Liz Quintana, of the Sorgin eta Anitzak association, has left us very satisfied the feminists we have met in Donostia called by the World Women’s March, after hearing the following question: “If your partner controls how you dress, when you go out and who you talk to, it’s clear that that’s violence. But what happens if these control attitudes are done by your boss?”

The objective of the conference was to rethink the concept of male violence. This challenge is often frightening, as it is easier to defend clear and simple doctrines. Thus, in feminism we have heard many times that the only component that explains male violence is the patriarchal root. Moreover, according to the Spanish law, gender violence is limited to the sphere of heterosexual partners.

Many say that if we open too much a concept loses its meaning, it warps: if everything is violence nothing is violence. Quintana himself responds to this resistance by saying: “The spread of the concept of violence weakens the struggle, makes it more ‘coherent’ and helps prevent further discrimination.”

In asking him the question he was asked at the beginning, Quintana referred to the employees of the house. In his view, this type of work, which forces him to live with his master, is violence in itself, because it inevitably violates eleven basic rights: intimacy, rest and the possibility of developing sexual rights, among others. If more than 90 per cent of domestic workers are women, do they not experience this labor violence because they are women of patriarchal society? When the master is a man, workers also frequently report sexual harassment. In this case, it is clear that violence is chauvinist. But if she's a heterosexual couple? At the basis of this conflict there is also sexism, Quintana said: the employees of the house do the jobs that the wives should supposedly do for free, and following that logic, it will be the responsibility of the woman to control the worker, assume the evil police role.

The drivers of the World Women’s March are clear that sexism itself is not enough to explain the violence that women live in. They propose the concept of “transystemic violence” to better describe and understand how different systems of oppression are combined. In the case of domestic workers and caregivers, this transsystemic violence is clear: in addition to sexism, xenophobia (the law on aliens excludes immigrant women from this type of precarious work) or classism (the stigma of the cleaner facilitates disrespect) is what shapes the situation of these workers. Prostitution is the same thing. The round table of Liz Quintana also included the sex worker Ericka Arbizu: woman, transsexual, immigrant. It is clear that, in addition to sexism, xenophobia and transphobia have limited their path, that is, the confusion of all.

Transfeminists have long advocated (we affirm) that it is not by chance the strict definition of male violence advocated by institutions, which take as a reference the married heterosexual white woman. At the round table, a spokesman for women workers in striking residences pointed out that although their sector is so feminized, they do not feel the solidarity of feminists as much as they want. All three of them have asked us in some way: “Feminists also rethink which women take as a reference our debate and our policy and which do not.