Women’s rights organisations advocating for sex-based protections and rights from a second-wave feminist tradition have been systematically mischaracterised in public discourse as ‘right-wing’, ‘reactionary’, ‘regressive’, or sometimes even ‘far-right’ or ‘extremist’. These labels are not merely inaccurate: they represent a form of political erasure of women’s organising that obscures the feminist lineage of our advocacy and misrepresents the nature of our concerns and advocacy.
Our political lineage
The majority of women in feminist, women’s rights organisations such as AAWAA are rooted in second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation traditions that emerged from progressive movements of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Our advocacy is grounded in materialist feminist analysis: we recognise sex as a biological fact with material consequences for females living under patriarchy.
Historically, this analysis has driven campaigns against prostitution, sex trafficking, male violence against women and girls, surrogacy, pornography, sexualised advertising, misogyny, everyday sexism, and the denial of abortion rights — amongst other things. These we recognise as forms of systemic exploitation of women’s bodies and reproductive capacity: not matters of individual ‘choice’, but structures and mechanisms that enable and support male violence against women and that perpetuate our oppression as a sex class.
These positions were once widely recognised as core feminist positions. They emerge from the understanding that women exist firstly as a sex class before we exist as individuals or within any other class that includes the category of males. And they emerge from the knowledge that structures that commodify women’s bodies — whether through prostitution, surrogacy, or pornography — license prejudice against and the exploitation of women and girls at both the population and individual levels.
The mischaracterisation and political erasure
Despite the acceptance of this analysis within decades of feminist scholarship and grassroots organising, its legitimacy is now routinely called into question in mainstream public and political discourse. Too often, our concerns are dismissed or mischaracterised through partisan labelling, whilst the underlying evidence and principles are ignored.
Yet our analysis has not changed; rather, it is the political and cultural landscape that has shifted.
Women advocating for feminist stances on sex-based protections and rights are now routinely characterised as ‘right-wing’, ‘reactionary’, ‘regressive’, ‘extremist’, or aligned with political movements opposed to equality and human rights. These characterisations obscure the feminist lineage of our advocacy and misrepresent the nature of our concerns.
Forced alignment
A particularly pernicious aspect of this mischaracterisation is the forced alignment approach: the assumption that holding one position on sex and gender automatically means subscribing to an entire set of other (typically characterised as right-wing) political beliefs. The views of those who believe that sex is a biological reality, or that women require female-only spaces for safety and dignity, are treated as a package deal rather than as independently arrived-at positions grounded in evidence and, in our case, second-wave, feminist principle.
This forced alignment presumes that women cannot reach feminist conclusions on sex-based rights whilst maintaining progressive positions on other matters — but even those positions are now also frequently characterised as right-wing, where once they were unequivocally accepted as anti-exploitation and anti-oppression.
The reality contradicts the narrative, however. Many prominent advocates for women’s sex-based protections and rights come from trade union backgrounds, left-wing activism, and progressive feminist organising. Our concerns about sex self-identification laws and the erosion of female-only spaces emerge from our intellectual tradition of feminist analysis, not from sudden conversion to right-wing politics.
Our concerns are feminist concerns
The issues we raise are not new. They are continuous with longstanding feminist advocacy.
Our concerns about sex self-identification laws replacing the biological category of ‘woman’ with a subjective identity claim represent feminist concerns about the erasure of women’s sex-based protections and rights and of our analysis. Our concerns about males in female-only spaces (including crisis services, prisons, hospital wards, change rooms, and sports competitions) represent feminist advocacy for the recognition that women require spaces free from male presence for reasons of safety, privacy, and dignity. Our concerns about the conflation of sex with gender identity in law and policy represent feminist critiques of gender as a hierarchy that subordinates women — and that spoils data collection by making it impossible to track and address sex-based patterns of discrimination, violence, and disadvantage that affect women as a class.
And our concerns about the decriminalisation of prostitution, legalisation of surrogacy, and promotion of pornography represent longstanding feminist analysis of these practices as forms of structural exploitation that harm all women, but that disproportionately harm women from disadvantaged backgrounds.
These concerns are not partisan; they are feminist, grounded in a materialist understanding of women’s oppression. Where we differ from those who support gender identity policies is on the question of how best to achieve feminist goals in the context of law and policy that increasingly conflates sex with gender identity. We believe that meaningful equality cannot be achieved by erasing the category of ‘woman’ in law or by subordinating sex-based protections to other non-discrimination grounds — a position grounded in the recognition that women’s oppression is rooted in material reality and that protections for women as a sex class are essential to advancing equality.
Reclaiming our feminist lineage
The fact that our feminist positions are now contested does not change their lineage in the second-wave women’s liberation movement, but underscores the importance of claiming and articulating our feminist genealogy in an environment that increasingly seeks to erase it.
We do not seek to impose our analysis on others, nor do we claim to speak for all women. We do, however, insist on the right to articulate a feminist analysis grounded in material reality, to organise on the basis of biological sex, and to advocate for protections and resources for women as a class. These rights are consistent with principles of free speech, freedom of association, and democratic participation, as protected under CEDAW.
Women who raise concerns about policies that create conflicts between sex and gender identity, or that treat the commodification of women’s bodies as ’empowering’, should not be dismissed as bigots, extremists, hateful, or holders of reactionary politics.
Mischaracterisation functions to silence, but it need not succeed. Women across Australia continue to organise, to speak, and to challenge policies that obscure the reality of biological sex and undermine protections won through generations of feminist advocacy. The work of reclaiming our lineage, defending our rights to organise as women, and demanding evidence-based policy continues.
