Gendered oppression: divide and rule

Have you ever wondered why there seems to be so much hostility, or at best indifference, between feminists and trans people?

Both groups suffer under the same rigid ideas about sex and gender: how we should look, behave and live, based on the bodies we’re born with. Both would benefit from relaxing those rules.

And yet here we are, apparently fighting one another.

Indeed, turning feminists and trans people into public rivals could be one of patriarchy’s cleverest tricks. And, I think, one of its most astounding victories in recent times.

Blurring the boundaries

The outrage of the establishment against trans people reminds me of the anger once directed at women wearing trousers. They were harassed, even arrested, for wearing clothes that were considered male.

Hierarchies depend on clear boundaries. The more visible, the better.

Black or white. Female or male. Worker or aristocrat. If you can tell at a glance which group someone belongs to, you know how to treat them. More specifically, how much respect (or even basic consideration as a human being) to give them.

People who blur or cross those boundaries threaten the order.

Getting them to do the work for you

In the meantime, if you can persuade two marginalised populations to fight each other, you scarcely have to lift a finger. You can sit back and watch the show, free to keep exploiting, dehumanising, and oppressing to your heart’s content.

While, it is hoped, those on the lower rungs obediently ignore one another’s struggles (and how and why they were imposed), and instead fight one another. Like dogs in a pit, as though the other group’s suffering were not at all related to their own.

“Divide and rule,” they say.

Sadly, it certainly seems that way.

Policy: a bit of history

In colonial America, poor white workers and enslaved Black people joined together in uprisings against plantation owners. The response was to give poor whites a few meagre privileges, effectively dividing those who had stood together.

The people at the top kept their wealth and power. The people on the lower tiers were divided, with the group at the bottom being the new underclass.

In a very similar vein, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, when Black people and women were both fighting for the vote in the United States, Black men eventually gained that right in 1870. Black women, meanwhile, were left behind twice over – denied the vote and pushed further down the hierarchy within their own communities.

Feminists and trans folk

Turning feminists and trans people against one another follows the same pattern. Both suffer under the same oppressive rules, and would equally benefit from being released from them. And yet are each being fed the other, as (the narrative goes) either the enemy or their obstacle to freedom.

This rivalry, I believe, is manufactured. There is too much of an obvious answer to the question, “Who benefits from it?”

It’s almost incredible that we keep falling for this trick. And yet we do, over and over.

Perhaps a smaller, weaker enemy close at hand feels easier to fight, than a large one that’s above us and everywhere?

In polls, it's consistently seen that men are by far more transphobic than women. Although this may come as a surprise to many.

This is because very vocal anti-trans women are the ones who get granted influential platforms to air their views. Making it look like a fight by women, for women. ¹

This reminds me of something bell hooks describes in Ain’t I a Woman?: Black women who were against feminism were given the podium, while those in favour of women's equal rights weren’t. This created the impression that Black women weren’t interested in feminist issues. They were ‘real’ women, the story went. Yet, a poll at that time found that 67% of Black women agreed with feminism, compared to only 35% of white women.

So who gets to be heard often tells a very different story from what's happening on the ground. The biggest question, for me, is, “Who’s granting the influential platforms or else denying access to them?”

"Who's pushing that tide?”

The Fear

So… how do you go about convincing feminists that trans people are women's greatest threat?

Start with something women have every reason to fear: male violence. Then present trans women as more of that threat. This turns a struggle for safety into a case for excluding another marginalised group.

It's a recognised process: construct and exaggerate a threat, attach it to a whole group, and then present the removal of that group’s rights as a defence of another, slightly less marginalised group. ²

The message is: their freedom comes at your expense. Their recognition means your erasure. To protect yourself, you must oppose them!

Social media gives that message an enormous loudspeaker.

The smear campaign

A horrifying story, an angry exchange, a screenshot: any one of these can be shared thousands of times. One person or moment becomes the face of a whole population – and the most shocking example (fabricated or not) becomes the supposed rule.

Something going ‘viral’ increases everyone’s outrage, while making a perceived threat feel way more dangerous. And then, of course, a feed full of scary posts can quickly feel like proof of a population-wide threat. ⁴

In effect, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Especially when social media platforms weigh in with algorithms that gleefully encourage this practice of polarisation, ‘exposure’, outrage, and alarmism.

Sweet little nothings

People can also be diverted into complicated fights over language.

I picture us like children fighting over a large label with ‘label’ written on it. One child feels they have so much to lose, while the other feels that, without that label, they'll be shot dead on the way out.

Meanwhile, the teacher is standing behind the child in possession of that suddenly-prized label, poised to make sure the other child never gets their hands on it.

And every time anyone tries to point out any practical solutions, or just the ridiculous nature of the situation, everyone points at them and chants, “Traitor!”, drowning out whatever they were trying to say.

Words can bring us together. But they can just as easily be used to drive us apart.

Who benefits?

Behind the rise of right-wing populism and the burgeoning manosphere are some enormously wealthy and powerful interests.

Keeping women in traditional roles makes excellent sense to the well-off. The world economy depends on vast amounts of unpaid domestic and caring work, overwhelmingly carried out by women. In my article Should Parents Be Paid?, I've explored in more detail how this works, and who benefits from it.

At the moment, we're witnessing increasingly aggressive demands for women to “get back in the kitchen” and have babies (while surrendering their reproductive rights) – alongside furious attacks on trans people.

Trump has forced transgender people out of the US military, while Elon Musk has described his own transgender daughter as having been “killed by the woke mind virus”.

Any political party who tries to advocate either for women's rights or trans rights gets promptly shot down, on one ground or another.

Perhaps, considering everything, we should be asking who funds and encourages these movements, and how much they stand to gain.

The method

Marginalised people are regularly turned into public controversies through dramatic claims of danger, corruption, and harm. The RESIST research project examined thousands of media articles and hundreds of parliamentary debates across Europe, documenting how this happens. ⁶

What we’re seeing here is nothing new.

This is how the trap closes. Opposition to trans people becomes a test of loyalty to women. Solidarity becomes betrayal.

Feminists are then persuaded into defending ‘real womanhood’ through biology and childbearing. The very things used for centuries to keep women in their place become the things we’re told to guard, as proof of our own slightly-superior position within the hierarchy.

And so the order sits… not just intact, but reaffirmed, and stronger than ever. That’s a big win for patriarchy. Quite a clever trick, if I may say so.

Persuading many of those fighting gendered oppression to put their energy and fight into guarding the walls of our own prison.

It’s become very hard for anyone to move either women’s rights or trans rights forward (though the two go so tightly hand in hand) without being dragged into endless, exhausting, and largely pointless debates.

Fighting battles that change nothing, while leaving the real enemy untouched.

Yes. Touché, patriarchy.

Solidarity

I feel it's clear what we could do to improve our situation.

We could do what gay and lesbian people did in the eighties, when they joined forces with miners in South Wales in their struggle against oppression and economic inequity.

Recognise one another's struggles as our own.

Join forces, and join hands.

❤️

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Footnotes

1. YouGov – Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25? ↩
2. Othering, peaking, populism and moral panics: the reactionary strategy ↩
3. Algerian Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif Not Transgender Woman Or Biologically Male
   Transgender woman falsely blamed for attempted Trump assassination – AFP Fact Check ↩
4. Research article indexed by PubMed (PMID: 38421751) ↩
5. It's perhaps not astonishing that Vance and Trump chose Haitians to target. Haiti was the first country to be founded by formerly enslaved Black people. It gained a hard-won independence in 1804, and has been punished for that freedom ever since. The US later supported forces involved in terrorising its population, then intercepted Haitians fleeing that terror, returning many to horrific danger and detaining others at the Guantánamo Bay prison, which was custom-built for the purpose. ↩
6. RESIST research project – What we have found ↩

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