Can we find a way through and even around the messy “gender wars” currently raging on-and offline? A 2021 profile of Finn Mackay in The Guardian described them as “the writer hoping to help end the gender wars”. However, in the days leading up to this conversation in early April 2022, the UK government reneged on their promise to ban conversion therapy for trans people and Finn acknowledges that the gender wars have significantly worsened in the time following the publication of their book, Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars, in 2021. In this conversation, Finn explores the histories of feminist exclusions; the deepening political antagonism towards the trans community; the performance of gender; and much more.

Finn Mackay is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England. A longstanding feminist activist, Finn founded the London Feminist Network in 2004 and is a frequent media commentator on feminist and LGBTQI+ topics.

Jana Bacevic is assistant professor at Durham University, UK, and member of the editorial board of The Philosopher. Her work is in social theory, philosophy of science, and political economy of knowledge production, with particular emphasis on the relationship between epistemological, moral and political elements.

Jana Bacevic (JB): Your recent work has drawn attention to the fact that the so-called “gender wars” have a longer intellectual history than most people realize. What are some of the key points in the history of this debate, especially when it comes to the UK and the US?

Finn Mackay (FM): There are many different lineages here, but Iwill focus on the feminist history. I come from a political background of organizing in the women's liberation movement and the women's peace movement. I have worked with radical feminists and radical feminist organizations, and I have learned a lot from radical feminists and revolutionary feminists, who themselves had been active in legacy building, protest and legal campaigning back in the 1970s and 1980s. I have also been involved in LGBT organizing and queer community-building for a long time.

As a result, I have been especially saddened to see radical feminism, a politics that I identified with and resonated with, being used in name to beat other minoritized groups: trans, transgender and queer people. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what radical feminism is generally, and particularly on this question.