Assuaging the Anxious Matriarch

Abstract

In recent years, social conservatives and certain radical feminists have joined forces in legislative and judicial conflicts over the rights of physicians and therapists to treat gender-nonconforming and transgender youth as well as inclusionary bathroom access policies. Though this resembles past partnerings of feminists and conservatives who allied against pornography and for victims of violent crime, this new coalition’s mobilization of feminist, antiracist, and even intersectional arguments against the notion of trans experience and identity heralds the advent of a new social conservative feminist political logic. The Family Policy Alliance unveiled its version of #MeToo with its “Ask Me First” campaign, which champions the voices of cis women and (presumably cis) children. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the country’s largest, most well-funded right-wing Christian litigation group, has funded trans-exclusionary radical feminist groups and worked with them. This chapter tracks these campaigns and interrogates the rhetorical and ideological transformations that attend them.