Is Donald Trump a feminist?
There was a time when anyone asking such a question could reasonably expect to be laughed out of the room. Yet, just three weeks into Trump’s second term, the man responsible for stripping women in the US of the right to an abortion was declared a “feminist kween”, “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” by several prominent feminist writers in the UK.
The occasion for these declarations was Trump’s all-out assault on trans rights. Since taking office, the president has used executive orders to attempt to restrict the ability of trans Americans to travel, work, receive medical care, serve in the military, attend school and participate in women’s sports. Though there are thought to be fewer than 10 trans athletes among the more than half a million competing in college sports in the US, it was this sports-related executive order that prompted certain, trans-exclusionary feminists to declare Trump’s feminist bona fides.
How did we get here? How have we arrived at a place where self-identified feminists ally themselves with a man who has so extravagantly dedicated his personal and political lives to the humiliation, domination and degradation of women and girls?
I brought this question to Sophie Lewis, whose new book, Enemy Feminisms, out this week in the US, seeks to understand how and why some forms of feminism have diverged so fundamentally from others as to become, well, enemies.
When we spoke by phone, I mentioned to Lewis that my strategy for dealing with such feminisms has tended toward repudiation. I have long maintained a personal policy of avoiding the term “Terf”, an initialism for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, because I reject the idea that the underlying ideology qualifies as feminism.
“It is difficult – I would say impossible – to say that [Terfism] is not feminism, that the philosophical and movement roots of their whole deal is not feminism,” Lewis said. “That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there were always other feminists fighting them tooth and nail.
“It hurts and confuses us to imagine that there are anti-liberatory feminisms, but I think when we do allow that and we do conceptually break that possibility open, that’s when it becomes possible to stake out our ground as an anti-colonial, proletarian, trans feminism,” she continued.
An independent scholar and self-described radical, Lewis was raised in France and educated in the UK, and now lives in the US. Her previous books have advocated family abolition, an idea that seeks to de-privatize the care and social reproduction that capitalism assigns to nuclear families.
Enemy Feminisms is structured as a “bestiary of enemy feminisms”, tracing reactionary tendencies in western feminism all the way back to Mary Wollstonecraft and taking on such archetypes as “the civilizer”, “the KKK feminist”, “the pornophobe” and “the prohibitionist”. Throughout, Lewis shows how feminists have been shaped – and misshaped – by the ideologies and historical conditions of their times, from the opportunities that slavery and imperialism afforded some white women to the strictures of working within a liberal democracy and the seductive lure of violence.
And what a bestiary it is. We begin with Wollstonecraft’s 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a foundational text for feminism and a prime example of how feminist analysis can contain its own forms of misogyny (Lewis calls it “the original claim to being not like the other girls”) and straight-up white supremacy. Wollstonecraft’s inability – or unwillingness – to parse the difference between the chattel slavery imposed by the British Empire on Black people and the metaphorical “slavery” of upper-class married Englishwomen is only the first example.
Here we have May French Sheldon, a wealthy American feminist who in 1891 traveled “alone and unescorted” – that is, carried by 150 hired African workers but no white people – through Kenya and Tanzania beneath a US flag and a banner reading “noli me tangere” (touch me not), only to report on her return that everywhere she went, Africans had gathered around “entreating her to remain and rule over them”. She would go on to make several trips to Africa and become a staunch denialist of the Belgian genocide in the Congo. Sheldon’s is one of several forms of feminism that can only be expressed through the domination of people of color, an original sin of the movement that still troubles it today. (Lewis draws a direct line from Sheldon to Israel’s promotion of so-called “lionesses of the desert” who fought for the first time on the frontlines in Israel’s war on Gaza, writing: “Genocide is sometimes feminist.”)
And here we have Mary Richardson, a British suffragette whose enthusiasm for the movement’s campaign of violence, arson and bombing saw her earn the nickname “Slasher” after she took a meat cleaver to a Diego Velázquez nude in the National Gallery. After the first world war, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists and quickly assumed leadership of the women’s section, only to be expelled, two years later, for demanding “fair play” for women.
While popular feminist history often idealizes the British suffragettes, and lingers particularly on the brutal violence enacted upon their bodies by the British state, Lewis argues that more attention must be paid to the violence they themselves carried out. Emmeline Pankhurst’s band of feminist activists “detonated as many bombs between 1912–13 as the Irish Republican Army did during its 1939–40 ‘S-Plan’”, she writes.
“To this day, it’s not particularly popular in academia to talk about this bombing and violence unless you are basically an anti-feminist,” she says. And while Lewis does not want to denounce violent tactics across the board, she warns: “I think we need to talk about how movements that lean heavily on terrorism are likely to take an authoritarian internal form that very much favors a rightward political lurch.”
For some suffragettes, that lurch came thanks to the onset of the first world war. When Pankhurst ordered her followers to stop bombing the British state and start helping to arm it for the war effort, it left some of the most radicalized to fall into “a feminist-fascist estuary formed in the crater generated by Mrs Pankhurst’s pivot from law-breaking insurgency to conformist cheerleading”.
Betrayed and disillusioned, these suffragettes lost faith in the democratic system and found a new hero to worship in Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. “How do we make sense of that?” Lewis asks. “They are reacting to something real … but they are making, essentially, a fascist choice.” Lewis compares what she calls a “feminism of fools” to the idea of the “socialism of fools” – that is, the way in which awareness of structural injustice in the economy can veer away from Marxist analysis toward antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Another feminist ancestor in this tradition was Mary Sophia Allen. A British suffragette, Allen jumped at the opportunity the first world war gave her to “larp” (live-action role play) as a kind of volunteer auxiliary police officer, patrolling the private lives of working-class women living near troop installations. Her postwar career saw her traveling the world as a “woman’s police’ consultant”, promoting the dubious but persistent idea that criminalizing women’s sex lives can be feminist if a woman is the one applying the handcuffs. She wore a police uniform and monocle, called herself the “commandant” and spent a considerable amount of time in Spain and Germany, where she developed both a dedication to fascism and personal relationships with Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler.
In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis also takes on the anti-pornography turn that some radical feminists took in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of the Islamophobic femonationalist (“death by drone bomb is better (and more feminist) for women than life is under sharia law”), the 21st-century girlboss (“we might consider beginning with a general girlstrike”) and, finally, the “adult human female” – or Terf.
Though trans-exclusionary feminism originated with a subset of radical American feminists in the 1970s, Lewis notes that the ideas found little support in the US beyond a tiny fringe of eco-feminists and the explicitly anti-feminist religious right. Anti-trans thinking survived and thrived in the UK, however, becoming part of establishment feminism, only to be “exported back to the US in the 21st century like an unholy boomerang”, she says.
Terfism grows from many of the tendencies of previous enemy feminisms, Lewis demonstrates, such as the “femmephobia” of Wollstonecraft and the 19th-century moral panic around “white slavery” that drove some feminists to embrace prohibitionism and xenophobia. She also draws an analogy between Terfism’s inaccurate insistence on sex as an immutable binary and contemporary nationalism.
“It’s almost like a nationalism of sex,” she says of Terfism. “At the psychic level, they want strong borders, and they want to make sexuation great again.”
Enemy Feminisms debuts at a perilous moment in the growing global movement for state repression of trans people; its blatantly rightwing, authoritarian and religious nature (key proponents include Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and the Vatican) is complicated by the alibi afforded it by a handful of trans-exclusionary feminists. It is thanks to their efforts that Trump can frame a bigoted attack on a minority as “defending women from gender ideology”.
Lewis is not the first to connect Terfism to the rising power of the global far right. The philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler has warned for years of the growing movement against “gender” – and the damage that feminist transphobia does to the coalition building needed to combat fascism. “Continuing the ‘anti-gender ideology’ discourse places contemporary ‘radical feminists’ in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” they wrote in the 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender.
“It is not unfair to hold anti-trans British feminists co-responsible for this agenda of the religious right [in the US],” says Lewis. “The historical record is very clear about this: American rightwing transphobia was only able to roar into life after the infusion of radical-feminist language, framing, support and vocabulary.”
Some Terfs who bestowed the title of “feminist” on Trump claim to have done so begrudgingly and despite, not because of, most of his personal and political assaults on women. But others appear to welcome his support. On 9 February, the author and anti-trans activist JK Rowling credited Trump with influencing anti-trans policies in the UK and expressed hope that he would also help stymy a proposed UK ban on conversion therapy for transgender youth, saying: “I suppose we have to hope Trump says it soon. Then, maybe, they’ll listen.”
To publish a book that amounts, in a certain light, to an annotated enemies list is its own provocation, and Lewis is bracing herself for criticism from feminists who might view the current climate as the wrong time for infighting, or who prefer not to focus on the skeletons in feminism’s closet. But Lewis argues that it is an especially urgent time to fight fascism, even if that means fighting fascist feminists. And she claims that the project was ultimately “a sort of love letter to feminism”.
“I belong to feminism,” she told me. “The first passionate feelings I ever had, the first political animus I ever harbored, at four years old, were feminist, and I have chosen to stick with feminism or – to invoke a Donna Haraway phrase – to stay with the trouble and to not cede the ground of feminism to these actors who are unfortunately also grounded in feminist ancestry and feminist history.”
Last fall, when Lewis was looking ahead to the book’s release, she anticipated that its reception would occur under a freshly inaugurated President Kamala Harris. The ultimate glass ceiling being broken by a politician who embodies Lewis’s archetype of “the policewoman” might have made for interesting discussions. How might leftwing feminists have reconciled our relief at achieving relative safety from a second Trump presidency with its coming through the elevation of a Glock-owning, sex worker-prosecuting, “most lethal fighting force in the world”-touting Black and South Asian woman?
Those conversations won’t happen now. The re-election of Trump has demonstrated resoundingly the weaknesses of Harris’s brand of feminism, even as it has precipitated crises in every aspect of American life that demand a feminist response.
“My God, you know, it’s a scary time,” Lewis told me, when I asked her what comes next for feminism, “but I suppose one might optimistically say that the lay of the land now becomes a little clearer.”
“People know what to do, in many ways because they’ve been forced to do it for so long. You know, people in the south had no abortion access long before Roe v Wade was stricken down, and they’ve been making abortion happen anyway, for decades. The same goes for estrogen, which is being distributed all across the country, DIY … People are literally doing DIY healthcare for themselves. They are standing up for each other in the face of eviction, in the face of deportation, in the face of sexual violence and familial abuse and patriarchal terror … That’s just how feminism works.”
Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation is published by Haymarket Books
