How can the women's movement become so divided? Guardian article

[OneDreamyAquaEagle]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/aug/12/feminists-how-did-the-womens-movement-become-so-divided-and-how-can-it-reunite perhaps we can start by finally all agreeing that men cannot ever become women and work from there, Natasha?

And twisting themselves in knots defending misogynistic ‘cultures’ and defending the importing of cruel and medieval restrictions on women’s lives and and pandering to inadequate males’ insistence on women wearing ‘modest’ 😡clothing.

It's just a tired cliche - things were better in the past and they are so much worse now.

From my point of view, the 2010s was the doldrums for feminism, not much was happening. I went on some of those demos too, but I don't see it as some kind of women's liberation golden age.

Natasha has a book to promote 🤷‍♀️

I wonder what her opinion is on putting a male rapist in a women’s prison? Whose rights would she be fighting for?

She lost me once she'd shoehorned trans women aka men into the middle of the article. Yet another hand maiden.

I can disagree with friends and comrades on many subjects, and still respect them. But feminism is about centring women’s rights. Anyone who claims to be a feminist while supporting men’s right to invade our spaces, steal our prizes etc is taking the piss.

It became divided when it stopped centering women and started prioritising men's wishes and rights.

I had a vague memory that Natasha Walter was quite Terfy. But looking at this article from a few months ago, she seems to be one of these women who is trying to take a middle road - which is a futile exercise, as we all know from experience:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/may/06/heat-floods-droughts-men-more-violent-to-women-natasha-walter-eco-feminism-world

I don't think she really gets it. Most of us who regard ourselves as feminists would much prefer to be spending our time campaigning on things like male violence, abortion rights etc, but we have had to switch our focus to defending an all-out attack on our rights by men who want to remove women's ability to define ourselves as a distinct class of people.

I posted on another thread a couple of days ago, wondering whether “feminism is failing because of terfs” would be the next TRA tactic. Only time will tell, but interesting timing.

I remember doing an interview for a PhD scholarship (very informal, my supervisor to be had been my personal tutor and already something of a mentor). Towards the end of the interview (this was in 1993, for context) she asked me what I thought about the (then) newish "third wave" of feminism. Having relaxed a bit by then - and being more than a touch intellectually arrogant - I just blurted out something about it being fine for those that liked it, but it wasn't really feminism, was it? Panicked as I saw her left eyebrow head for the ceiling, then relaxed again as I noticed the beginnings of a grin she couldn't quite stifle. I still don't think anything developed after the second wave counts as feminism.

(And yes, I got the scholarship...!)

Debates around the place of transgender women in feminism became particularly wounding and destructive due to the outrage spiral of social media.

Debates around the place of transgender women in feminism became particularly wounding and destructive due to the outrage spiral of social media fact that 'transgender women' are men.

When I ask her what are the key concerns that women raise, Warnock tells me that unlike discussions on social media, they are solidly practical. “Women’s safety comes up all the time – women’s safety on public transport, on the streets.

But not women's safety in RCCs, DV shelters, changing rooms, toilets, hospital wards and sports. No, women don't have any concerns about that.🙄

I'm not even sure that I am a feminist, but even I can see that it isn't feminism if it centres men.

Exactly. It's amazing how it's possible to miss the point so completely. The analogy has been made before, but if white people suddenly started identifying as black, and wanted access to all the things that black people have, and moreover, insisted that "trans black" people were more oppressed than "cis black" people, then obviously everyone would understand why black people were outraged about it.

You cannot, absolutely cannot, defend the rights of women if you allow men to be counted as women.

Liberalism in the third sector creates a truly special kind of handmaiden. The metal gymnastics they must do, to square everything off in their heads, never ceases to astound me.

And for an article talking about the importance of grassroots organising, I do find it rather ironic that she couldn't 'organise' the opportunity to interview any community grassroots women directly.

Should have been a LinkedIn post.

Women’s movement in Uk has been stronger in past 10 years than decades previously. We have come together.

So I cba to spend time on reading this because it’s like where have you been?

Read it, rolled my eyes at the usual ignoring of the massive elephant in the room ie how do we keep women safe if men can just announce they are women and cross all the barriers designed to keep them out and moved on

she has nothing to stay whilst sat on the fence with splinters in her arse

"This event is for women, trans women and nonbinary people."

So lots of people then (sadly missed it)

www.kairos.london/event/women-and-the-climate-emergency-with-natasha-walter-trudi-warner/

Sick and tired of ‘feminists’ telling feminists what we should and shouldn’t be doing. There is not one breed of women with a hive mind who all believe in and advocate for exactly the same things.

It's not really feminism as such. it's just a branch of Social Justice politics that shoehorns in as many groups as possible in the hope that they can all be prodded into a revolution against the cis-normative, white, colonialist, capitalist hegemony.

I'd love to know what they would do if a TIF turned up🤔

No divide, those who are for women are calling out, and kicking out, those who are for men.
Faux feminism is no feminism, those who prioritise the self interest of men over the needs of women, will have to invent something else to call themselves because we're talking back our cause as well.

I agree. Mainstream media, pop culture and governments have successfully promoted the idea that feminism is no longer needed and that women have got all the rights they need. - in fact, the say, maybe women have it too good.

Cultural fads like 90s ladette culture and 00s raunch feminism successfully convinced a lot of younger women to work against their own best interests and they promoted female behaviours that benefitted men rather than women.

Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy is a great book on the subject.

We still need second wave feminism because the things achieved by that movement for women are being undermined or ignored by employers and governments. Women still don't automatically earn the same as men for the same work, women are still fired because of pregnancy, women still have to decide between work and childcare, women are fighting to have rape crisis services properly funded, police services and courts still don't take rape seriously enough, governments treat women as unpaid carers and consider themselves frugal and thrifty for doing so. The list goes on.

The fight to ensure that women are defined correctly in law underpins the fight for women's rights - you can't protect what you can't define.

I tend to think of those later developments misleadingly described as waves of feminism as early examples of the way patriarchal culture appropriates, perverts and finally destroys any intellectual analysis which resists or critiques male privilege. Exactly as gender ideology has appropriated, perverted and attempted to destroy any and all language we have to define/describe/defend ourselves and any small cultural space we have managed to make for ourselves. The coincidence is not an accident, this is not a new playbook, by any means.

💯
You put it much better and more succinctly than I did 👍

I agree, I was reading the article and waiting for the size 12 shoe to drop.

Thunk.

Interestingly enough, this divide is largely confined to the UK. Gender-critical feminism elsewhere in Europe is considered fringe and is largely rejected by the mainstream feminism movement within other European countries as being rooted in patriarchal expectations, while gender-critical people in North America are usually anti-feminist as well (as feminism itself is still controversial in the United States).

Where in Europe? It's made up of lots of different countries with different approaches. Where do you mean specifically?