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.