It's Fascism. New Rules. | Part 2

It's Fascism. New Rules. Part 2 | by Esmee Streachailt

0:00

/1455.785167

1×

I’m not ready to make nice either. Like many feminists, I am both disappointed in and pissed off – dissapissed!! – at a whole bunch of people who made this political textbook perfect fascist regime possible in the US. Still have doubts? OK, here:

No matter where you stand on the violence between Israel and Gaza, you need the US’s 1A (Frist Amendment) to express that view and advocate for actions. Mahmoud Khalil, who held both an education visa and a green card that make him a legal resident of the US, is in prison now for leading protests in support of Gaza-Palestine at Columbia University. He’s not yet been convicted of any crime in a US court. For a few days, no one knew where he was. He is in a prison in Louisiana, very far from any family or support. 

Like David Roberts and many other lefty-lefties, I always suspected that the (now) center-right, Reagan conservatism was a cover for a much more radically nationalist and anti-progress agenda. And lo, for the day has dawned, over the horizon charge the … Knights Templar? 

Yeah, it was all bullshit. Opus Dei is the Heritage Foundation. Elon is a nazi. Trans people, Black people, Latino people, disabled folks, and women specifically are being actually erased from government records and targeted for firing from leadership positions across agencies. A woman graduated from Top Gun? A woman? When? No record of it here. Enola Gay? Who was she? 

It worked. This is the fight. Like all fash, the Manchurian Administration (the Volgan Candidate?) is walking right through that restraining order, the Constitution, like it’s written on paper. Our resistance is not optional (<– how the Italians did it).

The Emergency means we have to band together. But, many feminists are not ready to make nice with any of the following: misogynist leftist men, aggro trans allies, more aggro trans activists, single issue women, single issue women cozy with fash influencers, men who casually consume manosphere content, MAGA, and the Entire Right Wing up to and including 5 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices.

For different, but eerily similar reasons, the going idea is that we need to give all these people a ‘way back’ or ‘forgiveness’ that does not require them to feel any shame or to admit that they have been assholes/idiots. — No. 

All of these people got off talking shit about feminists of any kind who tried to point out that their tactics &/ goals were going to land us all in trouble. And that’s when some of them were not threatening to rape and murder us, and that’s when they weren’t erasing us or redefining us as a subcategory of our sex category. And that’s when they weren’t telling us that we were exaggerating and making stuff up, there’s no material harm to women from transwomen in any context dontchaknow. All of this behavior made giving a shit about trans people … harder. Compliance to (mostly) male demands is not really in the feminist toolbelt. And yet, many of us desperately want to preserve space and dignity for gender nonconforming women and men. We just won't bow down to another male supremacist reversal of sex and gender. 

Also aggravating was the refusal of either the TRA/MRAs, aggro allies, or Democrat/Left politicians to admit there might be some material conflicts of rights to address (post-conviction trans identification, anyone?) and find a balanced solution that protects this “vanishingly small” but more-important-than-any-other minority. Thanks to this stalwart irrationality, the Hold The Line and Single Issue women just would/could not see that they were being coopted by a well-coordinated (I’m gonna say it) cabal of no kidding bad guys like Seb Gorka, AFD, The Heritage Foundation, Opus Dei, the NeoReactionaries (Musk), MAGA (Bannon), Fidesz, the BNP, the BJP, Reform … … … and whatever Geert Wilders is. 

All of these had their go at piling on the ‘socfems’ and ‘head girls’ with a thrashing the likes of which the TRAs had never yet laid down all for showing up with grounded analysis and evidence of historical precedents. 

SocFems include radical materialist feminists, anarchafeminists, socialist feminists and any feminist who ever, ever references a book in her writing or speech. 

Most MAGA voters don’t read at an 8th grade level. I’m for common cause with the common people and the ‘regular women’, but ya gotta be able to cope with a complex, interrelated world to help women get our due and that reading level ain't it. Level up. 

Well, no. No. Not yet. I have terms and conditions for my own alliances. We don’t trust any of y’all at all. Or I don’t. ‘Socfems’ don’t all see everything just the same way and we live all over the world where the experience and effects of The Emergency are different. But I can say this for me in the US: There will be no compromise. What's happening in the US is reassertion of Patriarchy 1.0, straight tyranny no chaser. 

See, the reason regular old misogyny and patriarchy get on so well with fascism/authoritarianism is = they’re the same dominance structure. Corporations look like (what we imagine as) feudal estates because they’re the same structure. Both run on currents of extraction (resources, labor) ensured by domination (violence, debt). The ideal expression of patriarchy is fascism. To maintain the lie that men are (in every way) superior to women you have to suppress a lot of knowledge and punish a lot of people. 

[Here, I slip into the second person, as I do when I am 'dissapissed' with some cadre of folk, but I'm addressing an imaginary 'you', not you-the-reader of this newsletter. I'm assuming (?) you read this because you generally vibe with RadMatFem.]

So if you pushed the ‘trans agenda’ or the ‘single issue’ or the MAGA agenda hard all these years, you have some dumb shit to walk back. There is no ERA. There’s shit in the UK’s rivers. There’s soon be shit in the US rivers. Musk is coming for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Never mind the overhead on SS is like 2%. That too is an attack on women, don’t you see? It will demand our service. Cutting Medicaid and Social Security means either many people will die for lack of care, or able-bodied women will be ‘forced’ to do that caring instead of whatever else we’re doing now. Our compassion will be, is being, turned against us as a weapon. Just like patriarchy always does. #BeKind

This bananas idea shared on left and right that 'everything is the fault of feminists' from the rise of the TQ subculture to the 'male loneliness epidemic' has helped land us here. Feminists have long held a tradition full of the theories and plans concerning economics, the environment, and the sexualized violence of male domination that are currently being slowly reinvented by various other movements. That context helped allow 'politically homeless' and Single Issue women – epitomized by organizations like WoLF, WDI USA, and whatever Posie Parker is calling her business model these days – ignore the full complexity of women's experience under male supremacy and just focus on the one issue that also allowed them to know about the ambitions of the ADF or Heritage or Gorka-Bannon-MAGA but overlook them.

These organizations are very pleased with the EO on gender identity ideology, never mind its full throated endorsement of the trauma of traditional gender role socialization and it's not subtle endorsement of fetal personhood. They say they're working for women, but much of their efforts have been either symbolic (Women's Bill of Rights, which is not one, and which is only adopted in states that also seek to dismantle women's rights) or actively working against women's interests (Posie Parker's long held, oft repeated support for Trump).

And now, these fashy forces are actively dismantling the wider social context in which women's liberties have been experienced at all. Cuts to education, threats to universities, threats against free speech and the right of public assembly, the drive to delete our social safety nets — all of these will pressure women out of public, economic and civic life and move us back into the home as caregivers to our newly disadvantaged families.

Now, there is great honor in the work of care and management of a family — just not any that our re-masculinizing culture will offer beyond chintzy mother's day cards and cheap roses. Our retreat from the public sphere — as our compassion and love for our families and communities is weaponized against our replete humanity — will further impoverish our families and reduce everyone's ability to revolt/resist/survive in the teeth of this fascist and rapacious regime. It's back to old fashioned patriarchal extraction from both woman and planet we go. So much for women.

To be clear, if you were a MAGA or a Single Issue woman, you recently celebrated actions against Trans and Queer people that are draconian and cruel. They have Stephen Miller's clammy little fingerprints all over them.

Imagine what this can mean for feminists, for all gender nonconforming women. Fascist use red tape against citizens to create a collapse of our agency. A passport is one of the most convenient ways for women to maintain our voter registration if (when, really) the SAVE Act becomes law. But you might find yourself in this limbo, and then what?

Should a convicted trans person be able to change their sex marker and name on all their documents resulting in a separation between them and their criminal record? Medusa's Blood, absolutely not. These laws can be written ethically and intelligently. But, denying Americans their passports, holding their sensitive and essential documents hostage thus disenfranchising them? Medusa's Blood, absolutely not.

If you're good with this level of Big Government interference in the personal lives of citizens, you can stay on that side. We'll see you in the streets one of these days. RadMatFems have no need of that kind of women's movement. We very much want a dignified and secure life for TQ folks as much as for ourselves. It's called solidarity. And where that movement failed was in a lack of solidarity for women, I do know. Both you anti-feminist women and the TQ and allies are going to have to do much better. Like I said, I have terms.

Revivifying the Sedition Act seems on the cards as well. What we are getting is a political context in which US citizens can be gulagged for just about any reason. I am telling you now, Sisters & Readers, if I have argue for women's rights/spaces/sports/dignity for another 100 years I'll do it happily if that's the price of putting down this threat to our very freedom. We get as much freedom as we are willing to fight and even die for. Sometimes less. Never more.

They’re not reasonable measures that would have protected women’s rights/spaces/sports but pretexts for taking those rights away, too. “A person who at conception” is a phrase that will haunt us yet. The freedom they're interested to protect is “the freedom to express the binary nature of sex,” which is a fact, not a thing we express except through the deformations of traditional gender socialization. Women who choose not to marry or to have children are not expressing the binary nature of sex. Butch lesbians. Women engineers. Feminists. ... witches ... If that's our freedom, what a gender gulag that will be.

So will this also haunt us, “Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation's children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases, but usurps basic parental authority.” That's a pretext for no longer teaching our actual history, which is a blend of cinematic heroism and despotic genocide both on scales rarely witnessed before. It's OK to face up to that ambivalence and resolve to do better. Because this is also a rejection of the entire lineage of women's history, archeology, sociology, poetry, fiction, art, economics, philosophy, and theory. Unless you don't want to do better, as is the case with Trump & Co. 

This stuff is written by the kind of people who think George Soros is a Marxist. Who think corrective rape is a grand strategy for getting back to the natural order of things.

Florida and Texas have both passed bills that would remove children from homes where they are “at risk” of being affirmed in a gender identity. Meanwhile, California was seeking to go to the other extreme, taking kids from parents who would not immediately affirm. 

Both teams here are wrong in the RadMatFem view. We're pretty sure that most teen trans-identification is an expression of other, deeper issues that deserve to be addressed and resolved to the benefit of the teenager, and not the egos of nearby adults, not the profit incentives of the medical industry, and certainly not to legitimate a subculture of (mostly) narcissistic men who can't handle aging, and very definitely not in the place of confronting family or community abusers who need a good curb. The RadMatFem view is that the ‘trans and queer community’ is broad in fact and complex enough that any child seeking to enter it deserves to go slowly, to be sure. 

No one is doing a single thing more about rape/porn culture, femicide, trafficking, or domestic violence. The predations men visit upon women every day. The material conditions of women’s lives are deteriorating in many places. The SAVE Act in the US will complicate/cost about 70 MILLION women’s votes. The reactivation of our nation’s racist and xenophobic habits is putting families in terror. That sound you hear in the economy? That is a chasm opening. So yeah, as that’s the short list of terrible stuff you were willing to overlook for your ‘one most important thing.’ It was stupid where it was not deliberate and venal. 

And, from what I see, none of you have anything to offer that’s smarter or better adjusted to reality than anything you offered before. So, until some wisdom and genuine care for your wider community shows up in your actions, go have a think about what you did. 

Be quick. The more The Emergency breaks, the longer things stay broken, the more factual they become, the more irreversible. Own up. Get real. Everything everywhere is on the line all at once. 

But if you expect me, or ‘socfems’ to act like an exasperated mother in a sitcom as we compromise so you can have political support humans — 

Well, that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard since January 20th.

+++

Ok, so now I've laid that marker down, feels good, the next part of this series will explore the way facts calcify out of the historical flows and how we, citizens in our countries, have to collapse before tyranny can claim its prize money.

If you have thoughts you want to share with us about all this, please send them to us. Especially (but not only) if they are grounded in the Manifesto for a Radical Materialist Feminism. 

And send other things. We will need poems, fictions, introspections, beautiful discoveries. We can't let any part of our humanity wilt. 

I hope to digest and alchemize all this with you in real time. In the final part of this series, I'll come back around to some conclusions and practical suggestions for how to stop punching ghosts.

Maybe this post moved you? Would you like to dedicate it in the name of an ancestor, sister, sister-friend, lover, daughter? Use Eopsin's Ward to have your dedication added here.

Add your voice to this Gorgon chorus? Visit Contribute.