“It didn’t cross anyone’s mind that Women’s Day could become the first day of the revolution.” Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution.

ISL Women and LGBT+ Committee

Women and LGBT+ community will once again take to the streets to confront the attacks of the governments driven by the growing and bold reactionary and anti-rights far-right. To defeat them, we need more mobilization, organization and the construction of a socialist and revolutionary alternative so that patriarchy and capitalism fall together.

The reactionary offensive against mobilization

Social polarization is a worldwide aspect of reality that heithens the socialism or barbarism dilemma. The far-right has managed to reach the government in important countries in all continents. Within the framework of an anti democratic and social rights agenda they attack the rights seized by women and the LGBT+ community.

At the beginning of his second term, Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring U.S. federal agencies to “acknowledge that women are biologically female and men are biologically male” . During his first speech he stated the following: “I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” He also suspended funding for 90 days for HIV programs. UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS) estimates that, without such funding, the number of deaths between 2025 and 2029 could increase by 400%, That’s about 6.3 million preventable deaths. In addition to that, during their conservative speeches, Trump and billionaire Elon Musk defended “traditional family” and the “submissive place of women”.

At the beginning of 2025 at the Davos Forum, Argetina’s president Javier Milei launched a violent speech against the LGBT+ community. As an answer to it, thousands of people mobilized. A year earlier, he also denied gender inequality and spoke against the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy (IVE) Law with the intention of overturning it as soon as he had a majority in Parliament.

There are also examples of the European far-right that try to recycle their chauvinist and retrograde image with a sort of “feminization” of some governments, such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine Le Pen in France. Beyond the nuances between the two, they are anti-migrant, xenophobic and racist, mainly against Muslims and Africans, identifying them as enemies of the Western lifestyle that allegedly defends the rights of women and the LGBT+ community. Of course, none of this means defending their rights, but a policy at the service of the anti-rights agenda.

Islamic fundamentalism represents another reactionary element. In 2023, a year after the murder of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian regime’s religious police, Parliament voted to impose harsher penalties on women who do not wear the hijab in public. In most of Africa, women still struggle with child marriage, genital mutilation and lack of economic independence, among other brutalities of patriarchal violence. Amendments voted earlier this year by Iraq’s parliament could allow child marriage from the age of 9, as amendments to the Personal Status Law give greater authority to Islamic courts in family matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance.

These are some examples of the political and religious reactionary offensive that emerged with the boost of the far-right after the ebb of the feminist wave that swept the world between 2015 and 2019.

Feminization of poverty on the rise

UN Women’s 2023 Report warns that gender equality remains a distant goal and, at the current rate, would take around 300 years to achieve. Women face significant barriers in the labor market, earning only 51 cents for every dollar earned by men and spending more time in unpaid and unrecognized work. In addition, gender-based violence remains a serious issue. One in four people believe mistreatment of women is justified.

The feminization of poverty and violence are increasing at the same pace as economic crises, climate change and wars. It is essential to emphasize that, according to the UN, 70% of the deaths caused by the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in Gaza are women and children. Three years of war in Ukraine have resulted in detrimental effects on the mental, physical, sexual and reproductive health of women. In Ethiopia, sexual crimes perpetrated against girls and women in times of war constitute war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Our answer must be radically anti-capitalist, revolutionary and internationalist.

Mobilization in response to the attacks has not stopped and, at different rates, continues to grow and expand. While the far-right is emboldened and ready to attack their rights, women and the LGBT+ community answer by taking to the streets. There were large mobilizations in Brazil against the attack on the right to abortion. In Argentina, the anti-fascist and anti-racist pride mobilizations continue and there were massive mobilizations on 8M and 25N of 2024 in several countries.

There should be no room for confusion when it comes to governments of false left or false progressivism, which claim to be feminist and even socialist, but under which the reality is not very different from that of those countries governed by the right: the feminization of poverty increases, abortion is criminalized in all circumstances and there continue to be serious violations of the human rights of women, girls and LGTB+ people.

That is why it is important that the women’s movement and LGBT+ join the call from revolutionary feminism for the broadest unity of action in the streets to stop and defeat this regressive offensive. Every feminist or LGBT+ group, and every political, union, youth or popular organization that claims to be democratic, must take part in this unity to mobilize.

It is necessary to explicitly denounce anti-rights leaders and organizations and show how their campaigns and proposals affect the daily lives of women and the LGBT+ community. Our emancipatory program includes full gender equality in education, health, employment and other areas; the fight against violence, hate crimes, femicides and transvesticides; the right to sex education, contraception and abortion; freedom regarding attire and the rejection of any related imposition; equal access to land, housing and inheritance; the socialization of caregiving tasks; the secularity of the State.

We must confront reformism, which gears struggles towards institutional “ways out”; radical feminism, which sees men as the main enemy; the identity based currents, which divide the movement by prioritizing differences; and autonomous feminism, which dilutes the protagonism of the workers’ movement.

Mobilization as an answer against the reactionary offensive throughout the world is inevitable, its strength will depend on the organization and political orientation of the radicalized vanguard. In this situation, we revolutionaries have the urgent task of mobilizing thousands of activists, youth and workers willing to fight for a revolutionary project with the aim of influencing the course of future struggles and lay the foundations of a party that represents the working class and defends socialism. As long as patriarchal capitalism subsists, women and dissidents will only achieve partial advances, which are always at risk. As Trotsky said about a just and egalitarian society: “Genuine emancipation of women is inconceivable without a general rise of economy and culture, without the destruction of the petty-bourgeois economic family unit, without the introduction of socialized food preparation, and education.“

This March 8th, different activities will take place again in many countries: mobilizations and other initiatives. The sections of the International Socialist League will be an active part of the calls in the different countries where we will once again strongly discuss the fact that struggle against patriarchal oppression cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalist exploitation. At the service of this struggle, from the International Socialist League, we place all our efforts to regroup revolutionaries internationally and transform everything in order to live free from all oppression, exploitation and violence.