New England Women’s Solidarity was founded in 2023 by feminist women who came together out of concern over the dismantling of long-established women’s rights.
Most of us have spent our lives on the political left. We campaigned for women’s reproductive freedom and fought to legalize same-sex marriage. We supported social programs for the disenfranchised and equal education and employment opportunities for everyone, regardless of race, religion or sex. But our own experience as women also taught us that there are unique vulnerabilities to being born female that men cannot simply identify into.
Over the past decade, we’ve watched with growing unease as the legacy organizations that we had long depended on to protect our rights began prioritizing the feelings of men who claim a female identity over the needs and safety of women and girls. We found this change to be both regressive and profoundly illiberal. What was accepted as common sense only ten years ago was suddenly branded ‘transphobic’; one could be labeled a bigot merely for expressing concern over the safety of female inmates now forced to share prison cells with sexually intact male rapists who had begun identifying as women themselves while incarcerated.
Likewise, it was no longer acceptable to acknowledge that men have significant strength and speed advantages over women, because some of those men now identified as women themselves and demanded to compete in women’s sports. Those of us who volunteered in rape crisis services and shelters for homeless and battered women – or who had needed such services ourselves – were told to welcome any man who called himself a woman into our support groups and accept him sleeping alongside women seeking to recover from intimate male violence, because inclusion was more important than traumatized women’s need for a single-sex space.
The meaning of ‘trans’ that we had all grown up with changed, too: no longer does it refer only to people who’ve been medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria and are taking cross-sex hormones and/or have had surgery. Now self-identification is all that’s needed for someone to be transgender, so if the large, sexually intact man undressing beside our daughters in the swimming pool locker room says he’s a woman, we’re told we must accept that as fact.
Most troubling of all, questioning the impact of any of this on the rights of women and girls had become grounds for immediate cancellation; a number of people have been dismissed from their jobs in recent years for expressing beliefs as simple as “there are only two sexes.” Feminist women who tried to speak out about women’s rights being set back found themselves deplatformed by both public institutions and the media, their legitimate concerns derided as a mere ‘culture war’.
For those of us who continue to believe that sex in humans is binary and immutable and that men cannot know what it feels like to be women, it is clear that we need to stand together and declare that women’s rights are based on our sex and not on some ill-defined concept of ‘gender identity’.
A few national feminist groups, notably Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and the USA chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI-USA), have been founded in recent years with that in mind. Some of us met through them, while others connected on social media or by word of mouth, but we all share a common goal: to defend the sex-based rights of women and girls here in New England.
“For those of us who continue to believe that sex in humans is binary and immutable and that men cannot know what it feels like to be women, it is clear that we need to stand together and declare that women’s rights are based on our sex and not on some ill-defined concept of ‘gender identity’.”