Women and the Far Right

We are in a new age of terror, with self-radicalising, hard-to-categorise individuals planning violence. Each one caught by the British state tells us something about British society.

Security services are striving to contain a staggering 3,000 far-right extremists, Islamists, and other potential threats. From dating websites and prison cells to Telegram networks and Tesco knives, Lizzie Dearden’s deep dive, Plotters: The UK Terrorists Who Failed, offers one disturbing certainty: the plotters will keep coming.

To confront them, we need to understand them. And as the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the world, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women. Understanding how and why women join movements that explicitly aim to restrict their autonomy is essential if we want to fight back.

In their book Pink-pilled, journalist Lois Shearing interviews leading experts and infiltrates communities of tradwives and femtrolls to provide a cutting-edge account of how the far right uses the internet to recruit women. Shining a light on women’s experiences within these movements, Shearing offers key insights for countering women’s radicalisation and building communities resistant to far-right thought.

Lois is a freelance journalist and author. They are the author of Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life (2021) and the co-editor of It Ain’t Over Til the Bisexual Speaks: An Anthology of Bisexual Voices (2024). Their writing on sex, sexuality, gender, relationships, digital culture, and politics has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Mashable, The Metro, and Gay Times, among others.

Lizzie Dearden is a journalist, a guest lecturer in security reporting at City, University of London, and former home affairs editor of The Independent. She has covered UK terrorism and extremism in depth since 2017, as well as global terrorism trends. She previously reported on Isis-inspired attacks around the world.