Extinction Phobia
On TERFism, Zionism and What (Still) Cannot Be Said
Extinction phobia is, at the most basic level, an irrational fear of annihilation. It is a kind of existential dread, which is a profound, deep-seated psychic or spiritual condition of insecurity and despair about the human condition and the meaning of life. There’s a lot of it going around these days, understandably so.
More than just merely dread, extinction phobia is a concept that confuses who has power in society by situating those without power in society as somehow capable of eliminating those who hold a great deal of power. This is the focus of an important piece of writing by political science scholar C. Heike Schotten, who argues that extinction phobia transforms into “right-wing annihilationism” — you know, the “great replacement theory” popular on the far right — via the dehumanization of those with less power, making them seem innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination. Schotten brings the idea of extinction phobia into play around two panics occurring now: one about trans people, the other about the state of Israel.
Recently, I explored the TERFism of white feminists like J.K. Rowling. TERFism is a belief in a narrow version of feminism, one that takes sex assignment at birth as immutable, a view that contradicts decades of biological science. For example, the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has spent a career investigating the violence done to intersex children, that is infants born with genitalia that is neither (or, both) “male” or “female.” In her classic book, Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling documents the way intersex infants are surgically altered by doctors to make the child’s body conform to the parents’ binary hopes about the gender of their child. From the file marked “every accusation a confession” are the transphobes like Rowling who scream about the supposed violence of sex reassignment surgery, freely chosen, when actual intersex infants are mutilated to make sure they fit the pink or blue expectations of their parents. It’s the stuff of the mirror-world.
Later in the day, I tweeted out some lines from Schotten’s article, “TERFism, Zionism, and Right-Wing Annihilationism: Toward an Internationalist Genealogy of Extinction Phobia,” and someone reported my posts as “hateful” speech. Someone on there alerted me to the fact that it might have been the word “cis” as in cisgender which flagged my post. I’m not sure.
So, being the stubborn cuss that I am, I took that as a challenge and am exploring Schotten’s argument more fully here. I think it’s a useful piece for connecting the “anti-gender” ideology of far-right authoritarians with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Let’s get into it.
In the article, Schotten argues that following Israel’s war on Lebanon in 1982, many Jewish people took the position that referring to Israel as a colonial power, similar to the United States’ policies of genocide against Native Americans, was tantamount to anti-semitism. For Jewish-identified feminists, there was an additional twist. Schotten writes:
"Needing to make sense of Israel's excesses in the face of an unquestioned Zionism ideologically established by the looming threat of a second Holocaust, American feminists......turned to Jewish identity to shore up their commitment to Israel, transforming the question of Zionism into the question of anti-Semitism and insisting that both were fundamentally existential questions regarding Jewish survival."
Here, Schotten points to a now famous article from Ms. Magazine in 1982 by American feminist Letty Pogrebin, called “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” which was published just before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. In that piece, Pogebrin said, “Like many Jews, I have come to consider anti-Zionism tantamount to anti-Semitism because the political reality is that its bottom line is an end to the Jews."
In the article, Pogrebin laments “how often I had noticed Jews omitted from the feminist litany of ‘the oppressed.’ " And this feels like a tell. To me, Pogebrin’s desire to be counted among ‘the oppressed’ reveals another constellation of desires: to be seen in a particular way, to be oppressed but not capable of enacting oppression. This is where this particular brand of Jewish feminism overlaps with the brand of white feminism I so often lament.
As Schotten observes, beginning in the 1980s Jewish women started to identify themselves as “Third World women." I remember some of these discussions about racism and anti-semitism in books like Yours in Struggle. But what stands out to me from this writing was the way that feminists struggled with the complicated ways that privilege and oppression informed the struggle.
What Schotten is highlighting is a different approach to identity and political struggle. For example, Schotten cites the example of a Jewish woman in a Black-Jewish discussion group, who explained her feelings this way: “I don't feel like I'm white people. . . . And sometimes I talk about feeling dark in situations even though I am fair-skinned and light-eyed, [but] I'm not like other white people.” It’s this contradiction - I may appear white but I’m not like other white people — that makes it possible for some Jewish women to position themselves as victims of racial oppression as Jews in the United States, while leaving aside the many ways that Jews became white and because of that had access to social resources in a way that Black people never have. For Jewish-identified feminists, then as now, the refusal to acknowledge Israel as a settler colonial state and the steadfast denial that the struggles of Palestinian women under occupation are feminist issues, leads down a path to imperial feminism.
Both Sandberg and Messing have announced documentary film projects that take up various aspects of hasbara, and Amy Schumer continues to light up social media with hot takes that end with her getting schooled by Dr. Bernice King (MLK’s daughter). If you’re ever wondering what kind of feminism you embrace, ask yourself if it’s the kind of feminism that is FOR the bombs dropping and the genocide or AGAINST them, then work backwards from there.
Zionist Feminist Extinction Phobia
For months now, I have wanted to write about the overlap I see between the nice white ladies I’ve written about and the ardent white women Zionists like Sandberg, Messing and Schumer but it has felt like that which could not be said. So I am even more grateful for Schotten’s analysis because it helps me articulate what is underneath their embrace of imperial feminism: extinction phobia. They are afraid of annihilation - as Jews, as women, as feminists - and they are trapped in a delusion that somehow their support for the state of Israel will save them from that, which it will not. What it does in fact is shore up support for a brutal regime that is grinding up the lives of Palestinians in front of us.
Their fear is similar to the extinction phobia experienced by some white, cisgender lesbians. Schotten points this out with the mention of the old subcultural lesbian TERF chestnut that “all the butches are becoming men,” a bromide that’s linked to several theorists here, including Sheila Jefferys, Janice Raymond and Mary Daly. These white TERFs lack any theorization of empire or colonialism.
Something else is at play here, as Schotten points out. These radical lesbian feminists write about “the transsexual empire” and American gynecology as the equivalent of the medical experimentation conducted in Nazi death camps. Yet this failed analogy deployed by TERFs reveals something crucial. For TERFs, the trans person is the unthinkable, the existential threat to the survival and integrity of a community, a culture, and indeed an entire people, just as the Palestinian is the unthinkable for the Zionist. Schotten again:
"By comparing 'gynocide' or the 'transsexual empire' to Nazism, [they] exploit an implicitly exceptionalist claim to unique Jewish victimization via the Holocaust, an exceptionalism they seek to apply to their feminist analyses of the exceptional victimization of (cis) women."
In other words, trans women — are seen as complicit with Nazis and as subjecting cis women— especially cis lesbian feminists — to a genocidal extinction scheme. It’s in this twisted logic of extinction phobia that cis women can only be safe if trans women are eliminated.
Why draw on the Nazi analogy? Because, Schotten contends, this invokes “Holocaust Exceptionalism,” the Eurocentric worldview that obfuscates the history of racism and colonization by singling out the genocide of Jews in twentieth-century Europe as historically, morally, or politically unprecedented and unparalleled. I mean, that was certainly the version I was taught in my honors history class at Spring High School in Texas, and it turns out to be the cornerstone of Zionism.
What (Still) Cannot Be Said
The platforms we engage through now are the arbiters of speech. We do not have anything like the “free speech” imagined by some as unfettered. What we have is platform capitalism with teeny-tiny possibilities for dissent around the edges of the machine. The “marketplace of ideas” is an illusion, a myth, a hologram.
On these platforms, we say what the affordances of each platform allow us to say. On TikTok, people say “unalived” and “S.A.” because the algorithm will delete videos with the words “murder” or “sexual assault.” And, as I’ve discovered on that platform and others, it is impossible to talk about “white supremacy” because the algorithms will flag it as “hate speech,” even if you’re against it. On Twitter, it’s not the word “trans” or even “Nazi” that will get my post removed, it’s the mention of “cis” or “cisgender.”
The only way to know where the boundaries of dissent are is to keep pushing up against them. We have to keep critiquing the powerful, even when they are trapped in a delusion of victimhood fueled by their fear of extinction.