In Algeria, the Pope stood in a place where Christianity cannot be freely proclaimed and spoke of “communion” between Christians and Muslims under the mantle of Mary. It was a striking image—generous, expansive, carefully chosen. It was also at odds with the conditions under which Christianity actually exists there. Christian proselytizing is restricted, and conversion can carry legal and social consequences. The terms of coexistence are not mutual. Yet the language offered was one of unity, shared aspiration, and spiritual closeness. The question is not whether peace is good. It is whether the language of peace can substitute for the language of truth without cost. When it does, something quieter disappears: the ability to name what is.

What the Pope expressed in Algeria is not an isolated gesture. It reflects a broader institutional posture, one that prizes openness while losing clarity about its limits. Where reciprocity does not exist, refusing to name that asymmetry does not produce unity. It obscures it.

This tension is not unique to the Catholic Church. It appears wherever institutions adopt openness as a posture while losing sight of what that posture is meant to protect. I recognized that pattern years ago, when I became a Unitarian Universalist. I was drawn to the faith’s stated commitments: a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the right of conscience. What made the tradition compelling was not the absence of structure, but the presence of principles that allowed inquiry without collapsing into relativism.

Over time, those principles shifted—not through rejection, but through refinement. The language softened. Emphasis moved toward shared values such as equity, transformation, and pluralism, all gathered under the broad and difficult-to-contest banner of love. Taken together, those changes marked a turn away from principles that protected inquiry and toward a framework that prioritized alignment. The revision of Article II formalized that turn, replacing the Seven Principles with a model centered less on how individuals come to truth than on how communities commit to shared positions.

That distinction matters. When an institution deprioritizes the mechanisms that make disagreement possible—conscience, inquiry, process—it does not become more open. It becomes more cohesive, but on narrower terms. The accompanying resolution affirming gender identity ideology made that dynamic explicit. It did not simply state a position. It established expectations around that position, collapsed contested distinctions, and framed dissent as harm. At that point, the language of welcome remained, but its function had changed. Inclusion no longer described openness to difference. It described an expectation of agreement.

This is how institutional drift occurs. Not through overt takeover, but through substitution. The vocabulary of openness remains while the boundaries that once gave it meaning recede. In their absence, the institution does not become neutral. It becomes vulnerable to the most assertive framework within it—the one most willing to define terms, set expectations, and enforce them. What emerges is not pluralism, but consolidation without acknowledgment.

The pattern is familiar. The setting is different.

Its consequences are easiest to see not in abstract doctrine, but in the areas where boundaries matter most. Questions of sex and vulnerability do not tolerate ambiguity well. When institutions lose the ability to name distinctions clearly, those distinctions do not disappear. They are redistributed, often at the expense of those with the least power to absorb the cost.

In recent years, debates around women’s spaces and the medicalization of gender-distressed children have exposed this tension with unusual clarity. The language of inclusion has often been used to dissolve sex-based boundaries that once functioned as safeguards. At the same time, dissent from that shift is frequently reframed as harm, placing the burden not on those redefining the boundary, but on those trying to maintain it. Where clarity gives way to consensus, and consensus to enforcement, the line between protection and participation becomes harder to see and easier to move.

Seen in this light, the Pope’s language in Algeria is not simply aspirational. It reflects the same assumption: that openness, once offered, will be met in kind, and that shared language can bridge asymmetrical realities. Where reciprocity does not exist, a posture built on assuming it becomes less a bridge than a misreading of the conditions. Yet those conditions remain. In Nigeria, Christians have been killed in significant numbers in recent years. The causes are complex, involving insurgent groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, as well as regional conflict and weak state control. But complexity does not erase the religious dimension where it is present, nor the need to name it plainly.

The problem arises when institutional language operates at a level of abstraction that no longer corresponds to lived conditions. Appeals to unity are not wrong, but they become insufficient when they obscure asymmetry rather than address it. An institution that cannot distinguish between mutual coexistence and constrained tolerance risks confusing the two, and in doing so, loses the trust of those who experience that difference directly.

None of this means openness is misplaced, or that institutions should retreat into rigidity. Openness remains necessary for any institution that intends to engage a plural world. But openness is not self-defining. It depends on boundaries that clarify what is being opened, to whom, and on what terms. Without those boundaries, openness ceases to function as an invitation and becomes a void—one others will inevitably move to fill.

The challenge, then, is not to abandon openness but to recover its structure. That requires a willingness to state, without evasion, what an institution believes, what it does not believe, and what it is prepared to defend even under pressure to harmonize. It requires distinguishing between coexistence and equivalence, between dialogue and dissolution. These are not semantic niceties. They are the conditions under which an institution retains its identity while remaining capable of engaging others.

It is still possible to pursue unity without relinquishing clarity, just as it is possible to welcome others without surrendering definition. But that balance does not sustain itself. It must be maintained deliberately and expressed plainly. When it is not, the language of unity expands while the substance beneath it contracts. What remains is an institution that speaks in increasingly universal terms while becoming less able to account for the particular realities it claims to address.

At that point, openness has not strengthened the institution. It has thinned it. And where that thinning occurs, the consequences do not fall evenly. They settle where boundaries once offered protection—and they are not borne by those who set the terms.

A voting bloc that never moves does not have to be persuaded. It only has to be managed.

That is the quiet reality shaping Black political life in the United States. While other constituencies are courted, segmented, and studied, Black Americans are treated as a foregone conclusion. The expectation is not that our votes will be won, but that they will arrive—reliably, predictably, and in the same direction. And because of that, the conversation around Black political power has become less about negotiation and more about maintenance: how to preserve alignment, how to discourage deviation, how to ensure that the outcome remains stable.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about permission structures—the mental shortcuts that allow people to withdraw empathy once someone has been labeled morally suspect. That framework applies just as clearly here. Political disagreement within the Black community is rarely treated as disagreement alone. It is reframed as betrayal, irresponsibility, or even harm. And once that reframing takes hold, the response shifts. Debate gives way to discipline.

This is not an abstract dynamic. It is visible in how political language is used and who is permitted to deviate without consequence. During the 2020 election cycle, Joe Biden remarked that voters unsure of supporting him “ain’t Black.” The comment was criticized, but it was also absorbed with remarkable speed. It did not fundamentally alter the political relationship it revealed. If anything, it clarified it. The Black vote was not being courted as uncertain; it was being referenced as assured.

That assurance has consequences. Political power depends on leverage, and leverage depends on the credible possibility of movement. A group that can shift its support forces engagement. It compels candidates to compete, to tailor policy, to demonstrate responsiveness. A group whose support is guaranteed, by contrast, becomes easier to deprioritize. Its loyalty is acknowledged rhetorically, but it is not tested materially. Over time, the exchange becomes imbalanced: consistent support given, inconsistent results received.

That imbalance is not only theoretical. It shows up in priorities—what is addressed urgently, what is deferred indefinitely, and who is expected to accept the difference without objection.

In recent years, immigration policy has been framed with urgency, compassion, and moral clarity. Resources, attention, and political capital have been mobilized quickly. In some cases, proposals have extended to forms of financial assistance or benefits that echo—at least in structure—long-standing conversations about reparative justice.

At the same time, Black Americans—whose claims to reparations are rooted in centuries of chattel slavery and state-sanctioned discrimination—are still told those efforts are politically difficult or indefinitely deferred. The contrast is visible.

The issue is not whether immigration policy should be humane. It is whether Black Americans are expected to accept a hierarchy of concern in which their claims remain secondary, while their political support remains consistent.

When that tension is raised, the response is often not engagement but moralization. Concerns about resource allocation or enforcement are dismissed as alignment with the “wrong” side. The label arrives first. The argument is dismissed after.

That pattern extends into public life. In moments of confrontation around immigration enforcement, even Black officers carrying out federal duties have been treated not simply as wrong, but as disloyal. The expectation is not just agreement, but alignment. And when alignment breaks, discipline follows.

What sustains this dynamic is not only party behavior, but community enforcement—and that enforcement is not applied evenly.” The expectation of political alignment is reinforced socially, often more aggressively than it is articulated institutionally. Black Americans are not simply encouraged to vote a certain way; they are expected to police one another into doing so. The consequences for deviation are uneven, but they are real.

The sex-based nature of those consequences is particularly revealing. Black men who express political divergence are frequently criticized, but they are still afforded a degree of individual framing. Figures like Kanye West or Ice Cube are cast as unpredictable, controversial, or strategic. Their choices are treated as their own.

Black women, by contrast, are more likely to be positioned as representatives of the collective. When they depart from expected political positions, the reaction is not merely disagreement but correction. Nicki Minaj, Chrisette Michele, and Rozonda ‘Chilli’ Thomas have each faced backlash that extended beyond critique into reputational and professional consequences. The message is rarely stated outright, but it is widely understood: political deviation carries a higher cost for Black women because it is interpreted as destabilizing the group itself.

This dynamic does more than constrain individual expression. It weakens collective power. Every other major demographic group in the United States contains visible political diversity. There are liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, within every racial and ethnic community. That internal variation does not dilute those groups’ influence; it strengthens it. It forces both parties to compete for different segments of the same population.

Black Americans, by contrast, are far less politically distributed. The result is a bloc that is easier to model, easier to predict, and ultimately easier to take for granted. A voting population that does not meaningfully split cannot surprise anyone. And without the capacity to surprise, it loses its negotiating power.

The solution is not ideological uniformity in a different direction. It is not a call for Black Americans to adopt any particular party affiliation, nor is it an argument that one party is inherently more deserving than another. It is a call to reconsider the structure of political loyalty itself. When allegiance becomes fixed, accountability erodes. When support is conditional, responsiveness increases.

Independence—whether formal or functional—introduces the possibility of movement. It disrupts assumptions. It forces candidates to ask not just how to mobilize Black voters, but how to persuade them. It shifts the relationship from one of expectation to one of engagement. And in doing so, it restores a basic principle of democratic participation: that votes are earned, not owed.

When Black women are supported only when they reinforce dominant narratives—and penalized when they diverge—the standard being applied is not solidarity, but compliance.

Communities reveal their priorities not only in what they affirm, but in what they punish. If political independence is met with social sanction, then the message is clear: unity is being preserved not through shared interest, but through enforced conformity. And this comes at the expense of long-term power.

A voting bloc that must be earned is a voting bloc that matters. A community that can move is a community that cannot be ignored. The question is not whether Black Americans will continue to participate in politics. It is whether that participation will remain predictable enough to be taken for granted—or become flexible enough to demand results.

Because in the end, political systems respond not to loyalty, but to leverage.

And leverage begins the moment a vote is no longer assumed—and must be earned.

A few days before I gave birth to my daughter, I came across a tweet that stayed with me. A woman described showing her newborn to a group of teenage girls, expecting excitement—maybe even an offer to babysit. Instead, they said the baby was cute, took their candy, and moved on. Her conclusion was blunt: the birth rate is doomed.

At the time, I didn’t read it as offensive. I read it as familiar.

I was heavily pregnant—but not far removed from a version of myself who would have done exactly what those girls did. In my mid twenties, I called myself a “spinster.” I even blogged under the heading Spynster with a ‘Y’. I owned my home, lived alone, and imagined a quiet future—something self-contained and undisturbed. Maybe a place on one of the lakes in Pickens or Oconee County (South Carolina), just me and my dogs.

Children weren’t part of the plan. Not because I disliked them, but because I understood what proximity to them often meant. In a college town, where many people didn’t have family nearby, being friendly could quickly become being relied upon. It was easy to become someone’s emergency contact, their backup plan, their “village.” I didn’t want that responsibility, and I was deliberate about maintaining that distance.

So when I read that tweet, my instinct was not to chastise the girls. It was to side with them. They were out enjoying themselves. They did not owe anyone childcare, attention, or interest simply because a baby was placed in front of them.

That remains true.

Girls are not born into service roles for others. They are not obligated to perform care on demand, and they are not wrong for choosing themselves in that moment. Any analysis that starts by assigning blame to them misses the point entirely.

But that is not where the story ends.

My life changed slowly, and in ways I did not anticipate. I joined a church—ironically, a very liberal one—and began teaching Sunday school to teenagers. I spent more time around families, not as an outsider looking in, but as someone embedded in the day-to-day reality of it. What I saw was not an idealized image but something steadier and more grounded than the life I had constructed for myself.

At first, I thought I might adopt someday. That felt controlled, intentional, contained. But over time, I began to see marriage differently as well. I watched how the husbands in that community interacted their wives and children. I saw a kind of reliability that had been absent from my life. It shifted something in me.

I fell in love, got married, and nearly a decade later we had our daughter.

Now I sit in a position that allows me to see both sides clearly. I understand the instinct to keep distance. I understand the reluctance to step into responsibility before you’ve chosen it. But I also understand something I did not understand then.

After my daughter was born, I kept her close. For the first few months, we stayed mostly inside—doctor’s appointments, grocery pickups, nothing more. When she was close to five months old, I brought her with me into the city to pick up supplies for my craft business. My husband came along. The employees at the store were young, clearly Gen Z.

I wasn’t expecting anyone to fawn over her. If anything, I had prepared myself for the opposite problem—the overly familiar stranger, the person who reaches too close, who assumes access. But that isn’t what happened.

They didn’t react at all.

Not warmly. Not negatively. Just not at all.

We walked the store more than once. She was there in her stroller the entire time. And aside from not being bumped into, it was as if she didn’t exist. No acknowledgment, no passing comment, no moment of recognition that a new human being was present.

When we got back to the car, my husband said it first. He noticed how strange it was.

And if he noticed it, it was not subtle.

That moment stayed with me, because it was not the same thing I had felt in my twenties. What I felt back then was distance—a conscious boundary, a decision not to step into something I had not chosen. What I saw in that store was something else entirely.

It was absence.

There are moments where avoidance makes sense. I’ve done it myself. I remember someone bringing a large, uncontained dog into a small gym I used to go to. I wasn’t familiar with dogs, and I didn’t want to provoke it, so I avoided eye contact and kept my distance.

But that isn’t what this was.

Avoidance comes from awareness. You register something as present and choose not to engage. What I saw in that store was different. It wasn’t caution. It was non-recognition.

There is a difference between not wanting responsibility and not recognizing value. One is a boundary. The other is a cultural condition.

A society that stops orienting itself around reproduction does not become neutral. It becomes dislocated from reality. The continuation of human life is not an abstract concept or a lifestyle preference. It is the material basis of any society that intends to exist beyond the present moment. When that reality fades from view, what replaces it is not freedom, but detachment.

Young women today are coming of age in a culture that tells them their bodies are infinitely modifiable, that motherhood is optional to the point of irrelevance, and that fertility is something that can be delayed, outsourced, or discarded altogether. At the same time, those same systems profit from women’s reproductive capacity—through IVF markets, surrogacy, and lifelong medicalization. What is framed as liberation often functions as detachment: a removal of women from the material reality of their own bodies. I’ve written before about how feminism has been narrowed to “nothing but abortion”—and how that flattening leaves everything else unaddressed.

In that context, disengagement begins to make sense.

If sex is treated as negotiable, if reproduction is framed as burdensome or obsolete, if the creation of new life is detached from any broader social meaning, then the presence of a baby does not register as significant. It becomes background noise. Something to step around, not something to orient toward.

This is not about returning to a past where girls were expected to mother everyone else’s children. That expectation was real, and it was unjust. Women have spent generations pushing back against being reduced to unpaid labor, and rightly so.

But eliminating obligation is not the same as eliminating meaning.

When there is no expectation placed on women, but also no recognition of what women uniquely contribute, something essential is lost. The answer is not to conscript girls into caregiving, but neither is it to raise them in a culture where the creation of life itself holds no weight.

I do not look at those teenage girls in the tweet with contempt. I recognize them. I was them. And I do not look at the young women in that store with anger. What I saw was not hostility, but disconnection.

What I question is the environment that produces that disconnection.

For years, the institutions that once centered family life—churches, extended families, local communities—have been weakened or discredited. In some cases, that critique was warranted. But what has replaced them is not a stronger or more coherent structure. It is hyper-individualism: the idea that fulfillment is entirely self-directed, self-contained, and disconnected from continuity.

That model works, for a time. Until it doesn’t.

Because eventually, a life organized only around the self runs into its limits. It cannot explain why anything should continue. It cannot sustain itself beyond a single generation.

Now, with my own family, I understand something I did not before. Building a family is not simply a personal milestone or a lifestyle preference. It is participation in something larger than the individual. It is how societies persist. It is how meaning is carried forward.

This is the best part of my life. Not because it is easy, but because it is grounded. It connects me to something beyond myself in a way nothing else ever has.

I don’t say that to pressure anyone, and I don’t say it to assign obligation. I say it because there was a time when I genuinely did not understand what was on the other side of that choice.

And I suspect there are many young women now who don’t understand it either.

Not because they have rejected it, but because no one has shown them what it is—or why it matters.

There is something clarifying about a moment when the script falls apart—not the polished messaging or carefully constructed language, but the point at which a simple question is asked and no one can quite bring themselves to answer it. That is what happened during the Ohio hearing on HB 249. Representative Josh Williams did not ask for a theoretical defense of identity or expression. He asked a straightforward question: why should adults be allowed to perform simulated sexual acts in front of minors?

What followed was not an answer but a kind of circling. Concerns about vagueness were raised, references to unnamed existing statutes were offered, and the conversation drifted toward parental discretion. Each response moved around the question rather than addressing it directly, and in that avoidance the underlying issue became more visible than any prepared testimony could have made it.

The Question No One Would Answer

The bill itself is not especially complex. It does not ban drag, criminalize adult performances, or label entire categories of people as obscene. It draws a narrower and more familiar line: explicit sexual conduct belongs in adult spaces, not in the presence of children. The intensity of the opposition to that boundary is what makes the exchange so revealing. When the restriction was described, the response was not to distance oneself from the conduct in question, but to insist that the bill must be targeting them. No one imposed that interpretation; it was offered freely. In doing so, the debate over language and definitions gave way to something more direct. The conduct at issue—simulated sexual activity, masturbation, nudity—was not in dispute. What was in dispute was whether it should be restricted in the presence of minors at all.

This moment cannot be understood in isolation. The person giving testimony against Ohio’s HB 249, Andrew Levitt: drag name Nina West, has not confined his performances to adult-only venues. He has been deliberately positioned in spaces that center women and children. As a Pride ambassador for Lane Bryant, a company built around the needs of plus-size women, he was elevated over the very women the brand exists to serve. He has also appeared in Pride-themed programming tied to Blue’s Clues, content explicitly aimed at children. These are not incidental overlaps but part of a broader pattern in which male adult performance personas are inserted into spaces that were not originally designed to accommodate them.

The Pattern Is Familiar

I recognized that pattern several years ago, before it appeared in legislative hearings. In 2021, I ended a long-standing patronage of Lane Bryant after more than a decade as a customer. That was not a symbolic gesture but a personal decision shaped by experience. It was the store where my mother helped me assemble my first professional wardrobe, where I learned how to present myself with confidence. When the company chose a male drag performer as the face of its Pride campaign, the shift was unmistakable. The issue was not inclusion in any meaningful sense, but substitution. The women who constituted the brand’s customer base—lesbian women, bisexual women, plus-size women—were no longer centered. They had been replaced by a performance of womanhood that was not rooted in female experience. The response I received when I objected was polite and procedural, assuring me that no offense had been intended. But intent was not the point. What mattered was that the space had changed, and once that shift becomes visible, it is difficult to ignore.

The same dynamic now extends beyond women’s spaces into those involving children. During the hearing, the argument that parents should determine what is appropriate for their children was presented as a sufficient safeguard. Yet that principle has always had limits, which is why laws governing obscenity and exposure exist in the first place. Children have never been treated as a general audience for adult sexual expression. What HB 249 reveals is how far that assumption has eroded. Performances that would once have been confined to explicitly adult venues now appear in public settings—libraries, parks, and community events—where the presence of children is not incidental but expected. When those boundaries are questioned, the response is not to clarify or reassure but to resist the boundary itself.

Georgia Already Knows

This tension is not confined to Ohio. In Georgia, lawmakers have already encountered similar questions but have struggled to resolve them. A related bill, HB 671 sponsored by Representative Carmen Rice, advanced out of committee but never reached the House floor, ultimately expiring without a vote. At the same time, the legislature has acknowledged that existing laws are increasingly inadequate in other contexts. HB 171, which addresses AI-generated obscene material involving children, reflects an awareness that technological developments have created new forms of exploitation that older statutes cannot easily address. The inconsistency lies in the response. When the threat is clearly technological, the need for updated law is readily accepted. When the same underlying issue appears in physical spaces—public performances, shared environments—the willingness to act becomes more tentative. Yet in both cases, the question is the same: where are the boundaries, and who is prepared to enforce them?

What the Ohio hearing ultimately revealed was not a disagreement over identity or artistic expression, but an unwillingness to defend a boundary that once required no explanation. The question that was asked—why explicit sexual performances should be permitted in the presence of minors—remains unanswered because answering it directly would require shifting the focus from who is performing to what is being performed. Once that distinction is made, the issue becomes more difficult to obscure.

Boundaries are often reframed as acts of exclusion or hostility, but they function as a form of structure. They recognize that not every space serves the same purpose or the same people. The erosion of those distinctions has already reshaped spaces created for women, often in ways that make them difficult to recognize as such. The same process is now underway in spaces involving children. HB 249 does not resolve every aspect of that shift, but it restates a principle that was once taken for granted: explicit sexual content does not belong in the presence of minors. The fact that this must now be argued is itself an indication of how much has changed.

What the Ohio hearing exposed was not confusion, but reluctance. The boundary is clear: explicit sexual content does not belong in the presence of minors. That principle once required no defense, now it does. The question is no longer whether we understand the line—but whether we are willing to enforce it.

When the BBC premiered I Kissed a Girl, the premise felt almost disarmingly simple: women meeting women, navigating attraction in the sun-washed setting of an Italian masseria. In an era when television depictions of same-sex relationships had grown increasingly entangled in the language of gender identity, that simplicity carried a quiet novelty. The show allowed lesbian and bisexual women to appear on screen without qualification or explanation. It presented female same-sex attraction as exactly what it is: women drawn to other women.

That clarity was part of its appeal. But it also made the program unusually fragile.

Two years ago, reflecting on the show’s first season, I wrote about the cultural significance of reclaiming words like lesbian. During one episode, a contestant named Georgia raised the subject directly, admitting she struggled with the label even though she knew it should be a source of pride. The conversation that followed was revealing. Several women confessed they preferred softer or more ambiguous terms—“queer,” “gay girl,” or simply saying they were “into girls.” Yet the discussion ultimately circled back to history. Georgia reminded the group why the word lesbian mattered, pointing to the role lesbians played caring for gay men during the AIDS epidemic. By the end of the exchange, the tone had shifted from discomfort to recognition.

That moment captured something larger than a reality-TV conversation. It reflected an instinct that has quietly reemerged among many women: the desire to reclaim language that describes reality. Words such as lesbian exist because they describe a specific human experience—female same-sex attraction. When those words are softened or replaced, something concrete is lost.

At the time, I Kissed a Girl seemed to offer a rare space where that clarity could exist on television.

The space did not last.

Last year I wrote about the early signs that the show’s premise was already being reshaped. The companion series I Kissed a Boy—which follows gay male contestants—introduced a heterosexual woman identifying as male. The casting placed gay men in the peculiar position of being expected to treat a woman as a potential romantic partner on a program explicitly built around male homosexuality. Contestants were now meant to flirt, validate, and perhaps even kiss a woman on a gay dating show, with the unspoken understanding that refusal might be framed as prejudice.

The contradiction was difficult to miss. Gay men historically fought for the freedom to live openly as homosexuals rather than conform to opposite-sex expectations. Yet here was a program reintroducing heterosexual dynamics into a space created to celebrate gay relationships.

The BBC described the move as representation.

In reality, it illustrated how gender ideology can distort the very categories it claims to celebrate. A show designed to highlight same-sex attraction began quietly dissolving the boundaries that define it.

Now the experiment appears to have reached its conclusion. The BBC recently announced that both I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl will end after their upcoming seasons. Officially the network cites funding challenges. Budget pressures are a familiar explanation in television, and they may well play a role.

But the trajectory of the shows themselves suggests another difficulty. It is hard to sustain programming about homosexuality while simultaneously insisting that sex categories are fluid or irrelevant. The premise eventually begins to contradict itself.

Reality television, despite its name, still depends on recognizable realities.

At almost the same moment the BBC’s dating experiment fades from the schedule, another British program has produced a different kind of cultural paradox. After years as one of the country’s most beloved craft competitions, The Great Pottery Throw Down recently concluded its ninth series with three female finalists—Angharad, Elham, and Fynn—competing for the title of Britain’s best home potter.

It was not the first time the show’s final had been composed entirely of female competitors. A similar outcome occurred in 2022, when AJ Simpson ultimately won the series. Yet even then the moment carried a linguistic complication: AJ identified as non-binary. In the most recent season, the complication returned in another form. The winner, Fynn, identifies as male.

In both cases the visual reality was straightforward. Female competitors dominated the field, advancing through weeks of technical challenges to reach the final. Yet describing these outcomes as achievements by women became awkward, if not culturally discouraged.

The tension becomes clearer when placed alongside the show’s broader embrace of gender identity discourse. Earlier seasons introduced kiln technician “Rose” Schmits, presented as a transgender potter whose artistic work explores themes of transition and bodily transformation. The inclusion was widely celebrated in queer media, with some commentators describing The Great Pottery Throw Down as an unexpectedly “radical” space for gender diversity.

Gender identity representation, in other words, posed no difficulty.

But when women as a group excelled in the competition itself, the language surrounding those moments grew noticeably more cautious. A final composed entirely of female competitors could not easily be framed as a women’s achievement. The reality remained visible, but the words required to name it became contested.

Taken together, these stories illustrate the same cultural pattern.

Gender ideology frequently presents itself as an expansion of representation. In practice, it often produces a stranger effect: the categories that once made representation meaningful begin to dissolve. Lesbian dating shows struggle to maintain the boundaries of lesbianism. Milestones achieved by women become linguistically unstable the moment identity labels intervene.

The result is a striking asymmetry. Gender identity is foregrounded, celebrated, and treated as culturally significant. Meanwhile the category of female becomes harder to say aloud precisely when women succeed.

Reality does not disappear under these conditions. It remains visible—in the dynamics of attraction, in the composition of a competition final, in the ordinary patterns of human life.

What disappears is the willingness to describe what everyone can see.

And without that language, even genuine milestones begin to fade from view.

Georgia’s legislative session reached an important milestone last week with Crossover Day, the deadline by which most bills must pass their chamber of origin in order to continue moving through the legislative process this year. As usual, the day produced a flurry of activity, headlines about what survived and what did not, and the familiar sense that the legislative field had narrowed overnight.

For those paying attention to issues affecting women, children, and the responsible use of taxpayer dollars, several measures remain viable. Yet the more consequential development may not be legislative at all. Instead, it concerns the small number of Democratic lawmakers who were willing, even briefly, to depart from party orthodoxy and vote in line with what many Georgians recognize as common sense. Several of those lawmakers are now gone from the legislature, preparing to leave, or facing circumstances that have removed them from public office entirely.

This shift matters because legislative outcomes are shaped not only by the bills that survive procedural deadlines but also by the kinds of voices still present when those bills are debated.

What Remains Alive After Crossover

Despite the attention surrounding Crossover Day, several of the bills most relevant to the concerns many Georgia families have been raising in recent years did not depend on that deadline for survival. They had already crossed chambers during the first year of the legislature’s two-year cycle and therefore remain viable vehicles for action during the current session.

Among them is SB 30, which addresses the use of hormone treatments and puberty blockers for minors for the purpose of gender transition. The bill reflects the growing recognition among lawmakers across the country that children should not be subjected to irreversible medical interventions before they reach adulthood. Closely related is SB 39, which seeks to prevent taxpayer funds from being used to finance sex-trait modification procedures through public programs. Supporters of the measure argue that whatever choices adults may make privately, the public should not be compelled to subsidize procedures that attempt to redefine biological sex.

Another bill still in play is HB 171, which targets the rapidly expanding problem of obscene material involving children generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence. As technological capabilities have accelerated, the law has struggled to keep pace, leaving gaps that prosecutors have found increasingly difficult to address. HB 171 attempts to close some of those loopholes and provide clearer tools for law enforcement when dealing with digital exploitation.

Also remaining viable is SB 21, which focuses on strengthening immigration enforcement. Although immigration debates often unfold separately from discussions about women’s rights, enforcement policy intersects directly with concerns about trafficking, exploitation, and public safety. When immigration laws exist primarily on paper and enforcement becomes inconsistent, the people most vulnerable to abuse are often women and children.

Not every bill addressing these broader concerns advanced. SB 248, which dealt with sexually explicit material and ideological content in schools and libraries, did not clear the legislative hurdle necessary to move forward as a standalone measure. The substance of the proposal could still reappear later as an amendment to another bill, a common occurrence in the Georgia legislature, but as an independent vehicle it stalled.

Taken together, the legislative landscape after Crossover Day is mixed. Some proposals touching on child protection and public accountability remain alive, while others have fallen away. But legislation alone does not capture the most revealing change inside the Capitol this year.

The Disappearance of Dissent

Last year’s legislative debates over girls’ sports and taxpayer-funded medical procedures for prison inmates revealed something unusual inside the Georgia Democratic caucus: a small group of members willing to break with their party’s dominant position. I wrote about that moment in an earlier piece, “Courage in the Minority: The Abandonment That Made Republicans the Default,” which examined how a handful of Democratic legislators chose to remain in the chamber and vote for measures they believed their constituents supported.

That group included Senators Elena Parent, Sonya Halpern, Ed Harbison, and Freddie Powell Sims, as well as Representatives Lynn Heffner, Tangie Herring, and Dexter Sharper. Their votes did not change the outcome of those legislative battles, but they did demonstrate that party affiliation did not entirely dictate how every Democrat approached questions involving biological sex, taxpayer funding, or fairness in women’s sports.

The political landscape surrounding those lawmakers has shifted noticeably since then. Representative Lynn Heffner resigned earlier this year after residency complications related to damage to her home during Hurricane Helene. Representative Dexter Sharper resigned this week following federal charges alleging that he made false statements while collecting pandemic unemployment benefits. Senator Elena Parent has announced she will not seek reelection, and Senator Ed Harbison recently made the same decision. Senator Sonya Halpern remains in the Georgia Senate representing District 39 after briefly exploring a congressional run if Lucy McBath vacated her seat—a scenario that, so far, has not materialized. Senator Freddie Powell Sims also announced her resignation, citing a serious illness in her family that requires her full attention. Of the Democrats who broke ranks during those debates, Representative Tangie Herring now appears to be the only one clearly positioned to remain in the legislature and seek another term.

Sharper’s legal situation deserves acknowledgment and should not be ignored. At the same time, it does not erase the fact that he was among the few Democratic legislators willing to vote against party pressure when questions of fairness for women or responsible use of taxpayer funds were on the table. Both realities can coexist without contradiction.

What is harder to ignore is the broader pattern that emerges when these individual developments are viewed together. The already small number of Democrats willing to depart from the party’s ideological consensus on issues involving sex and “gender identity” is shrinking. The implications of that shift extend beyond the fate of any single bill.

The pressures facing dissenting Democrats in Georgia are not new. In 2023, Atlanta Representative Mesha Mainor became the only Democrat in the House to support a school-choice bill. The backlash from within her party was swift, including public calls to recruit a primary challenger. Within months, Mainor left the Democratic Party entirely.

That episode illustrated the same dynamic visible in the legislature today: breaking with party orthodoxy can quickly become politically isolating.

A Smaller Space for Independent Judgment

A functioning political system depends on at least some degree of independence among its elected officials. When legislators are unwilling or unable to depart from party expectations—even when their constituents might support doing so—policy debates begin to narrow. Questions that once invited disagreement gradually become matters of loyalty rather than judgment.

The small number of Georgia Democrats who were willing to vote for measures protecting women’s sports or restricting taxpayer-funded gender procedures never represented a dominant faction within their party. Even so, their presence signaled that disagreement was still possible.

Today that space appears to be narrowing. The few legislators who demonstrated a willingness to cross that line are either leaving the legislature, facing circumstances that have removed them from office, or pursuing roles outside the chamber.

That development deserves attention, even if it has not yet become a headline story. Because when the range of acceptable positions inside a political party contracts far enough, it becomes difficult for that party to engage honestly with issues that many voters consider basic matters of reality.

The fate of individual bills will become clearer as the legislative session continues. But the disappearance of dissenting voices is already visible—and its consequences may last longer than any single piece of legislation.

Editor’s note: After this piece was published, Senator Freddie Powell Sims announced her resignation, citing a serious illness in her family; the article has been updated accordingly.

Several months ago, I wrote about permission structures—the mental shortcuts that allow us to treat other people as disposable once we have labeled them morally suspect. The process is simple: disagreement becomes “harm.” A label replaces curiosity. And once someone is categorized as dangerous, misguided, or traitorous, withdrawing dignity or defense begins to feel justified.

At the time, I was thinking about private life—friendships strained by politics, conversations shut down by clichés. But permission structures do not stay private. They scale. They migrate into institutions. They surface on public stages.

In recent weeks, two very different stages exposed something about hierarchy — not identical harms, but identical instincts. One revealed how communities discipline. The other revealed how communities defend.

The NAACP Stage

At the NAACP Image Awards — a ceremony meant to celebrate Black excellence — Nicki Minaj became the subject of a joke. The remarks were not devastating. It was simply disrespectful, and notably out of place at an event designed for elevation rather than correction.

That distinction matters.

Public figures are fair game for critique. Nicki Minaj is not beyond scrutiny. Her public defense of a husband with a sexual assault conviction raises serious moral concerns, and Black women are justified in questioning how her loyalty to men in her life who have harmed women and children can perpetuate harm. But what unfolded on that stage was not a substantive reckoning. It was a signal. A shorthand distancing. A reminder that she had strayed, politically.

The significance was not the severity of the joke, but the ease of it. A celebratory platform felt comfortable participating in ideological correction.

This is where permission structures enter quietly. Once a woman is labeled politically wayward, disrespect feels permissible. The label does the thinking: “lost,” “co-opted,” “dangerous.” Disagreement is reframed as moral failure. And once moral failure is assumed, public diminishment feels justified.

The issue is not that Nicki Minaj was gravely harmed. It is that a space meant to uplift Black achievement felt no hesitation in disciplining a politically inconvenient Black woman.

That comfort reveals hierarchy.

The Asymmetry

The hierarchy becomes clearer when we compare how Black men who depart from mainstream Democratic politics are treated.

Kanye West has been criticized relentlessly. But he is also framed as mercurial, complicated, independent. Ice Cube is described as strategic when he engages across party lines. They are controversial. They are mocked. But they are still treated as individuals exercising agency.

Black female dissent is more likely to be framed as betrayal. The reaction shifts from “I disagree” to “You have abandoned us.”

Black women occupy a distinct moral position within the community. We are described as the backbone, the conscience, the most reliable voting bloc. That praise carries expectation. When Black men diverge, they are autonomous. When Black women do so, they are destabilizing the collective.

The stakes feel higher because we are expected to carry the moral weight of everyone.

The BAFTA Baseline

The recent BAFTA ceremony provided a different kind of clarity.

When Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were subjected to a racial slur during the broadcast, the Black American community rallied swiftly and without hesitation. There was no audit of their political affiliations. No inquiry into their ideological consistency. No conditional extension of solidarity.

They were defended as Black men who had absorbed harm on a global stage. Full stop.

That clarity matters. It establishes a baseline: when harm is recognized, protection can be immediate and unified.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

If a politically inconvenient Black woman had stood alone on that stage and absorbed that same slur, would the response have been equally unqualified? Or would permission structures have intervened first, prompting a quiet evaluation of her prior statements, her affiliations, her deviations?

We have seen how quickly such audits occur. Women who refuse to affirm dominant narratives—particularly around gender ideology—are not merely debated; they are labeled harmful. The label authorizes dismissal. Disagreement is reframed as violence. Solidarity is withdrawn with moral confidence.

The issues differ. The architecture does not.

Nicki Minaj is not a martyr, and no public figure is entitled to uncritical loyalty. The question is not whether she should be shielded from criticism. The question is whether the communal reflex is consistent.

Do we defend Black women as a principle?
Or only when they reinforce our preferred political narrative?

Permission structures thrive on certainty. They tell us that once someone is on the “wrong” side, ordinary standards of empathy no longer apply. They allow us to convert disagreement into moral failure, and moral failure into disposability.

If “protect Black women” is to mean more than a slogan, it must withstand ideological divergence. It must extend beyond the agreeable and encompass the inconvenient. Otherwise, protection becomes performance—contingent upon compliance.

Communities are not measured by how they treat those who echo them. They are measured by how they respond to those who complicate them.

When protection evaporates the moment a Black woman deviates politically, that is not solidarity.

It is discipline.

And discipline is how obedience is enforced.

On the morning of February 16, 2026, Dr. Linda Davis was driving to work in Savannah when a vehicle fleeing federal immigration officers ran a red light and struck her car. She died from her injuries. The driver, identified by the Department of Homeland Security as Oscar Vasquez-Lopez, reportedly had received a final order of removal in 2024.

The sequence is now familiar: a traffic stop, a U-turn, a red light, a collision. The language reduces it to procedure. In seconds, a woman whose life was defined by devotion — to her students, her children, her faith — was gone.

Dr. Davis taught at Hesse K-8. Her sister described her as “the tall one,” nearly six feet, the best singer among four girls, a soprano who filled her home with Disney show tunes and laughter. She was a mother of four and guardian to another child. Former students still recognized her in the grocery store years later. Her sister wrote that the grief was “so vast it feels as though it fills the Mariana Trench.”

In that same statement, she expressed compassion for the man who killed her sister. She prayed for him and his family. She affirmed his dignity and due process under the law. It was not performative. It was Christian.

Her grace deserves respect. It also requires honesty.

For years, Americans have been told that illegal immigration is a “victimless” offense — a paperwork issue, a technical violation. But immigration law is not theoretical. A removal order left unenforced is not neutral. It is a decision. And when that decision collides with reality, the consequences are not abstract.

Georgia has confronted this before. February 22 marked the second anniversary of Laken Riley’s murder on the University of Georgia campus. Her mother, Allyson Phillips, stood at the White House this week honoring “Angel Families” and reminding the country that what happened to her daughter “could be any family.” Families who bury their children do not experience immigration policy as an abstraction.

In Savannah, only weeks before Dr. Davis’s death, 14-year-old Marcus Anderson was killed in a hit-and-run while riding his bicycle. Two men were arrested in connection with the crash and later held on ICE detainers. A detainer does not establish unlawful entry, but it does indicate federal immigration proceedings. The cases are not identical. Yet in each, immigration status became relevant only after a family had already lost someone they loved.

This is not about hostility toward immigrants. It is about governance. Every sovereign nation retains the authority to control its borders and enforce its own laws. No non-citizen is owed American residency as a moral entitlement. Lawful presence is granted through process, not assumed by crossing a border.

When enforcement is treated as cruelty, removal orders accumulate. And when removal orders accumulate, the risk is displaced onto the public.

That risk does not distribute evenly.

It falls disproportionately on women who share roads, neighborhoods, and workplaces. It falls on mothers who assume the systems meant to protect their children are functioning. It falls on a teacher driving to school before 8 a.m.

Feminism once insisted that women’s safety in public spaces was non-negotiable. We did not treat preventable harm as the cost of ideological purity. Yet when it comes to immigration enforcement, background checks and removal orders are cast as moral failings rather than basic governance.

Dr. Davis was a Black woman, a devout Christian, and — by all accounts — a person inclined toward mercy. When victims do not fit partisan narratives, urgency can fade. It should not. Her life carries the same weight as any other, and her death warrants the same seriousness.

Her sister wrote that their lives are now “inextricably intertwined” with the man who killed her. That is tragically true. But they are also intertwined with the policies that left a removal order unexecuted.

Georgia’s leaders now face a choice. After Laken Riley, there were hearings. After Marcus Anderson, there were vigils. After Dr. Linda Davis, there will be statements. The question is whether there will be reform.

A removal order should not sit unenforced until a red light is run. Law exists to prevent the moment that cannot be undone.

Women should not have to die for us to admit that illegal immigration is not victimless, and families should not be left to absorb with grace what government failed to prevent.

Dr. Linda Davis filled her home with music. She poured into children who were not her own. She loved loudly and without reservation. Honoring her memory requires something harder than sentiment: acknowledging that compassion without boundaries is not justice. It is risk transferred elsewhere.

And too often, that elsewhere has a face — a woman’s. Or a child’s.

As of Valentine’s Day, my husband and I had been parents for one hundred days. In the months pre- and postpartum, I’ve purchased more FridaBaby and FridaMom products than I can easily count: a cradle cap system, saline kits, a baby bathtub, thermometers, a nebulizer, postpartum recovery supplies. I wasn’t shopping as a cultural critic. I was a tired new mother looking for what worked. The packaging was modern, the reviews were solid, and I needed the product so I ordered it.

I barely noticed what was printed on the boxes.

Then, Valentine’s Day weekend, screenshots began circulating online: sexual innuendo embedded in marketing for infant products. “This is the closest your husband’s gonna get to a threesome,” read one caption beside a thermometer. “How about a quickie?” appeared on another box. “I get turned on easily,” said a humidifier panel. An older post resurfaced showing a baby with nasal discharge and the line, “What happens when you pull out too early.”

The reactions were predictable and divided. Some parents found it inappropriate; others defended it as irreverent humor for exhausted adults. The brand has long positioned itself as candid about motherhood, and to many the tone felt consistent.

What struck me was not outrage. It was recognition. The tone felt familiar…not shocking, but continuous. Part of a cultural register millennial women absorbed long before we had language for it.

Those of us who came of age in the 2000s grew up in a retail environment saturated with sexual suggestion packaged as empowerment. Limited Too and Victoria’s Secret PINK were fixtures of adolescence. Tween girls pooled allowances to buy lingerie framed as confidence and self-expression. It was marketed as edgy, playful, grown-up. It was a joke.

Years later, we learned more about the power structures surrounding those industries. Lex Wexner, whose empire included Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret, had extensive ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The exposure of Epstein’s crimes revealed how easily commerce, celebrity, and predation could intertwine. Not every executive was implicated in criminality, but early sexualization of girls existed within systems that rewarded blurred boundaries and protected power.

For millennial women, girlhood unfolded inside that atmosphere. Sexual suggestion was ambient. Humor and irony made it palatable. When discomfort surfaced, it was reframed as prudishness. We learned to laugh.

Now we are the parents.

The FridaBaby controversy is not equivalent to tween lingerie marketing, nor does it mirror the crimes exposed in the Epstein files. The comparison is tonal, not literal. What persists is the register: adult-coded innuendo positioned as harmless and clever in spaces centered on children.

Some parents welcome that humor because it lightens the intensity of early motherhood. There may be truth in that. Identity narrows in these first months. But it is worth asking why adult selfhood is so often reasserted through sexual humor in contexts involving infants. Why is that the reflex?

The answer may be less conspiratorial than cultural…it is a tone we were formed inside. Sexualized wit has long functioned as background noise, and familiarity rarely invites scrutiny.

Yet familiarity does not make something neutral.

We are living through what increasingly feels like a boundary era—a period in which questions about childhood are being renegotiated across institutions. In commerce, we debate tone and messaging. In medicine and law, we debate intervention and identity.

Earlier this year, as the Supreme Court prepared to hear arguments in cases testing whether Title IX’s protections for girls remain sex-based, I wrote about the cost of maternal silence. That legal fight, too, turns on whether boundaries rooted in material reality are treated as protective or discriminatory. The venue is different; the underlying question is not. In both instances, the pressure runs in one direction: toward expanding adult claims and narrowing female-specific space.

In Georgia this session, lawmakers moved to restrict certain medical treatments for minors experiencing gender dysphoria, arguing that childhood warrants firmer limits; critics argued that such restrictions overreach. Strip away the party labels, and what remains is the same philosophical tension: how permeable should the boundary between childhood and adult frameworks be?

These debates are not interchangeable and they should not be collapsed into one another, but they converge on stewardship. They ask whether childhood is a stage to be insulated and guarded, or a space to be rapidly integrated into adult concerns.

Looking back, many millennial women now recognize that what was marketed as empowerment often carried an undercurrent of commodification. Our precociousness was profitable. Adult-coded messaging reached us because it worked. The fact that we did not fully grasp it at the time does not render it harmless in retrospect.

Humor was part of that mechanism. It lowered defenses and reframed critique as humorlessness. “It’s just a joke” dissolved discomfort before it could solidify into boundary.

Today’s cultural and legislative conflicts feel intense because they revolve around the same underlying issue: who exercises caution on behalf of children, and whether restraint is viewed as regression or responsibility.

Millennial women are now raising children in the aftermath of revelations about institutional complicity and corporate excess that we did not have language for when we were young. We understand more now about how systems protect power and how tone normalizes what once would have been questioned.

That knowledge does not require panic. It requires resolve.

We did not choose the atmosphere that shaped our girlhood. We were formed by it before we could evaluate it. As parents, we are no longer passive recipients. We decide what becomes background in our homes and what does not.

The question is not whether one marketing line deserves boycott or whether one bill settles a national debate. It is whether we recognize patterns that feel familiar because they shaped us—and whether we are willing to draw lines even when doing so feels unfashionable. Restraint is not repression. It is responsibility.

We grew up in the gaze, but our children do not have to.

A month ago, I asked a simple question: Do women have a right to single-sex public spaces in Georgia—or don’t they? Since then, Georgia has provided an answer. Not in statute. Not in policy. But in its consequences for real people.

Recently, DeKalb County quietly terminated a veteran police officer for doing what many parents assume is still permitted: responding to a mother’s complaint about a biological male using the women’s restroom at a public library while women and children were present.

The officer did not act on a whim. According to internal records, he intervened only after a mother with two children complained to library security. The library, for its part, had no sex-based restroom policy to enforce—only a local ordinance protecting “gender identity.” With no statewide public-accommodations law to provide clarity, the burden fell on an individual officer to navigate a conflict the legislature has refused to resolve.

The result was predictable. The officer was fired. The woman who complained disappeared from the story. And the public was told—once again—that the real problem was enforcement itself.

This is what policy avoidance looks like in practice.

When Lawmakers Decline to Draw Lines, Someone Else Pays

Georgia lawmakers have not been silent on sex-based rights altogether. In recent sessions, the General Assembly enacted the Riley Gaines Act to protect girls’ sports, affirming that biological sex still matters where fairness and safety are concerned.

That clarity, however, stops at the gym door.

Outside of schools, Georgia has no statewide public-accommodations statute affirming sex-based spaces such as restrooms, changing rooms, or shelters. Instead, the state relies on a patchwork of local ordinances layered over evolving federal interpretations—many of which collapse sex into identity without legislative debate.

In DeKalb County, that meant a library policy allowing patrons to use whichever restroom “aligns with their gender identity.” When a mother objected, there was no policy protecting her concern—only a process for disciplining the person who responded to it.

Other States Have Already Acted—Carefully and Lawfully

What makes this avoidance harder to justify is that it is not unprecedented. Other states have enacted legislation clarifying sex-based access to public facilities—particularly restrooms and changing areas—often through careful drafting that distinguishes sex from identity while allowing reasonable accommodations where appropriate.

States such as Florida and Oklahoma have enacted statutes that provide sex-based clarity for public facilities, particularly in government-owned or government-operated buildings, while others have extended similar protections at least to educational and institutional settings. These laws vary in scope, but they demonstrate that legislatures can act without resorting to criminalization or ambiguity.

While structured differently, they share several key features:

• They define sex as biological sex for purposes of facility access and institutional policy.

• They distinguish sex from identity—without criminalizing expression or presence in public life.

• They allow reasonable alternatives, like single-user or family facilities, without erasing sex-based boundaries.

• They give institutions and public employees clear guidance, so conflicts don’t land on individual workers.

In other words, they do exactly what legislatures are meant to do: set rules in advance, rather than leaving individuals to guess under pressure.

The claim that such clarity is impossible—or inherently discriminatory—is contradicted by the fact that multiple states have already implemented it.

Georgia can too.

Importantly, these statutes do not rely on criminalization or sweeping penalties. Enforcement is typically administrative, directed at institutions rather than individuals, and grounded in statutory definitions and agency guidance rather than punitive sanctions. The purpose is predictability, not punishment—so conflicts are resolved by policy, not by whoever happens to be on duty that day. Framing this clarity as “criminalization” obscures the real problem: it is the absence of law that turns routine boundary-setting into crisis.

This is where the conversation usually goes sideways. What sex-based facility laws do not do is also worth stating. They do not criminalize identity, expression, or participation in public life. In states that have enacted such statutes, enforcement focuses on institutional compliance, not individual confrontation.

“Protecting Girls” Cannot End at the Playing Field

This month, Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor—now a candidate for governor—launched a “Girl Dads” coalition to protect fairness in girls’ sports. The language is familiar and, on its face, unobjectionable: girls deserve safety, opportunity, and common sense protections.

But if that principle is sincere, it cannot stop at athletics.

Girls do not shed their sex when they leave the field. They carry it into locker rooms, restrooms, libraries, parks, and public buildings. Parents do not stop worrying about boundaries once the game ends. And mothers do not stop calculating risk simply because a space is labeled “inclusive.”

Protecting girls “on and off the field” requires more than slogans. It requires laws that acknowledge reality across public life—not just where political consensus is easiest. That includes the public spaces girls use every day—not just the teams they play on.

The Cost of Clarity Deferred

The DeKalb library incident should not be understood as a departure from the norm. It is the logical outcome of a system that asks women to tolerate uncertainty, asks institutions to manage liability, and asks individual employees to absorb consequences when conflicts arise.

The officer lost his job. The concerns of the mother who complained were rendered invisible. And the state’s refusal to act remained untouched. This is what happens when lawmakers wait for courts, activists, or crises to force their hand—rather than governing. Clarity isn’t radical, cruel, or unprecedented. It’s the ordinary work of governance.

Georgia Still Has a Choice

A month ago, I argued that waiting for harm is not leadership. Since then, Georgia has been offered a case study in what waiting produces. The question now is whether lawmakers will continue to outsource responsibility—or finally acknowledge that women’s public spaces are not a niche issue, a local matter, or a problem best left unresolved.

Other states have shown it can be done. Georgia has already shown it can draw lines when it chooses to. What remains is the willingness to extend that clarity beyond sports—and into the spaces where women and girls live their daily lives.

The line is not radical, it is simply overdue.

A quiet crisis has been unfolding for years, largely unnoticed because it masquerades as progress. In progressive youth culture, femininity has increasingly ceased to be a neutral set of tastes or dispositions. It has become a moral liability—something that must be justified, muted, or politically disavowed. And for some girls, the most reliable way to escape that liability has not been to defend womanhood, but to exit it.

We are told that gender ideology frees girls from stereotypes — a claim that has circulated for years. But what I see, again and again, is something far more paradoxical: girls who come to believe that enjoying femininity—especially unapologetic femininity—makes them politically suspect. Loving glamour, camp, excess, softness, or beauty is treated not as harmless preference but as evidence of shallowness or complicity. To remain acceptable, enlightened, and “woke,” they do not say, “I am a girl who loves femininity.” They say, “I am not a girl at all.” When femininity is framed as embarrassing or regressive, girls learn that the only way to enjoy it freely is to disown the category it is supposedly attached to.

This did not emerge spontaneously; it has been taking shape over years of cultural reinforcement. In activist spaces, online discourse, youth culture, and even parts of feminist theory, femininity has been recoded as evidence of false consciousness. Makeup, dresses, romance, softness, beauty—and especially camp, theatricality, and excess—are no longer neutral preferences. They are read as political signals. A girl who embraces them is not merely unfashionable; she is treated as unserious, regressive, or morally compromised. Rather than defending her right to inhabit womanhood on her own terms, she is offered a workaround: keep the dress, keep the camp, keep the glamour—but change the identity that authorizes it.

There has been another pressure operating alongside this one, and it is just as corrosive. For many girls, one of the few socially sanctioned alternatives to rejecting femininity outright is a sexualized version of it. In adolescent culture shaped by pornography, social media, and constant peer surveillance, femininity has increasingly come to mean performance: being desirable, available, consumable. A girl may be feminine—but only as an object.

In my work with Women’s Declaration International USA, where I co-authored the organization’s anti-pornography statement, we argued that pornography is not simply entertainment but a system of training. It teaches boys to eroticize domination and teaches girls to understand femininity as submission, spectacle, and availability. In that framework, girlhood becomes a narrow corridor: either perform a pornified version of femininity shaped by the male gaze, or find a way out of the category altogether. Over time, some girls have chosen the exit—not because they reject femininity, but because they want to enjoy it without punishment.

For some, identifying as a boy or nonbinary has not been a declaration of gender theory, but a strategy of permission. A way to be flamboyant, campy, glamorous, or feminine without reproach. A way to make the moral scrutiny stop—to step out of being judged, dismissed, or reduced before they are ready. Gender ideology does not dismantle the sexualization or shaming of girls; it manages both. Instead of protecting girls from being turned into objects or liabilities, it offers them a new identity with which to flee womanhood itself.

I saw this logic play out years ago in someone I knew personally. After a relationship marked by sex-based emotional trauma in her teens, she stopped wearing dresses entirely. Femininity felt unsafe, humiliating, and exposed. Years later, something shifted. Only after she began identifying as a “transgender man” did she feel able to wear dresses again. The trauma had not disappeared. The garment itself had not changed. What changed was the meaning attached to it. As a woman in a dress, she felt judged and vulnerable. As a “man” in a dress, she felt protected, validated, even celebrated. The same body, the same fabric—rendered acceptable by disidentification from womanhood.

This pattern now appears across contemporary gender culture, having consolidated over years of repetition.

Consider the aesthetic of figures like GottMik: high-glam, couture, theatrical femininity framed through the identification of a ‘transgender man’ performing as a drag queen. In any other generation, this would simply have been a gender-nonconforming woman with exceptional taste. Today, the male designation functions as insulation. Femininity that might once have been dismissed as frivolous or regressive becomes daring and subversive once it is buffered by male identification.

The enthusiastic praise surrounding Gottmik’s top-surgery runway was itself instructive. The applause was the point — and it told girls exactly when femininity is allowed to count. The performance was hailed as daring and revolutionary precisely because it staged femininity after the removal of female anatomy. The message this celebration sent was not subtle: femininity is acceptable, even admirable, only once womanhood has been materially disavowed. That may be read as progress within drag culture, but for girls watching, it reinforced a narrower and more damaging lesson—that femininity becomes worthy of respect only when it is no longer attached to female bodies.

The same logic appears even more clearly in the series King of Drag, a competition built around female performers who perform as drag kings—women playing exaggerated, campy versions of men. I had been anticipating the show, and it proved to be a rich site for observing how contemporary gender norms are negotiated through performance. The cast is female, and many identify as some form of transgender man or nonbinary. What they perform, however, is not masculinity stripped of femininity, but masculinity saturated with it: makeup, theatricality, camp, spectacle. Notably, at least one contestant described only feeling comfortable wearing makeup once it was framed as part of a performance of maleness. Here again, femininity is not rejected; it is permitted. It becomes legible, safe, and even celebrated only once it is routed through male identification.

The lesson mirrors the one taught elsewhere: femininity earns respect only when it is no longer claimed by women themselves.

What has changed is not the performance—lesbians and women artists have occupied this terrain for decades—but the permission structure. Femininity, in this setting, is only respectable once it is performed “as a man.” A woman playing with gender or glamour is treated as unserious or politically compromised. The same gestures, once routed through male identification, become daring and subversive. The implicit rule is stark: femininity belongs to women only as a liability. It becomes admirable only when outsourced through manhood.

This is not the dismantling of gender roles. It is their reinforcement, with a new moral hierarchy layered on top.

And there is an asymmetry here that is impossible to miss. Men are not asked to renounce manhood in order to enjoy masculinity. No movement tells boys that liking strength, competition, aggression, leadership, or authority makes them politically suspect or hard to take seriously. Masculinity is never treated as a moral failure that needs an ideological alibi. Only femininity carries this burden. Only girls are taught that their pleasures require explanation, disguise, or escape.

Radical feminism, at times, has helped create the conditions for this dilemma. In our effort to resist patriarchy, parts of the movement came to treat anything coded feminine as lesser than: weak, ornamental, male-serving, unserious. Women were encouraged to harden themselves, to distance themselves from beauty and softness, as if liberation required becoming more male-like.

More than a year ago, in “Beyond the Ballot: How Radical Feminism Can Lead the Fight for Women’s Rights”, I wrote:

“We must also address a critical issue within our movement: the tendency to view traits associated with femininity as weaknesses. Empathy, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence—traits often labeled ‘feminine’—are, in reality, powerful tools for fostering unity and strength… Radical feminism should respect each woman’s unique qualities and focus on dismantling the structures that impose restrictive gender roles on us all.”

When girls are taught that femininity is contemptible, we should not be surprised when they attempt to escape womanhood itself. Gender ideology rarely recruits by announcing hostility to feminine traits when exhibited by female people; instead, it reframes that hostility as liberation. More often, it offers something gentler: a promise that you can keep what you love, as long as you stop calling yourself a woman.

The consequences are material. Girls navigating trauma, shame, or sexual pressure are funneled toward identities that medicalize distress, destabilize self-concept, and fracture female solidarity. A generation has learned that womanhood is too narrow, too embarrassing, or too politically dangerous to inhabit—and that liberation requires erasing themselves from it.

This is a profound loss for girls.

Womanhood should be wide enough to hold tomboys and ballerinas, lesbians and lipstick lovers, engineers and fashion majors, mothers and misfits, girls who reject femininity and girls who delight in it. A feminism that cannot defend women’s right to be feminine without apology will not defend women at all.

Femininity does not need to be redeemed by male identification. It does not need a new label to become worthy of respect.

What it needs—and what radical feminism must once again provide—is a movement willing to say something unfashionable and necessary: girls do not have to abandon womanhood in order to belong. Femininity belongs to women. And no ideology has the right to take that from us.

A few years ago, I wrote an essay titled Beyond Tokenism: Challenging the Exploitation of Black Struggles in Gender Debates. The argument was straightforward: Black suffering is not a public utility. Our history is not a rhetorical shortcut. Our trauma should not be summoned whenever someone needs emotional force for an argument that has nothing to do with us.

What I did not anticipate was how much worse this habit would become.

Across the political spectrum, Black American history is now routinely treated as a grab-bag of metaphors. When an argument needs urgency, someone reaches for slavery. When a conflict needs moral weight, someone invokes Jim Crow. When a debate needs shock value, someone reaches for the N-word—not because the analogy fits, but because Black history still carries unmatched emotional power.

What’s happening here is the laundering of political arguments through Black history—the habit of borrowing Black suffering to give unrelated arguments instant moral authority.

Shock Value as Political Currency

Recently, I came across a comment regarding self-identity debates claiming that the word “cis” is the “LGBTQ+++ mafia’s N-word for all of us.” The statement was meant to provoke, to scandalize, to flatten centuries of racial terror into a clever comparison. It did none of those things well.

The N-word is not a generic insult. It is a word forged to justify enslavement, rape, segregation, and lynching. It carries the moral weight of a caste system enforced by law and violence. A descriptive term used in identity discourse does not occupy the same universe, morally or historically. Treating them as equivalent is not radical. It is highly unserious, historically illiterate, and deeply anti-Black.

The right does the same thing, only with different symbols.

Recently, some conservative commentators compared Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s refusal to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement to George Wallace blocking school desegregation. On paper, both involve states and federal authority. In reality, the analogy collapses immediately. Segregation was not an abstract constitutional disagreement. It was a system designed to deny Black people their humanity. Ruby Bridges did not walk through screaming mobs so her story could become a reusable prop for modern partisan disputes.

These comparisons are not attempts to clarify. They are attempts to borrow moral gravity.

Immigration, Slavery, and the Lie of Equivalence

Nowhere is this habit more grotesque than in immigration politics.

Activists regularly describe ICE as “slave catchers,” and tweets circulate claiming immigration enforcement is simply what America has been doing to Black people “for 400 years.” Even Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges has been AI-altered to place an immigrant boy beside her, recasting a singular moment of Black courage as a tool for someone else’s narrative.

This is not poetic license…this is historical abuse.

My ancestors were owned as property. They were hunted for trying to escape the shackles imposed on them in a land they were dragged into by force. They had no visas to overstay, no borders to cross, no legal pathway to pursue. Chattel slavery was a hereditary caste system enforced by law, commerce, and terror. Illegal immigration, whatever one’s politics, is not that.

Calling ICE “slave catchers” erases the specificity of Black bondage while laundering contemporary arguments through the most sacred trauma in American history. It converts slavery into a metaphor, and Black people into tools.

If your cause is just, it should not require stealing ours.

Selective Outrage and Disposable Black Victims

The exploitation does not stop at language. It shapes whose suffering counts. And the consequences are not theoretical.

When U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed during federal operations in Minneapolis, the outrage was immediate and national. Protests followed. Statements poured in. Moral collapse was declared. Their deaths—caught on camera and widely reported—became part of a national conversation about the use of force by immigration agents.

But whose suffering draws attention often depends less on human life than on rhetorical utility.

Across the country, everyday Americans have been killed in violent incidents involving non-citizens who, according to authorities, were in the country without legal status. Seven-year-old Ivory Smith in Texas was murdered when a drunk-driving illegal immigrant—reportedly released from an ICE detainer—slammed into her vehicle while she was out with her family. Larisha Sharell Thompson, a South Carolina mother of two, was shot to death by a group of six undocumented teenagers and young adults, according to law enforcement. And when Dacara Thompson, a Black woman, was murdered by an illegal immigrant in Maryland, there were no comparable national protests or campaigns. No sustained outrage. No reckoning.

This pattern has become painfully familiar. Black suffering is amplified when it supports fashionable causes and quietly ignored when it complicates them. “Black and brown” becomes a slogan that often means everyone but Black. The selective reservoir of empathy on the national stage reveals a harsher truth: some victims count because they serve the moral framing of a political moment, while others disappear because they do not.

Many Black Americans see this clearly now. “Use your own history,” one woman wrote online. If you are on the right side of history, that should be enough.

She is right.

Georgia and the Politics of Convenience

Here in Georgia, the selective outrage becomes impossible to miss.

Just this week, our senators took to social media and public statements to threaten a government shutdown over the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis—deaths that have sparked protests and a national debate about federal enforcement tactics and oversight.

Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock invoked moral crisis and constitutional collapse, denouncing ICE as lawless and dangerous and pressing for dramatic changes to how immigration enforcement is funded and conducted.

Yet in the very same state they represent, when an illegal alien reportedly forced his way into a Georgia mobile home and raped an eleven-year-old girl at knifepoint—an attack that occurred less than a week ago—there was no comparable urgency. No sweeping statements. No press conferences. No national mobilization.

This is not about principle. It is about narrative utility—about which suffering can be mobilized, and which can be ignored.

I support national sovereignty. I support immigration enforcement. America is not Section 8 housing for the world. That does not mean I support reckless federal tactics or the killing of American citizens. One can oppose government overreach while still supporting deportation. One can demand accountability from agents and still believe that any non-citizen may be removed for any reason.

This is how narrative utility works: outrage is not guided by principle, but by which stories are politically useful.

Intersectionality Without Boundaries

This is the deeper failure of how intersectionality now operates in public discourse.

Why are Black Americans always the default example? Why does our suffering function as the universal moral yardstick? Why are slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights endlessly recycled to explain conflicts that have nothing to do with us?

This is not representation. It is exemplary scapegoating. Black history is used as a moral proxy so other movements can inherit authority without inheriting cost.

The result is flattening, distortion, and exhaustion. Our past becomes a debating trick. Our trauma becomes portable.

Without Euphemism

And this is what needs to be said without euphemism.

Stop calling ICE “slave catchers.”
Stop rewriting Ruby Bridges.
Stop comparing every political dispute to Jim Crow.
Stop reaching for anti-Black slurs for shock value.

If you want to argue about immigration, argue about immigration.

But leave Black history out of it.

Our ancestors did not suffer so you could win an argument. And we are done being your analogy.

Male supremacy is a malicious, malevolent sentient entity that thrives on ensuring that institutions and individuals conform to its insidious ideologies, one of which is that women are not fully human and can therefore be reduced to objects for the purpose of exploitative oppression; radical feminist Peg Tittle knows this and makes unveiling the ugly awry axiological framework of androcentrism an integral element of her important book Gender Fraud. In this text, Tittle predicates her analysis of male domination on a dystopic world in which parochial, patriarchal understandings of gender dictate that women abandon actions and attitudes that connote individuality and autonomy while embracing epistemological and ontological frameworks which promote deindividuation, superficiality, and preoccupation with the somatic dimensions of the self. The promotion of these aspects of normative femininity–all of which are predicated on the organization of a reality in which women are subordinated to men–contributes to the maintenance of the logics of sexist domination by ensuring that women do not utilize their minds in ways that challenge male power and female dependence on men.

Near the onset of the narrative, the reader learns that the protagonist–Kat Jones–has been arrested for Fraudulent Identity. Apprehended while running, the officers stop her and explain that she is under arrest for Gender Fraud. In elaborating on the charge, one of them explains that “You’re presenting as male, when, in fact, you’re female. That’s fraud. And a criminal offence” (6). In explicating what constitutes Gender Fraud, the officer asks if she disputes the facts of the case, which include that she is

wearing men’s clothing, that you are not wearing make-up, that your hair is short and undone, that you are not wearing any jewelry, that you are unmarried, that you do not have any children, that you have had your breasts removed [due to a cancer concern], that you have had your reproductive capacity nullified via tubal cauterization, and that you have pursued an advanced academic degree?” (11-12).

In reflecting on the officer’s assessments, Kat Jones begins thinking about who may have reported her. Inwardly and introspectively, Jones enumerates several men who, in living in the same neighborhood as her, have embodied various forms of toxic masculinity. Chuck, she remembers, had called her a “cunt” (6) after she left a printout in their mailbox explaining that the leaves they burned created toxicity in the air. Mike, she recalls, had called her a “bitch” and kicked her dog, Tassi, after she called the Ministry to determine whether there were any laws against his practice of cutting trees down along the shoreline (6, 7). As the list of toxic men continues, the reader grasps that the writer is setting the stage to create awareness of how the male supremacist climate in which Kat Jones lives is conducive to the production and proliferation of sexist laws which result in the dehumanization and objectification of women.

As the fictional novel unfolds, the specificity of the degrading oppression that Jones experiences becomes evident. The penalty for the crime of committing gender fraud is relocation to a psychiatric facility, and, upon arrival, the reader becomes acclimated to Jones’s inundation in the realm of androcentric thought and praxis. The counselor assigned to Jones informs her that she will help the imprisoned woman “adjust” (15), with this term operating as a euphemism for the sadistic process of reducing Jones to a slave-woman. Picking up on this reality quickly, Jones notes that the counselor’s disposition and mode of expression is characterized by a “permanent cheer” (15) which is ostensibly an integral, inalienable element of being a woman. In reading this component of the text, the reader may be reminded of Marilyn Frye’s assessments regarding how, under the system of male domination, women are expected to maintain dispositions which include smiles for the purpose of conveying their appreciation of patriarchy and willingness to acquiesce the males who have more power than them within its hierarchical, binary-based structure. The annihilation of independence and identity, an integral element of normative constructs of humanness, transpires as Jones grasps how, rather than being permitted to operate as organically thinking and multifariously feeling sentient entities, female people are required to express a limited range of emotions; moreover, these emotions must be contiguous and continuous with obedience to the system of male domination.

As the text continues to unfold, the reality of the psychiatric facility operating as a training ground for female subordination and objectification becomes increasingly salient. Shortly after entering the facility, Jones’s clothes are replaced with the prototypically parochial and patriarchal garb prescribed for women: dresses. In receiving the dress she is supposed to wear while in the center, the counselor asks her if the size is right. Jones responds that she doesn’t know and subsequently recalls a former era during which, while teaching in college, the discourse of her female students functioned as evidence of their immersion in the aspect of male supremacist ideology which involves women conforming to normative (dehumanizing) notions of femininity. In reflecting, the protagonist recalls when

she’d started hearing her students say they were a size four or a size two, she thought surely that can’t be right. Even with anorexia. When they started saying they were trying to become a size zero, she laughed. What was next, a negative size? Yes! Agree to become invisible! Agree to actual female erasure! (16)

This introspective moment enables the reader to grasp how the protagonist’s former life experiences outside the facility parallel the epistemological and ontological frameworks she is being asked to embody and replicate inside the facility. Specifically, the dress functions as a metaphor for her subordination given its symbolization of female people being systematically trained to think of themselves as objects whose bodies must fit into clothing items in a manner which conveys conformance to strict aesthetic standards. The value of the female-object transposing herself into the clothing item is contingent upon the degree to which she conforms to the designated standard of beauty. Although the protagonist’s reflection stops here, the reader might extend it by noting that the patriarchal construct of normative femininity and its requirement that women conform to strict beauty standards functions in conjunction with another aspect of male domination: patriarchal scopophilia. I like to identify this ideology and praxis as the convergence of Laura Mulvey and John Berger’s discourses on the topic. In “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey recalls the historical definition of scopophilia: “the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object” (806). She goes on to argue that this visually dehumanizing form of objectification is a prevalent, normative mode of gazing in cinema such that female actresses are presented as passive spectacles to be looked at by male audiences. In his own configuration of patriarchal gazing, John Berger argues in Ways of Seeing that

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object-and most particularly an object of vision: a sight (47)

Here, Berger conveys the hierarchical nature of viewing under patriarchy. Men actively watch; women passively appear for the purpose of being watched by men. Additionally, and perhaps moreover, women also survey themselves through a male lens which is such because the male gaze involves looking at female people in ways that reduce them to objects. When women view their own selves in this objectifying way, their inundation in the system of male logic and praxis becomes evident such that, as once argued by theorist Julia Kristeva when interrogating female conditions under patriarchy in “The Transformative Feminine and Heterosexuality,” it becomes accurate to suggest that women don’t exist at all. The notion that women don’t exist at all becomes particularly germane to the concept of male viewing when the reader grasps Berger’s argument that, in a society predicated upon the organization of reality through a male lens, women disappear and also become men in the process of examining themselves. The dress that Jones is told to wear points towards these patriarchal principles by indicating that the objective of the facility is to cause her to conform to the androcentric edicts of society which insist that she perform a very parochial, patriarchal version of normative femininity which involves objectification and self-objectification (the latter form of objectification, self-objectification, transpires upon the donning of the dress because doing so is interpreted by patriarchy as a sign of one’s willingness to collude in her own oppression by adopting the visual logic prescribed by the system of male domination).

The persistent insistence of the patriarchy, exemplified through the demeanor of the counselor who encourages Jones to wear dresses, is recapitulated throughout the text. As the narrative continues to unfold within frameworks of devolution which involve the ongoing abrading of Jones’s independence and autonomy, she is forced to obtain a bikini wax. When she protests, the protagonist is told that she has no choice and is physically restrained (strapped to a table by male attendants) for the painful removal of body hair. As she continues to protest, Jones is told that she is operating in a childish manner. In response, Jones sputters “at the irrationality” (45) of the esthetician’s logic, with this somatic utterance pointing towards the fallacious nature of patriarchal rationale. Specifically, attempting to assert ownership over one’s own body is associated with adulthood, maturity, and self-respect. Conversely, children acquire an understanding of these principles as they grow older and have life experiences which teach them that they are entitled to various levels and dimensions of autonomy and independence irrespective of factors such as social position and economic standing. Yet the esthetician reduces Jones’s resistance to another individual claiming that her body can be misappropriated and misused to childishness because, given her collusion in the system of male domination which dictates that women have no bodily rights, her understanding of what constitutes querulous, immature behavior incorporates the idea that adult female people are “mature” enough to grasp that their bodies exist for patriarchal pleasure; this “maturity” is incompatible with resistance, and protests are thus associated with the childishness that results from one not understanding how the androcentric world operates.

True to life under male domination, the story worsens as time unfolds because, as the narrative progresses, Jones is increasingly subjected to the perverse, pernicious rules of male domination which are operative within the psychiatric facility. The unfolding of the text clearly conveys that the androcentric project is one predicated upon the denial of female personhood. This fact becomes evident at many points, including when facility representative Dr. Gagnon begins to conclude a meeting with her by stating “next week I’d like to discuss your diagnosis” (76). Jones responds “As would I” (76). The text notes that he looks at her after she gives this response and proceeds to ask “What, surprised she could handle such a grammatical construction?” (76). Here, the reader notes that Dr. Gagnon’s consternation is germane to the issue of identity. Specifically, in asserting that she would like to discuss something through the use of the self-referential term “I,” Jones asserts that she exists as an independent, autonomous being rather than operating as an ancillary, adjacent entity who belongs to a man. Dr. Gagnon’s surprise and ostensible resistance to this sequence of verbal self-assertion and certitude works to convey the patriarchy’s ongoing antagonism towards the concept and reality of axiological frameworks which include the valuation of female subjectivity. In a patriarchal planet where female subjectivity is a crime, the grammatical construction “I” is infinitely dangerous and damning.

In addition to providing readers with excellent commentary regarding the system of male domination, Tittle’s text offers individuals racial information which they can ponder in order to develop a more acute awareness of how racism, like sexism, operates as a discriminatory axiological framework predicated on a hierarchical structure in which one group dominates and dehumanizes another. In incorporating race into a discussion which had previously been confined to the domain of gender, Jones asserts “I recognize that my gender is important to other people….but I also recognize that although a lot of people, mostly white people, don’t identify themselves by skin colour–” (142). Her grammatical construction ends here with the agrestic em dash, but the reader’s cognitive processes regarding the signification of racial identification do not necessarily stop there. At the onset of the em dash, readers might find themselves pondering the issue of why white people choose to self-identify as white or not. This is an important issue for many reasons and has been discussed by numerous anti-racist scholars who seek deeper understanding regarding how whites can and do operate within the white supremacist structure. Whites choosing not to identify themselves by skin colour can function as a sign of white privilege insomuch as, while race is conferred upon black people as a marker of inferiority (given all the negative stereotypes attached to blackness) which they cannot avoid given the color of their skin, whites do not have to consciously and intentionally assert that they are white but can rather simply exist as fully human while being white (given that, according to racist logic, being white means being human while being non-white always represents the domain of the subhuman). In other words, whites don’t have to identify themselves by skin colour because they already are identified by white skin which represents positive stereotypes such as individuality, industriousness, moral purity, etc. This is part of white privilege. That Tittle chose to include reflections on whether whites choose to self-identify as white is important. This is the case because the references to race speak towards the aspect of radical feminist theory which, in critiquing the pernicious harms engendered by patriarchy, also subjects the edicts of white supremacy to scrutiny in order to facilitate deeper awareness regarding the deleterious impact that multiple systems of domination can have on individuals embedded in regimes of subjugation.

Readers who thrive on exposure to fictional texts which incorporate radical feminist theory into the processes of narratology, characterization, and plot development will likely love this text. Irrespective of the emotive and intellectual disposition one acquires towards the work, Gender Fraud will likely motivate the reader to reconsider her presuppositions regarding the sex/gender system and ponder how, within dystopic frameworks in which women who attempt to assert their independence and autonomy are accused of attempting to be male, patriarchy works to perpetuate its project of annihilating, or at least abrading, female subjectivity.

Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist based in Atlanta whose writing centers on sexual assault as the core of male supremacy. She affirms that gender is a construct that sustains male power, limiting women’s agency and fostering dependence. Committed to building community with women-centered radical feminists, Jocelyn envisions a world where women and girls are free from male violence.

Georgia’s legislative session began yesterday, and like many women paying attention, I’m entering this session with a mix of realism and resolve.

Last year, I wrote about Southeastern lawmakers advancing reality-based policy—particularly around girls’ sports and the legal recognition of biological sex. Some progress was made. Some lines were held. And a small number of lawmakers showed real courage by refusing to abandon women and girls when ideology demanded it.

But one issue regarding sex-based rights has remained conspicuously untouched: public accommodations. That omission stands out as Georgia’s 2026 legislative session begins the same week the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in cases testing whether sex-based protections for girls still have legal meaning. While those cases arise in the context of sports, the underlying question is broader: whether “sex” remains a coherent legal category, or whether it can be overridden by self-identification across public life.

Courts can only respond to disputes placed before them. Legislatures, by contrast, exist to provide clarity before conflict turns into litigation—or worse, harm—and other states have already shown that such clarity is possible. When it comes to public accommodations, waiting for the judiciary to resolve what lawmakers refuse to address is not prudence but abdication.

Georgia has shown in recent sessions that lawmakers can draw clear lines grounded in biological reality. What remains conspicuously absent is any willingness to extend that clarity to women’s public spaces.

The Tucker Library Incident Wasn’t an Aberration

It was a warning.

In October, a police officer at the Tucker–Reid H. Cofer Library asked a trans-identified male to leave the women’s restroom, citing safety concerns for women and young girls. That officer is now under internal investigation. Not because anyone was harmed. But because—outside of schools—Georgia has no statewide public-accommodations policy that affirms sex-based spaces.

What we have instead is a patchwork: local nondiscrimination ordinances layered over federal civil-rights interpretations that increasingly collapse sex into identity. In places like DeKalb County and Tucker, gender identity protections are explicit. Sex-based protections are not.

So when conflicts arise—as they inevitably will—the system defaults not to women’s safety, but to institutional risk management. Police departments investigate their own officers. Libraries apologize. Advocacy groups demand “liaisons.” And the underlying question goes unanswered:

Do women have a right to single-sex public spaces in Georgia—or don’t they?

This dynamic is not theoretical. I’ve experienced it firsthand.

Years ago, when I still considered myself a trans rights activist, I stopped at a Walmart on my way home from work because I urgently needed to use the restroom. Normally, I used the restroom at the back of the store, but time was tight, so I went to the one near the front, where there were more people around.

I made it into a stall just in time. As I was finishing, I heard a man’s voice calling out a woman’s name from the entrance of the women’s restroom. At first, I assumed he was looking for someone who he thought had come in. Then I heard his voice again—this time from inside the restroom.

I froze.

The voice moved closer. He called the name again. Then again—now directly in front of my stall.

In that moment, every abstraction disappeared. I wasn’t thinking about politics or policy. I was thinking about the fact that I was alone, confined, and physically vulnerable—pants down, door locked, nowhere to go. I started running through scenarios I had never considered before: What if he wasn’t looking for the woman he was calling out for? What if he was testing whether I was alone? What if he didn’t leave?

He did leave. Nothing happened.

But the question stayed with me: What if he hadn’t?

After that day, I stopped using isolated restrooms altogether. My only sense of safety came from proximity—being where someone might hear me if something went wrong. That calculation had nothing to do with ideology. It had everything to do with being female.

This is the kind of vulnerability policy debates erase—and the kind legislators invite when they refuse to draw clear lines.

Patchwork Is Policy Avoidance

And avoidance has consequences.

I’ve been told—candidly—that a statewide public-accommodations bill is unlikely this session. The political appetite isn’t there. Leadership fears backlash. And until litigation risk becomes unavoidable or a truly serious incident occurs, lawmakers are content to leave this to local governments.

That should alarm every woman.

Because what that means, in practice, is that women’s boundaries are only defended after something goes wrong. After a lawsuit. After a headline. After harm. That, again, is abdication—not leadership.

What makes this avoidance harder to justify is that it is not unprecedented. Other states have enacted legislation defining sex-based access to public facilities, particularly in restrooms and changing areas, often with careful drafting that distinguishes sex from identity while allowing reasonable accommodations where appropriate. These laws vary in scope, but they share a common premise: that legislatures have both the authority and the responsibility to provide clarity rather than leaving women, institutions, and courts to navigate conflict on their own.

The Cost of Losing the Few Who Stood Firm

This avoidance becomes clearer when the few lawmakers willing to say so plainly are no longer in the room. This legislative session began with the resignation of Representative Lynn Heffner—one of the few Democrats who broke ranks to vote to protect women and girls when it mattered.

Her departure matters. Not just symbolically, but practically.

It leaves fewer voices willing to say what most Georgians already believe: that sex matters, that children deserve protection, and that public policy should reflect reality rather than ideology.

Courage in the minority is still courage—and it shouldn’t be this rare.

My Hope Is Simple

I’m not naïve about the political climate. But I do have one clear hope:

That Georgia lawmakers stop waiting for women to be harmed before acting.

Public accommodations cannot remain the elephant in the room. Women should not have to rely on local ordinances, sympathetic officers, or institutional apologies to maintain basic dignity and safety in public life.

If the law cannot yet say plainly what most people know to be true, then at the very least, lawmakers should stop pretending the problem doesn’t exist.

We deserve better than silence.
We deserve better than patchwork.
And we deserve leaders who act before something goes wrong—not after.

The session has begun.
Georgia women are watching.

For a deeper legal analysis of the Supreme Court cases referenced here, see Kara Dansky’s, “Are Women and Girls Female?”.

Back in August, I asked a simple question: Are Georgia Republicans loyal to Trump—or loyal to Georgia? Five months later, as we enter 2026, the answer is clearer—and more discouraging—than before.

I remain convinced that Jon Ossoff needs to be replaced. His record on women’s sex-based rights is indefensible. Voting against protections for girls’ sports, dodging constituents, and hiding behind party talking points while calling himself a “girl dad” is not leadership. I’ve written that plainly, repeatedly, and with receipts. I am politically independent and oppose Ossoff on substance.

But here’s the problem no one in the Georgia GOP seems to want to confront: wanting Ossoff gone does not magically produce a serious replacement. And as of now, Republicans still haven’t shown they have one.

The Georgia GOP’s Candidate Problem Hasn’t Improved

The three leading Republican contenders—Derek Dooley, Mike Collins, and Buddy Carter—continue to campaign less like future U.S. senators and more like regional brand ambassadors for Donald Trump.

That might win a primary. It also signals that loyalty matters more than judgment—and Georgia voters have learned to read that cue.

Georgia is not Alabama. It is not Wyoming. And it is no longer safely red. It is a narrow, expensive, high-scrutiny battleground state where seriousness, discipline, and independence actually matter.

Ossoff understands this. His campaign memo didn’t offer bold vision; it highlighted Republican infighting and cast him as the grown-up in the room. That strategy only works if the opposition keeps proving him right.

So far, they are.

That lack of judgment is already catching up to the field. One of the leading contenders, Mike Collins, is now under review by the U.S. House Ethics Committee following allegations outlined by the Office of Congressional Conduct involving the hiring practices of a top aide. Collins has denied the claims, calling them baseless. But ethics reviews have a way of lingering—sometimes for months or years—and the mere existence of an inquiry creates exactly the kind of cloud incumbents exploit.

Georgia has seen this before. In 2020, Jon Ossoff ran successfully against corruption allegations surrounding then-Sen. David Perdue. An ethics inquiry—regardless of outcome—is political oxygen for an incumbent. And it underscores the broader problem: candidates elevated before they are fully vetted become liabilities, not alternatives.

MAGA Loyalty Is Not a Governing Philosophy

I’ve been clear about this before, and nothing has changed: blind loyalty to Trump is not conservative, populist, or pro-Georgia. It is just lazy politics.

When Trump signs executive orders testing the limits of free speech, or when his administration experiments with government ownership of private industry, Georgia voters notice. When Republicans reflexively cheer every move—without analysis, without hesitation, without even pretending to think independently—Georgia voters notice that too.

And they remember.

Georgia’s political DNA includes deep skepticism of federal overreach, corporate-government entanglement, and foreign adventurism dressed up as “strength.” Which makes the recent chest-thumping over the Maduro capture especially revealing.

On Maduro: Serious People Ask Serious Questions

All three GOP contenders rushed out nearly identical statements celebrating the U.S. military-backed operation against Nicolás Maduro. “Peace through strength.” “Justice served.” “No other president could have done this.”

But not one of them paused to ask the obvious question that even mainstream commentators raised. As Kat Timpf put it:

“Let me get this straight: We go to a country, capture their leader, bomb it, and say we run it now—and that’s not war. But when they send cocaine here, that people willingly snort—that’s war? That doesn’t make any sense.”

You don’t have to be anti-Trump to recognize the problem here. You just have to be capable of independent thought. And for many Georgia mothers, that independence shows up in one unavoidable question. As Kat Timpf also asked:

“Question to people who support a U.S. military-backed regime change effort in Venezuela:

Do you support sending your own self—or your children—to fight and potentially die for this cause, or do you only support sending other people’s children?”

Georgia doesn’t benefit from unserious foreign policy cheerleading. We benefit from senators who understand restraint, constitutional limits, and the difference between national interest and political theater.

Georgia mothers don’t confuse strength with spectacle—and they don’t outsource sacrifice to other people’s families.

Women See Through This—Even If Parties Don’t

The reality that Republicans keep missing is that Georgia women are politically homeless right now.

Democrats like Ossoff have openly betrayed women on sex-based rights, Title IX, and sports. Republicans correctly point that out—but then offer candidates who seem incapable of standing up to Trump even when his agenda conflicts with Georgia values, constitutional norms, or basic common sense.

Women notice that too.

We notice when critique is dismissed instead of engaged. We notice when party leadership blocks writers instead of answering arguments. We notice when loyalty tests matter more than judgment.

I’ve been blocked by the Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party without a single prior interaction—after writing a critique about vetting, standards, and candidate quality. That tells me something important: this is a party culture that struggles with correction.

And parties that can’t tolerate critique don’t improve. They calcify.

This Is How Ossoff Wins Again

Democrats are increasingly confident about Ossoff’s reelection—not because he’s beloved, but because women are being offered no credible alternative.

He runs as steady.
They run as chaotic.

He campaigns on process and incumbency.
They campaign on vibes and Trump proximity.

And until Republicans put forward a candidate with:

• a real governing record,

• the discipline to break from Trump when Georgia’s interests require it, and

• the seriousness to appeal beyond a primary electorate

Ossoff will keep coasting.

Not because Georgia loves him—but because the alternative isn’t credible.

Wanting Better Means Demanding Better

This is not an endorsement of Ossoff.
Nor is it a softening of my criticism.

It is realism.

Georgia deserves a senator who will defend women’s sex-based rights and uphold constitutional limits—who understands that loyalty to Georgia sometimes means saying no to party leadership, powerful personalities, and the loudest voices in the room.

As of now, the Georgia GOP still hasn’t shown it can produce that person. And until it does, Ossoff’s biggest asset won’t be his record.

It will be his opposition.

As 2025 comes to a close, I wanted to pause and look back at a year of writing that was often uncomfortable—but necessary. Some pieces reached wide audiences. Others found their way to a smaller circle. All of them were written in good faith and grounded in material reality, even when the conclusions weren’t easy or popular.

If you’re new here—or if you missed a few posts in the blur of the year—these are five worth revisiting as we head into 2026.

I shared a similar year-end reflection last January. If you’re curious how my thinking—and the broader landscape—shifted from 2024 to 2025, you can revisit last year’s post here.

Most Viewed:

This piece reached the widest audience in 2025, likely because it put words to something many people have sensed but struggled to articulate: that gender ideology is sustained less by evidence than by a carefully protected sense of victimhood. It explored why self-correction can be so rare—even in the face of clear harm—and why women and children often absorb the consequences.

Most Liked:

This post resonated strongly with readers because it named a pattern many Black women recognize immediately but are rarely given room to discuss openly: the repeated use of the Black female body to legitimize an ideology that ultimately erases women. By looking at how “representation” is used to shut down dissent—particularly on International Women’s Day—it addressed race, sex, and power without detours or euphemism.

Most Engagement:

This piece generated some of the most divided responses of the year because it challenged an assumption shared across political lines: that grief should suspend debate. The reaction—supportive, critical, and conflicted—was a reminder of how unsettled our collective commitment to free speech has become when emotions run high.

A Hidden Gem:

This post sat a bit outside my usual cultural commentary, which may be why it flew under the radar. It treated the Grace Hopper incident as an early warning—showing how women-centered spaces, labor markets, and immigration policy collide long before the consequences are widely acknowledged. It’s a quieter piece, but one that reflects how often women notice what’s breaking first.

A Timely Reflection:

With major Title IX cases now before the Supreme Court, this piece remains especially relevant. It documents what happens when sex-based rights exist on paper but not in practice—how girls are displaced, officials defer responsibility, and enforcement erodes well before courts are asked to intervene.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting The Peachy Perspective this year. Whether you’ve been here since the early posts or found your way in recently, I’m grateful for the time and attention you’ve given my work.

In 2026, I’ll continue writing at the intersection of womanhood, policy, culture, and motherhood. I’m thankful to do that work alongside readers who value clarity, accountability, and reality-based discussion.

Onward into 2026.

— Kristin Zebrowski, MPA

For too long, American culture has rewarded the appearance of compassion over the exercise of responsibility. Nowhere is this more evident than in debates over sex-based rights, where women—especially mothers—are increasingly pressured to subordinate their children’s material interests to ideological conformity.

That pressure is now coming to a head.

On January 13, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments connected to B.P.J. v. West Virginia and Little v. Hecox. These cases will help determine whether female-only sports teams may lawfully exclude males, or whether males who identify as female must be treated as members of the female sex for purposes of athletic participation.

This is not a niche sports dispute. It is a constitutional reckoning with far-reaching consequences.

I write this not only as a citizen concerned with the integrity of civil rights law, but as a new mother raising a daughter who will inherit the legal precedents now being set. The Supreme Court’s forthcoming decisions will not merely resolve a policy dispute; they will determine whether the protections women secured under Title IX remain meaningful for the next generation of girls.

What the Court Is Being Asked to Decide

At the center of these cases are two intertwined legal questions.

First, do Title IX’s sex-based protections—hard won by women to remedy historic exclusion—apply exclusively to females, or do they also extend to males who identify as women?

Second, do males who identify as female constitute a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause, such that excluding them from female sports constitutes unconstitutional discrimination?

If the Court answers yes to either proposition, the implications are profound. Title IX ceases to function as a remedial civil rights law addressing sex-based disadvantage and instead becomes a mechanism through which female-only spaces can be legally dismantled. Women’s sports would no longer be protected as a category rooted in biological reality, but contingent on self-identification.

What is being asserted here is not inclusion, but entitlement—the claim that male interests must take precedence even within spaces created to remedy female disadvantage.

This is not a question of empathy. It is a question of law, precedent, and material consequence.

Why This Matters to Mothers—Especially Mothers of Daughters

For decades, Title IX ensured that girls had access to fair competition, scholarships, and athletic development without having to compete against males. These protections were grounded in the recognition that sex differences are real, relevant, and—in sports—decisive.

The erosion of sex-based categories does not happen in the abstract. It happens in schools, on teams, and in communities. It happens when girls lose podium spots, roster positions, scholarships, and opportunities that were explicitly created to counteract male physical advantage.

A society that asks mothers to accept this in the name of social harmony is asking them to normalize female disadvantage for the sake of male accommodation.

Mothers recognize these stakes not because they are uniquely moral, but because they are positioned to see how sex-based disadvantage reproduces itself across generations.

The Women and the West: Liberty, Tyranny, and True Liberal Values report, published by the Independent Women’s Center for American Safety and Security, identifies this pattern clearly, describing a form of “suicidal empathy” in which institutions abandon truth and boundary-setting out of fear of appearing intolerant—often at women’s expense. When this occurs, women’s rights are not merely neglected; they are reframed as obstacles to progress.

Performative Virtue vs. Parental Responsibility

Much of the current silence from mothers is not indifference—it is social conditioning. Women are encouraged to believe that voicing concerns about sex-based protections is unkind, regressive, or socially dangerous. The result is a vacuum.

Legislators routinely hear from professional advocates, national organizations, and well-funded lobbying groups pushing ideologically polished narratives. What they hear far less often are ordinary mothers explaining how policies affect their daughters’ daily lives.

This absence matters.

Lawmakers do not legislate in a cultural vacuum. When they lack real-world testimony from the women they represent, they are left with abstract language and advocacy scripts supplied by those with the loudest megaphones. If mothers do not articulate the stakes—clearly, calmly, and persistently—those stakes will be defined for them.

That silence is not confined to legislatures. It exists just as powerfully in school drop-off lines, group chats, parent associations, church communities, and extended families. Many mothers privately hold concerns about the erosion of sex-based protections, yet hesitate to voice those concerns aloud for fear of social friction. This hesitation creates the illusion of consensus—an illusion upon which this ideology depends. When mothers remain isolated, they assume they are alone. When they speak, they often discover they are not.

The Civic Role Mothers Must Reclaim

Mothers are not merely private caregivers. They are stakeholders in public life, particularly when laws reshape the conditions under which their children grow, compete, and develop.

Writing to legislators, testifying at hearings, and submitting public comments are not symbolic gestures. They are how lawmakers acquire the language, examples, and grounding needed to advocate effectively. When mothers explain how sex-based protections affect their daughters’ safety, confidence, and opportunity, they provide something no lobbying firm can manufacture: lived clarity.

The Women and the West report underscores that women flourish where institutions maintain moral clarity and enforce boundaries rooted in reality—not where rights are redefined to accommodate ideological pressure. That clarity does not sustain itself. It must be defended by citizens willing to speak plainly.

Mama Bears or Shrinking Violets

The Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing will help determine whether women remain a legally coherent class or are reduced to an identity category that anyone may claim. But courts do not operate in isolation from culture, and culture is shaped by who speaks—and who stays silent.

This moment demands more than passive concern. It requires mothers to reject the idea that good parenting means staying quiet, agreeable, or non-controversial. Protecting daughters has never depended on politeness. It has depended on women’s willingness to insist on reality, even when doing so invites backlash.

This is not about individual bravery, but collective recognition—women realizing that what they have been taught to endure privately must be confronted publicly.

The question is no longer whether this debate affects our daughters. It does.

The question is whether mothers will make themselves heard—before others finish rewriting the rules on their behalf.

Patriarchy, in my opinion, is the most difficult reality that an individual can grapple with in this life. And although feminism is a formidable force that consistently critiques and condemns male supremacy, misogyny is demonstrably more powerful in its necrotic work of demeaning, dehumanizing, and demoralizing women and girls. Perhaps it is for this reason that I found Sara Ahmed’s introduction to her important book Living a Feminist Life particularly poignant. At the onset of her important text, she argues that feminism is a force which involves both loud acts of rebellion and refusal as well as quiet modes of releasing realities that diminish us. The word “diminish” is particularly apposite here insomuch as feminism exists in response to the recognition of the role that patriarchy plays in making women become or feel as if they are becoming less than what they might be. And, in a male supremacist world that promotes the proliferation of life-diminishing realities such as prostitution, pornography and popular propagandistic literature which encourages women to just be bodies rather than becoming thinking minds, the diminishing of female people is the norm rather than the exception. Thus the need for texts like Ahmed’s. In this work, she discusses the purposes and praxes that women who have chosen to live a feminist life can and should become cognizant of in their professed disloyalty to the patriarchy. At one point, she contextualizes the issue of rejecting patriarchy by referring to the fact that, as a result of it, we are caught up in a “struggle for more bearable worlds” (1). Despite the unbearable nature of patriarchy, the material realm in which we live continues to be, as Ahmed notes, a “not-feminist and antifeminist world” (1), with this reality pointing towards heightened awareness of the multifarious responses that can and do surface in context of patriarchy: complicity, false consciousness, ignorance, collusion with the oppressor, etc. In light of these realities, she argues that living a feminist life means that we can ask ethical questions that lead to answers regarding how we might live more productively and positively in a world predicated on inequality and injustice.

Although the entire book is an exemplary depiction of what a feminist life marked by ongoing disloyalty to the patriarchy can look like, Chapter 1 offers the reader a particularly effective representation of feminism because it is grounded in the author’s experience. Ahmed, for example, discusses a jarring experience she endured while jogging:

There is one time I remember, very acutely, still. I was out jogging, just near my home. A man whirled passed on a bike and put his hand up the back of my shorts. He did not stop; he just carried on cycling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not done anything. I stopped, shaking. I felt so sick; invaded, confused, upset, angry. I was the only witness to this event; my body its memory (23).

Here, Ahmed’s list of verbs convey her emotive reaction to the perverse action that her body was subjected to. She recalls the experience to convey multiple key aspects of feminist living, one of which is a process she refers to as memory work. In stating that “feminist work is often memory work” (22), Ahmed notes that feminism often arises from an awareness that something does not feel right. In recalling an experience which conveys an awareness of sensorial wrongness, she simultaneously cultivates consciousness regarding what is right about living the feminist life. It involves, she says, an intensity which includes being “aroused by what you come up against” (22). This arousal, the awareness that something is wrong with the world, can involve bodies. Specifically, Ahmed states that “Feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with a world, a body that is not at ease in a world; a body that fidgets and moves around. Things don’t seem right” (22). In the case of Ahmed’s memory of a man inappropriately touching her body, living the feminist life becomes the process of recalling the event and noticing that her bodily response conveyed that something was definitively awry about his infraction. In so doing, Ahmed writes that after being violated by the man’s hand, “I began jogging again, but it was different: I was different. I was much more nervous. Every time someone came up behind me, I was ready, tense, waiting. I felt differently in my body, which was a different way of encountering the world” (23). Here, the reader can note the intersections that Ahmed makes between feminist living, the body, and memories. Memories of sexist encounters that one experiences in her female body can function as a site through which allegiance and adherence to feminist principles burgeon or deepen, leading one to lead a feminist life in which the reality of male privilege is recognized and repudiated rather than overlooked and ignored. This process of noticing rather than ignoring, Ahmed writes, can be difficult. Specifically, she notes that “Feminist consciousness can feel like a switch that is turned on. Turning off might be necessary to survive the world that we are in, which is not a feminist world. Feminist consciousness is when the on button is the default position” (31). Here, she explains that “turning off,” or acting like one is not aware of the patriarchal harms that are unfolding all around one, could play an integral role in surviving within a patriarchal world. Yet feminism, she says, is the counterforce which operates by making awareness of patriarchy one’s normative, consistent practice and position.

As the text continues to unfold, Ahmed conveys that living the feminist life involves experiencing various forms of antagonism from individuals who have ingested and adopted the mainstream, patriarchal way of viewing and living in the world. In discussing this matter, Ahmed notes that when feminists speak, people roll their eyes. The eye rolling functions as a form of somatic communication. Ahmed states that the eye rolling communicates “collective exasperation because you are a feminist” (38). This emotive response to feminism conveys that feminist theory and practice is frustrating for individuals who want the process of “going along to get along,” sharing power with privileged men, and suppressing the reality of the ongoingness of femicides for the purpose of maintaining a false sense of peace and relative equality with men to become and remain normative. Feminists upset the normalization of women’s oppression by speaking about it, and experiencing resistant eye rolling from individuals who would rather contribute to the patriarchy’s perpetuation by remaining silent about or complicit with it is a response that those who wish to lead a feminist life can expect to receive. Ahmed conceptualizes this somatic framework with the equation “Rolling eyes=feminist pedagogy” (38). To paraphrase the equation would be to say that a sign that one is espousing feminist ways of thinking and learning about the world is that many, if not the majority, of people will respond with dismissive bodily responses that convey their sullen disregard for feminist dissidence.

In Chapter Two of the text, Ahmed discusses the feminist life in context of awareness of the palpable, tangible way that patriarchal norms make themselves evident to us. Specifically, she notes that an individual might “walk into a toy shop” and “pick up the vacuum cleaner, a toy vacuum cleaner, and feel like you are holding the future for girls in a tangible thing. You can pick up a toy gun, and also feel this: the future for boys held as a tangible thing” (43). In providing this example, Ahmed illustrates how patriarchy orients bodies in intentionally gendered ways such that our experiences in the living world involve our programmed gravitation towards specific objects which come to represent certain gendered, patriarchal patterns that we are supposed to conform to. Girls, for example, are led to envision themselves completing domestic tasks with vacuum cleaners; boys, on the other hand, are taught to engage the world in ways that involve normalizing weaponization and violence. This is how, Ahmed says, patriarchy directs us toward certain futures. Living the feminist life, then, is noticing how this patriarchal power operates as a “mode of directionality” (43) resituating and reorganizing our bodies such that we naturalize the process of moving towards and into ways of being and knowing that sustain gender norms.

As the book progresses, Ahmed becomes increasingly acute in her analyses of the interconnected, antagonistic relationship that exists between feminism and patriarchy. For example, she notes that feminism is inundated in an aura of negativity because it involves recognizing and responding to one’s feelings regarding the wrongness of patriarchy. People who have bought into patriarchy thus view feminism as a problem because it involves feminists feeling things which get in the way of normatively conforming to patriarchal patterns and the expectations that these social conformists have regarding “who we are and what life should be” (65). To those who have accepted patriarchy as a desirable, viable, or inevitable way of life, individuals who oppose it are killjoys whose ontological condition is one of “being against happiness, being against life” (65). In other words, living the feminist life involves recognizing that those who choose to adopt and reflect patriarchal values view feminism as a process which involves challenging and condemning the lives of “happiness” that people attain when they accept the privileges, inclusion, and sense of collective belonging that come with ideologically aligning themselves to male-centered ways of being and knowing. Thus feminism, to non-feminists who choose patriarchy, is a threat to the patriarchal way of life and the learned “happiness” that results from immersion in its fictions, scripted realities, ongoing demonization of women, creation of domesticity cults, etc.

As the text progresses, Ahmed delves into the complexity of diversity work as a site through which the antagonism that exists between dissident feminist thought and normative cognitive frameworks which tolerate logics of domination such as racism. To make this discourse meaningful, Ahmed explains that the praxis of diversity work is multi-faceted, involving both 1. the process of attempting to transform an institution which has historically not been invested in or reflective of principles of inclusion and 2. the work of recognizing and responding to the reality that many individuals do not conform to institutional norms (91). In discussing her experiences with diversity work, Ahmed maintains that while some individuals are appointed to help change institutions that are not diverse, this process can involve one’s growing awareness that the institution does not actually actively seek transformation. This reality has been observed by many individuals who maintain radical ideologies and praxes; they find that institutions employ them for the professed purpose of making their environments and procedures more inclusive without actually being receptive to the transformative process. Thus it is disturbingly interesting to note that being hired to do diversity work can be a part of an institution’s process of making itself appear progressive and inclusive without actually maintaining a deep interest in and commitment to these values. In other words, hiring people to do diversity work can be an institution’s process of keeping up appearances, thereby unveiling a layer of inauthenticity and collusion in oppression which those who seek to lead an authentic feminist life should be aware of. Ahmed shares a practitioner’s story to illustrate this point:

I came to [the university] three and a half years ago and the reason that they appointed someone, I think, was because of the compliance with the Race Relations Amendment Act. . . . You come into a position like this and people just don’t know what kind of direction it’s going to go in. You’re not, sort of, there’s nobody helping to support you. This job does not have support mechanisms and you know maybe you’re just there, because if you’re not there then the university can’t say that it’s dealing with legislation. (94, 95)

Here, the reader can see the role institutions play in hiring individuals under the premise of having them develop processes and procedures which will contribute to the creation of a more equitable, inclusive educational environment. Yet in so doing, these institutions fail to provide those they hire with the support systems and mechanisms necessary to make the diversity work effective. It appears that institutions organize this process in an intentionally ineffective way. In concluding this, Ahmed notes that “An appointment can be how you are not given institutional support, as if being “just there” is enough” (95). As Ahmed’s words imply, just being there is not enough; ontological presence does not necessarily translate into material change.

As Ahmed’s discourse on diversity work continues, she incorporates another reference to the role that bodily responses can play in revealing the antagonistic attitude that individuals who are committed to maintaining systems of domination have towards people who press against regimes of sexism and racism. In discussing how mainstream individuals often roll their eyes when exposed to feminist pedagogy, Ahmed draws attention to the somatic effects that antipathy to patriarchy can engender. And in her discussion of diversity work, she brings this reality to light again by noting that when individuals attempt to discuss the walls that exist when people of color try to successfully work within academia, some listeners “just blink” (147). Although the blink could convey that listeners are startled or disoriented upon becoming the recipients of new information regarding the perpetuity of racist discrimination, the blinking action does not translate into a form of awareness that is accompanied by concern or deep empathy towards or about the historically subjugated individual who is attempting to move successfully within an academic institution that is hostile to her or him. Rather, as Ahmed notes, the blinking response of individuals who are exposed to discourse regarding the walls that people of color experience when attempting to work successfully in higher education reflects their awareness that “when you bring up walls, you are challenging what lightens the load for some…” (147). In other words, challenging the persistence of inequity constitutes a threat to the way of life for privileged people who benefit from being able to maintain positions within higher ed while also attaining promotions in the field. That people of color experience challenges with either or both of these vocational realities is not a priority to individuals who benefit from these institutions privileging their whiteness.

When viewed as a composite whole, Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life functions as a depiction of the profoundly thoughtful and rewarding existence that individuals who choose to unlink themselves from patriarchy can attain. In providing readers with a plethora of personal and professional examples conveying how both patriarchy and white supremacy work to oppress women generally and women of color specifically, she enables individuals to understand that the feminist process involves becoming aware of the power that these regimes of domination have so that these forms of perverse power can be analyzed and summarily rejected.

Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist based in Atlanta whose writing centers on sexual assault as the core of male supremacy. She affirms that gender is a construct that sustains male power, limiting women’s agency and fostering dependence. Committed to building community with women-centered radical feminists, Jocelyn envisions a world where women and girls are free from male violence.

Six months after his premature birth, Baby Chance remains hospitalized. He now weighs 11 pounds and is being transferred to another facility for specialized care. His grandmother, April Newkirk, asked the public for prayers—not outrage, not political mobilization.

“It’s holiday season and I’m very down…Chance is 11 pounds still in the NICU and will not be coming home soon…he’s going to be moved to a different hospital for more help with his health. I’m very grateful for your prayers…God has the final say so.”

That was the November 24th update.

Within weeks, however, “reproductive freedom” advocacy groups reframed her words as proof of political atrocity. “Devastating update,” they declared—not because Chance is worsening, but because he is still alive, still growing, still receiving care, and still costly. Once again, Adriana Smith’s death was converted into a weapon against a law that never governed her case.

For readers who want the full legal and medical background, I’ve already covered it in “Weaponizing Heartbreak: What the Adriana Smith Coverage Gets Wrong” and “Not Forced Birth—A Mother’s Final Act.” The facts remain the same. What has changed is the continued refusal of national activist groups to accept them.

Earlier this year, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office stated plainly that nothing in the LIFE Act requires keeping a brain-dead woman on life support. Withdrawing life support is not legally considered an abortion unless the purpose is to end the pregnancy. Adriana’s situation was governed by Georgia’s 2007 Advance Directive for Health Care Act, passed during the Roe era. Because she had no advance directive and her baby was pre-viable at the time of her neurological death, physicians were required to continue life-sustaining treatment.

This distinction is a matter of public record. The insistence on blaming the 2019 “heartbeat bill” is no longer an error—it is a narrative choice.

What is especially revealing now is how Chance himself is being framed. Reproductive Freedom For All Georgia labeled his continued hospitalization “devastating,” blamed it on “inhumane” policy, and used Newkirk’s update as a springboard for legislative messaging. Yet her words contained no condemnation of the child—only fatigue, concern, gratitude, and faith.

The emotional framing is coming from political actors, not the family.

What we are witnessing is not simply disagreement over law. It is a worldview in which a surviving child becomes the problem that must be explained away.

There was a time when a premature baby’s survival was a medical challenge to be met, not a political story to be exploited. In the early twentieth century, most hospitals refused to care for infants born too early, labeling them a lost cause. It was not ideology that saved them—it was human stubbornness. Martin Couney, working outside the medical establishment, built incubator facilities at world’s fairs when hospitals would not. Parents who were told their babies would die brought them to him; Couney funded the care through public admission so families paid nothing. Thousands of premature babies lived because someone refused to accept that their lives were disposable.

Their survival was not framed as failure. It was celebrated as progress.

Today, a premature baby grows from under two pounds to eleven—and advocacy groups cast his care as a political indictment. That inversion should disturb anyone who believes medicine exists to preserve life where possible, not to adjudicate whose life is worth the effort.

In Nothing But Abortion, I wrote about how mainstream “feminist” advocacy has narrowed women’s interests into a single fixation on termination, while everything that safeguards women and children—medical accountability, maternal health, sex-based rights, informed consent—is treated as inconvenient. Adriana Smith’s case exposes that collapse with painful clarity.

Once she was declared brain-dead, there was no abortion decision left to make. The pregnancy already existed. The only question was whether her child would be allowed to continue developing. Georgia’s long-standing statutory default preserved that life in the absence of contrary instructions. Now that the child exists, the political machinery around abortion cannot easily absorb him—so survival must be rhetorically recast as harm.

That shift—from defending choice to resenting survival—cuts to the heart of this entire controversy.

Outrage, if anywhere, belongs with the medical system that failed Adriana when she first sought help. She presented multiple times with a severe headache, was medicated but not properly scanned, and blood clots were not ruled out. Days later, she was legally dead. This pattern mirrors other cases and raises questions about how pregnant women’s neurological complaints are triaged.

But confronting those failures requires holding modern medicine accountable. It is easier to blame a law that had no role in the life-support decision.

What should not be debatable is this: Chance’s continued hospitalization is not proof of cruelty. It is the ordinary reality of extreme prematurity. NICU care is costly, exhausting, and emotionally punishing—but none of that makes the child a policy mistake.

A society that once built incubators to save premature infants now issues press statements to condemn the effort. That reversal says more about our moral confusion than it does about Adriana Smith, her family, or the law.

Adriana’s death remains a tragedy. Her son’s life is not.

The legal framework has been misrepresented for months. The continued distortion is strategy, not confusion. And when advocacy organizations begin treating surviving premature babies as political “harm,” they reveal just how far “reproductive freedom” has drifted from anything resembling reverence for life, women, or motherhood.

Prayers for Chance are not extremism. Life-sustaining care is not barbarism. And survival should not have to justify itself in the language of politics.

Regardless of where you fall politically, a baby born at 25 weeks is still fighting to stabilize himself months later. The family’s GoFundMe is linked here for those who wish to help with medical and living expenses during their long season of waiting.

This is not an isolated scandal. It is the predictable result of a party that keeps rewarding flash over judgment.

Only months after being celebrated as the youngest-ever Black leader elected to a state GOP post, Ja’Quon Stembridge abruptly resigned as assistant secretary of the party. His departure followed the circulation of a series of confrontation videos from Street Sweeperz, a predator sting group based in Athens, Georgia. At the time of this writing, no charges have been filed. But the political damage is already done—and so is the evidence of systemic irresponsibility.

This did not happen in a vacuum. As long as the Republican Party continues to push “big-tent” rhetoric without serious vetting, it will continue. Platforms are being handed out faster than vetting can keep up. And when leadership is motivated more by optics than due diligence, the door is left wide open for grifters, opportunists, and those who should never be entrusted with power.

This is not simply about one young man. It is about a party culture that rewards image over integrity.

There is an uncomfortable truth the GOP refuses to confront: Republicans are often more concerned with not being seen as racist than with actually uprooting bad actors in their own ranks. The result is a political climate where representation is sometimes treated as a shield rather than a responsibility. When a young Black face appears eager to join the party, scrutiny softens. Celebration comes first. Questions come later—if at all.

Tokenization is not outreach. It is negligence dressed up as progress. And it creates the perfect conditions for people who want access without accountability to slip through the filter.

This pattern is not new. In my previous essay, Minstrelsy Over Substance: The GOP’s Black Voter Problem, I wrote about how the party routinely platforms Black conservatives for spectacle rather than for substance, especially when that spectacle involves attacking Black women for white applause. What we are seeing now follows the same logic. Viral over vetted. Optics over integrity.

Instead of cultivating serious Black leadership rooted in proven integrity, long-term trust, and real accountability, the party keeps chasing the headline: the youngest, the flashiest, the most unexpected. The result is predictable. When spectacle is rewarded, substance is expendable. And when substance is expendable, the public bears the risk.

And this failure of discernment is not confined to youth leadership posts. It now shadows the very top of the GOP’s statewide ticket-making operation. Mike Collins—one of the frontrunners in the Republican primary to challenge Senator Jon Ossoff—is currently under investigation following a referral to the House Ethics Committee. The committee has stressed that an inquiry does not itself establish wrongdoing. But once again, the party is left explaining why serious questions are emerging after a candidate has already been elevated, not before.

This is the same pattern I warned about in my earlier essay, Loyal to Trump or Loyal to Georgia?. Collins has built much of his public profile not on independent leadership for Georgia, but on provocation—race-baiting rhetoric, jokes about political violence, and the casual amplification of posts from antisemitic accounts. Most recently, in the wake of the Young Republicans’ group chat scandal, Collins responded by tweeting an image of the murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley with the caption, “I don’t care about some group chat.” A man who shrugs off bigotry using a murdered woman’s image is not showing moral seriousness. He is signaling that outrage management matters more than principle. Georgia deserves better than meme politics—and antics like that won’t unseat Ossoff in 2026.

That kind of politics rewards escalation over judgment. It favors shock over scrutiny. And it creates an environment where vetting is treated as secondary to spectacle.

The party has already paid the price for this approach. When Republicans last tried to unseat a Democratic senator, they ran Herschel Walker almost entirely on celebrity and name recognition. Substance was sacrificed for star power. Due diligence was treated as optional. The result was not just defeat—it was prolonged embarrassment, constant crisis management, and a race that never had to be lost as badly as it was.

Walker was not selected because he was the most capable candidate. He was selected because he was the most viral. This is how a party ends up repeatedly shocked by outcomes it engineered itself.

“Big-tent” politics without firm standards is not inclusion. It is a free-for-all. Outreach without discipline is not growth. It is recklessness. When the party’s primary concern is how diverse a press photo looks rather than who is being elevated and why, leadership forfeits the right to act surprised when disaster follows.

The GOP did not merely embarrass itself here. It failed to protect the public. It failed to protect young people. And it failed in the most basic responsibility of political leadership: do not elevate what you have not vetted.

Black Americans becoming disillusioned with the Democratic Party does not mean they are running into Republican arms. And it certainly does not mean the GOP gets to suspend its judgment in exchange for representation theater. This pattern only deepens skepticism among the very voters the party claims it wants to reach.

If Republicans are serious about growth instead of applause, they must stop drooling over Black faces for optics and start cultivating Black leadership with the same rigor they claim to value everywhere else. Character must matter more than shock value. Vetting must matter more than viral moments. And integrity must matter more than the press release.

Because when a party replaces discernment with desperation for diversity points, it doesn’t just look unserious. It becomes unserious.