It is more than 40 years since 17-year-old Julie Bindel came out as a lesbian and signed up as a feminist, the two threads that have run like a double helix through her personal and professional lives. Since the late 1970s, she has been a researcher, reporter and advocate for women around the world, with a particular focus on those who are the victims of male violence. Bindel is a veteran of the 80s feminist campaigns against pornography, a co-founder of Justice for Women, which works for women convicted of murdering their violent partners, and an advocate for women and girls around the world who have been raped, trafficked and prostituted.

The use of the word “prostitution” here is crucial to Bindel, who bridles at the way that the term has been supplanted by “sex work”. Although it sounds less judgmental, she argues that this linguistic whitewashing serves to erase the material conditions – the poverty, racism, the chronic health inequality – that force women into renting their bodies in often dangerous and degrading circumstances. It is, in short, to apply a neoliberal gloss, with its appealing language of “choice”, to a situation which is actually all about coercion.

For Bindel, this repackaging is a symptom of the way that liberation feminism (second-wave feminism, the kind on which she cut her teeth in the early 80s) has been eroded since the 90s by equality feminism. Equality feminism is market-driven, overly concerned with how many women are on the boards of FTSE companies and complacent about the dangers that women continue to face at the hands of men. One of her most disturbing examples concerns the normalisation of sexual violence: more than a third of UK women under 40 have experienced unwanted choking, slapping and gagging during consensual sex. Hardly a coincidence then, that there has been a marked increase in the “rough sex” defence used by men to get away with murder. All too often, Bindel argues, equality feminism is a cloak for the desires and interests of men.

Bindel is not an elegant writer, but then these are not elegant matters. She uses statistics, interviews and her own experience to build an account of how she believes that advances made in women’s lives over the past 40 years are being rolled back. What use, she asks, is “empowerment” in a Britain where such a low percentage of reported rapes result in a conviction? And how is it anything other than deeply damaging, literally shaming, that young teenagers learn about sex through pornography on their phones?

There is, of course, something else, something more. Over the past few years Bindel has become a controversial figure, often de-platformed, spat at both on social media and in the street. The anger is a response mostly to her insistence that there is a material basis to sexual difference that cannot be erased. Or, to put it another way, she doesn’t believe that what she calls a “feeling” can allow a man to become a woman. How, asks Bindel, are we to stop such a person causing discomfort and even danger in female-only spaces, including refuges and prisons as well as sports halls and changing rooms? Trans people and their supporters in turn say her arguments are scaremongering, especially when set against the violence they experience every day.

Bindel is not entirely innocent of baiting the opposition, at least on the evidence of this book. Calling trans activists the “Queer Isis” as she does at one point seems like deliberate provocation, no matter how badly she has been hurt. Yet behind this you do sense that Bindel’s predominant feeling is that of overwhelming regret that it has come to this, with the progressive left falling out viciously rather than coming together to tackle escalating sex-based social injustice. “Let us build a feminist movement grounded in solidarity,” she writes, “as opposed to conflict and sectarianism.” On this, it is hard to disagree.

• Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer by a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.