Why Exclusionary Feminism Will Always Fail

Against binary thinking, and why intersectional feminism is more likely to succeed

unknown literary canon is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis. if you would like to support this project, please like, share, comment, and if you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Because about 1/3 of the comments I receive are inappropriate, I’ve made commenting only available to paid subscribers.

Ah, “white feminism”. A term that is intended to inflame — to shock and awe through controversy. It doesn’t mean “feminists who are white” and everyone who uses the terms adds a disclaimer: “I don’t mean white women!”. I’ve defaulted to using “white feminism” in the past because I know readers know what it means. It’s easy. But it’s too divisive and requires that disclaimer, so I’m not going to use it anymore.

You know what a better term for that same concept would be? Exclusionary feminism. Or better yet, people who use the movement for their personal benefit. Because exclusionary feminism/non-intersectional feminism has less to do with race and more to do with a certain category of “feminist” that is using the movement to benefit herself. She’s simply doesn’t give a damn about the bulk of womankind once she gets what she and her small cohort wants. She’s privileged in comparison to other women — often middle or upper class, she’s heteronormative, she’s not disabled nor is she descended from the global majority/global south. She’s a #girlboss or aspiring to become one. She’s the spiritual daughter or granddaughter of Betty Friedan, who wanted to exclude lesbians — the lavender menace — from the feminist movement so the movement could focus on her. She’s the great-great-granddaughter of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were angry when Black men received the right to vote in the U.S. before white women did and thought white women should be ahead of people of color. Her ideology is that rights, power and equality are a finite resource, so to share them to others means she’ll get less. She’s the sort of woman who, a generation or two ago, silenced bell hooks in class in and tried to silence her within feminist movements because she thought that allowing women of color to speak meant she wouldn’t be heard.

What is a Woman? What is Gender?

hooks though….hooks outlived the women who tried to silence her. We’re still reading and paying attention to her after her death. bell hooks, Andrea Dworkin, and Judith Butler are the three feminist writer/philosophers that I repeatedly quote here. I turn to their work over and over again; they’re mentors I’ve never met that both teach and comfort me. All three were writing about intersectional feminism before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term. All three examine feminism as a movement and the feminine as a broad category.

The very cool 90s edition of Butler’s Gender Trouble that I found.

Of the three, I’m surprised to discover that I receive the most backlash for Butler. The backlash is of our time: related to the inclusive intersectionality of Butler’s interpretation of gender. About feminists who argue to exclude trans women, Butler said:

The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality.¹

and

I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.²

Pornography and the 1980s movement against it were hot button issues through which people questioned Andrea Dworkin’s relevancy. Today, people use the anti-trans and specifically the TERF movement to question Butler and non-exclusionary feminists. Also, apparently, to criticize me for finding relevancy in Butler’s work. Alas, I thrive on challenge, so this only further endears Butler to me.

For anyone who has Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity — first published in 1990 — would understand Butler’s position on trans rights. Butler believed that gender was a performance that is instilled into individuals through societal expectations, especially expectations of compulsory heterosexuality — Adrienne Rich’s idea that society compels people into heterosexuality.

How does that idea support trans rights, when the movement for trans rights is often predicated on the idea that gender is innate? Because Butler does not reduce the masculine and feminine to a binary based on genitalia. In their book and through their work, Butler both advocates for the position that gender is construct, but also argues that bodies themselves are constructs too. If the body is a construct, then “biological sex” is a social construct too³. So, two concepts can be true at once: gender is a social construct, and the identification for women with sex should not per se be “a conflation of the category of women with the ostensibility sexualized features of the bodies.”

Still, we have ideas about what a woman is that relates to the both the sexualized features and behaviors. For example, a woman could be defined as someone who for a period of decades menstruates and is able to give birth, but that is not true of every being we call a woman. We have a sense of things, but any definition of “woman” construed in the “biological” is somewhat incomplete.

And where does the metaphysical argument to define “woman” end? The argument to keep trans women out of sports is based on ideas that trans women are physically stronger and taller than cis-women. Averages, perhaps, but there’s no universally accepted ranges for height, weight, and musculature that can assigned to “men” and “women”. To do so sets a dangerous precedent: one that emasculates some men not being the right height (taller) or weight (heavier, muscular), and de-feminizes women (for being too tall, or being too muscular). THAT further slips into racist tropes, eg., of East Asian men being effeminate, and of Black women not being feminine enough. That is already happening, in the questioning of cis-women athletes of color, like Imane Khelif.

Then there’s the argument to keep trans women out of bathrooms and changing rooms. There’s another slippery slope: what’s that based on? That “cis women” are in danger because trans women have penises? Nah. It’s really based on the idea that trans women are a category of people that are sexually attracted to cis-women and have a physical advantage over cis-women. For those two reasons, trans women might use those spaces to attack cis-women. So then, does that mean lesbians — which would include me and Judith Butler — who also a category of people attracted to women, should also be kept out of “female spaces”? Or only if we’re butch, or something related to size and sexuality?

That one I find beyond silly. A woman is much more likely to be raped by a family member, intimate partner, even a close friend than she is a stranger of any gender in a bathroom or changing room. Too much focus on the latter, and too little to address the former. And besides, I’m a lesbian and close to the smallest, least physically incapable of successfully attacking an adult person. If we’re going back to the argument of height and physical strength as being more masculine, then I become extremely feminine. Because of my small size and feminine face and despite having short hair, wearing men’s jackets, (okay, boy-children) sweaters, and boxers, no one has ever mistaken me for anything but a woman. But would some cis-heterosexual woman, offended by my non-traditional appearance, try to exclude me regardless? I expect that if I wasn’t in one of the most progressive cities in the United States, one that already made bathrooms gender-neutral, yeah.

Why Exclusionary Feminism Fails

You might be wondering what all of that theorizing about gender and trans women has to do with feminism, and with exclusionary feminism. The reason I begin with that is to begin to deconstruct the idea of the binary, which exclusionary feminists want to uphold.

In their eagerness to highlight sexist injustice, women focused almost exclusively on the ideology and practice of male domination. Unfortunately, this made it appear that feminism was more of a declaration of war between the sexes than a political struggle to end sexist oppression, a struggle that would imply change on the part of women and men.⁴

Feminism begins with the idea that women are oppressed through sexism. As bell hooks wrote in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, some feminist activists believe that men were “the evil” from which other evils (eg., capitalism) stemmed⁵. If male domination was the original sin, then it followed that women making that arguments that saw and see themselves as the most victimized. However, that binary ignores that the source of domination and oppression isn’t singular. bell hooks pointed out that the women making the binary argument were often the most privileged. That privilege gave them proximity to power, and meant other oppressions were ignored. This allowed for the perpetuation of racism, classism, et al⁶, both within the feminist movement and in society broadly.

Most of the critical comments I receive here want the definition to end at that binary opposition: that the only oppression that matters is the male domination that creates oppression of the female. That other oppressions either do not exist — that racism, classism, aren’t real — or that antiracism, anticlassism, et al are separate movements. Most of the more trolling comments I receive are from women who advocate for feminism but against intersectionality. This is how exclusionary feminism works. Out of a lack of thoughtfulness, that view reduces complexity to an unsophisticated binary in which they were the most victimized.

As the victim, the exclusionary feminist centers herself in the movement. She alienates others because she believes that there are only so many rights to go around — that equality is a scarce resource — and so she cannot share. She silences and gatekeeps so that she can continue her narrative of being the most victimized. So she works to shut out trans women. And women of color. And lesbians…and you get where I’m going with this.

Here’s where this gets tricky: if a type of feminism is only advocating to end male domination of themselves, isn’t careful to include the concerns and viewpoints of all women, and doesn’t ask for a broad reordering of oppression, power, language, and discourse, then it fails. Because what happens when that power shifts, and only the oppression of middle class, white, heteronormative women is addressed? Then that would create a situation in which the category of women that already has power over other women would just gain more power. That means that movement doesn’t materially reduce the oppression of the majority of women in the world.

This is what I meant by “always fails”. There are two reasons for the failure: (1) that the majority of women are left out of the movement, and (2) that once privileged, self-interested women in the movement gain what they were after, they leave the movement.

How does that work with exclusionary feminism? Within feminist movements, that category of women oppresses other in the movement: I gave examples of Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the opening of this essay. That we have waves of feminism, that peak then fall also indicate patterns: that once those categories gets the personal benefit they were after, they can stop participating in the movement. They declare that equality has been achieved, which stalls the movement. Every movement has in-fighting and backlash. When a movement is already weakened through loss of people who were previously active, the inevitable in-fighting and backlash — which seem to part of every movement, every push for change, from the beginning — becomes more effective in derailing it altogether. Then, the movement is disempowered until it’s revitalized by women of relative privilege and power seeking a new benefit/type of power.

The Importance of Intersectionality

For a feminist movement to become more continuous and thus, create greater societal equality and end oppression, we need intersectionality. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler makes a very sophisticated argument for intersectionality within feminism:

If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered ‘person’ transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual , and regional modalities discursively constituted identities.⁷

And in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Audre Lorde makes another plain English argument:

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women⁸ leaves a gap within this conference and the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either / or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper, there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women ‘who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results’, as this paper states.

Like Lorde, I have the “lived experience” of lesbianism. I’m also a person of color, grew up working class, and am first generation American. But I think the greatest base of knowledge (that goes beyond formal learning) I personally bring is my knowledge of the reality of sexual violence, through years of activism and advocacy. As well, because my romantic/sexual life and work, activism, and writing are all focused on women, I bring a unique perspective of how to center women — so much of my consciousness is focused on the feminine.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House was a talk that Lorde gave at a conference on Simone Beauvoir’s work. In it, Lorde argued against the white/exclusionary feminism and against the lack of intersectionality of the conference. Rather than simply using moral arguments, she pointed out that the feminist movement would be strengthened if women of different identities, lived experiences, and consciousnesses were included in the movement.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialetic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and the sustenance to act where there are no charters.

A lot of my writing here builds off of the work of lesbian and feminists of color, because I share consciousness/perspectives with them. The feminist philosophers of color, including bell hooks, Amia Srinivasan, Kumari Jayawardena, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, the Combahee River Collective argue for greater inclusion in the movements of their era. None of them are feminist/lesbian separatists (the idea of women should be separated entirely from men), each addresses why women of color are reluctant to work within movements that don’t benefit them and sometimes harm their male counterparts. If you read the works of lesbian feminists, they were also historically inclusive: Judith Butler is a non-binary lesbian who’s also Jewish, Adrienne Rich and Andrea Dworkin were lesbians who were also Jewish, and were writing for inclusivity long before Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us a label to make discourse about the concept much easier.

And true inclusivity means including white, middle class, heteronormative feminist thinkers that are as inclusive as the ones I listed in the paragraph above. This includes another favorite feminist thinker/legal scholar — Catharine Mackinnon, who’s work shaped legal thinking on sexual harassment. I’ve also written about Alexandra Brodsky and Joanna Bourke’s writing and work around sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Inclusivity Today

After I finished writing the thesis and body of this essay, I read about Glennon Doyle, a woman with relative privilege, feeling bullied off of Substack.

Before that, I read about a white woman who called a five year old Black autistic child — a child with a relative lack of privilege — one of the worst racial slurs you can imagine. She chased him around a playground because the child took something that belong to her child. After that, she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through an online fundraiser, claiming she’d been doxxed. I made the dire mistake of reading some of the comments under that fundraiser, and they were absolutely chillingly racist. When I looked up that incident on Substack, all that comes up are accounts of people who support the racist woman. That Glennon Doyle has multiple think pieces written about her, versus so little for this little Black child, says a lot about how privilege and intersectionality work. The latter left me more shaken that I usually allow myself to get.

I am not a Glennon Doyle fan — I barely knew who she was before this. What I noticed was that the people who were opposed to her appearing on this platform seemed afraid that her success would take away from theirs. Which is….counterintuitive. Her success was built on over fifteen years of blogging and writing books… work that resonated with her fans. If anything, her presence on this platform would have helped, as she’s a big enough name to bring more users to the platform. That she’s a queer woman that was repeatedly called “privileged”, presumably in reference to her socio-economic privilege, being bullied by a lot of women calling themselves “feminists” in their profiles says a lot. It’s the sort of exclusionary feminism that I wanted to address in this essay.

As for the other woman, calling a Black child slurs and then using that racism to successfully raise money, that the racist person had so much broad support — that leaves me speechless with horror about what it says about the world. Some of the donors to that fundraiser revealed that they felt that progress against antiBlack racism was eroding their rights as white people; others were more abjectly, horrifying hateful. Scarcity mindset, binary thinking that leads to abject hatred. I rarely cry; that comment section made me want to bawl. I’ve experienced far more racism and sexism than I have homophobia — but to see so much of it, so loud, proud, and unified…

I’ve been thinking a lot about that famous quote of Martin Luther King, Jr: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Sometimes, it zigzags. It bends backwards before it can more forward again. These two things, very different in scale, bullied people whose identities and level of privilege are very different: they’re the arc moving backward. That’s part of the backlash against the progress of the last decade or so of social justice success.

In this essay, I wrote that I received more backlash for appreciate Judith Butler than the other feminist philosophers I write about. I’m a relatively new Substacker with a small platform, I imagine that if/as my platform grows, I’ll get more backlash alongside that growth. I block and delete the people who leave racist, homophobic, and transphobic comments, including those that call for exclusion. Notice that I didn’t mention sexist, because by and large the backlash I receive is related to intersectionality and not feminism. I earlier wrote that these sorts of commenters make me want to double-down, like Butler’s work even more.

And so, if you, like me, believe in advocating for intersectionality and inclusion, I hope that you, too, know the response to racism, sexism, and bullying — to exclusion — should be to double down and fight harder against it.

1. Ferber, Alona & Butler, Judith. Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”. The New Statesmen. September 22, 2020.

https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-living-anti-intellectual-times

2. Ibid.

3. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1990). p. 8.

4. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984. Republished, New York: Routledge, 2015). p 34.

5. Ibid, p 60.

6. Ibid, p 45- 46.

7. Ibid, p 3.

8. As far as I can tell, second-wave feminist thinkers use the term “third world women” to mean women of color, women who ancestry was outside of the West/Europe. In my research/data-gathering/reading, I’ve learned that Black women in the U.S. were part of organizations and movements of “third world women”.

However, I wasn’t around for second-wave feminism, so if there’s a more nuanced understanding of this from a reader who was, I’d love to hear it.