It’s a whole thing where British feminism has historically been confined to the white middle income professional class and never spread in to the working class or developed intersectionality the way us feminisms did. It resulted in a very narrow feminism that never fully shed the prejudices of the 1890s. Things have gotten better but there remains a cadre of British feminism adherents who loudly maintain a reductive and bigoted feminism.
This is the country that thinks feminism is when Thatcher. Patriarchal structure here is very rigid and isn’t really challenged at all, I don’t really see a shift in that way of thinking for a while.
What are you talking about? Thatcher is a feminist icon. She was such a strongly recognized world leader who was based because women can do absolutely no wrong, and it’s impossible for women to engage in any forms of oppression whatsoever. Wait, my viewpoint is essentialist and is totally at odds with feminism? These kinds of messages do nothing in liberating women or anyone who is oppressed by patriarchy? I’m sorry, what do you mean!? I’m the most radical feminist alive!
/s just in case
The history of British feminism is an interesting one. One thing that never gets talked about in popular discourse, is that many former suffragettes ended up becoming fascists. This undoubtedly had an affect on post-suffragette feminism in the UK. Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the WSPU, the organization that started the suffragette movement, expelled all socialists from the organization after WW1. She then became an anti-communist, and many former suffragettes flocked to fascism during the 1930s. Most people don’t even know that many of them even ended up holding positions in the British Union of Fascists.
And here’s an interesting bit from Wikipedia that ties this together:
In the 2020s, the Suffragette flag began to be increasingly used by British feminists protesting against transgender rights; Ria Patel, the spokesperson on diversity and equality for the Green Party of England and Wales, argued that this use “claims a lineage that goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored Vindication of the Rights of Women (and like most writers of the time used ‘sex’ to describe both biology, sexual orientation and gender expression), but often uses the language of Suffragette and post-Suffragette feminism”.
Someone on here once pointed out that because feminism and the LGBTQIA+ movements didn’t come to Britain until after its colonial era, it was never weaponized to justify imperialism to bring LGBTQIA+ enlightenment to the third world “barbarians” like what happened in the U.S.
Arguably, one of the reasons the LGBTQ movement has been fairly successful in the US is that empire is quick to adopt and recuperate that which it can use to further its goals abroad. The liberal wing of US Empire only embraces feminism and queer liberation because those are also weapons that can be used against socially regressive periphery countries. That’s not to say that they are illegitimate causes, of course in almost every way it’s a good thing that those movements have been fairly successful in the US, but interest convergence is the only way for them to flourish as much as they have.
In contrast, countries that aren’t constantly looking for reasons to do regime change have less impetus to expand their recognition of human rights, and have less reason to side with their own minorities against some enemy outside their borders. This generally applies to any country that doesn’t bear the load of opening up new frontiers for imperialism, so it doesn’t explain TERF island by itself. There’s some other factors that exacerbate transphobia in TERF island, namely the success of second wave feminism, lack of development of intersectional feminism, etc etc.
Because the early-wave feminism actually succeeded.
