No, Kara Dansky, Working with the Radical Right is not Feminism
Feminists resisting pressure to work with the radical right on gender identity policy and law is apparently a difficult phenomenon to stamp out, but Dansky gives it another go!
Feminists resisting pressure to work with the radical right on gender identity policy and law is apparently a difficult phenomenon to stamp out. Kara Dansky, president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA), former board member of Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), has been at it for years, yet reports in her August 6th blog post that it keeps “flaring up.” In this latest defense of her career of courting favor with anti-feminist, Christian nationalist groups to advance her political work, Dansky tries to make a distinction between her noble strategy and that of those who have gone a step further: inviting right wing militia men to protect them at their events.
But can these lines be cleanly drawn? Once you have made political bedfellows of right wing extremists, of politicians who attempt to overturn legitimate elections, who resist any restrictions on gun ownership, who seek to grab power by any means necessary, because they agree with you that “woman” should designate a biological female, or that males should not compete in women’s sports, how long before their foot soldiers arrive to join the movement? As my friend, UK journalist Jayne Egerton, says in her own response to Dansky’s essay:
[I]f January 6th has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not possible to ignore the mainstreaming of far right politics under Trump’s presidency and the consequent wafer thin division between its ‘respectable’ representatives and the insurrectionists.
Egerton has more to say about this in her guest post. I’ll address Dansky’s defense of her own actions, in which she studiously ignores many well-argued and researched feminist critiques of working with the radical right, and instead repeats the tired justifications she has made so many times before. By now, we know them all by heart: The teensy grant from the Christian nationalist organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to WoLF was a long-ago one-off; working with radical right groups and politicians can achieve feminist goals; Tucker Carlson’s show is a useful platform for feminists. Let’s put these to rest.
The 2016 ADF grant to WoLF was an inconsequential one-time deal.
WoLF received a one-time $15,000 grant back in 2016 to pay some legal fees. That’s literally it. As far as I know, WoLF has not received any other money from ADF (I could be wrong; I left the board in 2020 so I literally just do not know). Any serious person who has ever been involved in political organizing knows that in this context $15,000 is nothing.
That’s not “literally it” according to ADF’s 2021 form 990 which lists a grant to WoLF of $50k. And although an initial grant of $15k may be “nothing” in the world of political funding, it’s a start. WoLF’s IRS forms 990 in 2020 and 2021 together report revenue exceeding $1 million, all while operating as an amicus brief writing shop for ADF.
In her analysis of WoLF’s recent amicus briefs for ADF cases, feminist lawyer Dar Guerra (pseudonym) explains the utility of such briefs - and WoLF’s role in writing them for ADF:
Amicus briefs these days are often "coordinated" by one party to a case or another. "Coordination" means a number of front or real organizations are marshaled to submit seemingly "independent" briefs more or less together. The number of such briefs in Supreme Court cases has recently exploded because parties find them useful to advance ideas they want the Court to hear, but don't want to make directly.
Arguments from seemingly independent organizations, or even organizations usually considered hostile to the party, are especially useful…
Reviewing WoLF's amicus briefs from 2016 to 2023, it is obvious that WoLF's usefulness to ADF has been due to its own branding as a "radical feminist" organization. Under this imprimatur, it has made feminist arguments ADF's own lawyers can't stand, but which help [ADF] win its cases.
Any serious person would find it hard to imagine that none of WoLF’s recent lavish funding came from ADF or other right wing dark money organizations - or that Dansky is unaware of the rising fortunes of WoLF. Dansky left WoLF in late summer of 2020, the year in which that organization’s revenue jumped four-fold; from $58,613 in 2019 to $263,901 the following year. Moreover, while nonprofits are not required to disclose the identities of their funders, their income is public knowledge and WoLF has published its financials on their website.
WoLF or WDI USA working with right wing organizations is the same as Republican and Democratic senators “working across the aisle.”
Dansky presents a list of issues on which politicians of opposing parties have worked, and that powerful organizations like American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ADF have collaborated, to bolster her claim that WoLF and WDI USA are unfairly criticized for doing the same thing. The assumption underlying this justification is that we can work with anti-feminists on the issue with which we agree to achieve a common goal.
What she fails to understand is: 1) that senators and well-funded interest groups are in collaborations where both parties are roughly equal in power; and 2) feminists do not agree with anti-feminists on gender.
Small self-identified “feminist” groups like WoLF and WDI USA are junior partners in any common project with powerful, well-funded, Council for National Policy (CNP) networked organizations like ADF. Moreover, as I explained in my video, screened at the Women’s Place UK (WPUK) session at Filia last year, “gender ideology,” from the viewpoint of the radical right, includes feminism, lesbian and gay rights, and transgenderism - and they mean to roll back the gains of all three.
What feminists mean by “gender” is a set of sex role stereotypes - norms, characteristics, expected behaviors - assigned on the basis of sex, and that reinforce male supremacy. For the radical right, these sex role stereotypes are innate; defying them is unnatural.
Nowhere is this difference made clearer than in Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh’s 2022 film, What Is A Woman? in which he asks the question of gender affirmation health care professionals and people on the street. From the film’s opener, which depicts a children’s birthday party, bathed in blue and pink, where a boy receives a football, and girls gush over the gift of a tiara, to its conclusion, featuring Walsh’s wife in the kitchen making sandwiches and asking him to open a jar, Walsh skewers gender identity ideology, but also re-affirms sex role stereotypes.
Walsh’s bare-knuckle misogyny, (he has opined that a major bonus of overturning Roe v Wade is that it “would cause misery and suffering among the very worst people on earth,” that it is better for a 12-year old raped by her father to undertake pregnancy rather than abort so there is proof of the crime, and that feminism “is one of the worst things to ever happen to western civilization”), differs only in tone from CNP-affiliated organizations with whom Dansky works. ADF, Concerned Women for America (CWA), and Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) have similar anti-feminist beliefs and agendas.
The differences in power between feminist and right-wing organizations, and in their beliefs about gender, affects outcomes of jointly produced law and policy, as my analysis of the Women’s Bill of Rights demonstrates. The proposed legislation is a product of WoLF and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), the anti-feminist issue advocacy arm of Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). Intended to remedy the problem of gender identity increasingly given precedence over biological sex in law and policy, the bill affirms that in federal law, the term “sex” refers to biological sex, that the terms “woman” and “girl” refer to human females,” and that “‘mother’ means a parent of the female sex.”
To women fed up with gender identity policy, such as the unfairness of trans-identified males competing in women’s sports, the bill sounds appealing. However, the bill is not written in a way that would address historic and continuing structural inequality between the sexes, nor to affirm women’s equal standing with men in the Constitution, as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is intended to do. Instead, it merely affirms biological difference, which, historically, and still today, is the basis of female oppression. For example, in the not-so-distant past, US women were denied jobs, entry to some professional degree programs, credit cards, and other material resources on the basis of sex. Every fundamentalist religious regime agrees that “woman” means “biological female;” that acknowledgment alone is no guarantee of women’s rights.
Furthermore, of the three standards of scrutiny in Constitutional law - strict, intermediate, and rational basis - the Women’s Bill of Rights calls for “intermediate scrutiny” to be applied to sex discrimination cases. Intermediate scrutiny emerged in the 1970s when the Court first acknowledged sex-based discrimination, which was “not considered obstructive enough to apply the strict scrutiny test, but merited closer consideration than the rational basis test would afford.” With no specific constitutional protection for women,1 as there is for religious- and race-based discrimination, the Court felt free to develop an intermediate standard.
Thus, the Women’s Bill of Rights seeks to enshrine a standard of scrutiny for sex discrimination cases that is less strict than that for race- and religious-based discrimination. Keeping sex discrimination to the intermediate standard of scrutiny has long been a goal of right wing politics. So the bill, if enacted, would ensure sex-segregated locker rooms and sports; however, it would serve, primarily, the interests of the more powerful, anti-feminist organization, with whom WoLF partnered.
In contrast, Dansky’s example of two senators, Dianne Feinstein and Susan Collins, one a center right Democrat, the other a somewhat moderate Republican, “working across the aisle” to get a largely symbolic resolution passed to declare March Women’s History month seems fairly ridiculous. It is not in any way comparable to small feminist groups attempting to achieve significant legal protections for women by working with more powerful anti-feminist organizations with whom they have profound ideological differences and goals.
Tucker Carlson’s show is an appropriate and useful platform for feminists.
Dansky tries to breathe new life into her old defense of her regular appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show by noting that Ice Cube was recently hanging out with him. She chides her critics:
Things are changing and the feminists who criticize groups like WoLF for things like this need to keep up.
Carlson, who has a history of berating female journalists and triggering online harassment of them, was abruptly fired from his job at Fox News last April for reasons that are unclear, but his misogynistic behavior is the leading theory. Former producer Abby Grossberg had filed two lawsuits against the network, alleging “a culture of sexism and misogyny… especially among those who worked on Carlson’s show.”
Among a host of claims, Grossberg said that, on her first day, the office was decorated with photos of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a revealing swimsuit and that staffers debated which candidate for Michigan Governor – incumbent Democratic Gretchen Whitmer or Republican Tudor Dixon – they would rather sleep with.
Fox settled the lawsuit in June for $12 million.
Ice Cube is a rapper and actor who co-founded the gangsta rap group N.W.A. The group’s rise and fall was dramatized in the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton, which depicts the police brutality against black men that inspired many of their song lyrics. The film was a commercial and critical success, but some black feminists objected to the film’s failure to address the misogyny of their lyrics and Dr Dre’s brutal attacks on women.
Kim Trent, then chair of the Wayne State University Board of Governors, now an official in Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration, wrote at the time:
[M]isogyny isn’t a N.W.A “side story,” as “Straight Outta Compton” director F. Gary Gray has said in order to explain its omission from the film. You’d have to be in pretty deep denial to not recognize that sexism is an essential element of the group’s brand.
For this reason, Danielle Henderson (author, Feminist Ryan Gosling (2012)), called the film a “revisionist history” and asked, “Why can’t we focus on saving the lives of black men and black women at the same time?”
In an interview with Rolling Stone about the film, Ice Cube dismissed accusations of misogyny, saying:
If you're a bitch, you're probably not going to like us… If you're a ho, you probably don't like us…I never understood why an upstanding lady would even think we're talking about her.
To which Kim Trent responded:
Doesn’t Ice Cube realize that this is exactly the kind of reductionist thinking that he once railed against in his critiques of the LAPD? It erases the humanity of black women, reducing them to hollow stereotypes.
Two misogynists, both of whom have gotten rich, in part, by marketing their denigration of women, cruising around LA together, is not the innovative, progressive act Dansky seems to think it is. What, exactly, is Dansky telling feminists to get on board with here? And what, one wonders, does the Black Women’s Caucus of WDI USA think about Dansky’s admonition?
Dansky asserts that the relationships she has built with radical right activists and groups have produced “tangible benefits.” Her principal evidence for this is the Protect Women and Girls in Sports Act which is stalled in the Senate because there was no “working across the aisle” involved in writing the bill. (It probably doesn’t help that the bill’s sponsor, Rep W. Gregory Steube (FL), was one of 126 House Republicans who signed an amicus brief for a lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 election and voted against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6.) The Democrats are the political entity crucial for accomplishing “work across the aisle” on transgender issues, which they will not do without significant pressure from their own side. A small feminist organization signing onto a Republican bill does not constitute “working across the aisle;” it is instead giving a faux feminist fig leaf to anti-feminist politicians.
What feminists should be doing is organizing lobbying efforts aimed at the Democrats to make the most of the fissures now appearing in the trans lobby juggernaut. Recent polls show that while a majority of Americans oppose pediatric medical transition, think it’s unfair for males to compete in female sports, and don’t believe it’s “possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth,” they also do not wish to discriminate against trans people. Many are turned off by laws and rhetoric that appear to demonize persons who identify as trans and the LGBT community as a whole.
No doubt these relationships with right wing operatives have been beneficial to Dansky, personally, as she has a contract for a forthcoming book, presumably with Bombardier, the publisher of her first book, that has an unfortunate reputation for publishing right wing books of dubious quality. Her friend, Christian Post senior reporter Brandon Showalter, is already touting her new book, titled The Reckoning, in biblical terms. Noting that in her book Dansky will “mercilessly skewer her own party,” he quotes Isaiah 10:3:
What will you do on the day of reckoning when disaster comes from afar. To whom will you run to for help? Where will you leave your riches?
Democratic party leaders are going to tell us that they didn’t know. They are going to tell us that they couldn’t have known. They are going to tell us that the science has changed in ways that they couldn’t have anticipated…
Don’t believe them and don’t let them get away with it. I know they know because I have told them directly. I say that as a Democrat and a feminist.
The far right have taken over the Republican party, Christian nationalism is on the rise, and key CNP organizations, formed, in part, to counter the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are beginning to realize some of their long-cherished goals. They have been instrumental in the repeal of abortion rights at the federal level. Leonard Leo, leader of the Federalist Society, provided then President Donald Trump with a list of nominees for the Supreme Court in order to pack it with right wing justices. ADF lawyers wrote the model anti-abortion bill, enacted in Mississippi, that was upheld by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, thereby overturning Roe v Wade. In many states, Republicans are trying to impose draconian and medically ignorant abortion bans.
While it’s true that the Democrats have not been friends to women with regard to gender identity policy, it’s also true that this is not the issue currently galvanizing most US women and other voters. A majority of Americans support abortion rights and they are increasingly unwilling to put up with anti-democratic shenanigans by Republicans to thwart the will of the people.
Consider the latest election in Ohio, where Republicans tried to thwart a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution. They scheduled a vote to change the rules for constitutional amendment to require a 60% majority, instead of a simple majority, for August, when turnout is notoriously low, and tried to impose other rules to prevent the abortion rights initiative making it to the November ballot. But Ohioans turned out in record numbers to successfully defeat the attempt to block the November abortion rights ballot initiative. In the contemporary US, abortion rights and the survival of democratic institutions are linked.
Yet Christian nationalist organizations and far right Republicans are the people that Dansky is insisting feminists work with to curb the trans agenda. Dansky’s vision for women’s rights is blinkered by her single-issue focus, ill-informed, and insensitive to the current political climate. It’s past time to move on from this “debate” over “working with the right” and organize anew.
This points up the necessity of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, which WoLF opposes in agreement with Christian nationalist organizations with whom they work.
about the suffrage fight in early 20th century:
from book Fearless Women, by Elizabeth Cobbs
pg 180... "Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul and Mary Church Terrell did not have the luxury of allies who supported them for reasons with which they agreed. They could have an amendment with the help of unsavory allies or none at all, sicne either way, the same congressmen would retain office. As historian Ira Katznelson has observed with regard to Franklin Roosevelt's World War II alliance with Joseph Stalin, untainted partners did not exist."