SERF n TERF: Notes on Some Bad Materialisms

by Sophie Lewis

As I sit down to write this, I am haunted by images circulating in the wake of another brutal murder. In one of
them the person in question, still living, has the gloved hands of a Turkish riot cop on her arm. Hande Kader, may
she rest in power, was a sex-working trans woman of colour whose life we have, once again, collectively allowed
haters and the state to take away. To say rest in power is obviously the very least we can do. Now Kader
becomes another of our foremothers.

A friend is starting out in sex-work and is isolated and scared. Another likely cant aord the electrolysis she isnt
sure she wants (along with the other components of the medical pathway) but shes just purchased some
hormones illegally, exactly as she warned her clueless GP she would, having had her NHS wait-time for gender
reassignment extended further into the future than she could bear.

Soon, we will invoke Hande Kader on Transgender Day of Remembrance. How many corpses can one
memorialise in one lifetime?

It is always dicult to see the point of arguing with those who, even if they dont literally slash people, contrive to
cut people like Kader discursively into pieces with their carceral, so-called gender-critical feminism. The acronyms
TERF and SWERF designate a group of what Brooke Beloso has called ontologically oriented Anglo-Australian and
Euro-American feminists. They stand for trans-exclusionary radical feminist and sex-worker-exclusionary radical
feminist respectively. The aim in coining these shorthands, as many Salvage readers will know, was to refuse to
cede the legacy of radical feminism wholesale to those self-identied radfems who want to exclude those who
dont cyclically secrete luteinising hormone a quote from Kathy Scarbrough at Left Forum 2016 from their
organising, and who support criminalising the purchase of sex, theorising it as rape. #notallradfems, in other
words.

Dicult, right now, to see much of a dierence between the SWERFs and TERFs who are the focus of what follows,
and those who burned Kader.

Because there is a death-wish directed at trans people and prostitutes, epitomised historically by Magdalene
laundries[*] (now defunct) and other reparative conversion therapies for the deviant (still thriving). Most of us act
in complicity with it, whether we are prepared to own up to it, or whether we only acquiesce to what, borrowing
R. W. Gilmores denition, is the state-sanctioned and extralegal production and exploitation of group-
dierentiated vulnerability to premature death. We make harlots and other deviants killable.

The close association between sex-working and transness is well-recognised. I often say that there isnt a TERF
who isnt a SWERF, writes one blogger of her experience of both[]. But I am beginning to think separating the
two is in some ways a false distinction. For those claiming trans women are not women, part of the reason may
well be in order to silence a group who understand that sex work can be a choice even when you are homeless,
impoverished, and desperate for the drugs that will keep you alive. Its a feedback loop: part of the reason they
want to silence sex workers is so they can remove a group who, in ghting for sex workers rights, will make trans
people safer.[]

Adversaries are not all that sex workers and trans people have in common. Both sex workers and gender-
nonconforming people have both been sexualised, tainted with criminality, subjected to reparative treatment
and/or punitive rehabilitation, and pathologised (in particular, associated with childhood trauma and abuse). Both
trans people and sex workers are still systematically regarded as sacricial or bare life by police and bourgeois
courts. Those who attack, rape and/or kill them are frequently never prosecuted (especially if the perpetrators are
representatives of the law), else theyre exculpated, vindicated as if they were themselves attacked (as in the
prosecution of CeCe McDonald or Lynne Tansey), or considered simply not worth tracking down (especially if the
victims are migrants, undocumented or indigenous). The Philadelphia judge Teresa Carr Deni ruled recently that a
sex worker who was raped at gunpoint by four men was not truly raped but rather suered theft of services.
Such an attitude of course is connected to a punitive obverse of the carceral control of forced childbearing.
And there is a widespread denial that these are class issues.

Amid a broad, if ip-opping, trend towards criminalisation of the buyer rather than the seller of sex, both of
which endanger sex workers, attempts have been made (for instance in France) to keep penalties for passive
solicitation, the crime of being in the street. At the same time as ruling out a minimum wage, laws have been
proposed to criminalise entering a public bathroom whose designation isnt mentioned on ones birth certicate.
And yet, decriminalisation and trans advocacy campaigns have successfully challenged these, and are winning
demands around health, safety, recognition, dignity, and access to basic resources and rights in most parts of the
world. This is despite the persistence of systematic police violence against both groups, backed up, like all police
violence, by various other social and infrastructural persecution.

There are signs that the Nordic model (or sex-buyer law) may soon be fully discredited thanks to the data
grassroots sex-worker projects have relentlessly fed to key transnational bodies (for example, the Lancet, UN and
Amnesty International). And in the wake of a wave of defeats for transphobic law-makers in the USA, we can
anticipate class victories where binary state-identication requirements and basic-care access rules are
concerned. New forms of reproductive and non-reproductive justice will be built (if this inspires you, as it does
me, consider donating to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which is bridging trans and non-trans repro politics)[].

Of course, the fact that currently certain developments in neoliberalism happen to benet trans people and sex
workers is no reason to conate trans and sex-worker self-organisation with neoliberalism (or individualism,
identitarianism, postmodernism, and all the rest of it). The economic contexts of these developments is the same
as for the neoliberal selling back of freedom as zero-hours or exi-time, and the selling back of the right to
choose as the obligation to be entirely self-responsible. One need only skim the mainstream media to see niche
pockets of boutique sex-work becoming gentried (viz the Verge app for paid dating), while A-list representatives
of a particularly bioconservative notion of trans as consumerism are becoming mainstream (viz Caitlyn Jenner).

The more such shifts occur, the more the defence of these lives the rights of trans people and sex workers,
solidarity with their liberation can become associated with free-market ideology and bourgeois libertarianism.
As sex-industry union organiser Carol Leigh says, the price we have paid for decreases in sexual protectionism
has been more potential for exploitation. The challenge is the very long haul of owning our erotic labor as
individuals and communities, of communising gender relations under conditions of patriarchy, and learning to
work together through these divisions.

A non-soundbiteable message such as that, of course, does not make for digestible TV. What can relatively easily
be vindicated and/or exotied in public is the individual autonomy, privacy and choice of some relatively well-o
binary post-op transitioners and high-class sex workers, and/or the personality of the odd celebrity or
middle-class artist or entrepreneur who does not fear the police.

This type of progressive prostitution and trans politics does not get in the way, after all, of the intensive policing
of the vast majority of poor, precarious and racialised sex workers and trans people. As Dean Spade and others
have relentlessly hammered home, this is a class-blind, gender-dichotomist distortion of the dreams of those who
rst kicked o at Comptons Cafeteria and Stonewall.

The bottom-up trans/sex-worker movements are not primarily under siege from SWERFs and TERFs, nor even
from Caitlyn Jenner, but from terrorists and cops. Only with this signicant qualication should one turn to the
attacks operating from the right, coming from anti-feminists and feminists alike.
Just as sex work is work and trans women are women have been useful if imperfect slogans on our side,
implying transitional demands, so corresponding ripostes sex work isnt work and trans women arent women
have become clarion calls for a bipartisan coalition of bioconservatives even including some trans people.[**]

On the one hand, they are pro-life conservatives of the climate-denialist type, Family Research Council and their
ilk. On the other, they are people who call their politics left-wing and (often) ecological: Deep Green Resistance,
for instance, and sundry Radfem collectives. Key players include Lierre Keith, Janice Raymond, Kathleen Barry, the
former Mary Daly, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Elizabeth Hungerford, Cathy Brennan and Sheila Jereys. It is
admittedly an odd alliance: The person I nd I agree with most is Norman Tebbitt, said Jereys recently,
regarding the UK Gender Recognition Act (which she, of course, abhorred).

But no wonder. In a strange way (as Melinda Cooper and others have theorised), these two ideological formations
are very much compatible. In both frameworks, sexuate dierence is naturalised and seen as preceding class.
Whereas conservative Christians like to make class invisible and underline the sacred naturalness of procreative
purpose, radfems by and large theorise a binarising interpretation of reproductive biology as class. The latter
arent very numerous nor nearly as well-funded as the right-wingers, but they are academically privileged,
well-networked, and have sometimes teamed up outright with the lthy-rich right-wing evangelicals to promote
anti-transgender petitions or, as histories of FINRRAGE Feminist International Network of Resistance to
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, an abolitionist anti-surrogacy advocacy network mainly operative in the
80s. attest, oppose IVF and surrogacy. It is, of course, this ostensibly left-wing faction of the Anglo anti-trans and
anti-decriminalisation lobby whom I have amused myself by invoking in the title of this piece.

My observation is that those of us who beg to dier from prevalent ascriptions of our own gender, or who sell or
have sold sex, denaturalise a concept of the human body to which many people have a wounded attachment
even if they profess to be combating it. The claim of this declarative gender-abolitionism is self-contradictory.
Take Sheila Jereys, ever a quotable exemplar. You cant create a hierarchical sex caste system if you dont know
who is female and who is male, she says. So, not knowing would be good, right? Wrong. It seems we have to
double down on the knowability of femaleness and maleness created under that very system.

Why fan the ames of a counterrevolution in its lonely, resentful death-throes? It is worth remembering that the
ontologically-oriented denial of trans and sex-working subjectivities is common sense albeit common sense that
is being eroded in most colonial and settler-colonial liberal democracies as well as on the left. Despite or
because of the bad-faith brainwaves of some leftish public gures (such as Julie Burchill, Camille Paglia and Slavoj
iek) if you think about it, we are all whores! or were all trans! Im trans! eorts in left circles are seldom
ploughed into destigmatisation, institutional debinarisation, and safer workplace conditions for workers. The
uncritical use of words like whorebaggery to refer to the mode of accumulation of individual hate-speech-
mongers shows there is still a way to go. Warnings from Paglia and iek that the rise and toleration of trans
signify western civilisational decay (a bad thing, apparently) are conrmation that, while TERFism and SWERFism
might be rotten blossoms, they have healthy roots.

The radfem brand designated specically by those terms exists today mainly as a contrarian conference network
Radfem, Radfem Rebooted, Radfems Respond, etc with signicantly more voluntarist energy than resources or
credibility. Such Radfems may be no less internally incoherent and intellectually lazy than Paglia and iek, but
they are happy to be single-issue zealots unied around a set of endlessly repeated memes: we want to abolish
gender, you want to abolish reality; sex-worker unions prevent us from combating tracking; the term sex work
stops us mentioning male violence; cis is a slur; transgender ideology promotes insulting pastiches of women by
envious men appropriating/raping the sisterhoods energy; trans-ing [sic] is child abuse linked to systemic
erasure of the the female; perfectly healthy bodies are being abused; men can now say they are women in
order to force real lesbians to suck their dicks. Such ideologues are distinct from the wider culture in which their
ideas have purchase, however much their enthusiastic activism materially abets the murderous slashing of
healthcare provision and the expansion of police power.

Anti-prostitution and anti-trans activists admonish us all to love and respect our bodies and accept ourselves the way
we are. Yet what seems to incense them the most is when we manage, against all odds, to do so. Consider
Rebecca Reilly-Coopers discourse:

Many people justiably assume that the word transgender means something like having dysphoria and
distress about your sexed body . But according to the current terminology of gender identity politics
transgender [applies] even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess.

Perfectly happy and content, yet trans? What next?

Or consider the direction of feminist ire and bamboozlement, not so much towards the sources of shame and
whore-stigma, but towards individual sex workers portrayal of themselves as normal, untraumatised beings who
hate some aspects of the work, love other aspects, are neither empowered by it, nor particularly debased. This is
often characterised by seemingly compulsive mentions of blowjobs and cumshots (how dare you imply you dont
need rescuing from the tawdry scene Ive conjured in my head!). As Ana Lopes and Callum Macrae put it, We may
think we want labour rights, the argument goes, but in fact we are so debased by our circumstances that we dont
know what we want. Radfems promote body acceptance, but they have in mind bodies that perform certain
genders, not others. They have in mind the bodies cavorting around a re at the Michigan Womyns Music
Festival, or bodies stacking shelves and changing nappies, but not bodies selling sexual services.

There are certain exceptions to the rule that sex work isnt work and trans women arent women make a pair.
Neoconservatives, libertarians and neoliberals sometimes reject one of the two propositions, while embracing the
other. Antitracking celebrity Nick Kristof, for instance, does not consider what prostitutes do to be work, yet
has vocally armed and defended the identity of Caitlyn Jenner (who, incidentally, almost certainly agrees with
him about the other thing). Conversely, a number of street-level charitable services, including religious ones, take
what working girls (or boys) do seriously and hence support the full decriminalisation of sex work yet all the
while arbitrarily deny trans femmes access to certain spaces and services. Evie Embrechts is a trans revolutionary
socialist who makes sound arguments against separating trans struggle from feminism, yet is an avowed porn
abolitionist who considers sex-work, specically, a horrible crime against humanity. And there are post-op
transsexual women who stand in solidarity with sex workers, while refusing solidarity with pre-op trans sisters.

Nevertheless, generally speaking, invalidating the perceived basis of trans liberation and advocating for
criminalising the sex industry are coextensive obsessive activities.

SWERFs and TERFs are very much not synonymous with the history of radical feminism in theory and practice.
This is amply evidenced by the work of (for example) Cristan Williams at The Trans Advocate, Zagria at the Gender
Variance Whos Who, Leslie Feinberg, Selma James, Wages for Housework, the Transgender Studies Quarterly and
the archives of magazines like TransSisters. To be absolutely clear, the ideological mainstay of radfem ought to be
thought of as chromosome-reductivism or Dalyism or sex-essentialism or simply, as the acronyms suggest, as two
vigorously pursued projects of exclusion. It should certainly not be understood as representing a radical wing
within feminism, since it is rather, as I hope to show, the reactionary right wing of the struggle against patriarchy.

As Emma Heaney and others remind us, the spectacular transmisogyny of certain radical feminists is best
regarded as pushback against a 1970s radical trans and trans-inclusive feminism, the thriving of which we rarely
learn so much about as we do about its persecution and ousting.

Today, those who claim the name radfem are best-known for invisibilising trans men while coercively
brandishing the few trans women who agree with their axioms in the face of their critics. De-transitioned
penitents get brandished, too. They speak as, but more often for, survivors of prostitution, survivors of transing.
They ventriloquise and tokenise the harmed, the injured, and the dead. They sometimes partner with so-called
good men (like Chris Hedges and Robert Jensen) who see prostitution as rape/slavery too, and who advocate for
the Swedish model.

Of course, TERFs and SWERFs have no monopoly on abolitionism: theyre just doing abolitionism wrong, as James
implies. For instance, the organisation Red and Black Leeds stands for the ultimate abolition of gender and of sex
work indeed of work from their perspective as trans sex workers who have no intention of either quitting sex
work or detransitioning. As one trans member of RABL puts it: I have no wish for the sex industry to develop and
expand or be promoted. The fact that I think those of us working in it should be permitted to advertise
independently, or work from the same premises, does not contradict this. This same political consciousness
undergirds their critical analysis of (both) sex and gender essentialisms: stop blaming trans people for the sexist
ideology that oppresses all of us.

We who stand with work-abolitionist groups like RABL are in a stand-o, then, against these other abolitionists. It
is a situation in which all charges boomerang right back Youre conating sex and gender; No you are; Youre
reducing us to our genitalia!; No youre reducing us to our genitalia!; Youre speaking for child victims of
tracking; No you, etcetera etcetera.

The Radfems are eclectic, inuenced by a recent, womyn-born-womyn modication of lesbian separatism, but
also borrowing truncated elements of Marxism (specically the concepts of alienation and commodication,
which they morally abhor). They also overlap substantially with Dianic Wiccanism (which encourages the
proliferation of modernday wombyn priestesses). They signal their aliations by mourning Michfest the
Michigan Womyns Music Festival, a yearly cult event (since 1976) which ostensibly folded in 2015 rather than
admit penises onto its Land following decades of extraordinary antisectarian protest at its gates[]. They
present as victims of this unreasonableness (i.e. victims of Camp Trans), concerned mothers, heretic youth,
humiliated elders, oppressed lesbians, defenders of female sovereign space and (perhaps most horrically) trans
widows (implying that their former husbands bereaved them died! when they transgendered (sic)).

At their fevered fringes they are protesters against the alleged female-eliminationist reengineering of the human
race (yes, seriously). The names of forty or so of the people involved can be found on the contents page of a
forthcoming anthology called Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics War On Women, the
Female Sex and Human Rights[]. Hundreds of other, often more academically respectable names have also
appeared on various petitions protesting forbidden discourse, pitting safer space against free speech, and
expressing support for the Morning Stars defences of the female (sic).

It is a consciousness that pits gay and lesbian rmly against queer; that perceives the invention of gender
identity as an orchestrated assault on women and children; and detects in street sex workers organisations the
invisible hand of slave-traders, state-sponsored pimps, and Big Porn. Where this comes in the guise of avowedly
gender critical feminism, it is of course nothing of the sort, and where it uses the phrase violence against women
in the context of sex work, it isnt interested in dening either of those two terms. Its an immensely voluminous
fury, but one that often signies nothing.
A speaker at one radfem panel this year, giving her full name (Penny White) and referring to herself as This
Mother, read out a short text: To my little Girl who thinks Shes a Boy, written anonymously for The Guardian
years ago. I single it out because it made the SWERFism of TERFism explicit, and vice versa. White contends that
the existence of porn and prostitution, alongside catcalling and sexual harassment, are the reason why girls dont
want to be girls (and I agree that manifestations of patriarchy are factors in producing the desire to quit
femaleness). She concludes politically that for feminisms sake, girls have to be girls they have to learn to become
women (here I demur).

Dear daughter, White whispers faux-secretively, I dont disagree with you openly when you say youre a boy but
I know youre not a boy. A tragic image is conjured of the threat of a surgical knife looming over the childs perfect
body; the menace of hormonal poisoning. The letter ends deantly by folding its arms around the innocent child-
victim of transgender ideology: My girl. Nothing can change that. The letter has now been vindicated, she implies,
because the grown-up child in question has detransitioned or rather as This Mother puts it triumphantly she
has embraced her lesbian identity. Somehow: problem solved.

Seemingly oblivious to the real epidemic of trans adolescent suicide, White stubbornly equates trans identity
(though not cis identity, for some reason) with a liberal assimilationist solution to patriarchy. In this, and in her
disavowal of the existence of gender identity, White presents the characteristic framing in radfem discourse. It
would be nice if such a framing looked likely to die out with the generation, but Magdalen Berns has mastered
how to do it in fairly slick v-logs on YouTube, and twenty-somethings Meghan Murphy and Rachel Ivey are also
injecting new life into the cause.

The account goes like this: as feminists we face a zero-sum game: allow or encourage girls not to be girls, or
combat the system that makes girls hate the idea of being girls in the rst place. Meanwhile, all that is required in
the short-term to reconcile apostates, it seems, is promoting the celebration of separatist lesbianism and
menstruation: the good blood.

In the UK context, Victoria Smith chimed in on the website of Socialist Resistance: trans activists make the
exploitation of sexed bodies under patriarchy unmentionable. Since Radfem excludes specic (presumably
unsexed?) bodies from its spaces, she writes, the impression is that we are cruel.

Well, consider for yourself. Smiths article ends with the image of someone standing in front of two bathroom
doors, presenting the reader with two options: the feminist solution or the trans solution. Smith agrees that the
dilemma facing trans people is get yelled at or get beaten up. So the question is what to do. Incredibly, in
performing her choice for feminism, Smith writes that the trans solution namely, demanding entry into the
get yelled at space is tantamount to accepting male violence as a fact of life. In other words, transfeminine
people should continue to get beaten up in the male room on the road to revolution in the name of their cis
sisters, for otherwise, beaters might fraudulently receive access to female space. Analogous reasoning pins part
of the blame for mens sexual violence on the fact that workers exist who open the door to those men every day.
It is a terrifying, sacricial argument.

Trans-denying and antiprostitution sentiments like these frequently seek to position themselves as
anti-postmodern and anti-bourgeois. But the homogenising and ventriloquising of working-class morality that is
required to sustain this falls apart at a glance. The historic gay and lesbian association of trans and sex-working
people with the elite sexological academies of Berlin and New York that studied them (and yes, sometimes
catered to them conditionally) is also more and more widely understood as the mistake that it obviously is.

While the most common claims about trans people are probably the most dangerous we dont believe you, we
dont trust you, we have nothing against you but we wont help you there are various other disingenuous takes
available, intended to give the semblance of non-hostility to the TERF/SWERF cause. Namely: trans and
sex-working people are conventional-minded and unimaginative (Julie Burchill); they tragically hate their bodies
(Julie Bindel). Trans women are willing victims of a eugenic conspiracy (Janice Raymond). Which is it? As Juliet
Jacques says: The simultaneous characterisation of trans women [this goes for sex workers too] as unthinking
supporters of male-dened roles and politically aware enough to convince hardened feminists to admit them is a
theoretical clusterfuck.

Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen can always be relied upon for some of the more lurid claims: The unt are being
chemically sterilised once again. How sad and how emblematic of the ecological apocalypse, they write, that
anybody could think they were in the wrong body. If only wrong body discourse hadnt been theorised critically
by trans people for the past three decades!

Whats clear is how hatred of sex workers and trans peoples bodies is projected onto sex workers and trans men
and women themselves, who become death-eaters (though occasionally oscillating into victims if their attitude is
right). Its no coincidence that the same activists abhor BDSM and try to ban pornography. They think that trans
women and sex workers are pornography. They look at us and they see men, contamination by men, rape.

Emi Koyama is among those who embrace rather than repudiate the wrongness, the threateningness of the
trans whore to established feminism. She argues, in fact, that men and SWERFs/TERFs understand much better
than we do how threatening we are to them. It is the same kind of threat, she writes, bisexual and pansexual
politics present to gay identity. She inveighs particularly against racist feminist arrogance and against the
nonsense of chromosomes as the source of political aliations. After all, white skin is just as much a reminder of
violence as a penis. Controversially, she charts a course apart from history-revising and non-dynamic models of
gender aliation. We must not deny any of the genders we have incarnated. The fact that many transsexual
women have experienced some form of male privilege is not a burden to their feminist consciousness and
credibility, but an asset that is, provided they have the integrity and conscience to recognise and confront this
and other privileges they may have received.

Koyama is thus entirely unafraid to claim a transfeminine relationship with masculinity and maleness. In contrast,
in SWERF and TERF screeds, the looming presence is a predatory and spectral maleness that can never, despite
the stated aim being gender abolition, be made safe. This anti-material idea of patriarchy is, as a result, oddly
impressed with the power it believes emanates from people it considers to be men this is a magical and
ubiquitous power, vested in the humble cock.

As Charlotte Shane says; it seems ironic to me that you cant talk about the needs of people who sell sex without
a self-identied feminist demanding that men who buy it occupy equal space in the conversation. You can
observe this in the insistence of those who opposed Amnesty Internationals vote They maintained the
proposition enshrined the right of men to buy sex, when in fact the policy centered the safety of those who sell.
Likewise, as former (recanted) gendercrit activist, Aoife, says in a recent interview: In the sex-essentialist model
of trans women, the entire trans phenomenon is solely about desire, lust, and the triumph of the male orgasm. In
fact, it has the potential to destabilise mens supremacy.

Lesbophobia (which in pratice seems to denote something like butchphobia) has unfortunately become the
rallying cry of Radfems in opposition to queer culture, which they feel marginalises lesbians. And, to be fair, Ive
found that the types of everyday diminishment inicted on butch and transmasculine people are, indeed, rarely
even registered in political circles of my acquaintance. The reasons for this failure are complex. RABL oers this
comment: when some advocates of a certain trans politics put misogyny experienced by afab (assigned female at
birth) trans people under the heading of misgendering without noting the additional misogyny, this dismisses
the patriarchys inherent cissexism, and ignores the structures that build our identities in reality.

But the fulcrum of the twin disgust for prostitution and armative gender expression is an anti-feminine and,
more recently, specically anti-femme animus. Femme, here, is not remotely conned to the category lesbian
anymore, whence it arose. In fact, it was driven from some (Radfem) quarters of lesbian culture by femme-
phobia. The anti-trans sex-tracking UN lobbyist Elizabeth Hungerford (platformed at Counterpunch worrying at
great length about the misuse of gender identity for fraudulent purposes) puts this clearly: stereotypical
femininity is regarded by feminists as a harmful social construct that no person should adopt, perform, celebrate,
or identify with.

Yet materially and aesthetically, a kind of open-ended femme-inism and femme4femme solidarity is burgeoning
in many politically radical and in particular black political cultures. Femme has come to denote a politicised,
queered, non-white, performative, hustling, hackable open-access femininity. Far from anti-butch, in my
experience it tends to welcomingly enfold a wide variety of butchness (if willing) rather liberatingly within it. And,
while it is more than possible to be a femme (noun), the word has also emerged as a kind of verb, evoking the
ensemble of comradely practices of an internationalist, gender-diverse neo-sisterhood whose feminism is much
more cyborg than goddess.

Characterised by a reformulation of wages-for-housework demands (particularly around emotionally

reproductive labour), femme frequently attracts derision and contempt from a wing of feminism that thinks of
itself, not as masculinist, but as down-to-earth and anti-articiality. Think of the mocking of Serena Williams
femme blackness on-court by the white tennis-player Caroline Wozniacki with towels stued down her bra and
underpants (recently documented by Claudia Rankine). Or of Suzanne Moores claim that We [sic] are angry at
ourselves for not having the ideal body shape that of a Brazilian transsexual, which managed to dehumanise
a group of people subject to one of the highest rates of murder worldwide (hardly the ideal embodiment) in order
to express its resentful whorephobia. Or of Ariel Levy whining why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson
empowering?

Levy was bewailing what she sees as a trans/hooker tyranny responsible for dictating a form of fashion-based
empowerment to a world of what would presumably otherwise be anxiety-free androgynous butches. And this
kind of explicit condemnation of modernday femme culture as an outgrowth of sex-worker and trans solidarity
can be found in myriad Radfem titles including Levys Female Chauvinist Pigs and Being and Being Bought by Kajsa
Ekman. But contempt for femininity goes far beyond Radfem and has a long history among mainstream
(including social-democratic) feminisms chauvinistic right wing.

For example, in the view of the Radicalesbians trans-exclusionary statement on the separatist Woman-Identied
Woman in 1970, being feminine and being a whole person are irreconcilable. Cast a look across this tradition of
Anglo antiprostitution and trans-bashing public hate-speech (also known as gender-critical feminism or
questioning of narratives) and youll nd all those shame-lled references to cum and blowjobs, jeering at bad
wigs, imputations of mutilation, butchery, holes, genital stink, necrosis, and pitiably obvious articiality, such as
lipstick (garish, pathetic and debased), and insinuations (here with added mental-health stigma) of bed-wetting.
Under the guise of standing for something loftier than mere bullying an end to degradation, an end to gender
itself these people participate full-bloodedly in an abusive societys double-edged shaming rituals aimed at the
aesthetics, accessories and body-modication practices of femmes and fags, bitches and butches, queens, sluts,
hustlers, and whores.

Obviously, many prostitutes and trans people are not femme. But that fact has never been allowed to get in the
way of the whipping of cultures mythical abjects its whipping girls, as Julia Serano puts it whippings inicted
both for femininity displayed in conjunction with the wrong (especially racialised, male-coded) body and for a lack
of femininity. (Note: anyone can be a whipping-girl, not just girls). In fact, not performing femme while occupying
the whipping-girls position can make things even more dicult, since one is then simultaneously feminised and
encouraged to participate in femmephobia as the exception. For example, the friend who most recently
introduced me to full-service escorting is a trans man, and both clients and comrades frequently consider him
simply mistaken about who he is and what is happening to him and his vagina when he labours.

And hegemonic, not just dedicatedly TERF/SWERF, feminisms routinely scrutinise both groups, trans and hooker,
as though they were both sources and symptoms, ciphers, topics, victims, gures whose speech does not fully
count, who invite their bad treatment. As though trans people are trans, and whores whores, to make a political
point. Mainstream opinion analyses them, with scarcely veiled zoological fascination and then inevitably
scapegoats them if (when) they are found lacking in feminism.

In this way, whether rad-fem or anti-feminist, pro- or (avowedly) anti-capitalist, most of the people who abhor sex
work and reject trans-ness share the belief that the matter of being a woman isnt agentive, isnt work, isnt a
performance, and isnt a relation. Their belief fundamentally has to do with their anti-utopian understanding of
labour-power as necessarily alienated (rather than alienated in capitalism); and their concomitant view of most
alienated work as fundamentally natural and okay.

Pro- and anti-feminists of such analyses share a notion of the body as bearing an a priori, ahistoric, healthful
legibility; an immanent selfhood they see as bounded, rational, autonomous and given capitalism
notwithstanding. If only we would accept and claim its truth, and love our perfectly healthy bodies! This conception
of a royal road to liberation from gender is essentially identitarian. According to it, there is a positive way of living
womanness which patriarchy buried, tarred and cursed, but which the sisterhood can collectively recover. As
Monique Wittig recognised when she provocatively suggested that lesbians arent women, it is a beguiling
identitarianism. But confusingly, it is as identitarians that todays pseudoleftist radfems mock and lambast
transfeminists.

They imply too that capitalisms vectors relations like jobs and technology are simply out there in the world,
waiting for us to slot into them as and when. When in fact as anyone knows who consorts with Paul Preciados
communoid genderhack experiments, reads Octavia Butlers afrofuturism, dreams Ursula LeGuins post-value
dreams, or took to heart the Cyborg Manifesto matrices of labour and technology permeate our boundaries
full-time, co-constituting practically every aspect of our selves (including, perhaps especially, our sex and gender)
as part of a battle and contradiction between the liberatory and creative functions of social reproduction and its
merely reproductive functions.

So many transphobes also oppose the decriminalisation of sex work because both these abolitionisms have a
awed understanding of the relationships between the forces and relations of production: a awed
understanding of the relationship between the human body, human labour-power, human selfhood, technology,
and the commodity form. They are nihilists, in a sense: they understand capitalism and patriarchy to be evils one
must live with but which, at the same time, one must opt out of rather than struggle through. They are misogynist
feminists, too: they are upset at the production of more women. This might sound like a bit of a cheap shot, but
despite their occasional wombyn-priestess schtick, since they see conversion to womanhood as insulting, they
clearly dont actually like women.

Whether they be avowedly feminist or anti-feminist, pro- or anti-capitalist, the voices that reject trans-ness and
sexwork are perpetuating a bourgeois myth about the relationship between capitalism and individual
selves/bodies. Its a myth that says that we can and must protect our selves and bodies from commodication
and technological contamination, the better to do healthful productive work (whether as revolutionaries or as
capitalist evangelicals).

It should go without saying that there is nothing inherently or automatically radical about working, including in
the sex industry, or transitioning into a dierent societal role, position and identity. At the same time, we can tell
there must be something unruly in both spheres, or else neoliberal assimilationist politics would not be rushing
to recuperate and neutralise them by gentrifying sex-work and mainstreaming a liberal, carceral version of
transgender advocacy. Manufacturing new sexes and genders, and commercially producing intimate experiences
and aects that may be identical to those most prized by bourgeois ideology as sacred markers of the authentic
and free (love, i.e. part of the housework economy).

Sex workers and trans people share an outcast and liminal status at this point in history (one or the other label
may of course shed this status, through revolutionary struggle or as a result of capitalist assimilation). As a result,
they are typically under no illusions about the disavowed underbelly of the capitalist production-reproduction
dyad. If so inclined, they are well placed to garner proscribed knowledge from the wrong side of their assigned
locations, tracking as they do in activities that simultaneously explode and undergird the mythic dyad of formal
value production and national reproduction. While there is no dictating any group of peoples politics, trans
people and/or sex workers are in unique situations vis--vis systems of racialised patriarchy and capitalism, and
militants among them have cause to regard themselves as at the very epicentre of contemporary class struggle.

Which is of course not to say that trans people and sex workers exist simply in order to struggle against
capitalism, any more than that they exist to reproduce it, any more than anybody else does. It does not escape
their notice, however, that their lives imply a threat to the naturalised categories that have happened to order
bourgeois society for most of its history (not to mention the relation between them) love, sex, gender, the
family, the unied sexed body, the self, the commodity, work, not-work. Capitalist patriarchy may prove capable
of domesticating the threat. But fragmenting, refusing, literalising, exposing, masking, professionalising and/or
repurposing sex and gender in the way that trans/sex workers do, in multiple dierent ways, immanently
suggests the possibility of a dierent order of things while carrying no guarantee of radicality.

Irrespective of attempts by various paternalists at Counterpunch, Morning Star, Feminist Current or Logos journal
to lock down the rules of gender abolition and to proclaim its historic subject, many trans and/or sex-working
comrades are getting on with dismantling gender oppression via the cunning of surviving. They are
disproportionately engaged in the everyday organising that helps their communities thrive. And at the same time
they are often abolishing themselves as trans people and sex workers, as has been well articulated by Emma
Heaney. Heaney delineates the key generative tension directing the future genealogy of trans/feminism with
reference to two iconic moments in trans history. The two stand in dialectic tension with each other: the
armation of the transcendence of woman, and the armation of womens space. Says Heaney: The[se] two
strains of trans feminism that advocate, in turn, for the transcendence of gender and womens autonomy are
mutually enabling political practices that confront both enforcement of gender norms and misogyny. Trans
womens autonomy in all its forms is the necessary pretext for such a conversation to unfold, not between trans
feminists and trans misogynists, but among feminists of trans experience and their sisters and siblings who have
received the gift of trans-feminist autonomist legacies.

One of the younger generation of the old guard, Meghan Murphy at Feminist Current is complaining bitterly, to my
great satisfaction, that the left is increasingly focusing only on the work aspect of sex work. She clearly feels put
out that talk of the feminist war on sex-workers will reect badly as it should on her and her feminist heroes.
What trans and sex worker liberation will hopefully demonstrate to Murphy and her ilk, by whatever means
necessary, is that imagining that we can instantiate the world as we would want it to be by at is a terrible way of
engaging with the world as it actually is.

Justied hatred of (sex) work in no way justies attacks on (sex) workers self-organisation. Quite the opposite, in
fact. Nobody will abolish (sex) work but (sex) workers themselves. And neither surgery nor the absence of surgery
nor chromosomes nor lipstick nor cocks have anything to do with the class composition of this struggle against
the gendered division of work and gender oppression generally. As Riki Anne Wilchins put it in 1994: if pre-ops
are excluded, then I am pre-op. If non-ops are excluded then I am non-op. For that matter, if post-ops are
excluded, then I am post-op. Lets take over the factories of our own bodies and have no truck with eorts to
police the bounds of womanhood or, for that matter, humanity, let alone productivity. Being practically all of us
whores, its about time we learned to ght as such, especially for our trans sisters, and against the tyranny of
work.

[*] Madgalene laundries were Irelands church-operated workhouse-asylums for fallen women i.e. unmarried
mothers and women working as, or deemed to be working as, prostitutes. The last laundry closed in 1996.

[] Jemima at sometimesitsjustacigar.wordpress.com, a blog on BDSM and socialism.

[] Unsurprisingly, we are often the same people: a large proportion of trans people are sex workers and a large
proportion of sex workers are trans. Action for Trans Healthcare is just one of the groups who have recently
conrmed this in a study of their constituency.

[] For information on trainings, legal support, resources and how to donate, visit: srlp.org.

[**] Among those who say trans women arent women worldwide are trans people. In the Anglo world, some
among them are truscum (this bizarre term of abuse, which isnt an acronym but rather a hybridisation of the
words true and scrum, has been reclaimed by some of the individuals in question). So-called truscum subscribe
to a medicalised and sexualised (true) model of identity-transition and, on that basis, avow a trans-separatist,
often also gender-critical or gender-abolitionist position. The truscum position is associated with aggressively
policing the bounds of authentic trans-ness, and overlaps with those who derive their identity from the supposed
legitimacy of a congenital dysphoric condition called Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).

[] While Camp Trans is a convenient scapegoat, the reasons for Michfest closing were in fact manifold, including
nancial diculty and declining attendance.

[] Female Erasure is edited by Ruth Barrett and prefaced by Germaine Greer. It proposes a return to language
referring to females as a distinct biological class and features a gleaming white Eve on its cover. Its forty-eight
contributors supposedly expose the evils of gender identity politics and expose the prots of an emerging
medical transgenderism industry.