‘Counterfeit feminism’ is distracting the world from the real fight for equality

‘You can’t really just rely on whether somebody says they’re a feminist or not, anymore.’

These were the words of 53-year-old Hilary, one of the founders of feminist collective Not In Our Name (NION).

Like 88,000 other women who’ve signed an online letter, Hillary has become wildly concerned with people’s grasp of what feminism actually is.

‘It’s really difficult because you don’t actually know who you’re talking to now [when someone says they’re a feminist], but you find out very quickly if you enter into a conversation around attitudes towards the trans community – then it’s your option to have that chat or walk away,’ she adds.

NION is a diverse group of women focused on rejecting the narrative that trans people are a threat, particularly to feminism and the safety of cisgender women.

‘Feminism has always been a fight,’ Hilary says, ‘so I understand why people feel fighty, but I get nervous when we do that against whole groups.

‘There are those who believe that trans women are not women, and aren’t part of this fight, but I would like them not to air their views in such an aggressive way, it’s causing a distraction from the true causes of harm against all women and girls.’

For professor Kathryn Higgins, lecturer in global digital politics with an interest in gender at Goldsmiths University, this scapegoating of trans women is just one of the many forms of ‘counterfeit feminism’.

‘I have students who hesitate to identify as feminists because they’ve seen the word be used to justify forms of violence in society they’re strongly opposed to, whether that’s foreign conflicts, race riots, or anti-trans politics,’ she explains.

The ‘gender critical’ crowd

In recent years we’ve seen the rise of women who proclaim themselves to be feminists, but do not recognise trans women as women. Some call this group ‘gender critical’, others label them TERFS, which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

‘Feminism must unequivocally include trans women,’ professor Higgins tells Metro. ‘If you’re part of a lobby group that spends all your time worrying about whether trans women are able to access bathrooms, or whether a trans woman who’s being abused by her partner should be able to access the same domestic violence shelter as you, you’re not thinking about the major threats to women’s lives.’

Access to domestic violence services isn’t limited because trans women are taking up all the space, they’re a very small minority group (0.1% of the UK population, according to the most recent government census).

It’s limited because one in four women experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, and the police receive a call for help relating to abuse every 30 seconds, according to Refuge.

‘It’s this zero-sum politics that pits trans women against other types of women, and it’s not a politics that’s invested in improving the lives of women, it’s a politics invested in excluding trans women from public life which isn’t a feminist goal,’ professor Higgins adds.

Hillary explains that feminism to her shouldn’t exclude trans women, saying: ‘I would see it as a what… what struggles do women face, but also what struggles do black women face versus middle-class women versus trans women.’

The Tradwife choice

Over the past five years, searches for ‘tradwife’ (a married woman who adopts, promotes, and often showcases on social media a lifestyle rooted in 1950s-era gender roles) have increased by more than 250%, according to Google Trends.

Notable ‘tradwives’ include Nara Smith, who has 12.4 million TikTok followers, and Ballerina Farm, who has 10.5 million followers.

But while people in the comments say ‘feminism is about choice’ and that choosing to serve your husband in the home is ‘feminist because you made the choice to do so’, professor Higgins says Choice Feminism is misguided.

‘It’s not feminism because even if you choose it, you’re still advocating for and bolstering a system that limits the choices of women,’ she explains.

‘The idea feminism is about individual choice is a product of that 2010s feminism and the idea you can choose anything but that doesn’t address the fact we live our lives in a field of constrained choices.’

For example, you don’t ‘choose’ to be a tradwife when childcare costs an average of £7,000 per year for a part-time nursery place in the UK, making homemaking a more financially-wise decision.

But there’s a dangerous irony in the tradwife movement, too. ‘The most popular TikTok tradwives are the breadwinners in their family because they make money as influencers,’ professor Higgins says.

‘It’s a message about financial and economic subservience that’s not actually being fulfilled on the part of the women who are advocating for it.

‘It’s one standard for them and another standard for other women.’

Thankfully these TikTok tradwives would have the funds they needed to leave their relationship if that became necessary, but the women who opt into this lifestyle after seeing this videos and don’t generate an income aren’t left with the same luxury.

It’s alarming when Surviving Economic Abuse estimates one in seven women in the UK has experienced economic abuse by a current or former partner.

And professor Higgins theorises that this marks a failure of the early 2000s social rhetoric, which promised women that a high-flying career would give them liberation.

‘What we have now is many women who feel extremely dissatisfied with their work lives, who feel exploited by their employers and that’s not because of feminism, it’s because of degradations of workers’ rights, wage stagnation and care labour in the home still falling disproportionately on women,’ she explains.

‘Instead of this being a complaint about the economy and capitalism, it becomes a complaint about feminism. Rather than demanding affordable childcare, their solution is to go backwards and make yourself economically dependent on a male spouse to escape the exploitations of the workplace.’

Cynical feminism

Of course, we need male feminists too and, despite the news nearly a third of Gen Z men think women should submit to their husbands, it seems like we can still rely on the majority of men to advocate for equal gender rights.

In fact, 75% of men ages 18 to 29 believe men and women should be equal in every way, with the percentage largely increasing among older men, according to YouGov.

But professor Higgins takes issue with a recent rise is what she terms ‘Cynical Feminism’ largely perpetrated by men, in which she says feminism has been weaponised to justify reactionary movements that aren’t committed to gender equality.

For example, in 2024 when riots spread across the country in response to the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on 29 July, far-right protesters claimed they were in support of the safety of women and girls.

However, 41% of those arrested at these riots had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse, according to an FOI. This equates to 899 people arrested being reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence.

For those arrested by one police force, this figure was as high as 68%, and across the board, the Guardian found offences included actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour and criminal damage.

‘There’s a cynical weaponisation of care for women’s rights and care for women’s safety within movements that are reactionary and far-right, which makes feminism seem like it’s not committed to anti-oppression politics,’ professor Higgins says.

‘That’s why we’ve seen some people pull away from feminism, because they’ve seen it be weaponised and attached to movements they would otherwise oppose.’

In fact, when asked if they identified as a feminist, 45% of Brits said no, but when they were told feminism was defined as equality, 65% then said they did identify as a feminist.

Re-acquainting with the feminism we need

Ultimately, the scholar believes feminism needs to be thought of as ‘the liberation of all people’. Nobody is suggesting it is now a bad thing to be a feminist, but it’s vital to question how and why the term is being used.

She hopes it will come to be thought of, not as an aesthetic or just something we see as part of our identity, but as a political project.

‘We need to reconnect with a version of feminism that can be uncomfortable and challenging because the problems confronting us require feminist action,’ professor Higgins says.

‘They’re the mandate for feminism and tackling them is going to be hard and difficult and demoralising, like the enduring pervasiveness of sexual violence and abuse, low prosecution rates, threats to reproductive freedom which are propagated by the right. We have some of the most expensive childcare costs in the world.’

Where we’re going wrong, she adds, is viewing feminism as a choice and then choosing to live within the current system, rather than building solidarity with each other to change the system.

‘Feminism isn’t supposed to make you feel good all of the time, it’s a struggle,’ she says. ‘It’s about doing the work collectively to make a world radically different to the one we have now that’s less marred by inequality, oppression and exploitation.’

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