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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.

There has been a rise in the political power of organised religions in both western countries and the non-west in the last two decades. There has been desecularisation of the public sphere in countries such as the UK and Australia which takes the form of deliberate government policy both to consult with ‘faith communities’ and to create an influential role for them in policy formation. These developments are likely to endanger sexual equality because the religious organisations are usually discriminatory with respect to gender and sexuality, both in their employment practices and their ideologies. This article will examine the ways in which desecularisation has been taking place in the UK and Australia and the implications of this for sexual equality.

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.

This article examines a developing trend in the prostitution industry in the western world, the boom in escort prostitution. Escort prostitution, operating through mobile phones and the Internet, is supplanting the brothel as the major form in which prostituted women are delivered to male buyers. Policy-makers who promote the legalization of the prostitution industry have argued that this policy will make prostituted women and girls safer and combat organized crime. These assumptions are based upon the idea that prostitution will take place in brothels which can institute health and safety codes, and enable easy identification of the illegal brothel industry which can be closed down. Escort prostitution provides particular challenges to the regulation of prostitution because there is no way in which it can be controlled or made “safe.” Alongside the other harms associated with prostitution which are exacerbated in legalized regimes, this development provides a significant reason why the policy of legalization is doomed to fail in achieving its objectives. The problems associated with the escort boom will be examined in relation to the state of Queensland in Australia, and the Netherlands, jurisdictions in which the prostitution industry has been legalized. Pages 1–25

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

This article is a critical feminist analysis of the UK Gender Recognition Act of 2004. This Act is radical in enabling transgenders to gain certificates recognising their new ‘acquired gender’ without undergoing hormonal or surgical treatment. The Act has considerable implications for marriage, for motherhood and fatherhood, for women who are the partners of men or women who ‘transition’ and for ‘women-only’ spaces. It is based on confusing and contradictory notions of the difference between sex and gender. As such it should be of great interest to feminists but there has been a dearth of feminist commentary. The understandings of sex and gender and of the importance of the Act will be explored here through analysis of the parliamentary debates and public responses.

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.

This article examines a recent tendency amongst researchers of sex tourism to include women within the ranks of sex tourists in destinations such as the Caribbean and Indonesia. It argues that a careful attention to the power relations, context, meanings and effects of the behaviours of male and female tourists who engage in sexual relations with local people, makes it clear that the differences are profound. The similarities and differences are analysed here with the conclusion that it is the different positions of men and women in the sex class hierarchy that create such differences. The political ideas that influence the major protagonists in this debate to include or exclude women will be examined. The article ends with a consideration of the problematic implications of arguing that women do it too .

Although aspects of the prostitution industry in the state of Victoria in Australia have been legalized, the large growth in both the now legal and the illegal sectors and increase in the traffickingof women to meet the large demand for paid sexual services indicate that the legislation has not met its intended purposes of minimizing the harm in prostitution and stemming criminal involvement in and controlling expansion of the industry.

(2002). The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices. International Feminist Journal of Politics: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 72-94.

This article analyses the developing industry of body modification, in which cutting, tattooing and piercing are carried out in studios for profit. It seeks to offer a feminist understanding of this industry which places it on a continuum of harmful cultural practices that include self-mutilation in private, transsexual surgery, cosmetic surgery and other harmful western beauty practices. The ideology created by industry practitioners, that ‘body modification’ replicates the spiritual practices of other cultures, reclaims the body, or is transgressive, is supported by the use of postmodern feminist theory. These ideas are criticized here. On the contrary, it will be suggested that such harmful cultural practices of self-mutilation are sought, or carried out on, those groups who occupy a despised social status, such as women, lesbians and gay men, disabled people and women and men who have suffered sexual abuse in childhood or adulthood.

This article argues that contemporary concern about ending child prostitution is misdirected in its strategy. Some theorists and activists, even the ILO, are seeking to create a distinction between adult and child prostitution as if child prostitution could be ended whilst adult prostitution remains intact. The motivation for the distinction relies upon trends in the 1990s to characterize men's prostitution abuse of adult women as constituting legitimate work, choice and agency for the women themselves, and to construct a profitable prostitution industry which can create profits for governments and sex industrialists. I will argue that child and adult prostitution are inextricably interlinked, both in personnel (the women and children work together), in terms of the abusers (who make no distinctions), in the harm they cause and in that both constitute harmful traditional practices which must be ended. The acceptance of men's prostitution abuse as the basis for the industrialization of adult prostitution i...

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.

(1999). Globalizing sexual exploitation: sex tourism and the traffic in women. Leisure Studies: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 179-196.

Feminist analysis of transsexualism such as that of Janice Raymond has seen it as a deeply conservative phenomenon in which surgical mutilation is employed to maintain the genders of male dominance...

The Practice Of Love: lesbian sexuality and perverse desire TERESA DE LAURETIS, 1994 Bloomington: Indiana University Press The Lesbian Postmodern LAURA DOAN (Ed.), 1994 New York: Columbia University Press