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On Being a ‘Feminist Human’ in an Anti-rights Era

February/March 2025Nigeria
Feminist

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: GHANA GUARDIAN.

THE MINISTRY OF GENDER X SEXUALITY

On Being a ‘Feminist Human’ in an Anti-rights Era

In an era of accelerating anti-rights movements, our feminist liberation depends not on narrowing the gates of belonging, but on dismantling the very logic of exclusion that has been weaponized against all women.
Feminist

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: GHANA GUARDIAN.

THE MINISTRY OF GENDER X SEXUALITY

On Being a ‘Feminist Human’ in an Anti-rights Era

In an era of accelerating anti-rights movements, our feminist liberation depends not on narrowing the gates of belonging, but on dismantling the very logic of exclusion that has been weaponized against all women.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘Accelerate Action’—perhaps no greater paradox exists for a moment filled with multiple decelerating actions against women’s rights, overturning countless years of global feminist struggles for equality, dignity and the humanization of women. In this moment, I have turned to African feminist foremothers who lived through parallel moments—like Patricia McFadden, eSwatini radical African feminist, and Filomena Chioma Steady, Sierra Leonean African feminist scholar. From their works, I have been thinking deeply about the question of a human and feminist relationality that refuses isolation. McFadden’s particular use of the term ‘feminist human’ stood out to me, as she speaks to the gates that are closed to us as women, especially as women in Africa. 

Agreed, dehumanization might seem an exaggerated concept based on the word ‘feminist human’ alone—after all, humanity should be a matter of fact. Every human is born with agency, the capacity to think, dream and direct their lives. This capacity to dream is encoded in our signifiers of modernity: somebody dreamt that humans would fly, somebody dreamt up electricity, somebody dreamt up the internet, which has made the world a global village, somebody dreamt up automated virtual assistants and artificial intelligence. Humanity and modernity go hand in hand. But let us take a moment to unpack these progressive signifiers of our modernity. Who is human when one faction of the world serves as the labouring bodies upon which this very modernity was built? Whose ways of knowing and loving were obliterated such that our modernity can be directly traced to the dominance of a ‘monohuman’—either through actual invention, appropriation or downright theft? Who pays the price for humanity and modernity? And when we begin to unpack each layer of humanity, who pays the price for men’s apical privilege, for the apical privilege of white women or straight people? 

THE GATES OF BELONGING

While several movements in history began with a refusal against the overrepresentation of one kind of humanity, many of these movements also failed to escape the same gated community of humanity. Every audition of belonging then became based on aligning resistance with the same structure that created the hierarchies to begin with. Men in African nationalist movements—as McFadden, Molara Ogundipe, Nigerian African feminist scholar, and Ama Ata Aidoo, Ghanaian literary icon, would argue—used this very same exclusion logic to shut women out of socio-political representation, even within a movement for the freedom and dignity of African peoples. Aidoo calls this a ‘double quarrel’—being ‘colonised by the coloniser, then by our own men, with their new power’, as she pointedly rejects the contradiction of nationalist movements who, by framing feminism as somehow un-African or anti-nationalist, claim to fight for African liberation while excluding women. McFadden also critiques how this nationalism was used to define what was truly African, such that ‘our Africanness is defined by and through a patriarchal norm which defines Africans through the male.’ And Ogundipe calls out how ‘they will talk about changing society, mobilizing Africa, but not about the issue of the relationship of men to women’, instead offering a dishonest, hypocritical narrative about unity while perpetuating patriarchal exclusion. 

Sylvia Wynter, the Afro-Jamaican scholar whose work fundamentally challenges colonial/modern understandings of what it means to be human, offers a powerful counter to French Afro-Caribbean Marxist Humanist, Frantz Fanon. As Caribbean feminist scholar Michelle V. Rowley describes, Fanon’s vision of liberation for the Antillean man created new stumbling blocks for Antillean women. In the project of recreating the human beyond Western humanism, the Antillean woman in Fanon’s imaginary must contain herself within the limit of the Antillean man’s nationalist expectations. She must not be radical; she must be submissive, maternal, heterosexual and committed to the Black man and Black nation. Therefore, for the Antillean man to be human in a colonial imaginary, the Antillean woman must pay the existential price. 

Wynter pushes back against humanist projects such as this that merely substitute one code (race) for another (gender) while continuing to create norms and others. In this case, Black nationalists attempting to create the African or Antillean Man as the norm. She argues instead for dismantling the very structure that produces these hierarchies. She envisions a world where being human remains an open question rather than a fixed category with insiders and outsiders. It, therefore, becomes as plain as day how humanism has become a historical project of creating others. This truth, for instance, triggered the very reason for a Black feminist theory of intersectionality in the United States that revealed how systems of exclusion interconnect and reinforce each other. In American civil rights scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s own words, Black women had to find the ‘courage to challenge groups that are after all, in one sense, “home” to us, in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home.’ 

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THE FIGURE OF TROUBLE

Every wave of feminist movements in history has had a designated figure of trouble. The figure of trouble is the boundary marker that defines who belongs within feminism and who does not; the marginalized identity is systematically positioned as the complicated and threatening outsider whose exclusion becomes necessary to legitimize the movement. This figure has shifted throughout feminist history. For white feminists in the first and second feminist waves, Black women complicated their neat narrative of universal sisterhood. When American abolitionist Sojourner Truth evoked, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, she was pointing to the clear paradox of a movement that spoke for women only to the extent that they were white. 

As Black and African feminists began to organize on their own terms, it was ‘the lesbian’ who became the new figure of trouble whose inclusion threatened to undermine or dilute feminist objectives. There is perhaps no clearer example of this than Nigerian womanist scholar Chikwenye Ogunyemi and American womanist novelist Alice Walker freedom-dreaming womanism independently of each other and coincidentally around the same time. While Walker points to ‘women who love other women, sexually and/or non-sexually’ to indicate the inseparability of Black freedom and Black queer liberation, Ogunyemi’s womanism takes a different path, opting for an African womanism that rejects African-American overrepresentation; that accounts for the African woman’s need to have children; and that, especially, rejects lesbian love because of the ‘silence or intolerance of lesbianism’ in Africa. Therefore, from the 1980s and well into our current moment, the lesbian became an unacceptable figure in Nigerian feminist circles—her existence shrouded in deliberate silence, even as her very tangible presence continues to shape and haunt Nigerian feminist movements. 

One of the mountains Molara Ogundipe points to as the reason for women’s subjugation is women themselves—outside of the man, colonial/neocolonial structures, traditional structures, colour/race and underdevelopment. For Ogundipe, an internalized socio-political dehumanization persists because women themselves endorse and actively contribute to one another’s oppressions. From the mothers-in-law to the married women incorporated who shame single ladies; from the paragons of religion and tradition who deliberately make life difficult for fellow women; to the women who, for reasons I will never fathom, internalize their own inferiority. Women, ourselves, become key forces in our own oppression. This is largely driven by the need for social acceptance in a patriarchal culture. And this very same logic seeps into Nigerian feminism, where seeking acceptability for feminism is hinged on creating an othered category even more hated than the sheer audacity of women’s collective organizing force; this feminism defined by and through a patriarchal norm that undercuts a truly authentic African feminism—a countermeasure against the already loud voices calling feminism ‘un-African’. 

In 2021, Nigerian feminist and queer writer OluTimehin Adegbeye spoke with Nkoyo Toyo, one of the organizers of Women in Nigeria, an organization founded in 1982 to address the intersectionality of oppression against Nigerian women. Adegbeye talked about her experiences as a queer Nigerian woman who faces forces that a heterosexual woman does not have to face, and how the inseparability of her womanhood and her queerness creates a fundamental tension with mainstream Nigerian feminist movements who want to focus solely on women’s rights without addressing sexuality. As the criminalization of same-sex relationships through the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act continues to bring a new kind of unwanted attention to queer lives in Nigeria, Adegbeye asked: ‘Should I dedicate my radical energy to a movement that only wants my womanhood and does not want my queerness?’ 

While separatist movements might claim that Black women have anti-racist movements or queer women have gay power movements and thus should not rely on an ever-expanding feminism, such arguments obscure the gendered divisions of race and sexual politics, where activism becomes a matter of choice for women at these intersections. For African women, the path to authenticity for their struggles was to align with anti-colonial movements, just as Black women were forced to choose between their femaleness and their Blackness. Then the lesbian became another figure dividing women, where being a ‘real woman’ involved deriving and reflecting authenticity via affiliation with men. The Black feminist organization, Combahee River Collective, spectacularly challenged these false choices. They insisted that only Black women could consider their oppression/experience a priority—a politics that evolved from love of self, sisters and communities. This focus on their specific oppression was embodied in the concept of identity politics: ‘The most profound radical politics comes from our own identity (as Black feminists and as lesbians),’ which made them, ‘actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.’ They rejected lesbian separatism because it negates class and race and focuses solely on the sexual sources of women’s oppression. 

Most importantly, they also rejected any form of biological determinism as a basis for politics because it leaves out far too much and too many people: ‘As Black women, we find that biological determinism is dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.’ In their work on issues particularly relevant to Black women—including sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women rape and health care—they wielded the psychological tool of Black feminist political consciousness, knowing that ‘being at the bottom…we would have to fight the world.’ And now, in our contemporary moment, trans women have become the new figure of trouble; the ones whose existence is said to threaten the legitimacy of the feminist movement. The very rhetoric of this othering, which men have particularly taken on as a new project of dehumanization disguised as solidarity, is centred on ‘protecting’ and ‘saving’ women from gender ideology extremists. But how are women being saved in a fascist regime that is not content with staying within its borders but spreads out globally by overturning abortion rights, activist funds and ‘transvestigating‘ women? 

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FRACTURES IN OUR ORGANIZING

My own scholarship builds on the fact that we cannot talk of African feminism without acknowledging the digital, especially how an ‘African feminist Twitter (now X)’ has, in the last decade, brought us all into community. However, while we all band together to shame the patriarchy and mobilize for women’s rights, our commune has nonetheless been split into defensive feminists and intersectional feminists, creating deep-set fractured intimacies. I have seen Nigerian feminist pages repost anti-trans rhetoric from sexist and racist US conservative politicians simply because it momentarily aligns with their position. These same feminist voices also criticize others for being an ‘intersectional oyinbo feminist, centring men and enabling misogyny’ yet will readily amplify a Western politician whose broader agenda runs counter to feminist liberation. I was even more troubled to see these pages go on a five-day-long disinformation campaign against Olympic boxer, Imane Khelif—a prominent victim of transvestigation in the recent year—sharing content like the video of Josh Seiter, a cisgender American man, who had made it his mission to mock trans women by putting on a wig, makeup and dress, and staging bathroom invasions, all to prove a point of trans women invading women’s spaces. 

As a cishet feminist human who navigates both activist and academic spaces, and who is currently involved in a socially sanctioned heteronormative marriage, I witness these fractured intimacies with both insider knowledge and critical distance, conscious of the privileges my positionality affords me, even as I refuse the comfort of exclusion that my privilege invites. I cannot help but see the irony of how the same women whose foremothers were shut out of the gates of feminism because of white hegemony and meanness are now co-opting this hegemony and meanness in a fashion that reads like an audition of belonging into a ‘legible feminism’. But people who have no tangible systemic impact on the reality of the cishet Nigerian feminist—who are even more marginalized by these systems—are not the reason the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act is being repealed; the reason the female basketball and volleyball teams at the University of Lagos were not registered for the Federation of African University Sports Games because of ‘low funding’; or the reason musicians can sing songs glorifying femicide with no consequences. What must be understood is how anti-trans feminism provides fodder for the rhetoric, moral panic and fear-mongering of this broader anti-rights movement. Trans women are not the reason women’s rights are under threat. 

Non-white women in sports continue to face misogynoir from referee interactions to media representation, as we saw with the racist-sexist treatment of Cameroonian players during their match against the English team in the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The anti-rights movement, which targets trans women, and by extension women in general, for existing, has successfully directed panic to a new figure of trouble: transness—which makes up less than one per cent of the global population, and an even much tinier pool in Nigeria. And we are adapting to this fear rather than fighting it. Existing as a trans person in a raging patriarchal state like Nigeria is an existential risk. We can see this in the recent treatment of one of Nigeria’s most class-protected trans woman, whose exceptionalism was not enough to protect her from the wrath of the state, or in the recent killing of Area Mama in Abuja. 

Being trans in Nigeria, being queer in Nigeria, being feminist in Nigeria is like wearing a red cloth before the bull of profound citizen bigots. It is only a matter of how red your shade is, based on a taboo spectrum of redness. You wear a target on your back for openly challenging the socially agreed norms on which this state is built. Trans people, both trans men and trans women, have no legal protection, no rights, no spaces; they must create their community and spaces from scratch. The fear-mongering and moral panic are cop-outs of the patriarchy, to shut the gates to people whose pleasures and resistance do not further the rule of the father: women who are not maternal, heterosexual, normative or submissive; women who are not committed to the man and nation; and femme, gay and trans men who cannot embody the sacred authority of the patriarchy. 

If gender is sociological like Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Adichie says, then, in a patriarchy, femme or gay or trans boys/men cannot be socialized into privilege unless they pass or fold themselves into the state, along with other state categories of class, location and more—where at every layer, their humanity needs an ‘other’ as its foil. What then is the other for a poor queer or trans person in a deeply carceral state like Nigeria where every other day we hear news of them being ridiculed, beaten, thrown in gutters, kitoed and killed? Why should the marginalized have to pick a worse-off other? Why should the (worse-off) other exist? 

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FEMINIST ON FEMINIST BATTLES

I got an education in consciousness from watching how the anti-rights movement mapped onto the last Olympics and how this trickled into Nigerian Twitter and fractured, even more, our already shaky connections. Let us talk about the not-so-hypothetical case of a woman who was raised as a girl/woman all her life, training to be a boxer in a conservative society, and who in her adult life discovers, through arbitrary testing, that she has differences in sexual development or high testosterone levels. Should she be cast overnight from womanhood? Is all the activism she has done all her life no longer feminist because of a genetic mutation? Do Imani Khelif, Caster Semenya and other transvestigated athletes themselves not show how frankly ridiculous this is? 

A quick look at the Wikipedia page dedicated to transvestigation shows just how trans misogyny is targeted at not just trans women but women who are strong, have polycystic ovary syndrome (POS), stud/dyke/butch lesbians, and even women who look too much like their fathers! Our feminism cannot insist on shaming and gatekeeping, especially when history shows how this dangerous and reactionary bio-essentialist approach has been used to exclude Black African women until they began to push back. If we can tell anything from the disgusting treatment of the Cameroonian players by the English referee and media, it is that the Black African woman in the eye of the white anti-rights movement is just as queer/sub-human; she will always be regarded with the same derision as everyone who is non-normative, especially when the standards of the normative can barely fit anyone who is non-white. 

We cannot selectively parrot the anti-rights movement’s rhetoric and then be shocked when it expands to overturn all our rights. We cannot claim to be the only worthy people while marking out others for vitriol. There is no picking and choosing in the anti-rights agenda. The anti-rights movement stands in opposition to any push for equality—from feminism to reproductive rights; from environmental activism to indigenous rights; from sexuality rights to combating domestic violence; and from advancing girl child education, political representation to equal work opportunity. We especially cannot ignore the pattern of how anti-gender organizations target all women’s rights, as the same global forces opposing trans rights simultaneously work to dismantle reproductive freedoms that impact all Nigerian women. 

On 21 May 2019, the Marie Stopes Clinic in Surulere, Lagos, which provided women’s sexual and reproductive healthcare services, was raided by Nigerian police following a petition from CitizenGo, a conservative group with direct ties to European right-wing and US anti-choice organizations. Medical staff and patients were harassed and confidential client information was seized. This attack on reproductive healthcare affected all women seeking these services, regardless of their stance on gender theory. The #EndWarOnNigerianWomen emerged in response and created an unprecedented feminist/queer solidarity in Nigerian feminism in 2019. However, in the years that followed, this solidarity has decelerated. I have watched feminists drive mob reactions against other feminists for daring to consider a human reaction to trans women. At the same time, I have witnessed how feminists uncritically label other feminists as ‘fascists’. I understand the frustration when African feminists take gender critical and essentialist positions, especially when, as far back as the 1980s, Ama Ata Aidoo was refusing how men weaponized biology as a discriminatory factor for women, using things like periods or childbirth to shut the gates on women from socio-religio-political representation. 

But there is a wide gap between a fascist and a defensive Nigerian feminist. The fascist is the auto-genocidal Nigerian state, not feminists, especially when even the most respected upwardly mobile feminists were so publicly tagged insurrectionists and blacklisted as enemies of the state. Even when power draws our resistance into itself via the existence of state feminist structures, because feminism ultimately questions and makes power transparent, the state’s effort to draw feminism into a norm is eternally unsuccessful. Let’s take another moment to sit with these tensions. A woman who is a victim of misogynistic violence from child marriage to assault, and who has come to see men as the enemy will no doubt, at first glance, resist the possibility of transness. She will call trans men betrayers and trans women interlopers. Defensiveness comes from the perception of hard-fought-for spaces or hard-won victories being stripped away—but that is the very illusion of patriarchy. That there can only be a highly select few women socialized into power, only a few spaces; so therefore, turn on the less than one per cent and not the majority. Rather than our energies being directed against these oppressors, trans women must now be the shield and the figure—even when most have never encountered a trans woman in their everyday lives—that bears the brunt of feminist rage.

Our regression of solidarity in Nigerian feminist discourse becomes starkly visible when comparing the protest rhetoric between #SayHerNameNigeria (2019) versus #WalkAgainstSA (2024). In 2019, women boldly carried placards declaring ‘hoelosho na human being’, insisting on the humanity of sex workers and challenging a misogynistic culture where olosho and ashawo are typical insults rendered upon women who refuse to be well-behaved and meek by misogynists. The very premise of the movements that triggered #SayHerNameNigeria was that the Abuja police and members of the Environmental Protection Board had raided a nightclub under the charge of ‘cleaning up the streets’ of Abuja. They arrested up to 70 women, labelled them all sex workers without proof and locked them in custody, leaving the men behind. These women were harassed while in custody and forced to have sex for bail. 

It would not be until over two years later, in 2021, that the Federal High Court in Abuja held that the arrests and assaults violated women’s rights and ordered the payment of N2 to N4 million to six survivors. The court further ruled that the actions of the Abuja Environmental Protection Board exceeded its scope and issued an injunction restraining the police and other state-constituted bodies from arresting women in gender-discriminatory ways. By 2024, the message had however shifted to ‘I wear bum short no mean say I be olosho’—as feminists who had previously accepted this negative ‘slur’ and battled ideologically with it were now arguing that men have been misapplying it to them and insisting on personal exception. 

I am a big advocate of memory work, and our feminist ancestors did not fight so we could turn against each other, name-calling while the structures of our oppression remain intact. No social movement can be perfect, but organizers must maintain the ability to self-correct. Fighting for the right to dehumanize sex workers (because of ‘our African context’) betrays the fundamental feminist principle that women are human beings. If feminism is indeed the radical notion that women are humans, then why must the basis of acceptability be the denial of the sex worker, or the trans person, or the lesbian, or the Black woman, or the… you see the historical map this list is charting. 

TOWARDS A FEMINIST HUMAN SOLIDARITY

As humanism has now become a project of making others, what would it look like to constantly displace humanism—to approach it as an unresolved tension, a spiral that needs to be made transparent and keeps us on our toes? What would it mean to step into a new time-space of radical feminist human solidarity? Yes, we will have fractured intimacies in this journey towards a more inclusive feminism. But as the Black feminist foremother Audre Lorde reminds us: some of us are brave. Our bravery must now extend to creating a feminism that refuses the comfort of exclusion, that embraces the discomfort of constant evolution and that recognizes our liberation is bound together in ways that cannot be untangled. This is our call to accelerate action: to create a feminist movement that recognizes and embraces the full spectrum of human experience and that fights against all forms of oppression and exclusion. We must resist the temptation to secure our own position by pushing others down, recognizing that such strategies ultimately reinforce the very systems we seek to dismantle. 

To my sisters who fear that inclusive gender politics threatens hard-won women’s spaces: I understand your concerns and visceral reaction to defend what little we have carved out, especially in a country where women’s bodies remain socio-political battlegrounds. But I invite us to interrogate whether our safety is truly threatened by coalition with our most vulnerable siblings or whether this fear is another patriarchal trap designed to fragment our resistance. What if our liberation depends not on narrowing the gates of belonging, but on dismantling the very logic of exclusion that has been weaponized against all of us? 

I strongly believe our collective power lies precisely in refusing to reproduce the hierarchies we seek to destroy. We have the affordances of not just print but also digital cultures, and it is these very tools of connection that feminists, through generations, have used to call their sisters into formation, from the Egba Women’s Union to the Combahee River Collective. These affordances bring us out of isolation into community. I read my sisters’ words, and I know I am not alone. And to demonstrate my reality, rage, fears and consciousness to other women, I am here writing a feminist human manifesto for accelerating action. This practice across generations—educating and inspiring each other as we move forward together—is also what we are celebrating this month. Happy Women’s History Month!⎈

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