Alice Schwarzer, journalist: ‘We are facing profound changes in the relationship between the sexes. It’s dangerous’

Alice Schwarzer, who has been among the most famous and influential German feminists since the 1970s, is seated at a café in the Berlin neighborhood of Wilmerdorf. After more than an hour of conversation, she offers a wry smile: “Before you sits a cancelled person!” Schwarzer (Wuppertal, 81 years old) says that in Germany, they have stopped inviting her to talk shows. Her opinions on the war in Ukraine are no longer well-received, even though, she says, they are those of the majority. Many people who previously admired her are puzzled by these views, as well as her thoughts on immigration and trans rights.

Schwarzer, founder, editor and director of the magazine Emma, has had a first-row seat for a half-century of feminist struggle. Her Simone de Beauvoir Today: Conversations, 1972-1982 (Chatto and Windus, 1984), a book of interviews she conducted with the French philosopher, explain as much about Schwarzer as they do Beauvoir. At this point, criticism matters little to her — a point that becomes clear in this interview.

Question. What would Simone de Beauvoir think about the situation in which women find themselves today?

Answer. She would be horrified by the complete victory of capitalism and the unimaginable extent to which women are commodified. The internet and globalization were unthinkable to her. Today we are faced with some problems having multiplied hundredfold. There have also been some advances.

Q. The progress has been enormous.

A. Yes. Women are governmental leaders, they’re going to space. A portion of fathers care for their children. But there has been a step backward as well that has to do, in part, with globalization and capitalism. We are in a phase of profound changes to the relationship between the sexes, and that is always dangerous. We can also see it in the magnitude of the visible rise of violence in relationships. Many things are being perverted in the name of progress.

Q. For example?

A. Transsexuality. There have been a few thousands of people in Germany who were so uncomfortable with their body that they would have done anything to escape it. They had to and have to be assisted in this, and were able to change their gender identity. I’ve been speaking out against this since 1983. But on November 1, 2024, a law will take effect in Germany that they already have in Spain, the so-called “law of self-determination.” They present it as something progressive. Pure mockery.

Q. Why?

A. Sex and gender — biological sex and gender roles — are getting confused. They suggest to anyone who feels uncomfortable with their gender role that they change their sex. Now, any person over the age of 14 can register that they are actually of the opposite sex with the government, and one year later, can change their mind and change back. Tens of thousands of people have already signed up for this, 80% of them girls. They have gender trouble [the title of a book by U.S. theorist Judith Butler]. It’s understandable. They don’t want to be anorexic creatures dressed in pink. They want to have so-called masculine freedoms. But they could deal with this by merely taking up these freedoms. It’s the feminist utopia: to be a free person, independent of one’s irreversible biological sex. But instead of that, these young people are destroying their bodies and their physiques with hormones, getting their breasts removed and sometimes even mutilating their genitals, removing their desire via surgery. Only the pharmaceutical industry and unscrupulous doctors benefit from that, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Q. Isn’t it an advancement that one can self-determine, decide for themselves?

A. But you can’t really change your sex. XX chromosomes continue to be XX and XY continue to be XY. This is about pure ideology: the madness of believing that anything is possible that comes from a capitalist society that suggests anything can be bought. Self-determination is a beautiful word, but it has been completely perverted. I am absolutely certain that Simone de Beauvoir would be with me, 100%. It’s written in The Second Sex, on the last page: she wants a world of brotherhood between the sexes, “beyond biological difference.” Biological difference is an irreversible fact. Transsexuality is cultural appropriation.

Q. You have been criticized for calling immigrants from Muslim countries a threat to Western women, especially after the hundreds of aggressions that were reported as having taken place over New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne.

A. That is a fact, not an opinion. These migrants, who have walked hundreds of miles with their feet, still have to travel those miles with their heads, as Kamel Daoud wrote in the book I edited about Cologne in 2015. These are young men who, understandably, fled economic hardship in the hopes of being able to lead a better life. They come from cultures and countries where women lack legal rights, and violence against women and children is the norm. Like here, 100 years ago. They come and they feel frustrated, they have it harder than they thought. And they see that the women they despise, who are supposed to be beneath them, dare to go out at night. They don’t like that in their countries either. Just think of Tahrir Square in Cairo, how women were brutally assaulted, even those who wore veils.

Q. Isn’t it dangerous to generalize?

A. What do you mean, generalize? I believe that at its heart, this has to do with pure contempt for foreigners. That love for foreigners that Germans, in particular, profess — that you can’t criticize immigrants for having different customs, different cultures — is nothing more than the flip side of despising foreigners. Because this means that that the immigrant will be the other forever, the one you can’t expect anything of. That’s the state of things: your daughter can’t go to the club, your wife has to wear a scarf on her head. But I take the entire world in equal seriousness, I apply the same standards to immigrants as to men who were born here.

Q. And they see you as a Putin sympathizer due to your opinion on the war in Ukraine.

A. Putin sympathizer? If there is a conflict or a war in which 1,000 people are dying every day, you have to understand your adversary, their motives, and what they’re looking to achieve, don’t you? And both sides have to arrive at a compromise.

Q. Putin started it.

A. Yes of course. But now war is here. And Ukraine is the first victim, it has been destroyed. Military leaders on both sides are in agreement that the war can only end through negotiations, not military action. Why not now?

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