What "third wave" means

Third-wave feminism is the name usually given to feminist thought and activism from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. It followed the second wave (roughly the 1960s to the 1980s), which had fought for legal equality, reproductive rights and the liberation of women as a class, and it came before the fourth wave of online activism after about 2010. The "wave" labels are rough, and many second-wave feminists kept working right through the 1990s. Still, the third wave had its own priorities: difference (race, class, sexuality and nationality, not only sex), individual experience told through personal stories, a relaxed and often celebratory attitude to sexuality and femininity, and a strong pull towards postmodern theory, which doubts that any category, "woman" included, has a fixed meaning.

These ideas matter for detransition because several of them later became building blocks of today's gender identity beliefs: gender as something you perform, identity as something you define for yourself, oppression ranked along many axes, and the idea that any choice a woman makes is empowering. This page traces where those ideas came from and what their authors actually said, then looks at how some detransitioners describe meeting popularised versions of them.

Origins in the early 1990s

The Anita Hill hearings

In October 1991 Anita Hill, a law professor, testified before the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him. Senators questioned her hostilely on live television, and Thomas was confirmed anyway. The hearings made workplace sexual harassment a national issue, and the next year, 1992, became known as the "Year of the Woman," when a record number of women were elected to Congress (History.com 2018).

Rebecca Walker's "Becoming the Third Wave"

The term "third wave" took hold after the writer Rebecca Walker, then in her early twenties, published "Becoming the Third Wave" in the January/February 1992 issue of Ms. magazine, in direct response to the Thomas confirmation (Walker 1992). The essay ends:

I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave. — (Walker 1992)

The essay was a rejection of postfeminism, the 1980s media idea that feminism had already won and was no longer needed. Its tone (personal, angry, aimed at a new generation) set the voice of much third-wave writing. Books such as Manifesta took girl culture seriously as a political site (Baumgardner & Richards 2000).

Riot grrrl

At the same time, riot grrrl grew out of the punk scene in Olympia, Washington. Bands such as Bikini Kill, fronted by Kathleen Hanna, and a network of photocopied zines talked about rape, abuse and sexism in music. The 1991 "Riot Grrrl Manifesto," printed in the second Bikini Kill zine, attacked a society that says "Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak" and warned against "the internalization of sexism" (Bikini Kill 1991). Riot grrrl was do-it-yourself, collective and openly angry. It also reclaimed girlhood and words used against women, a strategy of reclamation that became typical of the decade.

Intersectionality

What Crenshaw originally meant

Intersectionality was named by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in a 1989 paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum. Her starting point was a concrete legal problem. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), Black women argued that the company's seniority system discriminated against them. The court would only consider race discrimination (judged by the experience of Black men) or sex discrimination (judged by the experience of white women), not the combination, so their claim failed. Crenshaw wrote:

Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. — (Crenshaw 1989)

Her 1991 Stanford Law Review article "Mapping the Margins" applied the idea to violence against women of colour, showing how domestic violence services and anti-racist politics could each fail women who fell between them (Crenshaw 1991). The idea itself was older. The 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, written by Black lesbian feminists in Boston, had described racism, sexism, homophobia and class oppression as "interlocking" (Massachusetts Women's History 2023).

In its original form intersectionality was a structural analysis. It was about how laws and institutions treat groups, and it was grounded in material categories (race, sex and class) that people do not choose.

How the popular version changed

During the 2000s and 2010s, "intersectional feminism" became a general label for inclusive, progressive feminism, and the concept changed as it spread online. Crenshaw herself has complained about the misreadings. In a 2017 interview she said one common version treats intersectionality as "identity politics on steroids," and another uses it as a vague way to say things are "complicated" (Crenshaw, Truthout 2017; Truthout is a progressive outlet).

Two changes matter most here. First, the popular version often became a ranking of individuals by how many marginalised identities they held, not an analysis of institutions. Second, it added identities that are self-declared, especially gender identity, alongside material categories like sex and race. Once "cis" and "trans" were treated as an axis of privilege like white and Black, a woman who did not identify as trans could be described as privileged on that axis. That is a long way from Crenshaw's case of Black women failed by a seniority system.

Some detransitioners describe the effect of this ranked version on their own thinking:

There's this grand scale, this grand hierarchy, and we all fit in. It feels like there is a "god" always watching, in some sense--you're always wondering "is this privileged of me?" ("is this sinful?"), and this kind of constant moralizing about every little choice or utterance in my life, and how it fits into the "intersectional privilege" hierarchy--it takes a toll. —throwaway7576349h, questioning own gender transition

Some of the blame belongs to the intersectionality movement. It gives lip service to different kinds of oppression, but basically people are ranked with a points system. It also largely ignores poverty and physical disabilities. —calloutfolly, detrans female

Judith Butler and gender performativity

The single most influential theoretical book of the period was Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), followed by Bodies That Matter (1993) (University of Delaware Library). Butler's work is covered in depth on the queer theory page, so only a short summary is given here.

Second-wave feminists had separated sex (the body) from gender (the social roles placed on it). Butler questioned that split. Gender Trouble argues that there is no gendered self that exists before or underneath gendered behaviour. Gender is produced by the repetition of acts, gestures and norms that society compels, which Butler calls performativity. The repetition makes gender look natural. Butler also suggested that "sex" might be as culturally constructed as gender, and pointed to drag as a parody that exposes how all gender is copied.

Butler's critics and admirers soon turned "performativity" into the slogan "gender is a performance," as if gender were a costume to put on. Butler rejected this almost at once. In a 1992 interview Butler said:

…my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that "performativity" is not radical choice and it's not voluntarism. — (Butler, interviewed in Kotz 1992)

The trans writer Julia Serano later made a similar point. She has argued that Butler's performativity is very different from the "trite" claim that all gender is performance, which she says is "at odds with what Butler actually claimed" (Serano 2015; see also Serano 2007).

This gap between the theory and the slogan is central to the story. Butler's argument is anti-essentialist: it denies that anyone has an inner gender waiting to be expressed. The popular slogan travelled in a different direction, towards the idea that because gender is "just" performance, anyone can perform any gender and be that gender.

Postmodern doubts about the category "woman"

Butler belonged to a wider wave of postmodern and poststructuralist feminism. These thinkers drew on philosophers such as Michel Foucault to argue that categories are produced by language and power, not found in nature. The historian Denise Riley, for example, argued in "Am I That Name?" (1988) that "women" is an unstable category that has meant different things in different eras, and that feminism has to live with that instability (Riley 1988).

These critiques had a real purpose. Women of colour, working-class women and lesbians had long argued that second-wave feminism spoke mainly for white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Doubting a single "women's experience" was a way to make room for them. Snyder's review of the third wave describes its aims as an "intersectional and multiperspectival version of feminism," inclusive and non-judgemental (Snyder 2008).

The political cost was also real. Feminism is a movement for women. If the category "woman" has no stable meaning, it is hard to say who feminism is for, or why female people as a group face particular problems such as pregnancy, sex-based violence or sex-selective abortion. Radical and gender-critical feminists later argued that this left the door open to defining "woman" purely by self-identification. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum's 1999 review "The Professor of Parody" made the sharpest version of the earlier criticism. She accused Butler of a "self-involved" feminism that turned away from real problems such as low wages and sexual harassment, and toward symbolic subversion (New York Times 1999).

The sex wars and sex positivity

The "sex wars"

The third wave inherited a bitter split from the 1980s known as the feminist sex wars. On one side, anti-pornography feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon argued that pornography and prostitution are central to women's subordination. In 1983 they drafted a civil rights ordinance for Minneapolis that would have let women sue pornographers for harm. A version passed in Indianapolis was struck down on free-speech grounds in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut (1985) (Media Coalition).

On the other side, sex-positive feminists warned that this alliance with censorship would harm sexual minorities. The 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, picketed by anti-pornography groups, became the symbolic start of the conflict. The anthropologist Gayle Rubin's essay "Thinking Sex," which grew out of that conference and appeared in Carole Vance's anthology Pleasure and Danger (1984), described a social hierarchy of "good" and "bad" sex and is often cited as an early text of queer theory. The anthology itself became a landmark of the sex-positive side (Signs call for papers, 2014).

The third-wave settlement

Much of the third wave sided, broadly, with the sex-positive camp. It treated sex work, pornography, kink and "reclaimed" sexualised femininity as possible sites of empowerment, and it saw anti-pornography feminism as prudish and judgemental. Critics replied that this was less liberation than a rebranding of old pressures. The journalist Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005) argued that "raunch culture," in which young women objectify themselves and call it empowerment, was itself a product of the unresolved sex wars (Levy 2005).

This matters because some detransitioned women describe a sexualised culture as one of the pressures behind wanting to escape womanhood. One wrote that "Women are reduced to parts for sale, parts for male pleasure, parts for male convenience" (spamcentral, questioned but didn't transition; see internalised misogyny).

"Choice feminism" and individual empowerment

Choice feminism is the idea that whatever a woman freely chooses is, by that fact, a feminist choice. The term was popularised by the lawyer Linda Hirshman, who criticised it in her 2005 essay "Homeward Bound" and her book Get to Work (2006) (Penguin Random House). Her target was educated women leaving careers for homemaking, but the logic applied just as well to cosmetic surgery, sex work or posing for Playboy.

The political theorist Michaele Ferguson gave the most careful account of why choice feminism took hold. She argued that it answered three common complaints about feminism (that it was too radical, too exclusionary and too judgemental) by offering a worldview that "does not challenge the status quo," includes all women whatever their choices, and "abstains from judgment altogether" (Ferguson 2010). The cost, in her view, was giving up politics: judging, excluding and demanding change are unavoidable parts of collective action. R. Claire Snyder-Hall defended the third wave's respect for women's own decisions, asking how feminists should respond when self-described feminists make choices that seem to prop up patriarchy, and arguing for respect for women's own decisions (Snyder-Hall 2010).

Choice feminism links directly to later gender identity politics. If a woman's choices cannot be judged, it becomes hard to ask why a teenage girl chooses to bind her breasts or take testosterone, or what social pressures shaped that choice. One trans commenter put the choice principle plainly:

Being a girly girl trans woman does not inforce patriarchy because that's what you chose. For example, if a woman chooses to be a stay-at-home mom, even tho that's in line with stereotypical gender norms, having the right to choose what kinda woman you want to be is feminism. —Emily__Lyn, mtf

Global and postcolonial feminisms

The third wave also absorbed criticism from feminists outside the West. In "Under Western Eyes" (1984), the scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty argued that Western feminist writing often turned "Third World women" into a single, passive victim group and measured them against an implied model of the liberated Western woman (Mohanty 1984). She called instead for attention to specific histories, economies and local struggles, and for solidarity built across real differences.

This postcolonial critique strengthened the third wave's suspicion of universal claims about women. Ironically, popular culture later took up the habit of citing non-Western "third gender" traditions as proof that the sexes are a Western invention, a claim that often flattens the very local detail Mohanty asked for (see third-gender cultures).

The first transgender theory

Third-wave feminism overlapped with the first wave of transgender theory written by trans people themselves. Sandy Stone's "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" (first published 1991) answered radical feminist Janice Raymond's 1979 critique of transsexualism and urged transsexual people to stop "passing" and speak as a distinct group (Stone 1991/1993). Leslie Feinberg's pamphlet Transgender Liberation (1992) used "transgender" as an umbrella for everyone who crossed gender lines, from a communist perspective (Internet Archive). Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw (1994) argued that gender is a cultural construct and the binary can be refused (Penguin Random House).

These works merged with queer theory in university gender studies. Much of the vocabulary later found in online gender communities, such as gender as a spectrum and refusing the binary, can be traced back to this decade.

Criticisms of third-wave feminism

The radical feminist critique is the most relevant to detransition. The lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys argued that queer politics celebrated practices, including sadomasochism, cutting and female-to-male surgery, that should be understood as forms of self-harm resulting from the oppression of lesbians and gay men (Jeffreys 2003). See radical feminism for more detail.

Defenders reply, fairly, that the third wave brought in many women who had felt shut out of feminism, took race and sexuality seriously, and refused to tell individual women how to live. The disputed question is whether a feminism that will not judge choices, and cannot say clearly who "women" are, can still resist pressures that shape women's choices from outside.

From performance to identity

The ideas above did not create gender identity beliefs alone. Medicine, the internet and LGBT advocacy all played large parts (see gender as an explanatory framework). But third-wave thought supplied several key parts:

• Gender separated from sex. If sex itself is "always already gender," the body no longer anchors the categories "man" and "woman."
• Identity as self-defined. Personal narrative, choice feminism and the refusal to judge made a person's own account of who they are the final authority.
• Gender as a spectrum. Doubts about the binary, and 1990s transgender theory, made non-binary and fluid identities thinkable (see non-binary identities).
• An identity hierarchy. The popular version of intersectionality placed "cis" on the privileged side of a new axis.

The irony is that the result often contradicts the theory. In 2006 the Yogyakarta Principles defined gender identity as "each person's deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender" (Yogyakarta Principles 2006). That is an inner essence, exactly what Butler said does not exist. The popular synthesis kept the third wave's anti-essentialism about bodies ("sex is a construct") while bringing back essentialism about the inner self ("I was always a boy inside"). Butler's own argument, if followed strictly, would undermine the idea of a true gender trapped in the wrong body as much as the idea that biology fixes behaviour (see born in the wrong body).

How detransitioners describe these ideas

Comments on r/detrans show several recurring ways in which third-wave ideas, or their popular versions, appear in people's accounts. These are self-selected comments, not a representative sample.

Third-wave ideas as a route into transition

Some detransitioned women name online third-wave feminism as part of how they came to identify as trans:

I got into trans stuff/the thought of being trans just because of third wave feminist/trans-affirming stuff online, people talking about gender and affirming it all the time, etc… people on tumblr guilting others into stating whether they're cis or trans because of privileges or whatever, made me question myself all the time, just because i'm a gnc female that obviously doesn't feel as if she were a cliché woman —maroooni, detrans female

Published research records similar accounts. In Littman's survey of 100 detransitioners, some female respondents described their transition as rooted in misogyny or a hatred of femaleness, and 23% described internalised homophobia as part of why they transitioned (Littman 2021). An interview study of detransitioned women found that some realised narrow stereotypes of womanhood had shaped their decision (Lomax & Butler 2025).

Escaping the "oppressor" category

The ranked-identity version of intersectionality appears in accounts from both sexes. Some describe transition, or a trans or non-binary identity, as a way out of a privileged category:

…due to what I was seeing on social media I felt so ashamed and guilty about being a cishet white girl. And of c good allies shut up and listen so when I transitioned it felt kind of liberating to feel like I could express my opinions without being dismissed immediately for being part of the oppressors. —SuperAceSteph, questioning own gender transition

I hated the idea that being a man makes me an oppressor or an enemy, and I hated the fact that I was interested in a lot of the stereotypical things that guys like, which I assumed was a sign of toxic masculinity… Wanting to fit into more left wing spaces definitely played some part in my decision to transition —LeGrandFromage64, desisted male

This pattern links to internalised misandry. For some young men in progressive spaces, maleness itself is described as morally suspect.

Performance taken literally

Butler's name comes up often, usually through the slogan and not the books. Some detransitioners see the slogan as having been read too literally:

Judith Butler's theory of queer and gender identity was taken to its literal extreme. Certain people with black and white thinking saw Butler's philosophical assertion that you express gender through performance as gospel. —ParticularSwanne, desisted female

Others found that following social constructionism to its end exposed a weakness in their own identity:

…if gender is a social construction, then is my gender dependent on being around people willing to construct it the way I want? Am I a woman with my queer-friendly communities but if someone sees me as male on the street is the social construction of my gender now unstable? —Pacesco, detrans male

Going back to the older feminist idea of gender

A striking theme is that many detransitioners do not reject feminism. Instead they turn back to the second-wave and radical feminist idea that gender means the roles forced on people because of their sex:

The "gender is a social construct" stuff is taken from early feminism where "gender" was used to describe all the ways people are divided by sex and expected to perform certain roles and fit certain personalities. The leap from that to transgenderism actually makes no sense… —novaskyd, desisted female

Therapy and re-discovering feminism helped me heal a lot more solidly than queer theory did. —toobertpoondert, desisted female

One detransitioned woman went further and blamed the third wave directly, arguing that treating misandry as equal to misogyny was "central to the third wave feminism that allowed transgender ideology to flourish" (zigzagstich, detrans female). In Vandenbussche's survey of 237 detransitioners, internalised prejudices were among the main psychological needs respondents described (Vandenbussche 2022), and for some, feminist analysis is how they make sense of them (see healing and recovery).

Trans perspectives

Many trans people see third-wave ideas as the basis of a feminism that includes them, and they read Butler differently. Some trans commenters treat performativity as compatible with an inner gender:

tl;dr Talking about gender as performance isn't about your gender not being real, it's about understanding the mechanisms by which your gender interacts with society. —anemisto, ftm

Others note that Butler's theory fits awkwardly with trans self-knowledge:

youre definitely not alone in finding butler's performative theory of gender unsatisfying due to the fact that it overlooks the reality of trans peoples' self knowledge and felt deep experience of gender. she theorizes that there IS no essential gender in any of us… —crynoid, ftm

Intersectionality is widely used in trans spaces to argue for inclusion. Some trans men also describe the ranked version working against them, being told that trans men are "less oppressed" (Myseelium-, ftm). That mirrors detransitioned women's reports from the other side. One woman who socially detransitioned described "woke" intersectional spaces where butches and trans men "are seen as more 'privileged' than femmes and MtFs, so we're expected to stay mostly quiet" (CreepyAid, socially detrans; medically trans).

Assessment

Third-wave feminism was not one doctrine, and it is unfair to blame it, or thinkers like Crenshaw and Butler, for every later use of their words. Crenshaw described a real legal blind spot. Butler explicitly denied that gender can be chosen. Mohanty's call for specific, local understanding is the opposite of slogan politics. Even so, the decade's main moves had consequences: individual narrative over shared material conditions, refusing to judge choices, and doubting whether "woman" means anything. Once the theory spread online and in schools, those moves made it hard to say that a girl's distress about her body might come from misogyny rather than from an inner gender, or that a boy ashamed of being male might need reassurance rather than a new identity.

Many detransitioners and desisters say what helped them was not more theory but a simpler idea that both earlier and later feminists share: sex is real, gender roles are imposed, and a woman or man can reject those roles without changing sex (see gender non-conformity without labels). For the wider story, see the feminism hub.

References

• Baumgardner, J. & Richards, A. (2000). Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. book record.
• Bikini Kill (1991). "Riot Grrrl Manifesto." Bikini Kill zine no. 2. CUNY Riot Grrrl archive.
• Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. University of Delaware Library exhibition record.
• Kotz, L. (1992). "The Body You Want: An Interview with Judith Butler." Artforum, November 1992, 82–89. Artforum.
• Combahee River Collective (1977). "The Combahee River Collective Statement." Summary: Massachusetts Women's History.
• Crenshaw, K. (1989). "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), Article 8. full text.
• Crenshaw, K. (1991). "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. doi:10.2307/1229039.
• Crenshaw, K., interviewed by Laura Flanders (2017). "No Single-Issue Politics, Only Intersectionality." Truthout (progressive outlet). source.
• Feinberg, L. (1992). Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. World View Forum. Internet Archive.
• Bornstein, K. (1994). Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. Routledge (later Vintage). publisher page.
• Ferguson, M. L. (2010). "Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics." Perspectives on Politics, 8(1), 247–253. doi:10.1017/S1537592709992830.
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• Hirshman, L. (2006). Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Viking. publisher page.
• History.com (2018). "How Anita Hill's Testimony Made America Cringe—And Change." source.
• Jeffreys, S. (2003). Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective. Polity. book record.
• Levy, A. (2005). Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Free Press. book record.
• Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page.
• Lomax, J. & Butler, C. (2025). Narratives of Adults Registered Female at Birth Who Started a Medical Transition and Later Detransitioned. study page.
• Media Coalition. American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). case summary.
• Mohanty, C. T. (1984). "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." boundary 2, 12(3), 333–358. doi:10.2307/302821.
• New York Times Magazine (1999). "Who Needs Philosophy?" (on Nussbaum's "The Professor of Parody," The New Republic, 1999). source.
• Riley, D. (1988). "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History. Macmillan. book record.
• Serano, J. (2007). Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal Press. publisher page.
• Serano, J. (2015). "Julia Serano on Judith Butler." Author's blog. source.
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2014). Call for papers, "Pleasure and Danger: Sexual Freedom" (on Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger, 1984). source.
• Snyder, R. C. (2008). "What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay." Signs, 34(1), 175–196. doi:10.1086/588436.
• Snyder-Hall, R. C. (2010). "Third-Wave Feminism and the Defense of 'Choice'." Perspectives on Politics, 8(1), 255–261. JSTOR.
• Stone, S. (1991; revised 1993). "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto." In Epstein & Straub (eds.), Body Guards, Routledge. author's revised text.
• Vandenbussche, E. (2022). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality. study page.
• Walker, R. (1992). "Becoming the Third Wave." Ms., January/February 1992. reprint with commentary.
• Yogyakarta Principles (2006). The Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. source.