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Synopsis This article is a feminist response to the campaigning activism and queer and transgender theory which promotes the ‘degendering’ of public toilets. This campaign originates in the demands of men who transgender to access women's toilets. Activists argue that sex segregation of toilets is the result of nineteenth century moralism and is a discriminatory practice. They say that degendered toilets would be safer for women because the good men would protect women from aggressors, and they show a remarkable degree of insensitivity to women's needs and interests. The campaign is increasingly effective, with schools in the US and local councils in the UK moving to degender toilets in response. This article will argue that the safety of women as a group requires that toilet provision should remain sex segregated or take the form of individual cubicles that offer privacy and safety to all users.

Synopsis This article argues that the emerging practice of transgendering children should be seen as a form of gender eugenics which has similarities with the practice of sexual surgeries carried out as a result of eugenics ideas in the early twentieth century. In the earlier period those suffering severe poverty, homosexuals, criminals, people with mental health problems and disabilities, and gypsies were sterilized. Presently, in Australia, children as young as 10 who are identified as suffering from ‘gender identity disorder’ are, with the connivance of the Family Court, placed on puberty delaying drugs. These drugs, if they are followed at age 16 with cross-sex hormones, sterilize the children. The similarities between earlier eugenics practices and the transgenderism of the present include the origin of the practices in the ideas of sex scientists, psychiatrists, biologists and endocrinologists, one of the target groups, lesbians and gays, support by ‘progressive’ sections of society, including some on the Left and some feminists.

Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics was pivotal for the developing second wave feminist movement. It was regarded as very important both by feminists at the time and by the media. Time magazine labelled Millett as the Mao Tse-Tung of women's liberation, but the book is not as well known today as might be expected for a work that had such an impact. In this article I seek to remedy the neglect of Sexual Politics. I examine the problem of why her work has been buried and suggest that the main reason was the development of a pro-sex feminist politics in the academy. Millett demonstrated the importance of sexual practice in the subordination of women, she showed that sex was political. She showed how male left intellectuals of the 1960s wrote famous erotica which treated women as disgusting objects to be violated. She described many of the misogynist ideas in these works which have formed the stock in trade of the very profitable pornography industry which has developed in recent decades. I argue that her work should be seen as a progenitor of later anti-pornography campaigns and regarded with the respect accorded to other significant social theorists.

Synopsis This article looks at the increasing links between the sex industry and business in the form of executives and companies using strip clubs and brothels to network and broker deals, using prostituted women as bribes, or offering visits to brothels as Christmas bonuses. This problem is only just beginning to be recognized by feminist researchers and feminist activists. The factors that are creating this problem are the normalization of the sex industry, and in some cases its legalization and decriminalization, the entry of women to previously male dominated industries and professions, and the difficulty some men in business have in relating to women as equals. This sex industry use constitutes a serious obstacle to the achievement of women's equal opportunities in business sectors where it takes place. Women employees have less chance to create the relationships and deals that would enable them to gain promotion and recognition, and may have to suffer indignities visited upon them by male colleagues on their return from sex industry venues.

Within the academy the 'sex work' position, i.e. that prostitution should be understood as legitimate work, and an expression of women's choice and agency, has become the dominant perspective. Most feminist scholars now take this point of view or show sympathy towards it. The critical approach to prostitution that was almost universal amongst feminists from the nineteenth century up till the 1980s, that prostitution arises from and symbolizes the subordination of women, is much less often expressed. The 'sex work' position has been extended to the issue of trafficking of women into prostitution through the transformation of trafficking into 'migration for labour' (Agustin, 2007). This new approach to trafficking, which draws a veil over the human rights issues involved and carefully removes the issue of the destination of the vast majority of trafficking in women, prostitution, from view, is fast becoming predominant amongst feminist academics writing on the issue in the fields of development studies and migration studies (Jeffreys, 2006). Unfortunately, some of the articles in this issue of Women's Studies International Forum demonstrate some of the common elements and problems of the new dominant ideology amongst feminist scholars. The 'sex work' position emerged from some sex workers' rights organizations in the 1980s (Jeness 1993). It gained strength from a sexual liberalism which portrayed pornography and prostitution as forms of 'freedom', and rejected any suggestion that they might be abusive to women (Jeffreys, 1990). This sexual liberalism was identified by its supporters as 'sex-positive' and those, mainly radical feminists, who criticize the whole construction of sexuality under male dominance as the eroticizing of women's subordination and argue for total transformation, as 'sex-negative'. This sexual liberalism joined up with the economic ideology of neo-liberalism in the next two decades to the point where the industries of pornography and prostitution came to be seen by governments as nice little earners (Jeffreys, 2009). Milton Friedman, the American sage of neo-liberalism, argued that pornography and prostitution should be decriminalized and subject to the ordinary rules of the market (Ammeson, 2006). As a result of these trends the global sex industry has been legalized, tolerated and normalized, and has become hugely profitable for domestic economies and in the global economy. Women's bodies are now well and truly launched into the marketplace as the basis of large profits for many different enterprises, the telecommunications companies that carry pornography, the credit card companies that the male buyers use, the banks that lend to the industry, strip club chains, the governments that tax legalized prostitution, the governments that gain foreign currency from the women sent abroad as 'entertainers'. In the global economy women from poor countries are trafficked to richer ones, or used in situ by prostitution tourists in what I define as the 'outsourcing of women's subordination' (Jeffreys, 2009). Meanwhile the average earnings of the prostituted women, whose vaginas and anuses are the raw materials of this industry, are well below the average wage in western countries (DeRiviere, 2006). It is radical feminists and those whom the writers in this issue call 'abolitionists', i.e. those who seek to rein in men's behaviour in the prostitution of women, that have called these processes into question... Keywords: Human trafficking Language: en

Synopsis This article argues that women in the military are in double jeopardy. They face the danger of rape from their male colleagues as well as the ordinary dangers of being killed or wounded by the enemy. They are used to send messages from one masculine military to another in their very bodies. This is particularly clear in the case of Lynndie England and the Abu Ghraib tortures where her womanhood, and sexual use of her by her comrades, were used as weapons to humiliate Iraqi prisoners. This sexual violence from their own side is the result of the fact that militaries are founded upon an aggressive masculinity that is vital to enable warfare to continue. For this reason the argument that it is important from the point of view of equal opportunities for women to be in all areas of the military, including the frontline, falls down. If aggressive masculinity is the necessary foundation of the military rather than being an unfortunate hangover of patriarchy, then women cannot be equal in this institution. Women's organizations should not be using the language of women's rights in calling for the subjection of women to these forms of violence.

Synopsis In April 2004, the Family Court of Australia made the decision that a 13-year-old girl, said to be suffering from gender identity disorder (GID), should be treated as a boy and embark upon a course of female hormone treatment to suppress menstruation. The treatment is expected to change to the administration of male hormones at 16, and surgery after she reaches 18. This decision is in line with a developing trend internationally to normalise the phenomenon of sex reassignment. I shall argue that gender identity disorder is a social construction created by the medical profession, and that it is culturally and historically specific. By imposing a diagnosis and treatment that will cause irreversible changes to an adolescent underaged girl's body, this decision should be seen as judicial child abuse rather than an enlightened decision in the child's best interests.

In this article, I shall examine the ideas and practices of the bisexual movement that has developed in the Western world in the last decade. I shall offer a lesbian feminist critique. Bisexual theorists and activists have formulated critiques of lesbian feminism at their conferences and in anthologies of their writings. Lesbian feminists have been described as “gender fascists,” as monosexists, and as biphobic for their failure to embrace bisexuals in theory or in person, but little has been published from a lesbian feminist perspective on these developments. I argue that bisexual politics, rather than forming a superior form of feminism, tends toward a belief in the naturalness of desire, a revaluing of the heterosexual imperative that women should love men, and an undermining of the power and resistance involved in the lesbian feminist decision to choose for women and not men.

This article suggests that the developing field of lesbian and gay studies shows a likelihood to discriminate against the interests of lesbians and certainly against lesbian feminist theory through the incorporation of a ‘queer’ perspective. Recent writings in the field suggest that ‘queer’ theory and politics are and should be based on the celebration of certain specifically male gay cultural forms, particularly those of camp and drag. The importance of camp as well as a worrying tendency to want to protect the study of sexuality from the intrusion of feminist insights promises to create lesbian and gay studies which disappear lesbians.

The history of sex in the last 100 years has generally been represented as a triumphant march from Victorian prudery into the light of sexual freedom. From a feminist perspective the picture is different. During the last wave of feminism women, often represented as prudes and puritans by historians, waged a massive campaign to transform male sexual behaviour in the interests of women. They campaigned against the abuse of women in prostitution, the sexual abuse of children, and marital rape. This article describes the women's activities in the social purity movement, and the increasingly militant stance taken by some pre-war feminists who refused to relate sexually to men, in the context of the developing feminist analysis of sexuality. The main purpose of the paper is to show that in order to understand the significance of this aspect of the women's movement we must look at the area of sexuality not merely as a sphere of personal fulfilment but as an arena of struggle in which male dominance and women's subordination can be most powerfully reinforced and maintained or fundamentally challenged.