Opinion

Protect all sisters, not just cis-ters

There is a slogan that gets stitched onto placards and tote bags every June: protect all sisters, not just cis-ters. It rhymes, which makes people roll their eyes, and it is right, which makes the eye-rolling beside the point. Strip away the pun and it carries the whole argument of this piece — that feminism is either for all women or it is a private club with extra steps, and that the moment we start ranking who counts as a real sister, we have stopped doing feminism and started doing border control.

Solidarity was always the point

It is easy to forget, in an age of personal-brand activism, that feminism was never primarily a theory about the self. It was a wager about the collective — the bet that women, who had every reason to be set against one another by class, race, marriage and money, could nonetheless recognise a shared situation and act on it together. The word for that bet is solidarity. Not agreement, not sameness, not even friendship; just the refusal to let the people in charge decide which of us is disposable.

Solidarity is demanding precisely because it does not wait for you to like someone. It asks you to defend a stranger’s right to walk home safe, to control her own body, to be believed by a doctor, before you have vetted her politics or her pronouns or her past. The minute feminism makes that defence conditional — available to these women but not those — it has quietly conceded the patriarchy’s favourite premise: that some women are more real, more deserving, more worth protecting than others. We have heard that logic before. It is the logic that decided, for centuries, that married women, Black women, poor women, queer women, were partial cases at best.

Excluding trans women weakens everyone

Here is the part that the loudest exclusionists never quite reckon with: drawing the line at trans women does not make cis women safer. It makes the line itself sharper — and a sharp line cuts in every direction. The instant you accept that womanhood can be audited, that a panel or a passport or a chromosome can revoke someone’s membership, you have built a machine that will eventually be pointed at women who were never trans at all. Ask the cis women who get challenged in public toilets for having short hair, broad shoulders or the wrong kind of face. The gatekeeper does not check your birth certificate at the door; he checks whether you look like his idea of a woman, and that idea has always been narrow, racialised and cruel.

Trans women, meanwhile, are not a hypothetical threat to feminism. They are some of the people most savagely punished by exactly the forces feminism exists to fight: gendered violence, policing, poverty, the medical establishment’s contempt. Organisations that track anti-LGBTQ violence, like GLAAD, have documented for years how transphobia and misogyny braid together rather than oppose each other. A movement that treats its most targeted members as the enemy is not defending women. It is doing the bigot’s work and calling it caution.

A feminism that throws trans women overboard to feel safer has not solved the problem of who counts as a person worth protecting. It has only moved the line — and the line never stays where you put it.

The fights were always shared

Look at what feminism actually fights for, and the supposed conflict dissolves. Bodily autonomy — the right to decide what happens to your own body, free of the state, the church or a stranger’s disgust — is the same principle whether the body in question needs an abortion, contraception or hormone therapy. The argument that no one else gets to legislate your flesh does not come with an asterisk. Concede it for trans people and you have not weakened the case for reproductive freedom; you have made it more consistent, and harder to pick apart.

The same goes for violence. The fear that drives so much exclusionary politics — fear of male violence, of bodies that overpower yours, of institutions that shrug it off — is real and rooted in lived experience. But trans women live inside that fear too, often more acutely, and they did not cause it. Aiming feminist energy at them is a category error: it spends the movement’s scarce strength on its own, while the men who actually commit the violence go unbothered. And healthcare is no different. A system that humiliates trans patients, that makes them justify their existence to be seen at all, is the same system that disbelieves women in pain, dismisses Black women’s symptoms and treats the female body as a riddle. You do not fix that system by helping it decide who is too inconvenient to treat.

What inclusive solidarity actually looks like

None of this is abstract, and none of it requires you to be a theorist. Inclusive solidarity is mostly a set of small, repeatable habits. It means saying "all women" and meaning it — refusing the dog-whistle qualifiers that smuggle exclusion in under cover of "common sense." It means, when a trans friend or stranger is being talked over or talked about, taking up a little space on her behalf and then handing the microphone back. It means resourcing the groups that trans women actually run, rather than the ones that merely speak about them.

It also means doing your own reading before you outsource your opinions to whoever is shouting loudest online. We have written elsewhere about the trans-exclusionary strand of feminism and where it goes wrong about sex and gender, and about the longer, trans-inclusive history that the exclusionists prefer to forget — the uprisings, the organisers, the writers who decided decades ago that policing the borders of "real" womanhood just rebuilds patriarchy with a feminist sticker on it. Our trans coverage keeps that thread going, on the simple principle that trans people are people, not a debate.

The test is not whether your solidarity feels comfortable. Real solidarity rarely does; it costs something, which is how you know it is more than a slogan. The test is whether, when the line gets drawn and someone is told she does not count, you are willing to stand on the far side of it with her. Protect all sisters. The "just cis-ters" half is the punchline, but the whole joke is on anyone who thought you could keep half the women safe by leaving the other half outside.