Laura Freixas: "I have always placed myself on the left with doubts and criticisms, but on the left"

Laura Freixas has just published Mi madre en el espejo (Tres Hermanas, 2026), a family and personal portrait. In the intimate sphere, her love for culture and a rebellion that does not accept passivity were forged: one becomes a feminist when one sees injustice and wants to change it. Her firm positions in the movement have brought her headaches, and we talk about this in this talk to get to know the writer and her yearnings.The book begins with a quote from Annie Ernaux that says: "To relive it all but without the pain, that only exists in writing". I do not believe that you have taken this path without the pain, despite the writing.

— There is pain, but it is the same as when you disinfect a wound. It is a pain that leads you to healing. The other one, the pain without words, is the one that is very difficult to bear. It is the worst. And I have pains without words and psychoanalysis, which has been very important for me, has helped me to put words to them, understand it and gradually free myself from it. This is also the process of writing, putting words to that which has none.

The family is the field where the impossibility of saying things clearly flourishes until a monumental misunderstanding is created.

— The first relationship is extremely intense, it marks everything. I do not think it is possible to put things into words; there are too many unresolved things. It takes a lot of willpower, a lot of work. With my mother, putting things into words did work. With my father, it was impossible due to an emotional impossibility. We will never have what we dreamed of as young progressives about abolishing the family and about more egalitarian relationships based on willpower.

This is very ambitious. I am only speaking about the fact that it is not always a movie that ends badly.

— I would not say that, it is simply of an unbearable intensity.

And that is why you decide, as you tell in the book, to distance yourself. Do you know that there is now a movement that is precisely about that: breaking with family?

— I didn't know that, I think it follows the line of this expression that has become fashionable: "toxic relationships". I believe the division between toxic and non-toxic relationships is illusory. What exists is a whole range of ambivalent and complex relationships.

What happened when you took this step?

— When I broke up with my parents I had a terrible time. I was very lonely, although now I see it as a necessary stage. In any case, you can never break, you don't break internally. Evolving and changing, yes, breaking, no. You can decide to distance yourself and not see them even for Christmas, but there is a pain inside that does not go away.

The constant judgment about appearance, like my mother's, seems like a minor issue, but it gets under your skin. It is the reflection of a society that never stops judging women.

— Society and family are very invasive and controlling with women. I experienced it with my parents, and with my mother with the contradiction that she was very critical regarding inequality. We are judged: what you wear, if it looks good on you, your weight, whether you shave, your hair... I tried to deactivate it by telling my mother that her comments about my appearance bothered me. There was no way.

Why was it important? What did it represent to her?

— There are other interpretations, but one is rivalry. My mother was fine with me being successful in my studies or work, nor did we compete for the father-husband: she was fine with my father taking an interest in me because it left her in peace. But there was one area in which she wanted to be the only woman. We all want to be accepted and loved. Her way of achieving this was to feel feminine, beautiful, and elegant. She felt inadequate as a housewife and as a mother. Where she felt at ease was in the realm of beauty, which did not interest me at all, so there should not have been any rivalry, but she needed to emphasize not only that she was very elegant, but that elegance mattered… and that I did not measure up. And this obsession with judging me in that area drove me crazy.

Does the comparison on the social level seem relevant to you?

— It places you in the position of an object and others claim the power to judge you. This undermines security, and the same does not happen with men. The domination of women has a component of surreptitious imposition: "We impose this on you and you cannot protest because we agree that it has no importance… but we impose it on you". A large part of our life goes into things about which we cannot even protest because they are supposed to be unimportant. The same happens with sexist jokes: you are immediately told that you have no sense of humor. Yes, it is important and there is a meaning in this.

And what about self-censorship? I suppose you considered it better not to explain some things. Specifically, I am asking you about non-egalitarian education.

— Yes, there is something to that. Of the four in the family, my brother and I remain and it is not his fault. I have nothing to reproach him for.

Do you think this has changed? The sexism of women has done a lot of harm to feminism in this area.

— It is inevitable to assimilate sexism: you tear off one layer of patriarchy and another one appears underneath. It is unconscious, an "adaptive preference," as Martha Nussbaum said. An example: is it sexist to tell your daughter not to go out alone or to watch her drink? It is a reflex to protect her from environmental sexism. I was clear that I had to tell her and I did. Afterwards, she reproached me for it.

And the solution?

— I told her that I would do it the same way again and she said I should have signed her up for self-defense; it hadn't occurred to me. My mother used to tell me that men did whatever they wanted, went to prostitutes, but that to get married they looked for virgins. Proof that these were not her own convictions but warnings of how society was: when the granddaughters arrived at the summer house with a boyfriend and shared a room and, the following summer, they had another one, my mother thought it was top-notch. She knew that that society was like that.

Maybe I was even jealous of the girls…

— She had it. She said it openly, that she had had the bad luck of being born when she was born.

One of the chapters narrates a scene of abuse by your father. It illustrates to what extent men believed, and still believe, that we women are theirs like an object.

— "You are mine!", he said, so convinced that I belonged to him. He would touch me, flirt, and make sexual allusions. An incestuous atmosphere and a constant threat of things going further that caused me great anguish.

Didn't your mother defend you? Perhaps she understood that you were hers too…

— My mother was exhausted from fighting with my father. She knew he was impervious and insensitive to any criticism. Partly due to being a neurotic person, with difficulties in truly seeing the other. He loved a lot, but was incapable of loving if to love is to take the other person into account and give things up. On one hand, there was that, and on the other, the fact of being a man, bourgeois, living in his own land, with success… He had the conviction that everything he did was correct; with my mother for being a woman and an immigrant, and with us for being children. He was incapable of understanding it. If I had told him: "You touched me, and that traumatized me", it would have seemed like an exaggeration to him. It was exasperating to know that I could express it, but that it would be met with the most absolute incomprehension and annoyance. It is distressing.

Speaking of ways of loving and affection, the grandmother appears as the figure of the supermom: unconditional love and dedication and almost without a life of her own. Isn't that what we are questioning now and want to change?

— Indeed. My grandmother gave everything for us, but what she could not give us was an example. She was an ideal mother and grandmother who lived for others, but at the same time she had a shitty life; we were her only consolation. I never, no matter how loving she was, considered her model to be preferable to my mother's, who said: "Children tire me and bore me," and she was a good mother. Men do not have this dilemma.

After a whole lifetime, there are truly moments of great tenderness. One is at the end, already in care, in the most terrible old age. It seemed to me that here something very difficult happens and it is that one turns, abandons the position from which one has always seen things, sees it in another way and understands everything. At what moment do you make this turn?

— When my mother has already lost her power, the relationship has changed. Here you can love her as you could not do before. And even with my father. There is a scene, a conversation on his deathbed. We talked about music and he told me some things… He seemed like a very interesting and very original man. That is the difficult thing about these love-hate relationships. I hate it when I remember how he abused his power and how he touched me… And, at the same time, you admire him and you love him… I still sometimes dream about him, that I hug him, we have a conversation without anguish and that we have overcome everything.

Have you overcome it all?

— I am happy. I was lucky that my parents were long-lived enough to have been able to close the circle. I wrote the book because I knew I had to write it. What I didn't know was when. I thought I wouldn't be able to publish it until they had died... Now I think I wouldn't have been able to write it either until they had died, I needed the story to be closed and for a certain amount of time to pass.

Your mother and you shared diagnoses about men, but your mother did not see solutions and you take action: the conquest of your feminism. That of the next generation?

— I would say love-sexual freedom, but I also don't know to what extent they have conquered it or received it. I was ahead regarding the freedom to have a boyfriend, something they have already assimilated, like the luck of growing up with contraceptives and legal abortion. Women's sexual initiation has taken place under three swords of Damocles: unwanted pregnancy—a fear already overcome—, the double standard, and the threat of sexual violence, which continues and perhaps has increased. Now the great enemy is hypersexualization (prostitution, pornography, OnlyFans). Inequality happens through sex; hence the resurgence of a prostitution that we thought would disappear and which has multiplied. The current struggle is to dismantle the discourse that sells this hypersexualization as freedom and empowerment.

I would like to ask how the division of feminism between the diversity or queer one and the classic, abolitionist and binary one is going. Do you think there is or could there be any point of agreement between both?

— There will be a reckoning when the dead end of the concept of gender identity is seen, but the price will be a sacrificed generation. I feel sorry for the adolescents who, believing they can change sex, undergo medical procedures with a huge cost to their health. Many will regret it and there will be lawsuits and claims. The injustice of having male femicides in women's prisons or competing in sports will also be understood. Eventually it will be known, but in the meantime this ideology will have favored the right, something that I deeply regret.

What do you feel when you hear the expression "gender ideology"?

— Let's see, gender ideology is a kind of catch-all bag where everyone puts whatever they want. It is the expression used by people who don't really know what this is about; it serves to reject en bloc both feminism and gender identity or the queer theory that presents itself as feminist, but for me it is not feminist.

Judith Butler the other day was saying the opposite…

— This is Judith Butler's discourse, which for me is not feminist, just as defending the legalization of prostitution and surrogacy is not. The rights won by women are emptied of content if we consider that only gender identity matters. Sex is an important material reality that will always have consequences. There will always be a difference, but it does not have to be hierarchical. This system of subordination versus power is gender: a social organization based on sex, not an individual or choosable identity. It is the place that society assigns to you, the possibilities and limits that are given to you based on your sex, not on your feelings or will.

What is the place that the feminism you defend and represent leaves for trans people who exist?

— I wish them the best. May they live as they wish. May they be able to access the medical treatments they desire when they are of legal age and there is truthful information about their consequences –which right now I believe does not exist, because ideology interferes with the data. May they dress as they see fit, may they associate with whom they want... But may the reality of biological sex be recognized. To believe that because a man adopts stereotypes associated with women he is a woman, is deeply sexist. What is progressive is to accept that a man can wear fishnet stockings if he likes and not cease to be a man because of it.

Two boxes, then…

— Two boxes, yes. Treating them as women in sports is unfair: it puts women in danger and falsifies fair play. And in statistics, the same: you cannot end biases in medical research if you do not know the sex of the subjects. Considering trans people as members of the other sex presupposes that it will have no consequences because they are few cases, but if you allow it for one, you have to allow it for a million. To include them, you have to change the definition of man or woman. If being a woman has nothing to do with biology, why make policies against maternity discrimination? They accuse us of being "trans-exclusionary", but it is not true. We welcome all allies, but they are allies: they have not lived the same experience. If we meet without men it is like in unions, where there are employees and not employers. To be allies they must share the feminist agenda, and transactivism does not share our ideas or claims. I am open to discussing everything, but not to being gagged, insulted, or disqualified by being treated as transphobic and far-right. They use my phrase "the trans law scares me more than Vox" as if it were serious, when it is a boutade. Everyone knows that I have always placed myself on the left, with doubts and criticisms, but on the left. I do not tolerate them denying me freedom of expression and conscience, forcing me to believe that one can change sex and that, if I disobey, they treat me like a heretic.