Yes, Some of Our Enemies Are Feminists

Sub-commandant Mary Allen (center), one of the earliest members of the Women’s Police Service, with four members of her force (1916) | Christina Broom / © National Portrait Gallery, London

Sophie Lewis, feminist scholar and author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022), reckons with Western feminism’s problematic history in her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025). In a conversation with Natasha Lennard, Associate Director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at the New School for Social Research and author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (Verso, 2019), Lewis lays out the capacious nature of feminist movement.

Sophie Lewis: There are contexts which make it helpful to understand an enemy feminism as a feminism to understand how to move against it. I don’t necessarily mean all strategic contexts—sometimes it probably doesn’t matter. I want anti-fascist feminists to ask themselves: What are the seductions in play here that actually work on me, at least a little bit? I don’t actually care whether you say J. K. Rowling is a real feminist or not, per se. Understanding the deep historic roots of her feminism of fear can help us, in my opinion, to navigate as anti-fascists against her brand of sexual nationalism. But what matters is whether or not you thinking she is a real feminist disarms you from avenging the blood she has on her hands. That’s the main thing. 

Natasha Lennard: It’s not simply a question of accurate labels … 

Sophie Lewis: Right. To be clear, I am undeniably tightly attached to “feminism”! I say this because it isn’t always a given in 2025, for someone with my trans liberation politics, to feel so attached to it. Even as there has been a mass rightward popular exodus from liberal feminism, many radical-left thinkers make no claim on the label “feminist.” (One of my inspirations and comrades, Jules Joanne Gleeson, a pioneer of transgender Marxism, has no use for it, I believe … I could be wrong.) I often remind myself that the word itself, historically speaking, has continually failed to capture the people we might want to identify as our favorite chosen feminist ancestors. Some would be quite annoyed if I described them as feminist! Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollontai would be annoyed. They thought that word didn’t describe them. Nonetheless, their works are extraordinary contributions to feminism, or so we say. We tend to make that epistemic imposition on them in retrospect. Frankly, maybe I make it on Jules, too: “You are a feminist, actually.”

Again, questions of labels are unimportant. What does it matter if you’re a self-described non-feminist if we’re fighting side by side together toward a queer horizon of gender liberation? In the end, feminist identification is a linguistic pull—somewhat akin to what Emma Heaney says is the collective “pull” that, together with a dehumanizing “push,” co-constitutes sexual difference itself. Sexual difference gets imposed on us, yes, but it is also a pull of affinity toward one side of a line of social difference or the other. Similarly, perhaps, feminism claims us—or it doesn’t.

Natasha Lennard: Yet what you’re saying, too, is that notwithstanding the similarity here in terms of the pull of affinity (what makes us female and feminist respectively), politically speaking, “the side of women doesn’t exist. It never existed.” 

Sophie Lewis: Yes. And the big risk in a book like this is that I may appear to be repeating the “purifying” gesture that I’m, in fact, criticizing in many of these fascist feminisms. I may appear to be putting a hat on that makes me “Sophie Lewis, Feminism Judge,” and I’m pointing at them one by one, intoning: “Problematic, problematic, fascist, problematic, fascist!”

But I hope to persuade you that I’m not doing that. I’m insisting, in fact, on the importance of impurity in anti-fascist politics, which means “staying with the trouble” (to use Haraway’s term) of the fact that people are our mutant “kin” even as they do fascism. That might mean they, say, wrote something that did wonders for our feminism years ago, but now they’re standing on the wrong side of a barricade, for instance excluding trans women from feminism. So then what? I think the most elemental level of politics is that we collectively decide, over and over again (always, contingently), what lines we want to hold, and then hold them. It’s not about making someone disposable forever, quite the contrary. It’s about collective clarity: If we’re serious about anti-fascism, then we have to fight everyone at that barricade regardless of whether they are a feminist, or a former comrade, or someone who taught us a lot about feminism in the past. 

People may confuse all of this with a call to not disagree. But I think it’s actually the opposite. If someone has gone down some terrible YouTube rabbit hole and now they’re spouting stupid ideas about something, and they’re your longstanding comrade, you don’t cast them out. You argue them down. You hold onto them fiercely by disagreeing passionately with them. If they then start materially grouping together with people to carry out that politics, you hold the line against them. It’s deceptively simple, which is not to say it’s easy. 

This is all about anti-fascism, fundamentally. Throughout this book there are plenty of people holding the line against their mutant kin. At one point, we find the communist Sylvia Pankhurst shouting down her former suffragette sister, the British Union of Fascists coordinator Mary Richardson; physically confronting her, opposing her also in print. They’re both “Votes for Women” alumni, yet, come the thirties, they’re mortal enemies.

Natasha Lennard: So let’s talk about enmity. It’s a hard word, but we are surrounded by enemies. You have a couple of examples of ambiguous cases in the book. You talk about the great work of bell hooks, someone who also talked about landlordism being crucial to feminism. You don’t need to be a Marxist to disagree. Can you share more examples of ambiguous cases and what we can learn from them?

Sophie Lewis: All cases are ambiguous, I almost want to say! No, but it’s important to think about how the relationship of celebrity, of heroization, in our movements does us a material disservice. Certain people—bell hooks perhaps among them—become beyond criticism. I could also mention Silvia Federici here, in light of the anti-trans turn she’s taken. There seems to be a fear that fighting her on that issue is tantamount to disregarding her every contribution. Yet this refusal to fight with her on this really does her a disservice, as does the bad editing of the essay collections in which she expressed these views (shoddily, and embarrassingly). Who failed to edit those essays? What were they thinking? What a failure of comradeship! Again: Insisting on our impurity and imperfection means we are rarely, regardless of what people say about “cancel culture,” going straight from comradeship to enmity. People are asking themselves: Okay, is the person in question standing behind material policy on this question, yes or no? Internal friction becomes enmity—and ought to!—when discursive violence is supplemented by practical reactionary activism.

It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if things were black and white (or indeed white and black, as the story of “white feminism” sometimes seems to want to make things!), with inclusive and liberatory figures on one side and exclusionary elitists on the other. The publishing industry, as we know, loves “storytelling,” and at one point it became clear—before I landed with Haymarket, who are great—that editors probably wanted this book to simply consist of “stories,” mini-biographies about individual enemy feminists, rather than theory and mess. The pressure, back when we were trying to see if I could work with a bigger publisher, was also therefore to put in the “good” feminist antidote opposite every enemy one. I did not want to do that! I defend the validity and richness of negation without immediate consolation. At the same time, I think this book uplifts the reader, rather than depressing her. My introduction and my concluding chapter lyrically pay tribute to the many movements of “feminism against cisness.”

Natasha Lennard: When this book was first being imagined, it was going to be called The Feminism of Fools, which is a reference to the German phrase whereby antisemitism is “the socialism of fools.” Can you take me through the genealogy of that thought and what that comparison is doing? 

Sophie Lewis: First, let me explain why I dropped it: “Foolishness” is a concept I actually cherish, in a utopian sense, where it speaks to the value of uncertainty and the willingness to not necessarily know for sure what or who you even are. That kind of foolishness is, specifically, what I thought feminism was often missing in its past. Many enemy feminisms have espoused a fatal kind of certainty concerning what women are and what they need. Their ontological orientation flows from that. 

But I also thought it was useful to make an analogy between these un-foolish feminisms and the socialism of fools, which is a name, as you say, that German communists came up with in the late nineteenth century, to diagnose a new form of antiisemitism that was emerging at the time and styling itself (unlike traditional forms of antisemitism) as leftist. This was a truncated materialism and expressed a deeply anti-communist politics: It proposed that class antagonism was not necessary for socialism to prevail. Rather, it proposed that the worker and boss can ultimately come together organically and become whole through the magic of the ethnostate, cleansed of Jews. The socialism of fools was all about repairing (rather than overthrowing) capitalism, i.e., purging capitalism of the Jew, a figure who is a financier and a Bolshevik all at once, a very powerful and simultaneously very weak and abject force of racial, sexual and economic pollution. It is, essentially, the structure of conspiracism, and it remains widespread to this day.

What is useful about the “of fools” frame is that it highlights someone taking a wrong turn immediately following an initial impulse that isn’t bad. Capitalism is bad! Yet “foolishness” is a potentially confusing word for the consequences of this wrong turn. It’s not a little oops!. It’s one way to become a literal Nazi. My original book title, The Feminism of Fools, was going to be a reference to that. The analogy goes: What if you (rightly) perceive that something’s very wrong in the field of gender relations, but then take a sharp tumble into an ontologically oriented, truncated form of sexual materialism? The feminisms of fools are, I want to say, feminisms that correctly intuit a systematic problem with gender but latch onto something partial to solve this.

Natasha Lennard: Let’s return to your contention that “there is no side of women.” I’ve been sitting and thinking, what does that mean? If there is no side of women, what does it mean to think about sides to push forward from?

Sophie Lewis: Our “side” is never given, is what I’m saying. This is what it means to attend to the contingency of our very being. Our interests are never given in advance, and that’s partly why these line-drawing actions have to be collective and also, unfortunately, unceasing. We decide what women’s “side” is again and again and again. We don’t receive the information from elsewhere. We cannot assume, sadly, that feminism and fascism are automatic antagonists. It is our job through struggle to render them antagonists. The always-contingent arts of redefining women’s “cause”—those are the arts I want to foster. 

Yet we don’t have to reinvent feminism! I personally think we are in a golden age of feminism. I know that a certain kind of contemporary high-literary feminist opinion says that feminism is boring right now, it’s cringe, and so on. That opinion comes from training one’s gaze narrowly on the worst elements, while also failing to see oneself as the main character in the feminism of today. From that, one concludes that there’s no feminism worth speaking of when, in fact, feminism has moved on, changed, mutated. Feminism today is abolition feminism, it is anti-femicide insurgency, it is the DIY estrogen underground, the abortion underground, and the collective workers’ organizing that has been called “me too from below,” for example. None of this readily takes the shape of the “universal sisterhood” narratives of white feminism’s supposed glory days. 

Natasha Lennard: You are saying that “white feminism,” as a popular frame, doesn’t always force us to see feminism’s responsibility for white supremacy, capital accumulation, and empire.

Sophie Lewis: A stronger formulation is needed, I reckon, to counteract the disbelief that some people feel in the face of information about women’s role, and self-described feminists’ role, in racial fascisms past and present. Even today, an editor will typically refuse to believe me when I say that British radical feminists have had a hand in the rise of anti-trans mobilization in the United States as we know it today. They just don’t think that it can be true. They don’t think it’s fair to blame feminists—because feminist equals good!—for what is obviously a right-wing anti-feminist efflorescence. Yet we have the receipts. It’s utterly clear that radical feminists provided the concepts, the moral alibi, the vocabulary, and the ideas that made their way into defunding trans healthcare, from 1980 on. We can point to Janice Raymond’s research papers for the government, all the way through Elizabeth Hungerford’s letters to the UN, and on and on.

I want people to understand that Western feminism has a two-faced origin story. Mary Wollstonecraft, the traditional “mother of anglophone feminism,” wanted to elevate the standing of the mother in the bourgeois nuclear household, endowing her, through education, with rationality and therefore proprietary authority over her children, which is to say, Britain’s imperial future. But then if you look at the guy who is said to have invented the word “feminism” several years later, Charles Fourier, what he said is that feminism consists—on the contrary!—of the liberation of women and children from the private nuclear household. How can two “parents” of a single ideology have such opposite definitions? I think it’s because sexual difference is intrinsically incoherent. You can build two things on top of it that are both logically striving for its resolution, yet they will be literal antonyms. Maybe that’s just the nature of gender: It’s a mess, it’s a contradiction. It’s going to implode. No wonder feminism is capacious enough to contain within itself its own enemies.