There’s a good piece in Doing Feminist Legal Work about the connections between gender and tyranny going back hundreds of years, and the way they’re connected on both sides of the Atlantic today.
The article makes the point that the US state-by-state attack on women’s reproductive freedoms, Donald Trump’s assertion that domestic violence by husbands shouldn’t be considered crimes, the growing calls on the US right to disenfranchise women and the war on LGBTQ+ people are all part of the same movement.
Protecting women, in this context, isn’t about giving women freedom or autonomy. Quite the opposite. It’s about concentrating power in the hands of (mostly; every repressive movement has its Ernst Röhms) straight white men and removing it from everybody else. And to concentrate that power, in a playbook as old as time, you create an out-group who the laws bind but do not protect. That out-group usually includes queer people and in this current moment, trans people in particular.
Trans people are being removed from the public sphere. And this is how you start. You are “protecting” women. But you do this by reducing women to a set of biological facts. We all know where that leads. In the US they are already there. The weaponisation of women’s rights or protecting women to marginalise and hurt another group, be they Trans people, immigrants or anyone else, is never feminist. Rather, it’s one of the first steps to tyranny.