While I agree that there are multiple feminisms, and space within the movement for conversations, for the movement to actually achieve anything, we have to build from a set common assumptions and understandings, and we have to be able to do this with some conviction. We need to be able to agree on a trans-inclusive, anti-racist feminism and we need to be very careful not to replicate broader systems of inequity by having the movement lead by its most privileged members. We need to look to our Indigenous sisters, to women and trans people of colour, to queer-identified folks, to women with disabilities, women without (immigration) status, working class women, sex workers and migrant women. We need to look to the people who are hurt the most, not just by patriarchy as we understand it — as a product of the state and of capitalism and of misogynistic culture — but also, by misogynistic feminism, a term I never thought I’d have to use before Wednesday.

As for what is and isn’t feminist: the fact is, that’s a messy and pretty problematic question, and I wish Steve Paikin had listened when I, and other panelists, expressed as much. No, I’m not the feminist police. All I can do is find ways of living the feminism I want to see, and re-adjusting as I ask questions and, yes, listen to the answers. I can only continue to work to find ways of destroying and re-imagining the very systems upon which patriarchy situates — focusing on broader issues like violence, economic and environmental injustice, racism and sexual and reproductive rights — all the issues that we visit, and, more importantly revisit here at Shameless. As a feminist, I can deconstruct these issues through a gendered lens, but it’s an incomplete analysis to just end there. I do believe we should work to a universal feminism, one that is inclusive and intersectional, one that perhaps can start with sex and gender, but should never — ever — end there, and one that doesn’t, and will not ever centre itself in Naomi Wolf’s vagina