The general category of ‘women’s rage’…trains our sights on gender, and away from race and class. It positions bourgeois white women as victims, and erases our complicity in racial capitalist exploitation and white supremacy.

The feminist ‘war machine’ is white. And white rage is necropolitical rage: political whiteness is characterised by a desire for power and punishment. When righteous anger about sexual violence is channelled through race and class supremacy, it can produce a need for infliction.

Claiming to be silenced amplifies and circulates reactionary forms of speech by generating outrage. And this manoeuvre works not because reactionary feminists are speaking truth to power and being accused of transphobia, but because they are speaking for power by expressing transphobia.

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?

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.

Violence against women is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. It results from the tussle for material and emotional resources, between commodity production and the reproduction of human life.

Right-wing attacks on feminism and Gender Studies are a defence of the heterosexual nuclear family. This is also a defence of capital and nation: protecting ‘our’ economy and ‘our’ way of life. It is impossible to disentangle the war against ‘gender ideology’ from the widespread racism and anti-immigrant sentiment directed at other Others also seen as threats.

We want Harvey Weinstein in prison. We want Brock Turner to have a longer sentence. We want Judge Aquilina to sign Nassar’s death warrant. We rely on a third party to take these ‘bad men’ away, usually in the form of an institution or the state. And this White Knight or Angry Dad is patriarchy personified. This is how our outraged activism fails to dismantle the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism that produce sexual violence – and strengthens them instead.