Western feminists must support Iranian women

This year I’ve offended the Russians, the Chinese, jihadists, the Labour Party and monetarists. So, now: Western feminists.

Women across the world were rightly on the streets before the judicial ink was dry when the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, and with it access to abortion rights for millions of women.

Iranian women might question why Western feminists remain quieter over a Muslim woman’s choice whether to wear a hijab.

Thousands of Iranian women have been risking their lives in Tehran streets since the death of Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old was arrested for wearing ‘‘bad hijab’’ and died in custody. Their Syrian and Kurd sisters have protested too, not against the hijab, but against being forced to wear it and against the enforcement of misogynist laws by ‘‘morality police’’.

Many Western feminists have tilted their heads with compassion, but the inactivity over decades is hard to miss.

Days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran in 1979, feminist icon Kate Millett jumped on a plane to Tehran. She joined arms with women protesting against the mullahs’ introduction of a mandatory dress code for women.

Veiled women, alongside unveiled women, threw their fists into the air, demanding gender equality. Kate Millett was arrested and expelled for accurately calling the Ayatollah a misogynist.

I’ve been trying to work out where Kate Millett’s successors went for the next 40 years while we have been confronted by a gender apartheid.

One possibility is that the ‘‘intersectionality’’ movement has changed feminist analysis. Intersectional analysis was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberle´ Crenshaw to describe the ‘‘intersection’’ of race, class, gender and other individual characteristics. She meant to highlight how, for example, a workingclass African-American woman will experience the world differently to a middle-class white woman.

But the insight into people’s lived experience has been weaker at working out how to respond. Somewhere along the way, class was dropped.

Crenshaw said intersectionality isn’t ‘‘an effort to create the world in an inverted image of what it is now’’. She doesn’t want to replicate existing power dynamics and cultural structures to give people of colour power over white people. She wants to get rid of those power dynamics altogether.

That is not where intersectionality has gone. It is now a dominant idea in modern left-wing politics. It holds that personal characteristics such as race and gender are not irrelevant to character, but crucial to it.

If your identity is inescapable and more important than your ideas then the experience of the mullahs of Iran trump the views of a Western white woman.

Activists, who know where they stand when the oppressor is awhite man, are confused when it is Muslim men subjugating women. The ayatollahs have not had the pile-on that has been directed at ‘‘heretic’’ JK Rowling. (Rowling supports trans rights and also believes biological women are real.) It’s not only in Iran that heresy is punished more than misogyny.

The ayatollahs have not had difficulty identifying women. That clarity tells us, also, of the repression of the hidden lives of gay and trans Iranians. We can stand up for the rights of all genders without diminishing the identity of Iranian women. Rights beget rights. Gender apartheid, enforced by law, is an affront to feminist and liberal values, whatever your identity.

Intersectionality creates a hierarchy of the more or less deserving, in which meddling in the matter of the veil is meddling in the indigenous traditions of another people. But human rights are based on our shared humanity.

I support the right of Muslim women to wear hijab in New Zealand if they choose. The issue is not about whether you or I approve of hijab. It is about the right of Iranian women to be free from violence and to make their own choices about what to wear.

Jacinda Ardern deserved global attention for wearing hijab in the mosque after the Christchurch terror attack. Imagine if she had used that international brand now to call for the freedom of Iranian women. What she actually did was, lamely, call for an investigation, the modern echo of those in the 1970s who claimed they couldn’t judge apartheid because they hadn’t been to South Africa.

No investigation is needed to support Iranian women. They have been fighting for more than 40 years for the right to choose what they wear without being raped, tortured or murdered. Our Iranian sisters need us now to defend their right to choose not to wear the hijab.

The Western progressive movement needs to move on from cultural or gender relativism and rediscover the moral clarity of icons like Kate Millett.

I’ve been trying to work out where Kate Millett’s successors went for the next 40 years . . .