White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?

Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.

How might mainstream feminist activism help or hinder other social justice projects, for instance around class inequality, race discrimination, migrants’ rights and transgender inclusion? When violent men and governments profess their concern for ‘women’s safety’, how should feminists respond?

Protecting white women was, and is, a key colonial preoccupation. Imaginings of Indigenous and/or slave uprisings were sexualised: fear of revolution was fear of rape. In colonial and neo-colonial cultures, white women’s tears are deadly to people of colour.

This…exemplifies how trans-exclusionary feminism uses the experience of rape. Drawing on the radical feminist idea of the penis as a weapon, it ‘sticks’ this organ to trans women through an obsession with their surgical status. The ‘threat’ posed by the trans woman is then juxtaposed with the threatened (white) femininity of the abuse survivor. Cue outrage.

Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.

The Western history of sexual violence is also capitalism’s history: it is linked to women’s historical status as property and ongoing status as reproducers of nation and life. It is also a device of the hierarchical and adversarial relations which characterise the greedy market economy.

Political whiteness is the systematic privileging of bourgeois white women’s wounds at the expense of others. Its obsession with threat is both sexualised and racialised, because of the role of colonialism in co-constructing race and sexuality.

Instead of using the white feminist wrecking ball, we should build towards a world without sexual violence. This is not about forgiveness, empathy or being ‘nice’ – it is about the fact that we cannot end violence by doing violence. Even – no, especially – if that violence manifests as tears.