To the Editors:
This is a response to “The Anti-Trans Playbook,” published by Paisley Currah in The New York Review of Books on December 18, 2025. Currah misleads readers regarding the positions held by the authors.
Currah’s opinion piece is wrong on the facts, the law, and the science, and reaches unsupportable conclusions. Currah imagines a dark alliance between conservatives and radical feminists that will send society careening backward.
Simple facts first: Kara Dansky is a Democrat and former ACLU attorney who has written two books about women’s sex-based rights and the real-life problems created by blurring the lines between the sexes. She served on the board of Women’s Liberation Front and was president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International, both radical feminist organizations. She now works as a consultant and writes a Substack, The TERF Report, and has appeared on television, though not on certain left-leaning shows because the legacy mainstream media tends to ignore the radical feminist critique of “gender identity.”
Some readers may truthfully say, “I’ve never heard of her.” They also have not heard the many dissenting voices on the political left on this issue—from women (including lesbians), men (including gay men), bisexuals, lawyers, doctors, nurses, counselors, biologists, and scientists. We cannot get published in most media outlets. We are canceled and suppressed. We lose jobs and friends. Dansky has been warning the Democrats and other liberals that they will lose power and electability if they ignore their dissenting wing. So far, her predictions have come true.
So why does it trouble Currah that we have found common ground with conservatives? Why is it alarming to Currah that both conservatives and radical feminists insist sex is dimorphic and real? And why do “trans” advocates like Currah never offer a coherent definition of gender? Currah’s tragic flaw is imagining that radical feminists think that “biology is in fact destiny” when in fact the opposite is true.
Currah fundamentally misunderstands radical feminism. Radical means “from the root.” Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s fought for women’s liberation by recognizing that women’s oppression is rooted in our bodies. We are, on average, not as strong as men. Men hurt and kill us. We can be impregnated against our will. We may be unable to leave an abusive man or to find work while caring for children. We can die in childbirth or be denied medical care because we are pregnant. Sex stereotypes can be used to strip us of self-determination. We cannot “identify” out of this.
Rejecting sex stereotypes never meant women are the same as men. We are fully human beings with agency. We do not need sex stereotypes to signal who we are; we simply are.
For radical feminists, gender is not a group of innate traits tied to the male or female sex. Currah assumes these stereotypes are somehow inherent in one sex or the other; we do not.
Currah accurately notes that major legacy women’s organizations have condemned the president’s executive order defining the two sexes. Organizations originally created to serve women now prioritize “trans” ideology over feminism. That is a deep betrayal. They ignored their basic remit and abandoned women. They surrendered our hard-won private spaces. They abandoned the most vulnerable women—those who have been raped, abused, or imprisoned—by insisting that men who say they “identify as” women are as entitled to those spaces as women are.
Currah is also wrong on biology. Human beings begin life as male or female, and fetal development proceeds on that basis. Females produce large gametes and our bodies are organized around gestation and birth; males have small gametes and their bodies are organized around impregnating. Disorders of sexual development do occur, but they do not create a new sex. Currah is correct that there can be variations in secondary sex characteristics—large or small breasts, infertility, body hair—but these do not place anyone in a different sex category. Sex remains binary.
Currah also misstates the law. The US Supreme Court did not grant that women are people under the Constitution until 1971, and since then, it has established a robust jurisprudence grounded in the coexisting realities that women are fully human and that sex is real and sometimes matters (referred to as “intermediate scrutiny”).
When the Supreme Court crafted this jurisprudence, it did not do so anticipating men would claim to be women and demand admittance to female spaces. It wrote from common sense. If we cannot protect our sex class in law, we cannot protect ourselves in public from men who wish to harm us. If the law refuses to recognize women as a sex class, women disappear as a legal category. And that is what will send us careening backward.
Kara Dansky
Former President
Women’s Declaration International USA
Board Member
WDI USA and Women’s Liberation Front
Florida
Elspeth Cypher
President
Women’s Liberation Front
Champaign, Illinois
Elizabeth Chesak
President and Board Member
Women’s Declaration International USA
Indiana
Kara Dansky and her colleagues ask why it troubles me that they have “found common ground with conservatives.” They applaud the Trump administration’s actions to purportedly defend women by attacking transgender people. But the vulnerabilities they identify as central to women’s oppression—those tied to pregnancy, caregiving, and economic dependence—are not fixed facts of sex; they are shaped by political choices. That same administration has rescinded guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care, reinstated and expanded the global gag rule, and refused to distribute contraceptives to women in low-income countries—moves that increase pregnancy-related deaths and deepen the economic precarity that Dansky and her colleagues claim to oppose. Women’s Liberation Front has partnered on drafting a “women’s bill of rights” with Independent Women’s Voice, whose sister organization, Independent Women’s Forum, dismisses the gender pay gap, opposes the Equal Rights Amendment, and sits on the advisory board of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
This is the problem: in embracing a campaign that claims to protect women from trans people, organizations like Women’s Declaration International and Women’s Liberation Front have aligned with a movement that is working to undo the very gains that have helped make women less vulnerable. Their core premise is that biology sets the limits of women’s lives. But it is policy, not biology, that determines whether pregnancy is dangerous, whether it can be avoided through contraception or ended through abortion, and whether caregiving goes unpaid. By making this alliance in the name of defending women’s “sex-based” rights, Dansky and her colleagues are capitulating to forces that make women’s lives harder and less secure.
English (US) · 