The WDI USA 2025 National Convention, September 19-21
By aurora linnea
The city bus that ferried me from the airport into Indianapolis lurched and juddered through an American Midwest the droughty ochre of Road Warrior, somewhere between “skin tone” pantyhose and 1970s linoleum. The grass and the buildings were this same dispiriting shade, and so too the houses, their windows and porches patchworked with plastic tarps, billowing raggedly in the overwarm breeze. It was hot in Indianapolis. We rolled past a gas station advertising “Fried Chicken and Liquor” and then past a Wendy’s, the sign outside of which did not hype the latest Frosty flavor or Baconator combo deal, as one might expect, as would after all be entirely the standard for fast food signage. But no. In somber all caps, the sign announced: “MISFORTUNE AWAITS / LUCKY YOU.”
So this was Indiana, land of the doomsayer burger franchise. It is fair to say I had my misgivings.
The bus was the final phase of my travels to the WDI USA convention, where I was scheduled to speak the next day. Misfortune awaits? I wrote to my friend to relay the Wendy’s oracle’s prophecy, since it suddenly seemed prudent to leave a clue as to where to begin looking for my bones if I were to fall out of touch. “Too on the nose,” came his reply. I tracked the bus’s route carefully on my phone, intent that I would not miss my stop and so be swallowed into whatever vortex of the rust-colored unknown. When at last I tumbled into the hotel, in the ambery beige silence of my room the enormous television greeted me by name. “Good afternoon, Aurora,” the television said, and invited me to be soothed to sleep later that evening by none other than Gwenyth Paltrow herself. Lucky me.
This year’s convention was WDI USA’s fourth, its theme, “Growing the Women’s Liberation Movement.” In line with this theme, there was from the first moments a pronounced emphasis on galvanizing women to get organized locally, in their own communities. Dinner on Friday was seated by region, to foster connections between women well-positioned to collaborate offline and in the flesh. This was followed by a structured networking session (which I confess I did not attend, my negligible social faculties exhausted by that juncture, though I fully support such activities in theory); and, glancing through the schedule of events, I was pleased to note talks and workshops on creating in-person women’s groups and gatherings, on taking local action, eager as I am for dissident women to prowl further and further out from behind our screens, to take up more physical space in the real live material world.
Kara Dansky spoke Friday after dinner about the present state of the feminist movement to halt what she terms transgenderism’s “abolition of sex,” charting our progress in relation to the nonviolent social change activist Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan. Dansky placed us at Stage 6: “Majority Public Support.” It is now a fact that the larger part of Americans support single-sex spaces, services, and sports for women; most Americans believe that a person’s sex is a question of biology, not personal affinity; the chemical and surgical remodeling of children’s bodies in deference to patriarchal sex-role stereotypes is frowned upon by more Americans than celebrate it. As we would learn from a later panel of young women formerly seduced by transgenderism’s promises of escape from lowly femaleness, the number of detransitioners and desisters has also seen a rapid increase in recent years, with detrans subreddit populations roughly ten times what they were in 2019. Yet majority public support, as Dansky reminded us, is not success. Too much power remains on the side of men determined to advance male entitlement and medical industry profiteering at the expense of women and girls’ safety, well-being, dignity, and bodily integrity. Misfortune awaits: as long as male rule endures, men’s egos and earning potential will reign supreme.
But it was also obvious to me that women are feeling far closer to success today, in 2025, than they were three short years ago, when I traveled to Washington D.C. for the first WDI USA convention in 2022. Undeniably, a dramatic shift in the collective energy has taken place: not so many women are in hiding now. Fewer women are gagged by the hypervigilant self-consciousness that for too long held us mute; we are not so wary now, not so reticent and shrinking, like dogs who stop mid-bark for fear of the scolding blow abuse has taught them to see coming. To gather together feels less a balm for isolation’s sting than a chance to catalyze and conspire. It was palpable, in that Indianapolis hotel conference room, that women are less afraid than we were three years ago.
The culture is shifting, within the feminist movement and outside of it. More women have had enough of shutting their eyes, stopping up their ears for men, lying for men, and kowtowing to men. More and more women are done with all that, finally, and thank goodness. I understand the excitement my sisters are feeling now; I want to share it; cautiously, uneasily, I do. I am relieved, at the very least, to watch the mainstream begin sheepishly to steer its course away from lockstep capitulation to transgenderist delusion and dogma. Women’s opposition has reaped real successes; of course these should be celebrated. Yet I struggle – and I know I am far from alone in this – to feel optimistic in this manmade world. Even as we succeed in kindling a small light to flicker in one room, a dozen other rooms in the Fathers’ manor darken more ominously than before. Misfortune awaits: patriarchy prevails, and the men are raging. As Lorraine Nowlin reflected during her talk on uniting women across the lines of hostility and loyalty that racism has drawn, male animosity and aggression towards women would appear to be on the ascendant, its viciousness intensifying not only in the United States, but worldwide. Men’s violence is becoming ever more erratic, more fevered and unhinged. When men sense the dominance that they claim as their birthright under threat, they resort to terrorism to bear it up, we know this: we have every reason to fear anxious, embittered, desperate men. Transgenderism has been one strategy in the backlash against feminist disruption of the patriarchal operations; now that it is foundering, I worry the next tack will be more barefacedly femicidal.
It’s not as if the women of WDI USA are unaware of what we are up against. Alongside presentations that addressed transgenderism and its ills – the patriarchal state’s ushering of male rapists into women’s prisons, for example, or so-called “gender medicine’s” crassly cynical exploitation of young women’s self-hatred – there were talks on men’s holy war against abortion, on racist misogyny, and pornography’s role in men’s sexual abuse of girl children. Women spoke about the dispossession of Afghan women precipitated by the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. And women spoke about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, 23, stabbed to death on a North Carolina commuter train for the misdeed of being female in public.
Misfortune awaits: men are doubling down in defense of male dominion. The war on women is hurtling towards its next phase.
On Saturday afternoon I had the great privilege of speaking to women about the history of patriarchal body horror, drawing on my new(ish) book, Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life (Spinifex, 2024). My talk was perfectly followed by Amy Sousa, who, with all her tireless flair and verve, presented on some of the many, many ways that this body horror manifests today: in a rhetoric that dissects bodies into “Build-a-Bear” sets of swappable buy-and-sellable bits and pieces; and in the institutionalization of social norms that proscribe attention to one’s physiological, instinctual perceptions of the world. Sousa argued that we are being systematically indoctrinated out of the recognition of our own gut feelings. Humans, she said, are the only animals who teach their offspring to discount their instincts. Senses dulled, creatures reared into such distrust of themselves make easy prey. And who is it that waits, in the dark and in the light, to exploit their manufactured vulnerability? We know this. It has not changed.
On Saturday night, alone in my hotel room, I watched on the enormous television half of a true crime documentary about an 18-year-old girl who disappeared while visiting home during her spring break from college. It was a big mystery, except it wasn’t: the girl had been raped and murdered and discarded half-buried under a house by her stepfather. We know who the predators are. Misfortune awaits.
But male dominion is not, as we also know, a misfortune; it is not a stroke of bad luck, not some ill-starred twist of fate, an unhappy accident. Instead, male dominion is a political architecture built and rebuilt and fortified and fiercely defended to keep women lowdown and hurting, violated, victimized, hungry, dependent and terrorized into submission, so that we betray ourselves over and over and betray our daughters and our sisters as we struggle just to survive, socially or economically or psychically. But lucky us: because of organizations like WDI USA, the women’s liberation movement is growing, it is gaining force, and we are getting braver. Which is just as it must be, for we will need to be brave, and braver and braver still, for the times to come.
To watch recordings of the convention’s incredible lineup of presentations and panels, you can visit the WDI USA Youtube page.
Aurora linnea is a radical (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North American colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth. She is the author of Man Against Being: Body Horror & the Death of Life published by Spinifex Press.
