The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Marsha P. Johnson, left, and Sylvia Rivera, right, at the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, 1973. Photograph by Leonard Fink. (Courtesy of the LGBT Community Center National History Archive @lgbtcenternyc)

  For Rivera and her allies, gay liberation was meaningless unless it allied with the most marginalized. The effects of homophobia weren’t most apparent among the white middle class, who often had economic resources to fall back on even when their families kicked them out, or worse. The brutal workings of racism, capitalism, binary sex, and state violence intensified homophobia, making homophobia itself most potent where multiple forces of power converged in the lives of individuals. Child and adult street queens weren’t exceptional cases that gay liberation could ignore: they were prisms that refracted and magnified the vectors of power itself. If a social movement didn’t include the most marginalized, then it was reinforcing, not undermining, the structures that make inequality immensely profitable for the few.

  STAR, in other words, began to articulate a nascent, trans version of what Pauli Murray was writing from her Brandeis office, what the Combahee River Collective would outline in its famous statement four years later, and what Black law scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would develop as the theory of intersectionality in 1989. All were arriving at a similar conclusion: the best vantage onto the true workings of power is from below. To be a Black woman, these theorists argued, was not only to experience racism, sexism, and capitalist inequality. It was to experience them in their full intensity. To understand and confront how power aims to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of the few, they argued, movements must put at their center those lives that show the full force of oppression in all its brutal strength: those on the bottom of multiple hierarchies.

  From a variety of locations across the country, intersectional feminist analysis was consolidating, and collectives were putting it into action in the 1970s and 1980s. From classrooms, movement meetings, demonstrations, advocacy, and downtown squats, a new form of politics interrogating multiple structures of power from below—rather than seeking to gain individual access to the status quo—gained strength.

  Lesbian white feminism had hardly exhausted itself, however. In the late 1970s, its reductive, single-axis account of power—men oppress, women are oppressed, and femininity is the mark of that oppression—consolidated around a new set of targets: pornography and prostitution. Prostitution wasn’t an altogether new concern of feminists; social purity crusaders had policed working-class districts throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the grounds of preventing “white slavery.” But 1970s feminists gave it a new spin. In the hands of figures like Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller—who drew on the myth of the Black male rapist—Catharine MacKinnon, and Janice Raymond, sex industries became the emblems of patriarchy’s addiction to exploiting and harming women. In the 1980s, fights between antiporn feminists, who saw sex industries as untrammeled exploitation, and pro-sex contingencies, who saw erotic material and sex work as elements of women’s sexual agency, escalated. The “sex wars” consumed much of feminism in the decade, especially among white women—whether or not they supported white feminist politics. By the early 1990s, the sex wars had largely come to an end. Pro-sex feminists emerged victorious and women’s right to the erotic became integral to third-wave feminism.

  But while antiporn feminists like Morgan and Raymond lost the sex wars, they did not disappear. They went “underground,” in the words of a prominent activist, until it was safe to reemerge. Safety materialized in the 1990s in the form of the anti–sex trafficking movement, which by the early 2000s blossomed into a major international NGO force.57 And from 1994 to 2007, Janice Raymond served as co–executive director of the most prominent feminist antitrafficking organization, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).

  At first blush, anti–sex trafficking work seems to be a rock-solid agenda. Who could support a global network forcing women into sex work against their will? Yet antitrafficking discourse like Raymond’s makes little distinction between those who voluntarily enter sex work—constrained though that set of choices may be—in their own countries, and those forced to migrate across international borders to become pawns in an industry of sex. Instead, it frames all prostitution as a sprawling industry that compels women into sexual exploitation, and it typically portrays these victims as brutalized teens. Antitrafficking accounts collapse the real, but infrequent, incidents of cross-border trafficking—which typically abduct women into household and other nonsexual forms of labor—and the flourishing domestic sex trade into one phenomenon, with one set of male perpetrators. Trafficking becomes a parallel of Raymond’s empire of transsexual medicine: a vast patriarchal enterprise to steal and sell women’s bodies, and in which participants are passive victims stripped of any agency. The title of a book by Raymond’s ally, the Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, underscores the point: the sex trade produces The Industrial Vagina.

  Raymond and other antitrafficking feminists see prostitution as the cornerstone of an empire of exploitation that subjects all women to a culture of violence, including rape and battery. Remove prostitution and pornography, they argue, and the edifice of patriarchal violence will crumble. But their work is simultaneously strengthening another power structure. To eradicate prostitution, they lean into policing and mass incarceration.58

  Raymond and other antiprostitution activists “protect” women by coordinating with police, extending prison sentences, and reinforcing international borders to punish men who solicit and organize paid sex. “Our responsibility is to make men change their behaviour by all means available,” Raymond declares, and those means include the punitive apparatus of the state. It means working in coalitions with police and other groups, such as evangelical Christians, who are no longer feminist enemies. These coalitions elevate one tactic above all: lengthy imprisonment. Successfully reframing pimping in the US courts as “domestic sex trafficking,” the charge now extends the possible prison sentence from ninety days to ninety-nine years.59

  Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein studies Raymond’s CATW and other feminist antitrafficking groups, such as local NOW chapters, and has coined a new term to characterize their embrace of criminal justice as a tactic: “carceral feminism.” Carceral feminism names the white feminist strategy of turning to police, the courts, and the prison system to protect women from violence. It operates on the fantasy that police and prisons end violence—rather than proliferate it. In the words of writer Victoria Law, carceral feminism “does not acknowledge that police are often purveyors of violence and that prisons are always sites of violence.”60

  The consequences of the white feminist push for increased arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of so-called sex traffickers have been stark for the usual targets of state violence: Black and Latinx people. Bernstein reports that between 2008 and 2010, African American men made up 62 percent of sex trafficking suspects, and Latino men another 25 percent. These numbers are wildly out of proportion with the percentage of Black and Brown US residents. They are, however, in keeping with the racial disparity of the criminal justice system. While male clients are the target of antitrafficking feminists’ punitive goals, women sex workers often get caught up in the resulting overpolicing. According to a recent study conducted in Baltimore, incarcerated women sex workers faced high rates of exposure to violence from both police and clients, as well as increased risk of exposure to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Among those studied, Black female sex workers were at the greatest risk for being jailed. These statistics are compounded by the fact that women are the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States.

  Similarly, the much touted Violence Against Women Act of 1994, sponsored by then senator Joseph Biden, works within the logic of carceral feminism. Its passage implemented mandatory arrest in cases of suspected domestic violence, increased the prison sentences of those convicted, and allotted $1.6 billion toward preventing and prosecuti
ng violent crimes against women.61 The vast majority of this funding was funneled into the criminal justice system, contributing to the highest incarceration rate in the world.

  Sandy Stone argued in the 1990s that the ultimate significance of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire lay in its method, not its topic. Raymond, she explained, “demonstrate[d] that one can cloak a radically conservative position in liberal language.”62 Stone’s claim bears out in the politics of Raymond’s antitrafficking work. Raymond’s white feminist politics not only attempted to cleanse the movement of trans women; in a misguided attempt to protect cis women, it works with cops, courts, and the prison system to cleanse society of sex work.

  The trajectory of Raymond’s career makes the political context of trans-exclusionary radical feminism clear: just like carceral feminism, trans exclusion is part of the tradition of white feminist politics. Anti-trans politics crystallized among an ongoing struggle between white feminists who insist that women share an identity, biology, and universal experience of oppression and intersectional feminists who illuminate the multiple vectors through which wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few. In the rampant inequality of late capitalism, the divide between the two forms of feminist politics becomes even more stark: carceral feminists who support the prison industrial complex and those who form coalition with street queens and sex workers, prison and gender abolitionists, and trans activists.

  When intersectional transgender politics—and the new term transgender itself—fully flowered in the 2000s, it emerged at the juncture of Sandy Stone’s posttranssexual manifesto and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera’s work organizing street queens. The term transgender emerged in the 1990s specifically to de-emphasize the role of surgery and other medical interventions. Rather than a diagnosis and embodiment “created” by medicine, as transsexuality marks, transgender encompasses a range of binary-defying modes of life that may or may not include medical treatment. The term underscores the agency of individual trans people, defying beliefs like Raymond’s that trans identity and embodiment are the invention of a medical empire. Like Stone had urged, many trans activists refuse the “born in the wrong body” narrative and instead emphasize that all bodies, trans or cis, are in continual states of transformation.

  Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, however, continue to wage war against trans women and the notion of gender itself. In 2014, Australian Sheila Jeffreys (author of The Industrial Vagina) issued a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. She argues that transgender identities are merely animated sex stereotypes; that “male-bodied transgender” people threaten women’s safety in restrooms, showers, and prisons; and that gender itself is a harmful ideology that works to subordinate women.63 The back cover of Gender Hurts features two blurbs by two influential feminists: Robin Morgan and Janice Raymond.

  Meanwhile, the campaign to deny trans healthcare has built many allies. In the first three months of 2021 alone, over eighty bills were introduced in state legislatures seeking to roll back trans rights, especially blocking youth access to healthcare and organized sports.64 The dangerous idea that transition healthcare mutilates bodies and that trans people jeopardize the safety of others is no longer a niche concern of some white feminists—it is a major national agenda.

  Yet the counterhistory also builds strength, on the street and on the university campus. In 2011, Susan Stryker—who turned transgender studies into a flourishing field—held a conference at Indiana University–Bloomington to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Stone’s essay “The Empire Strikes Back.” Nearly five hundred people attended, many of them trans. During a panel discussion, Stryker asked Stone to read aloud the final paragraph of the manifesto. Long a professor at University of Texas–Austin and the European Graduate School, Stone focused on media arts and was accustomed to delivering renegade performances in front of large audiences. Yet as she read her text and looked out over the crowd, humility, fear, and exhilaration overcame her. Sobs interspersed her words. She had dreamed of one day being part of a community of trans theorists—and now she was among hundreds and hundreds. “It’s been a long road,” she reflected. “We’re not near the end yet, but we’re all clearly on our way.”65

  Footnotes

  i The terms TERF and trans women are twenty-first-century coinages. I project them backwards because the ongoing struggle for trans rights requires recognizing the consistency of anti-trans and pro-trans feminisms and communities over time.

  ii I use the male pronoun here in accordance with Sandy Stone’s groundbreaking theorizing about refusing the gender binary and the erasures of passing, as explored below.

  PART III

  OPTIMIZING

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LEANING IN OR SQUADDING UP

  Sheryl Sandberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

  Always ally yourself with those on the bottom, on the margins, and at the periphery of the centers of power. And in doing so, you will land yourself at the very center of some of the most important struggles of our society and our history.

  —Barbara Ransby, How We Get Free

  SHERYL SANDBERG NEEDED A BETTER PLACE TO PARK. ONE WINTER MORNING IN 2005, ON-GOING morning sickness kept the heavily pregnant tech executive at home in front of the toilet until the last possible minute. She was now late to meet a prospective client at Google, where she headed the burgeoning sales and operations team. But the vast parking lot at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters brimmed with cars, and Sandberg was forced to take a spot in its outer reaches. Lumbering across the asphalt expanse only sent her stomach back into her throat. While extolling the value of buying targeted advertising on Google—a product that was turning the company from the red into a rapidly growing profit juggernaut—she prayed “that a sales pitch was the only thing that would come out of [her] mouth.”1

  That night her husband, Dave Goldberg, remarked that his workplace Yahoo! reserved close-in parking spaces for pregnant workers. Inspired, Sandberg walked into the Google founders’ office the following day and posed her request directly to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google pregnancy parking was born. The travails of one woman executive eased the way for all future pregnant employees.

  The parking anecdote is one of Sandberg’s favorite examples of her vision of feminist change. Her trial as a pregnant, nauseous executive traversing the oceanic Google lot opens and closes Lean In, the white feminist manifesto she published to much fanfare in 2013. It’s a disarming introduction to Sandberg, one of corporate America’s richest and most powerful women. Opening the book’s glossy cover emblazoned with her face and hair half-lit and softly focused as if she were an actress in a romantic comedy, I hardly expected to find her crouched over a toilet on the very first page. Yet the folksy story, as with the intimate close-up of Sandberg on Lean In’s cover, is key to the image she crafts. Imperfect, inspiring, relatable, and above all, normatively female, she presents herself through the appealing combination of remarkable competence and quirky, all-too-human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Faced with a gender inequity that compromised her sales pitch and her dignity she nonetheless solved it handily, for herself and her colleagues. Let women like Sandberg rise to the top of corporate America, she tells her readers, and the sexism women face in the workplace everywhere will diminish. “More female leadership will lead to fairer treatment for all women,” she insists.2

  While Lean In doesn’t discount the systemic barriers women face, such as unequal pay, a lack of family leave, and a deeply sexist culture, the book proclaims that these institutional factors have drowned out other feminist approaches. “Too much of the conversation is on blaming others, and not enough is on taking responsibility ourselves,” she later explained to a New Yorker journalist. The book thus turns away from structural solutions and instead emphasizes “internal obstacles,” illuminating the ways that women hold themselves back from career success. Women make individual choices, day in and day out, her book claims, that co
mpromise their own potential and keep them out of positions of power. Sandberg encourages women readers to stop underestimating their talent, lean in to their professional ambitions, and negotiate themselves all the way into the executive suite—where they’ll make sure those who follow in their stiletto footsteps have an easier path to tread. In the allegedly postracist, postfeminist days of President Obama’s second term, Sandberg’s emphasis on personal solutions to structural problems struck a ready nerve. Her ally Oprah trumpeted Sandberg as “the new voice of revolutionary feminism”; Gloria Steinem, another personal friend, aptly anointed her “feminism’s new boss.”3 Four million copies flew off the shelves.

  Sandberg helped usher in a twenty-first-century mode of white feminist politics. In this new form of feminism, the key strategy has become optimizing: striving for a streamlined efficiency in which personal health and happiness and feminist empowerment are indistinguishable from capitalist productivity. Her executive career, Sandberg relates, is compatible with motherhood because she rises early—sometimes at 5 a.m.—schedules her office time to end by 5:30 p.m.; rushes home for dinner, play, and bedtime; and runs from the crib back to her laptop to resume her workday, which includes being an inspiration to her female underlings. The worker, mother, and activist fully dissolve into one another, arriving at an allegedly “revolutionary” feminism whose central message is to work harder, smarter, and faster, even after you’ve reached the executive suite.