Disarticulate and rule: From abortion to trans rights

It is now frequently remarked that reactionary actors are using transphobic moral panics – around issues such as puberty blockers or trans women’s participation in sports – as a wedge issue to break apart feminist and progressive coalitions. However, while the scale and success of these attacks has caught many off guard, this tactic is far from new. Drawing on Angela McRobbie’s work on post-feminist disarticulation, this paper situates contemporary anti-trans divide and conquer techniques relative to older attempts to undermine feminist solidarity and sow intra-feminist division. It explores this tactic through a case study of ‘pro-life’ campaigns on sex-selective abortion. These campaigns used feminist language, including seemingly intersectional advocacy for ‘young Asian girls’, to disarticulate feminist and pro-choice coalitions and position anti-abortion actors as more authentically ‘speaking for women’. While this advocacy was not adequate as an intersectional response to sex-selective abortion due to its use of anti-migrant tropes and failure to problematise whiteness, it nonetheless convinced many feminist actors of the need for limits on abortion. The paper draws a through line from these events to today’s use of ‘pro-woman’ and ‘gender critical’ arguments to attack trans people, arguing for the need for shared learning between the sectors that have faced these attacks.