Building Feminist Solidarity for Real

When you said "women's rights are human rights," did you mean only women who look a certain way, act a certain way, and have a certain type of body? Only women who aren't too strong or too fast?

Cisgender women are not threatened or victimized by transgender and gender expansive people. If you are a White cis woman who is appropriating the language of women’s rights to inflict life-threatening harm on trans, Black, Brown, Indigenous or other marginalized communities who already experience widespread discrimination, you are advancing racism and transmisogyny, not feminism.

Throughout modern US history, the call to protect women has not moved us towards collective liberation but served as a smokescreen for oppression. Women's History Month cannot be a catalyst for change if we are unwilling to have more nuanced conversations about the complexities and complicities of movements for "women's rights."

White cis women, we should be standing in solidarity with all of our sisters/siblings, not weaponizing our womanhood and femininity against transgender women, gender expansive people, and Global Majority people.

Thank you for coming to my #WomensHistoryMonth talk!

ID: Art by Analise Bruno for The Daily Free Press: The Independent Student Newspaper at Boston University