Thumbnail credit: NIP Merseyside
On 24th September Mallory Moore was very pleased to participate in a panel discussion at TWT22 conference entitled Roe v Wade and the Global Fightback, alongside Labour MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Polish feminist and student researching nationalism and modern Polish Catholicism Marta Kotwas, Goldsmiths lecturer in gender, sexuality and migration Siobhán McGuirk, and led by academic on race, work and digital economy, Dalia Gebrial.
As part of Mallory's contribution she discussed how attacks on gendered services, particularly reproductive health services including trans healthcare, gynecological and obstetric healthcare, and around domestic abuse provision have been a key front in anti trans activism over the last 5 years. In the UK anti-trans legal activism was pioneered and largely waged by anti abortion legal groups and many cases have been funded by anti abortion organisations.
Around the world, the wider so called "anti gender" movement has been focused on fighting against abortion, feminism and LGBT equality, simultaneous with a rising nationalist tendency in politics. This is may be being driven in part by prejudice and culture wars but we should not neglect the bigger global issues fostering this.
The evolving impact of wars and colonial extraction and the resulting conflict driven migration are being exploited by white nationalists all across Europe, deploying “white replacement” conspiracy theories, which are also increasingly infiltrating our mainstream media.
Austerity and the pandemic have had a hugely outsized impact on women’s economic power in general, as well as services, leaving less to bargain with, and dissatisfied women turning towards conservatism with a growing “tradwife” fad. The overall impact is to grow demands for more stringent social controls on reproduction, which has wide ranging impacts on women, children and trans people. Because of these interconnections we must no longer treat gender, the environment, borders or care as being peripheral to antifascist work — liberation on these fronts are at the heart of what we need to tackle.