Listen to this articleWomen the world over kicked back against his sexist, machismo movement. But the fight is not over
The day before the US elections, a photograph of a Polish protester waving a rainbow flag went viral. She’s wearing a mask and dressed all in black; in the background, a group of men light smoke bombs and she stands, confidently, in front of billowing clouds of smoke. It’s a striking image and, as Polish women and their allies fight for their reproductive freedom, it gave me hope. To then finally hear, after days of tension, that the misogynist Donald Trump had been voted out of office felt as though a stone had been lifted from my chest.
Global feminism is like a tangle of cables, intertwined in complex knots. Those cables bind us to one another, transmitting our struggles in fractions of seconds. I have female friends who are Polish and Irish and American, and how they are treated by their home countries matters to me. But my solidarity stretches further than that, and is underpinned by a sort of simmering anger. I cried for American women when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and I applauded with joy for Irish women (and later, thank God, for Northern Irish women too) when abortion was legalised there. I stand with Polish women, because their fight is also our fight: it’s a fight to be recognised as fully human, and to obtain the rights that come with that.
Related: The Guardian view on Poland’s abortion ban: a betrayal of democracy | Editorial
Donald Trump | The Guardian
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