On July 2, 2022, the U.K. women’s group Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) published this piece by BBC journalist Jayne Egerton, criticizing the U.K. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI UK) for having any association with the U.S. chapter of the same organization (WDI USA) and, allegedly, with the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). The piece had originally been published in the magazine Radical Notion in July, 2021. WDI and WDI UK published this joint response in early September.
WDI USA did not initially intend to respond to Egerton’s piece on the WPUK site because U.S. radical feminists are, frankly, tired of defending ourselves against accusations of working with right wing organizations or even being, “right-wing” or “far right.” We find these conversations to be tedious distractions from doing the actual work of fighting to protect the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls, which is our top priority.
However, we recently came upon this public post by Egerton in the public Facebook group “Actual Gender Critical Left,” suggesting that WDI USA might bear some moral culpability for the heinous and treacherous violence that was perpetrated on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We now feel compelled to respond.
We will not address every accusation in Egerton’s piece because they are largely just baseless and insulting insinuations that paint a picture of something that bears no resemblance to reality. For example, Egerton rightly calls out the American right for its racism. We are appalled, however, at the insinuation that we are somehow tainted by it and we do not think that particular insinuation deserves a response. We also take issue with Egerton’s general acceptance of words like “transgender” and “trans women.” We think that use of such language is a misogynist attack on women and girls as a sex class, but we won’t take the time to point out every time she engages in it. Instead, we will simply point out some errors in her analysis and then move on to the January 2022 Facebook post about the January 6 insurrection.
Egerton’s biggest problem appears to be with the Council for National Policy (CNP), a very conservative group that was apparently established in 1981 to champion the conservative causes of Ronald Reagan and, more recently, worked to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency. Egerton ominously titles this section of her piece “The Trump Connection.” WDI USA has never had anything to do with the CNP (nor had any of us as individuals even heard of it until we read Egerton’s piece). The suggestion that WDI USA is somehow connected to the CNP and, by extension, to Trump himself, is absurd on its face.
The way that Egerton attempts to link WDI USA to CNP is through CNP’s membership. Egerton states, correctly, that a 2014 leaked membership list reveals that its 2014 members included Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) and Michael Farris of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). It is true that WDI USA has had conversations with staff members of both of those organizations, though we do not personally know either of those individuals. We certainly had no knowledge of their membership in the CNP in 2014 (six years before WDI USA launched).
Egerton then states, without providing any evidence whatsoever, that Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Jim DeMint, former president of the Heritage Foundation (HF) were also CNP members as of 2020. We have no idea whether or not that is true.
She states:
“The ADF, FRC, CWA, and the HF are a constant in the history of the CNP and were at the heart of Trump’s administration, even to the extent of the HF dictating his appointments.”
That may be true and, if so, would be utterly unremarkable in the context of American politics. These groups are always involved under any Republican administration.
But the other problem here is that, from what we can tell, CNP members appear to be individuals, not organizations. When doing coalition work, it hardly makes sense to hold coalition members responsible for the organizational membership statuses of individuals who work at other coalition member organizations. No one would ever get anything done. Penny Nance of CWA probably attends a church as an individual (we don’t know, but we’re willing to assume that she does). Is WDI USA somehow responsible for whatever that church might say or do? Someone who works at the Heritage Foundation might belong to a Parent Teacher Association or a sports team. Are we responsible if the Parent Teacher Association makes a bad batch of cookies? Is it our fault if that sports team loses? All of this is preposterous.
Most of Egerton’s criticisms target WoLF rather than WDI USA (mainly because WoLF has been around for longer than we have), and we do not speak for WoLF. However, we would be remiss if we did not point out that, as mentioned in the piece, the current WDI USA president, Kara Dansky, served on the board of WoLF from 2016-2020. That’s no secret. One of Egerton’s insinuations seems to be that after leaving the WoLF board in 2020, Dansky brought WDI USA into WoLF’s alleged right-wing ambit. We find this insulting. Not because we have any problem with the political or legal work that WoLF has done over the years, but because we resent being told that we are incapable of thinking for ourselves and/or engaging in our own strategic political work on our own terms. Egerton gives Dansky way too much credit when she suggests that WDI USA’s political organizing work centers on Dansky’s previous coalition work with WoLF. We’re quite capable of making our own decisions.
Which brings us to the Title IX Coalition. Egerton quotes American Katherine Acosta as saying this:
Already connected with a network of groups working to protect women’s sex-based rights, through her prior work with Hands Across the Aisle, [Kara] Dansky represented WHRC USA “in a national coalition to protect women’s sports, loosely referred to as the Title IX coalition.” The group included Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), Save Women’s Sports, and “a handful of conservative organizations with whom we disagree on many topics.”
That’s absolutely true, but the word “loosely” is being ignored here. What is loosely referred to as “the Title IX coalition” has never been a formal group or organization. When WDI USA was involved, it was a group of individuals and organizations that met once a month via Zoom to strategize about protecting women’s sports at the state and federal levels.
Egerton states, ominously:
We aren’t told which ‘conservative’ organizations, but can reasonably assume they are ones within the CNP stable, as with WoLF.
That’s actually a difficult question to answer, because participation in the coalition has fluctuated over time. It is absolutely true that ADF, HF, and CWA have been regular participants. FRC started participating later, but not because anyone in the coalition has any particular affinity for FRC. It’s because Meg Kilgannon (also discussed in Egerton’s piece) initially joined it as an individual, long before she accepted a position at FRC. Other groups and individuals have come and gone from time to time. If Egerton wanted to confirm the various entities that participate in the coalition, on a regular or on an irregular basis, she could have asked. We would have answered honestly.
And the coalition has been effective. It has been instrumental in securing the rights of female athletes in 19 states (one of those bills was vetoed by the Democratic governor of that state and others are currently on hold, subject to litigation brought by the ACLU). We are proud of our participation in the coalition, to the extent that we played a role in securing those victories. We withdrew from the coalition in June of 2022 because we sensed that the momentum was in favor of women and girls on the topic of athletics and because we wanted to focus our limited resources on other efforts, including our September convention on Reigniting the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Egerton asks:
And what of the pragmatic argument? Have there been any demonstrable benefits from these acts of political compromise? Have the joint rallies, press conferences, shared platforms, appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show, and co-signed legal briefs achieved anything for women and girls? I’ll wait …
Egerton doesn’t need to wait. The answer is yes. We have the 19 state wins on women’s sports. And through our participation in the coalition, WDI USA has had a positive influence on how the conservative members think and speak about “gender identity.” We brought them closer to a radical feminist framing of women’s sex-based rights. Arguably, they are doing a better job of messaging than Egerton does because we have persuaded them to stop using the language of the opposition (which again, Egerton does throughout her piece). We have also reached countless rank-and-file Democrats all across the country who are as dismayed as we are about the erasure of women and girls in law and throughout society. That was, in part, due to the rallies, press conferences, and Tucker Carlson appearances.
In June, Hillary Clinton stated publicly that “gender identity” is a bad campaign issue for Democrats. We share that information not because we want to persuade readers that they should like Hillary Clinton. We share it because prominent female Democrats are starting to talk about this publicly. If Hillary Clinton is talking about it, we can be reasonably sure that other female Democrats are talking about it. That can only be a good thing, and it is in part due to the exposure that we have brought to the radical feminist critique of “gender identity.”
Now to the January 2022 Facebook post. The Facebook group “Actual Gender Critical Left,” in which both Acosta and Egerton are active, was created for the specific purpose of criticizing radical feminists who have done coalition work with conservatives. It accomplishes absolutely nothing to protect the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls.
Another active member is Cathy Brennan. Brennan’s professional biography reads as follows:
She assists national and state banks, investment banks, consumer and commercial finance companies, mortgage bankers, installment lenders and other licensed lenders in the development and maintenance of nationwide consumer and commercial lending programs. Catherine engages in credit due diligence on behalf of investors in fintech firms, bank partnership platforms, small business lenders, merchant cash advance companies, consumer finance companies, title loan companies and payday lenders.
Why anyone (let alone a socialist feminist, as Egerton describes herself) would think this qualifies as “left” is completely beyond us. Brennan also recently doxxed Dansky by tweeting her residential zip code along with information obtained from the U.S. Federal Election Commission about a contribution that Dansky made to the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Screenshots are available to demonstrate this. Brennan is nothing other than a capitalist misogynist who cares much more about “women with penises” than she does about the safety of actual radical feminist women.
On January 4, 2022, Egerton posted this in the group (again, the group is public and its rules make it very clear that anything posted there can be seen by members of the public). It states as follows:
This will be a long one so bear with me. I wrote a critique of feminists working with the religious right in the US themed issue of Radical Notion. That issue also included Bess Hungerford’s dialogue with Amy Sousa on the same subject. (See related posts in this group). This particular post relates to an edited section of my article.
As a preamble..The Republican Party is explicitly pushing pro-authoritarian electoral reforms at the state level which allow state legislatures (the majority of which are Republican) to legally overturn election results and confirm Republicans as the official delegates in the next Presidential election.
There is considerable evidence that the assault on the Capitol last Jan. 6 was part of a highly organised effort to block the transition of power to Biden, the legitimately elected new President. We now know that this was co-ordinated by Trump and Republican legislators. Efforts to undermine democracy have ramped up over the last year and many political commentators, including from the left, are expressing well evidenced alarm.
I’m sure that many of us are critics of liberal democracy, in general, and the form it takes in the US, in particular. But people on the left must always defend representative democracy, however flawed it is because we should know enough by now about the dangers of authoritarian, anti democratic and fascist rule. Women who respond to this very real threat with comments such as ‘but the TRAs behave like fascists!’ are not comparing like with like, to say the very least.
My RN piece was very long and several cuts had to be made. I’m not criticising the editors, in any way. But I do want to share one of the cut sections as I think it needs to be out there given that it’s the anniversary of the 6th January insurrection
The intro to this section wasn’t edited:
“I sympathise with women whose disappointment with the left makes them wary of criticising American women who’ve made choices in circumstances which seem worse than our own. But it’s led to a blinkered focus on the shortcomings of the left, one which leads us to ignore the infinitely more dangerous politics of the US right…”
This is the section that was cut:
“Let’s be clear: A small group of radical feminists are working with the very same organisations which contributed to the events which led up to the assault on the Capitol:
Current and former members of the CNP organised and promoted so-called “Stop the Steal” protests in order to build a movement to question the legitimacy of the 2020 Election:
“Over the previous year the CNP and its members and affiliates organized efforts to challenge the validity of the election, conspired to overturn its results, and tried to derail the orderly transfer of power”: https://washingtonspectator.org/nelson-cnp/
“In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 mayhem, and on the day itself, the connection between CNP and Stop the Steal—and the campaign’s influence on the White House—became more apparent.”
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/…/how-ginni-thomas-and…/
“At least six current or former members of the Council for National Policy ….also played roles in promoting the rallies that preceded the deadly riot”
https://replica.seattletimes.com/…/article_popover…
Michael Farris, the CEO of the ADF, played a critical role in last minute efforts to overturn the election of Biden:
https://www.nytimes.com/…/religious-conservative…
The Heritage Foundation is crafting voter suppression laws around the country – laws which disenfranchise African Americans, in particular:
https://www.motherjones.com/…/heritage-foundation-dark…/
Meanwhile Wolf’s twitter account offered a self interested defence of these same organisations, taking their disingenuous claims at face value:
https://twitter.com/womensl…/status/1347184524032147456…
The political stakes are now so high that we need to sound an alarm. A 2020 report from the Department of Homeland Security named white supremacists as the gravest terror threat to the United States:
https://www.nytimes.com/…/homeland-security-white…
There can be no conceivable justification for partnering with people providing cover and ammunition to white supremacists who are intent on destroying representative democracy. Why have we reduced the rights and interests of women and children to one issue alone? We might well ask ‘which’ women & children. Certainly not those migrant mothers separated from their children at the US-Mexico border:
This is an insinuation that by working in coalition with the American Christian right, WDI USA bears some moral culpability for the disgusting events of January 6.
Joe Biden won Washington D.C. by 93% in 2020 (and Hillary Clinton won it by 91% in 2016). The local populace, nearly all Democrats, was terrified on January 6, 2021. That afternoon, the Mayor had sent a city-wide alarm to residents’ cell phones, blaring that a curfew was going into effect. Residents were told to stay inside after 6:00 p.m. No one knew what was coming or what the insurrectionists might be capable of.
Egerton’s underlying article is mostly a bunch of unsubstantiated insinuations that amount to nothing, and WPUK never should have published it. We wish that Radical Notion hadn’t either, because a BBC journalist ought to be held to a high enough standard that basic fact-checking would be expected. Nonetheless, we are grateful to Radical Notion for cutting the possibly libelous section that Egerton put in her Facebook post.
The idea that radical feminist women whose exclusive focus is on advancing the liberation of women and girls are somehow morally culpable for a right-wing (possibly treasonous) attack on the United States Capitol is disgusting and we condemn it in the strongest terms.
Signed,
Women’s Declaration International USA Board of Directors
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