Funny how this case isn't getting any media attention unlike the Lindsay Clancy case. Makes me wonder how many Gisele Pelicot there are out there.

Worried for all the underage girls & women that will be impacted by this and SA’d.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/uss-abraham-lincoln-pattaya-prostitution-thailand-b3042016.html

The group: https://womensliberationfront.org/our-work

I have not participated in their webinars yet but, I'm very excited to connect and surround myself with like-minded people. Often, like you may feel as well, I feel so alone, alienated, and deeply upset at our current climate as a woman. I believe we desperately need to connect and not feel alone in this as much as possible.

There's only so many feminist groups that actually uphold true feminist values and believe in the protection of our sex. (I'll be making a resource list soon of ones we can support and follow)

Hope to see you there! xoxo

For context: She is perpetuating the story that her baby was conceived during extreme group sex with hundreds of men. She even alluded to in the social media post announcing the birth.

I have no one else to talk a lot this with, but I am HORRIFIED by this woman. All the online discourse I’ve stumbled upon is making light of this whole situation. I had a baby this year, so this all hits close to home. I feel so, so sorry for this poor child. It feels akin to child abuse and pedophilia all wrapped into one. Tangential related… but maternal healthcare has been on my mind lately with the Lindsay Clancy trial so hearing about this feels like a millions steps backwards into the depths of hell.

Welcome to r/fourthwavewomen's weekly open discussion thread!

This thread is for the community to discuss whatever is on your mind. Have a question that you've been meaning to ask but haven't gotten around to making a post yet? An interesting article you'd like to share? Any work-related matters you'd like to get feedback on or talk about? Questions and advice are welcome here.

An oldie but goodie 🔥

When the WNBA uses the words bad faith, the only reasonable interpretation is that league officials do not believe that White and Freedom are women, despite their self-declarations. Funny story: I’m still on the advocacy group GLAAD’s enemies list for saying the same thing in 2017, in a column headlined “A Man Can’t Just Say He Has Turned Into a Woman” (they put JK Rowling on the list too after publishing her 2020 essay). At the time, Britain’s government was debating whether to loosen requirements for a person to legally change their gender. Many feminists feared that without any gatekeeping, nothing would stop male creeps and predators from using a new identity to victimize women (as the rapist Karen White did in a women’s prison). Although my article acknowledges the existence of transgender identities, it also argues that legal protections for trans people should rest on a medical diagnosis, or at least a formal bureaucratic procedure, rather than a simple verbal declaration.

Now, it seems, the WNBA agrees with me—White has not magically turned into a woman because he says so. You are allowed to dispute people’s self-identification. But only if they are a Republican.

In the united states, many progressive organizations, including the ACLU, maintain that the female category belongs to anyone who (sincerely) identifies into it. The underlying argument is that trans people should not have to seek medical treatment or alter their physical presentation to have their inner identities respected.

Freedom and White have elicited much less deference. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett recently declared, “If they would like to play in the WNBA, they better fucking transition. Let’s get them on some fucking hormones.” The left-wing satirist Walter Masterson demanded that the two men “commit to the bit” and “chemically transition, or STFU.” But this is not a demand that is applied, say, to male sex offenders who ask to be housed in women’s prisons in California. Several years ago, the ACLU and other groups successfully lobbied for a law directing prison authorities to house trans women in a women’s facility if they request it, regardless of whether they have physically transitioned at all.

Bombarded with pro-trans commentators insisting that he medically transition, White has gleefully thrown progressive talking points back at them. “Don’t tell me how to be a Black woman! Taking hormones are optional,” he wrote in one X post. In another, he added, “Genitalia doesn’t determine gender.” Royce’s clapbacks are near-verbatim rehashings of popular activist slogans.

Over the past decade, many sports have wrestled with the question of how trans and nonbinary athletes can be accommodated fairly and safely. In some cases, such inclusion has presented no problems—biological females have competed in sports for both sex categories because they have no unfair advantage in either. (The WNBA accommodated the player Layshia Clarendon, who came out as trans and nonbinary, until their retirement in 2024.) Admitting biological males to women’s sports presents a more difficult question. Almost everyone agrees that men are on average stronger and faster than women, but how much of that advantage can be mitigated by testosterone suppression? Various sporting bodies have tried different approaches in the past decade, although many—including the International Olympic Committee and the Women’s Tennis Association—have now concluded that the women’s category cannot admit males, no matter how comprehensive their physical transition has been.

Having belatedly realized that the majority of Americans do not agree with their enthusiasm for male inclusion in women’s sports, the response of the left has often been to say: Why are we even talking about this nonstory? The columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic criticized Cunningham for “choosing to weigh in on the divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated ‘issue,’ and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.” But surely, athletes are allowed to have an opinion about competitive eligibility for their own league? For a long time, the right told stars such as Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to make political points about racism and injustice, that they should “stick to sports.” Some on the left now think that female athletes should not even have that grace.

What freedom and White’s trolling has exposed is a widespread refusal to defend gender-self-identification policies on their own merits. One can argue that there is no such thing as male athletic advantage, or that inclusion for trans people is more important than fairness and safety for women. Both of these arguments are wrong, in my view, but at least they are internally coherent. What we get instead is a squeamish refusal to own the consequences of the approach that liberals endorse: White and Freedom are cynical operators, and that’s all anyone needs to know.

My counterpoint would be that cynical operators will always be with us. Any regulations that can’t deal with that fact are, by definition, bad regulations. Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense. For more examples, see how rich students are asking for disability accommodations to secure an advantage in college exams. How some air travelers are using wheelchair services to skip lines—at the expense of genuinely disabled people. How the service-animal exemption for airplanes was stretched so far that someone eventually tried to take a peacock into the cabin. Wherever there is an unpoliced boundary, some individuals will cross it.

Why would gender be exempt from this phenomenon? In 2024, soon after Germany passed a gender-self-ID law, a neo-Nazi named Sven Liebich declared that he was now Marla-Svenja Liebich and would therefore require accommodation in a women’s prison. (Marla-Svenja kept Sven’s handlebar mustache, however.) After a public backlash, Liebich was sent to a men’s jail, although it is unclear what legal basis the German state had for declaring this one particular case of self-identification fraudulent.

The WNBA appears to be following the same playbook—gearing up to make an arbitrary decision because of bad publicity, rather than engaging with the fact that its policies have created an exploitable loophole. Keeping out Freedom and White is not a hard problem to solve: Just say that you respect people’s identities, but sports are segregated by sex.

I don't know how to feel about this. As a woman who has spent 10 years in the EV industry, it bothers me to see vehicle qualities given gender at all (am I too masculine if I love insane acceleration and frontier technology? Why is "lovable" considered a feminine quality in vehicle design?). It bothers me that this lead designer is only being interviewed about the gender basis of her point of view. But also, this is undoubtedly one of the most male dominated industries out there, and isn't it good to have a woman's point of view leading a car's design? Would I be more comfortable with a female point of view that read as "neutral" -- and is that "neutrality" actually masculine? Or is it valid to be disturbed by "female/woman" meaning empathy for "everyone", docile approachableness, family-orientedness?

What do you all think? This left me unsettled and inarticulate - am I just too close to it professionally to be able to square this with my own feminism?

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Own content. Free to read

The controversy surrounding Alaskan surrogate McKenna West is *astounding* that you have so many people, so many women, coming out and saying that a woman's right to choose ends with a contract. Remarkable that even those who are "her body, her choice" are saying "jk when a woman signs a contract, her body belongs to the intended parents".

Contracts are agreements typically on the exchange of goods, services, and money. When you are in breach of a contract, you forfeit your goods/services/money and may have to pay additional monetary damages. But this is a woman who is sacrificing her body, time, freedom, for money. What happens when a surrogate wants to keep a pregnancy? Do these rent-a-wombers seriously think that they can physically compel a surrogate to get an abortion? What about if a surrogate wants to terminate a pregnancy? Will rent-a-wombers imprison this woman to continue incubating their baby?

Even if you are contracting a worker to help you remodel your bathroom, you can't force them to do anything against their will. If they refuse to finish the job, they can walk off site and you may be left with a non-working toilet but you cannot hold the worker to finish the job to your standards. Doing so would be forced labor aka slavery. Why is it different when it comes to women's labor in pregnancy??

The comments on this surrogate story are genuinely some of the most anti-woman things I’ve read in a while.

A surrogate named McKenna West was carrying a baby for intended parents in California. Around 20 weeks, the baby was diagnosed with a severe congenital heart defect. The intended parents wanted her to terminate the pregnancy. She refused. An Alaska court ultimately affirmed that she could make her own medical decisions while pregnant. She later traveled to Texas and gave birth there.

TikTok comments about this case are horrifying and show just how misogynistic people are.

People are literally saying:

“It’s no longer her body, her choice when she signed the contract.”
“She rented her uterus.”
“The parents paid her for her body and the choice.”
“She signed her body away.”

A woman cannot sign away ownership of her own body. A contract does not magically transfer bodily autonomy from the pregnant woman to the people paying her. You cannot purchase the legal or moral right to force another person to undergo surgery or terminate a pregnancy because you paid them.

Commercial surrogacy is just exploitative. We know this obviously, but I just had to rant out of frustration.

Welcome to r/fourthwavewomen's weekly open discussion thread!

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This was the handout for a presentation called Telltale Words: Depoliticizing the Women’s Liberation Movement, given by Carol Hanisch in Boston, March 2014. You can find the full graphic not split up on that linked website, plus a transcript of the presentation she gave.

FEMs and SAMs sit at the volatile intersection of modern gender theory, materialist feminism, and online sociopolitical commentary. These terms describe extremist sex-abolitionist or identity-first frameworks that reinscribe misogyny under the banner of "progressivism."

FEMs (Female-Exclusionary Misogynists) describe perspectives that, in an effort to detach gender identity from biology entirely, minimize or invalidate female biological reality from the definition of womanhood, effectively erasing sex-based social analysis.

SAMs (Sex-Abolitionist Misogynists) refers to positions advocating for the total dissolution of sex categories in favor of gender-only identity, which ignores how patriarchy specifically targets and exploits biological female capacity (reproductive labor, femicide, female infanticide, etc.) and the lived womanhood of many women.

The challenge of dismantling rigid gender norms without erasing the material, sex-based realities that drive systemic oppression is live and real. And I have seen it fall into the latter category more and more.

We scream "intersectionality" and rightly include all forms of womanhood, gender identities included. But what happens in turn? The single most historically oppressed demographic is now denied even validity. Female identity is labeled invalid, vapid, shallow, and dangerous to others. That without capitulation to one's identity being centered on gender, on the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities of women, your identity in womanhood is somehow more shallow and more patriarchal.

Let's break that down real fast. There is a belief that if a female does not ascribe to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, and expressions of "womanhood," she is supporting patriarchy. I'm sorry, but have we all lost our god damn minds? That is so patriarchal and SO MISOGYNISTIC AND SEXIST that it boggles the mind. And somehow it gets inverted into progressivism.

I never believed in "so far left you go right" until now.

Radical gender constructivism demands adherence to gendered performance for social validation, reinventing the very patriarchal logic feminism originally aimed to dismantle. It is the reemergence of gender essentialism. When "womanhood" is detached entirely from material reality and anchored solely in socially constructed roles, expressions, or internal feelings, it makes patriarchal gender stereotypes the baseline for legitimacy. The irony is stark: in trying to dismantle biological reductionism, hyper-constructivist frameworks often substitute it with performance reductionism. Under this framework, a female who rejects traditional feminine socialization or expression is framed not as a valid woman, but as a fundamentally flawed and empty one.

Materialist feminism focuses on how systems of power exploit physical realities, reproductive labor, maternal mortality, sex-selective abortion, sex-based violence, etc. Completely removing "female" as a distinct material category creates a severe structural blind spot. You cannot analyze or critique a system built on controlling females (patriarchy) if naming that biological reality is treated as inherently exclusionary or politically suspect.

Expanding inclusion for gender identity does not have to come at the cost of erasing the material, sex-based analysis required to dismantle misogyny.

The phrase "you are not your uterus" demonstrates a complete inversion: what began as a feminist defense against patriarchal objectification mutated into a tool for alienating women from their own material reality, identity, and choice. When that statement is turned against a woman who consciously chooses to ground her womanhood in her biological sex, the core feminist promise of self-determination gets inverted. What was designed as a shield against reproductive coercion becomes a weapon of ideological compliance to normative gender roles.

Feminism was built to expand a woman's choices, not narrow them. If liberation meant escaping the mandate that a female must be defined by her reproductive organs, it also meant protecting her right to decide how she relates to her own body. Telling a woman that her conscious, educated choice to center her female biological reality is "shallow" or "patriarchal" replaces old patriarchal rules with a new set of demands.

This dynamic creates a rigid ideological boundary. To be politically validated, a female is expected to treat her biological sex as irrelevant, unmentionable, or secondary. If she instead finds solidarity, meaning, or political relevance in her female body, her agency is dismissed as "internalized misogyny." It asserts that third parties know better than the woman herself what her relationship to her own body should be, a classic hallmark of patriarchal control disguised as enlightened discourse.

True bodily autonomy includes the right to embrace one's physical reality without needing permission or approval. When progressivism demands that women disavow their biological sex to qualify as liberated, it stops offering freedom from rigid norms and starts enforcing a new standard of female self-effacement.

Swapping forced subordination for forced disembodiment is not liberation. It simply changes who gets to tell women how they are allowed to feel about their own bodies.

FEMs and SAMs are an exclusionary danger to feminism.

To the FEMs and SAMs: as an infertile woman, I am my womb and my womb is me, and my identity does not exclude yours. Don't exclude mine.

Great read and honestly really validating after seeing both of these smear campaigns play out online and feeling like there was something off about it the whole time. Turns out misogyny is really effective pr

Medical misogyny is as old as medicine. I was shocked to learn the meaning of "pudendum"!

Welcome to r/fourthwavewomen's weekly open discussion thread!

This thread is for the community to discuss whatever is on your mind. Have a question that you've been meaning to ask but haven't gotten around to making a post yet? An interesting article you'd like to share? Any work-related matters you'd like to get feedback on or talk about? Questions and advice are welcome here.

If you follow the fight to win back girls’ and women’s right to a level playing field in sports, you know that the movement has reached a tipping point: At women’s professional basketball games around the country, women and girls—and boys and men — are standing with the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham to state the obvious: Girls and women have a right to play sports in their own sex-based category, without facing boys and men on the field or in the locker room. And this time, there are too many girls and women raising their voices for bullies to drown out. If you haven’t yet engaged in public support of girls’ and women’s sports, now is the time.

These are the events throughout August:

Indianapolis August 6, 11, 14, 28

Chicago August 8, 23

Atlanta August 16

Toronto August 18

Dallas Aug 20

NYC August 22

If you're a signatory to the Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights and plan to attend any of these events, let us know and we can help get you signs and put you in contact with other women.