Mission and Author
The rise of gender identity politics, and the power of the trans lobby in recent years, have led some feminists to believe that the only way to resist the assault on our sex-based rights is by allying ourselves with powerful right wing entities and institutions. It’s not hard to understand why. Driven off social media platforms for as little as saying men cannot become women, doxxed and threatened with job loss and violence by trans activists, faced with trans-identified males in our private spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms, competing in female sport and housed in female prisons, the irreversible damage to minor children of radical experimental medical interventions, and institutional capture of “the left,” e.g. the Democratic and Green parties, as well as activist organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women (NOW), leaves us feeling under attack on multiple fronts with nowhere else to turn.
Yet a turn to the Right, especially at this historical moment, is a dangerous move that will, in the long run, cause more harm than benefit to women’s rights. The organizations with whom some feminists are allying include Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and Concerned Women for America (CWA) - all of which work against women’s interests in other areas such as abortion, birth control, lesbian rights, voting rights for women of color, and even measures to counter violence against women. (See my article Blinded by the Right for more details and links).
Moreover, these organizations are linked under the umbrella organization, Council for National Policy, established in 1981 to pursue an agenda of connecting “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives” to establish what Shadow Network author Anne Nelson calls a “pluto-theocracy.” As we witness their success in packing the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues, their probable success in advancing voter suppression laws, and learn more about their role in “organized efforts to challenge the validity of the [2020 presidential] election, conspir[ing] to overturn its results, and tr[ying] to derail the orderly transfer of power,” the case against feminists working with CNP organizations becomes indefensible.
The purpose of this blog is to explore and explain the larger contemporary political context within which we work as feminists, why “working with the Right” is a bad idea, and open conversations about how we can develop a powerful, independent movement to advocate our interests, as feminists did during the Second Wave in the 1960s and 1970s. Please join me on Twitter to continue the conversation!
Katherine M Acosta is a lifelong feminist, a sociologist, filmmaker and writer. She has a BA in Women’s Studies (before it was “gender studies”!) and a PhD in Sociology. Divided We Fall is her documentary about the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, a weeks-long protest to oppose then newly-elected Governor Scott Walker’s radical right agenda - which included gutting collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. She was co-chair of the steering committee for Women’s Human Rights Campaign USA (now Women’s Declaration International USA) during its early formation.
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