia, racism, sexism. Who is allowed to work the “desirable jobs”? Who is allowed to enter the country? Who is allowed basic rights like voting and fair housing?
When you look at MRA public discourse and white supremacy, the intersections are apparent and the grievances are the same. We live in an imperialist era and these white men are feeling “victimized” — so they in turn increase violence against those with less power than them.
MRAs and white supremacists are of the same crop.
M: While people of colour are subjected to various forms of violence in North America, via the state, the police, the prison system, on the street, in their homes, etc., the issue of race as a factor specifically in terms of male violence against women is also a reality. Do you feel this issue is discussed or addressed effectively in public discourse or in the media? Do you feel women are left out of the conversation about racist violence in the US, specifically?
J: Race and violence against women are absolutely not discussed enough in the media or in our communities of colour, even in our movements.
I want to provide some concrete examples. When Trayvon Martin was brutally murdered by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, there was an all-out call to take the streets for Trayvon and all black people murdered by the state and those not held accountable by it.
AF3IRM in its eight chapters at the time attended protests nationally, attended meetings, answered the call, chanted, screamed, and wept.
We proudly followed the leadership of the queer black women who founded Black Lives Matter — Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. Many of us who are mothers of black and brown children found an additional home in the movement.
After Sandra Bland was killed and there was a call for #SayHerName protests, we showed up with the same voracity, even joining planning and leadership groups in our respective cities like the Bay and New York City.
When we got to the mobilizations across the countries, what did we see? Emptiness. Maybe a hundred protesters at each mobilization, maybe not. There was a moment on a national AF3IRM call when we had to ask one another how the mobilizations looked and a slow realization that they were smaller than any of the other protests.
We immediately turned inwards and looked at our work — did we not organize effectively or work hard enough? Was the messaging and media around deaths like that of Aiyana Jones not covered or projected enough?
We came to the conclusion that, no, the problem was not with failures in organizing or ineffective messaging. This is a result of all the people who did not have as strong a lens on gender violence, gender oppression, and patriarchy, deciding it was not as important to protest the killings of black women and girls as that of the men and boys targeted by the police. Instead of double or triple the amounts of people showing up to protest because of double oppressions, we see less. The crowd was predominantly women of colour.
Even more — where were the white American feminists who work day in and day out against violence? Were the lives of black women and girls not as important, were their deaths not enraging enough to show up for?
The experience is reflected in other protests — why is it that AF3IRM is one of the only feminist groups in the US putting forward the crisis of the 1,200+ missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in North America? What about the fact that, in the Philippines, the fascist President Duterte is allowing — even encouraging troops — to rape women under martial law in Mindanao?
We go back to the feminist question that brought us to women’s organizing to begin with: why are women secondary, even in our social justice circles? Why are women and girls of colour not on the radar of the liberal, white feminist movement?
M: Do you believe the left — and specifically groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter — are addressing misogyny and male violence against women in their activism? If not, why? What could be done differently?
J: Regarding Antifa and BLM and other groups: In our interface with BLM, which has been positive, we understand that each chapter looks different. I know their platform, their leadership, their written strategic plans include and prioritize women. The #SayHerName protests had BLM leaders in our respective cities. They did not have the mass mobilization of people that the other protests had. I hope that folks that subscribe to BLM’s ideological and political platforms follow the lead of women like Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors in their calling for the abolishment of patriarchy along with race and class oppressions.
For Antifa groups who have taken the forefront of defense against Nazis even moreso in recent months, their public stances do not have a strong stance against patriarchy.
I spoke with an AF3IRM woman who navigates these spaces — primarily in the anarcho feminist collectives. In those spaces, which have overlap with Antifa, there was strict accountability for men who engaged in sexual assault, harassment, etc. They were removed immediately. It is the lack of a programmed, public stance that is the problem (unlike BLM).
M:Helen Lewis recently wrote about the “Day Three Story,” explaining that many terrorists’ first victims are their wives (or girlfriends/other female family members). How does terrorism connect to domestic abuse? Do you think feminism has a role to play in addressing the mass shootings and terrorism that have become so commonplace these days?
J: I think it’s important to first talk about who is a “terrorist.” I think when we step back and look at where we are politically, economically, we also have to see the US in its complicity and in its role for creating, training these terrorists.
Feminism has a role in addressing mass violence if it does what it should do: be a comprehensive movement.
Feminists are not responsible for the mass violence happening in the world, but we are responsible for building a movement to address the roots and the product (the mass violence). Feminism is responsible for anti-racist work, for anti-imperialist work, for expanding our work to a global level. This issue in particular exposes our weakness as a movement. Why are feminists — who are thoroughly and publicly and ideologically feminist leaders — not at the forefront and deeply embedded in the anti-war movement, in the immigrant rights movement, in the workers’ rights movement? Why are they separate?
We can’t decry violence and not be part of dismantling the system at the root of it. That includes the multiple oppressions in addition to patriarchy.
M: What role do women play in the alt-right, if any? Do women have any responsibility, in terms of the rise of white nationalism in the US, or do you consider them to be victims of male supremacy (as well as victims of the individual men who spout racism and anti-semitism, and perpetrate acts of violence like the one that took place recently in Charlottesville).
J: Yes they do. White women are also to blame for the rise and consolidation of the alt-right. White women voted for Trump. They are more than complicit — they are comrades in the white supremacist movement. They may experience patriarchy, of course, but that does not excuse them. They become a tool of patriarchy and sexism in their both their active engagement in the white supremacist movement as well as their complicity in it.
To learn more about AF3IRM, visit: www.af3irm.org. Af3irm’s national summit will be held on October 21st in New York City
When I was in grad school, I got into a heated debate with a classmate who insisted that “white feminism” was a serious problem in the women’s movement. The man (who was white and from the United States) argued that, “white feminism” meant that the women’s movement had centered the lives and experiences of only a select few — privileged white women in the US who traveled mainly in academic circles — “for most of its history.”
I told him I thought the term functioned as a tool to dismiss second wave feminists, glorify the (very problematic) third wave, and encourage infighting among feminists, creating divisions in a movement where collective struggle is crucial. His claim was at odds with the grassroots movement I’d grown up with in the Dominican Republic, which was obviously not led by women in the US (and certainly not by upper-class white women or academics). There are legitimate problems within feminism in my home country, particularly around class difference, but there is far more solidarity than animosity, and Dominican feminism has been consistent in addressing the struggles of rural, working class, and immigrant women.
Notably, during my time as an immigrant in the US, most of the people who complained to me about what they called “white feminism” were white themselves. I felt tokenized; like they wanted me, as a Dominican woman of colour, to validate them and their feminism. I became suspicious of all white people who used the term. Criticizing “white feminism” seemed to be a way for white people to present themselves as different, better white people — as cool, “intersectional” feminists who just happen to be white.
Now that I am back in the Dominican Republic doing shelter work, I believe my friend from grad school was right about one thing: white feminism is real. It is epitomized by gender identity ideology.
The current trend among third wavers, as well as among progressives, is to argue that we can ignore whether people were born male or female and instead use language like “genderfluid,” “multi-gender,” or “genderqueer.” But there’s a massive gap between this language — popularized within Gender Studies classrooms in the West — and the realities of marginalized women in countries like mine.
I’ve been thinking about what gender identity means in the context of the Global South. What does gender identity mean for women and girls who look like me? What does it mean for Dominican women and girls who are marginalized not just by sex, but by poverty, race, and xenophobia?
Recently, the Dominican Republic has been debating whether or not to outlaw child marriage. The country has the highest rate of child marriage in the Latin American and Caribbean region. According to a 2014 survey, 37 per cent of women who are between 20 and 49 years old got married (or became common law partners) before they were 18. The survey also shows that one in five girls between 15 and 19 are in a relationship with a man who is at least 10 years their senior. There is a strong correlation between child marriage and teen pregnancy, which can result in dangerous health complications for girls, like blood poisoning, obstructed labour, and high blood pressure. Indeed, teen pregnancy is the number one cause of death for teen girls worldwide. This is particularly worrisome because the Dominican Republic prohibits all abortion, even in the cases when the mother’s life is in danger.
Plan International, a children’s rights organization, published a study in March, looking at child marriage on the south side of the Caribbean island. They interviewed men who married underage girls, as well as the girls who “chose” these marriages. Almost 40 per cent of the men interviewed said they preferred younger girls because they were “more obedient and easier to control.” The study also revealed that many girls marry older men hoping to escape family violence and poverty, but then face violence from these men once they are married. One 15-year-old girl who was interviewed for the study said:
“I got married because I needed to run away from home. They were beating me. They used sticks. They wouldn’t trust me. One day I said: ‘I don’t want to live like this anymore.’ At home, there was a lot of fighting, one day in front of everybody, they beat me, in the middle of the street. So, I started working at a household. I was 11 years old. It was even worse there, the violence increased. I had to do all the chores, including washing all the clothes by hand. They wouldn’t even let me go to school and they never paid me because they said that they already gave me food. I was suffering a lot. I felt imprisoned I couldn’t even go to the park. I wanted to get married to leave all of that. I thought that if I got married I was going to be in a calm house, that I would be able to eat, sleep and go out. I didn’t know it wouldn’t be like that, like another hell.”
In the Dominican Republic, boys are not expected to clean or help raise their siblings — that is the responsibility of girls. Prior to marriage, 78 per cent of the girls who participated in the Plan International study said they were put in charge of doing household chores like cleaning and caring for their younger siblings. When girls were asked what it means to be a woman, most said that it meant being a mother and a wife.
“Half of the women in Latin America who are in their [productivity years] are unemployed and the ones who do have a job earn considerably less than their male counterparts. For women in Latin America and the Caribbean, the wage gap becomes more exacerbated during their peak fertility years.”
This is because there is an expectation that women are inherently nurturing. Being forced into the position of caretaker translates to women having less savings, being promoted less, and accumulating less money in their pensions.
But gender identity politics reduces this reality — and womanhood itself — to a trivial, malleable identity. It is baffling that in a world where women and girls face structural oppression due to their biology, gender identity politics has thrived.
Susan Cox argues that: “The non-binary declaration is a slap in the face to all women, who, if they haven’t come out as ‘genderqueer,’ presumably possess an internal essence perfectly in-line with the misogynistic parody of womanhood created by patriarchy.” There’s a twisted, neoliberal cruelty in arguing that the primary problem with gender is its impact on the chosen identities of individuals, and not the way it operates systemically, under patriarchy, to normalize and encourage male violence and female subordination.
When confronted with evidence that, historically and globally, women’s oppression is sex-based, gender identity politics simply claims that sex itself is an “invented” social construct.
“Sex and gender are much more complex and nuanced than people have long believed. Defining sex as a binary treats it like a light switch: on or off. But it’s actually more similar to a dimmer switch, with many people sitting somewhere in between male and female genetically, physiologically, and/or mentally. To reflect this, scientists now describe sex as a spectrum.
Despite the evidence, people hold on to the idea that sex is binary because it’s the easiest explanation to believe. It tracks with the messages we see in advertisements, movies, books, music — basically everywhere. People like familiar things, and the binary is familiar (especially if you’re a cisgender person who has never had to deal with sexual-identity issues).”
But feminists don’t argue that sex is real because it is “the easiest explanation to believe” or because of what the media tells us. We argue sex is real because from the moment an ultrasound reveals a baby is female, her subjugation begins. And though “gender identity” is presented as an issue feminism must contend with, it is, as Rebecca Reilly-Cooper explains, completely at odds with feminist analysis of biological sex as an axis of oppression:
“Women’s historic and continued subordination has not arisen because some members of our species choose to identify with an inferior social role (and it would be an act of egregious victim-blaming to suggest that it has). It has emerged as a means by which males can dominate that half of the species that is capable of gestating children, and exploit their sexual and reproductive labour.
We cannot make sense of the historical development of patriarchy and the continued existence of sexist discrimination and cultural misogyny, without recognizing the reality of female biology, and the existence of a class of biologically female persons.”
Far from fluid, the realities of sex-based oppression are strict and enforced through violence — this is particularly true for women of colour and women in poverty.
Presumably, the Romanian women and girls who are filling up brothels in Spain (six out of 10 prostituted women in Spain are from Romania) would like to opt-out of their gender. Evelyn Hernandez Cruz, the 19-year old girl who has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail in El Salvador for having a stillbirth, after being repeatedly raped by a gang member, surely would like to reject her status as “woman.” The 12-year-old girls in Kenya who are sold into prostitution by their families, desperate for money amidst regional droughts, probably don’t identify with being exchanged as if they’re commodities. Presumably the girls in Nepal who die from snake bites and low temperatures in menstruation huts are uncomfortable with the restrictions of their gender.
Even in the US, sex-based oppression is compounded through other forms of oppression, like race. According to a 2017 report, black women are four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications, and are “twice as likely to experience a life-threatening complication during childbirth or pregnancy.” A study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that half of the murders of women in the US are committed by a current or former partners and that black women are most likelyto die by homicide than all other demographics. It is fair to assume that this is not a reality these women “identify” with.
To argue that sex is not real and that gender is innate or chosen, instead of socially imposed, demonstrates both ignorance to the world around you as well as a position of privilege. In this way, we see that gender identity ideology literally is“white feminism”: a (so-called) feminism that ignores the material realities of the marginalized, centers the feelings and interests of the most privileged, and presents itself as universal. It is a “feminism” invented by academics in Western countries that does little to address the struggles of those outside these circles.
“A specific set of single-issue, non-intersectional, superficial feminist practices. It is the feminism we understand as mainstream; the feminism obsessed with body hair, and high heels and makeup, and changing your married name. ‘White feminism’ is the feminism that doesn’t understand western privilege, or cultural context. It is the feminism that doesn’t consider race as a factor in the struggle for equality.
White feminism is any expression of feminist thought or action that is anti-intersectional. It is a set of beliefs that allows for the exclusion of issues that specifically affect women of colour.”
Considering this definition, what do we make of a man claiming that eyeliner defines his “womanhood,” as Gabriel Squailia did this year in an article for Bustle? He writes:
“My politics and my eyeliner became inseparable. Projecting my own sense of beauty, without shame or hesitation, scared the hell out of my opponents. My look was my armor and my weaponry. Every day, my personal power has grown. Strength and security come from drawing lines on my lids, and from the visibility that follows.My sense of myself is personal, particular, idiosyncratic. It involves massive, complex issues of identity and politics. And all of this is present when I’m leaning into the mirror, getting my eyeliner wings just right.”
The ridiculousness of Squailia’s claim that makeup makes him a woman and that power, strength and security are easily available and acquirable through superficial means, is made ever more clear when contrasted with the day-to day realities faced by most women and girls around the world. In his piece, Squailia admits womanhood is something he has been able to put on and take off, as he pleased:
“I stopped wearing anything that scanned as feminine. I didn’t even own eyeliner for 20 years. And I said nothing when people took me for a straight, cisgender man.”
But women and girls oppressed for being born female don’t have the privilege of opting out of womanhood, and appropriating the male privilege of straight men. Patriarchy doesn’t care if women don’t like or relate to their subordinate role.
Many people who consider themselves progressive believe that by swearing allegiance to gender identity ideology, they demonstrate “intersectionality.” But if they truly cared about the intersections of sex, race, and class, they would center women and girls marginalized by those axes of oppression. Instead, progressives and queer activists are centering men who believe oppression is something you can opt in and out of. Surely, most women around the world would take offense at the notion the violence and injustice they suffer is a choice… Or that it has anything to do with eyeliner.
RAQUEL ROSARIO SANCHEZ IS A WRITER FROM THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. HER UTMOST PRIORITY IN HER WORK AND AS A FEMINIST IS TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST GIRLS AND WOMEN. HER WORK HAS APPEARED IN SEVERAL PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS BOTH IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH, INCLUDING: FEMINIST CURRENT, EL GRILLO, LA REPLICA, TRIBUNA FEMINISTA, EL CARIBE AND LA MAREA. YOU CAN FOLLOW HER @8ROSARIOSANCHEZ WHERE SHE RAMBLES ABOUT FEMINISM, POLITICS, AND POETRY.
At The Establishment, Tori Truscheit asks, “How can the queerest generation ever still believe in gender roles?”
If that question seems jaw-droppingly lacking in self-awareness, congratulations: you have been paying attention. If, on the other hand, you’re scratching your head, trying to get to the bottom of why a society drowning in rainbows and glitter, with endless “genders” to choose from, remains so steadfastly misogynistic, you’ve probably spent too much time at Everyday Feminism and The Establishment…
We have one problem to start: the word “queer,” which in the past (first as an insult, then reclaimed) referred more explicitly to gay and lesbian people, has recently come to mean pretty much anything. We have heterosexual women and men calling themselves “queer” because they claim to be “non-binary,” like “kinky” sex, or wear glittery makeup. In other words, today, “queer” and “gay” do not mean the same thing. And mushing together homosexuality with a variety of chosen identities or funky haircuts means that the question of why “the queerest generation” might not be progressive on the issue of women’s liberation is flawed from the start, because it’s unclear what the word “queer” even means in this context.
Either way, whether we are talking about gay men or those who identify as “queer,” there is one glaring reason why sexist gender roles have stuck around: being “queer” is not necessarily the same thing as being feminist. In fact, in many ways the queer movement has wholly rejected women’s liberation, as a political aim.
Truscheit is right on one thing: the gay marriage movement was not particularly feminist. Rather, this was a liberal effort that chose not to challenge the institution of marriage itself — which exists only because men wished to trade women as commodities, among themselves — and instead fought for inclusion in a heterosexist, patriarchal tradition. This is actually a useful demonstration of the difference between liberal feminism and radical feminism: one fights for equal access to already existing institutions, the other fights for a new system (and therefore new institutions) entirely.
Most (if not all) American liberals support gay marriage, unequivocally, but don’t necessarily have any vested interest in destroying male supremacy. (This is evidenced, for example, by liberal support for things like the porn industry and the legalization of brothels.) Liberals are capitalist, also, which means, again, they are invested in maintaining the systems already in place, but tweaking them a little, in order to offer an illusion of equality (i.e. if we all are allowed to make more money, get married, and own property, the world will be a better place.)
It is here that North American liberals tend to get lost on the question of feminism: they fail to understand that in order to achieve liberation for women and other oppressed groups, capitalism and patriarchy need more than a few tweaks.
Truscheit writes:
“More than half of high school students identify as something other than straight, 12 per cent of millennials are trans or gender nonconforming, and millennials overwhelmingly support gay marriage.
In a world where millennials are increasingly embracing marginalized groups, you’d think their accompanying views on gender would follow suit.”
But the thing is that none of the positions or identities listed here are necessarily anti-patriarchy. By and large, the male-led fight for “marriage equality” ignored the plight of women in its effort, meaning that the oppressive system behind homophobia remained intact, despite marriage rights. Gender identity discourse misunderstands how the system of gender works and that it exists to oppress women and legitimize male supremacy. And “embracing marginalized groups” doesn’t mean understanding or fighting the underlying systems that ensure certain groups are oppressed as a class. To liberals, “marginalization” doesn’t need to happen on a class basis — it can happen on an individual basis, which is why liberal societies keep digging themselves deeper into these pits of violence and vast inequality — because fighting structures of oppression can’t happen within an individualist framework.
Truscheit’s big mistake is to look towards yet another anti-feminist, liberal movement for a solution to patriarchy: queer politics.
Trans activist Mya Byrne at Pride San Fransisco, June 25, 2017.
While Truscheit blames “mainstream gays” for not “questioning gender,” she lets the trans movement off the hook — an odd blind spot considering that trans activism is largely responsible for re-popularizing the idea of gender itself. Whereas feminism has said gender, under patriarchy, is something we should reject, not embrace, today’s queer movement has positioned gender as fun and liberatory. Indeed, transgenderism itself can only exist so long as we have gender and believe gender roles are fine, so long as we choose them.
Truscheit says the “white male activists behind the marriage equality movement… sacrificed trans rights on the altar of their own desired outcome,” connecting this to what she perceives as a failure to “question gender.” But what she doesn’t realize is that an end to gender means an end to transgenderism — we can’t “identify” with gender roles if there are none to identify with. Indeed, if the gay rights movement had explicitly gone after gender, the result would not have been allyship with the transgender movement.
While I understand feeling let down by those around us who claim to want a more just, more equitable world, what feminists have learned over and over again in the past 150-odd years is that we can’t rely on male-centered movements. In order to liberate women, we need to put our energy into political activism and ideology that centers women and addresses the root of male supremacy.
Transgenderism isn’t going to save us from male dominance anymore than liberal gay men or male anarchists will. If we want real change, we need to look back, and take our cues from the women who broke ties with the men who sold them out and took matters into their own hands. From Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, after being betrayed by their abolitionist allies, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which refused to support constitutional changes that did not enfranchise women; to the radical feminists of the late 1960s, who told the left to fuck off because “we’re starting our own movement;” to the black women involved in black militant politics who were expected to take a “traditional feminine role,” allowing men to lead the movement and hold positions of power within it — these women learned the lessons we should have memorized by now.
There is one answer to the question of patriarchy — there always has been. While queer politics may be more trendy (a result, in part, of its marketability and individualist ethos), feminism is the only political movement that can free women from the shackles of male domination.
Liberals like Truscheit and her colleagues at The Establishment will continue spinning their wheels until they decide to pick up where first and second wave radicals left off. We need to stop looking around, and asking ourselves who to turn to next: our sisters have the answer.
