Background image is of Aboriginal domestic workers at the Pilbara Strike, from the 1987 documentary How The West Was Lost.

In 2025, feminism has become dominated by its worst mutations. “Radical feminism” is obsessed with farcical concerns about cis women’s safety and “loss of identity”, at the expense of very real harm to trans women. Sex worker exclusionary feminism conflates sex work with sex trafficking, attacking sex workers as anti-feminist and without agency. Girlboss (or neoliberal) feminism is gender equality but only in boardrooms and seats of power.

Then there is the vicious strawman of feminism popularised by the right, that has turned feminism in the popular consciousness into little more than apolitical man-hating. Imitation movements imported from the US are springing up on this continent, that want to justify repealing abortion rights, putting women back in the home, incentivising motherhood with sexist economic policies, removing trans, intersex, queer people from public life and cutting them off from gender-affirming healthcare.

Already, ‘tough on crime’ laws mean that First Nations women will continue to be the fastest growing prison population and have higher rates of death in custody. Migrant women were disproportionately utilised in the Australian healthcare system during COVID-19 lockdowns and exposed to the virus as a result. For their service, migrants face mounting anti-immigrant sentiment.

The mounting right-wing attack must be challenged by a feminism rooted in revolutionary class struggle and militant unionism. Welfare, parental leave, family and domestic violence leave were all backed by a strong workers movement of the past. These gains gave women more freedom and agency, to break from abusive partners and to develop financial independence.

Migrant care workers in Canada organised for a decade to win permanent residency that is now granted upon their arrival in the country. This win here would mean that migrant women would no longer be tethered to bosses or spouses as a condition of their visas, and would prevent the use of deportation threats to force their silence in the face of abuse. It would enable migrant women to organise freely in their unions and bring their unique struggles into the light. The ‘epidemic’ of domestic violence can’t just be targeted culturally, appealing only to cisgender men to not use violence. It must be fought structurally.

Whatever our system looks like, and however it harms gender-marginalised people, workers keep that system going, and the withdrawal of our labour can bring that system to a halt and allow us to make counter-demands of those in power.

Since Australian unions have been defanged by four decades of anti-union attacks, it’s not just about asking people to become passive members of their unions, or showing up to the occasional protest. We need workers engaged in their unions, in their workplaces, building power and making demands of their unions to take up the mantle of feminist struggles. As workers, we need to organise around and connect issues of workplace discrimination, visa precarity, housing, incarceration, Deaths in Custody, reproductive rights, access to childcare, access to hormones and surgery, sexual and domestic violence.

As Anarchists and workers interested in the project of rebuilding a fighting workers movement as a bulwark against the right’s attacks, we come together in an Anarchist organisation united around shared goals and analysis. With a high level of agreement, we strategise together and plan our interventions in our unions and workplaces with the goal to eventually coordinate strike action across industries and even continents; in solidarity with workers struggles against gender oppression and genocide in the Global South. The focused power of the organised working class will be the necessary power to hold back the advance of the right in forcing trans people back into the closet and women back into the home, as well as global imperialist violence.

Instead of letting girlbosses and fascists tarnish the name of feminism, relying on advocacy campaigns that negotiate with government, on call out culture, or individual crusaders, we need to get organised to build a revolutionary counter power rooted in the working class that fights against gender oppression, and ultimately for the full liberation of all people on earth.