There is a pattern that has become difficult to ignore. A political shift occurs, the language escalates, and almost immediately the burden moves—not upward toward the institutions that claimed authority, but downward toward those with the least capacity to absorb loss.

This time, it is young Black athletes being asked to carry it.

The NAACP’s “Out of Bounds” campaign presents its call as a moral imperative: withhold talent, withhold participation, withhold economic contribution from states accused of weakening Black voting representation. The framing is urgent. But beneath that urgency sits a simpler question: who is being asked to sacrifice—and why is that burden being directed downward?

Leaders who have spent decades inside political and nonprofit institutions are now turning to 18- and 19-year-olds and framing sacrifice as obligation—despite the fact that the cost is not symbolic. Scholarships, NIL opportunities, draft positioning, long-term earning potential—these are the mechanisms through which many young athletes secure stability, not just for themselves, but for their families.

What makes this moment difficult to ignore is that the institutions now calling for sacrifice have not shown the same urgency when it comes to protecting the material interests of those they are addressing.

Recent federal proposals around college athletics, including legislation supported by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, have included provisions that would limit athletes’ ability to challenge compensation structures, restrict pathways to employee status, and override stronger state-level NIL protections. These are not abstract policy questions. They go directly to the economic leverage of the same young athletes now being asked to withhold opportunity for the sake of political pressure.

Constraints on athlete compensation and labor rights were treated as negotiable policy matters. But when institutional political power is perceived to be at risk, the language shifts immediately to urgency, crisis, and moral obligation.

To ask young athletes to risk that path in service of a political outcome that older generations have struggled to achieve over decades is not empowerment, but transfer of responsibility.

And it is not an isolated one.

Increasingly, modern activist politics operates through a downward transfer of burden. Institutions retain authority and insulation, while the cost of moral action is shifted onto those who are younger, more emotionally invested, and more materially vulnerable. Women are asked to absorb instability in the name of inclusion. Students are elevated as the moral face of movements they did not design. Young athletes are asked to leverage—and potentially jeopardize—their futures. The logic is consistent: those with the least protection are asked to carry the greatest weight.

This dynamic appears even in spaces explicitly designed to preserve group-specific experiences. A long-sought Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum—intended to materially establish a national institution dedicated to women’s history—collapsed after disputes over ideological framing, including whether the definition of “women” itself should be contested within the museum’s scope. The result was not an expanded outcome, but no outcome at all. Women were left without the institution, while the broader conflict remained intact.

Radical feminism has long named this dynamic. Women are expected to stabilize systems they did not create, to absorb conflict quietly, to subordinate their own interests for institutional harmony. What is happening here is not separate from that pattern—it is an extension of it. The expectation is not just participation, but moral labor on behalf of institutions that remain largely unaccountable.

For more than half a century, Black political loyalty has been treated as both expected and sufficient. The community has been mobilized, organized, and reliably turned out in moments framed as urgent or existential. Yet when those moments pass and outcomes are measured materially, the results remain uneven. Underperforming schools, limited economic mobility, uneven healthcare access, and persistent neighborhood instability are not new problems. They are enduring ones.

That absence of results is reinforced by how political urgency is constructed. The history of Black disenfranchisement is real. But that history is increasingly used to collapse distinctions that matter. Any shift that weakens Democratic political advantage is framed as a racial crisis. Partisan loss becomes existential threat. And once that shift is made, the expectation of sacrifice becomes easier to justify.

There is also an assumption doing quiet work here—that the athletes being addressed are politically aligned, that they share the same priorities, and that they should subordinate personal opportunity to a strategy they did not shape. That assumption removes the need for persuasion. But real political engagement requires making a case—and demonstrating that what is being asked will produce tangible outcomes.

What is offered instead is largely symbolic. Boycotts generate attention. Campaigns create visibility. But the costs are not symbolic. A declined scholarship is a lost opportunity. A disrupted athletic trajectory is a material consequence. It is easy to call for sacrifice when the cost is externalized. It is harder when those making the call remain insulated from its effects.

The issue is not whether political power matters…it does. The issue is where responsibility is being directed. If organizations and leaders claim to represent Black interests, then accountability should follow. What was promised? What was delivered? What changed?

Those are harder questions than asking young people to take a stand. But they are more necessary ones.

Because real political power is not measured by how much a community is willing to sacrifice. It is measured by what that community can demand—and receive in return. A group that is consistently asked to give—time, loyalty, opportunity—without clear material return is not being empowered. It is being managed.

There is a difference between collective action that builds power and demands that redistribute loss. Young Black athletes are being asked to make decisions that could shape their lives. That deserves more than urgency. It deserves clarity, honesty, and accountability from those making the ask.

Because if the strategy requires the youngest and least insulated to carry the greatest burden, then the question is not whether they should comply.

It is why that burden keeps being placed on them at all.

By now, the pattern is familiar. A woman dies under tragic circumstances, and before the details have fully settled, the cause is declared: an “abortion ban.” The story arrives pre-packaged, emotionally charged, and politically useful. It travels quickly because it feels clear. It offers a villain. It offers urgency. And it offers a ready-made conclusion. But clarity is not the same thing as truth.

The death of Amber Nicole Thurman has once again been pulled into this narrative. Her mother, Shanette Williams, is speaking publicly about her loss and urging voters to see her daughter’s story as evidence of a system that failed women. The grief is real, and it is devastating. A young mother is gone. A child will grow up without her. Nothing about that should be minimized.

What deserves scrutiny, however, is not the grief itself—but what is being built on top of it.

Georgia law explicitly permits abortion procedures in cases of “medical emergency,” defined as necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” In response to confusion surrounding high-profile Georgia cases, Attorney General Chris Carr also stated publicly that “there is nothing in the LIFE Act” requiring doctors to withhold necessary treatment or maintain life support in situations unrelated to intentionally terminating a pregnancy.

The barrier was time.

According to reporting, doctors delayed performing a routine, life-saving procedure. Not because it was explicitly forbidden, but because of hesitation, confusion, or misinterpretation. And in medicine, hesitation can be fatal. When care is delayed in a situation that requires urgency, the outcome is no longer a matter of policy—it is a matter of practice.

That distinction keeps disappearing.

This is not an isolated framing error. It is a pattern. In an earlier piece, I wrote about how Thurman’s case was initially presented as proof of a system that denies care, even as evidence pointed toward a failure to deliver care in time. The same narrative arc has re-emerged, now with greater political force, as her story is folded into campaign messaging and electoral strategy.

We saw a nearly identical dynamic unfold in the coverage of Adriana Smith. When Smith, a pregnant nurse, was declared brain-dead, the media quickly attributed her prolonged life support to Georgia’s LIFE Act. That claim was repeated widely—and incorrectly. The law governing her situation was the Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care Act of 2007, a statute predating Dobbs and the current abortion debate.

That legal distinction mattered. It explained why doctors were required to continue life-sustaining treatment in the absence of an advance directive. It clarified that this was not a case of abortion law overriding medical judgment, but of an existing framework determining default care. Yet that explanation never carried the same weight as the initial claim. It was less useful, less provocative, and far less politically convenient.

More importantly, it redirected attention away from another uncomfortable truth: Adriana Smith sought care before her collapse and was sent home without critical testing. Her symptoms—severe headaches—were not treated with the urgency they required. A CT scan was not performed. By the time the full extent of her condition was discovered, it was too late.

Once again, the failure was medical…but that is not the story that traveled.

What followed instead was a broader cultural argument about whether her continued life support represented compassion or cruelty. The debate centered on autonomy, on law, on ideology. Meanwhile, the question of why her condition was not properly diagnosed at the outset faded into the background.

That omission is not neutral. It shapes what the public understands as the problem—and therefore what they demand as a solution.

There is another part of Smith’s story that complicates the narrative further, and it is one that has been far more difficult to incorporate. Her son, Chance, survived. Born extremely premature, he spent months in the hospital before finally going home. By recent accounts, he is growing, gaining weight, and described by his family as a happy, pleasant baby now reunited with his older brother.

He is here.

And his presence exposes something that much of the coverage has tried to avoid. Because it is difficult to maintain that this was purely a story of harm when there is a living child whose life was made possible by the very outcome being condemned. It is even more difficult to reconcile the intensity of the outrage with the fact that his own family expressed a clear desire for him to survive—that they wanted Adriana’s life to continue through her children.

That reality did not fit cleanly into the narrative. In some corners, it was met not with relief, but with hostility. The fact that a child survived was framed as an extension of the injustice rather than as something worth acknowledging on its own terms.

At a certain point, that response forces a harder question. If the survival of a wanted child is treated as a policy failure, what exactly is being defended?

Across these cases, the throughline is difficult to ignore. Women present with serious symptoms. Those symptoms are minimized, misread, or not acted on quickly enough. Care is delayed. The outcome becomes fatal or irreversible. And then, almost immediately, the cause is reassigned to a legal framework that did not, in fact, prohibit intervention.

This does more than misinform. It displaces accountability.

Because if the problem is understood as restrictive law, the solution becomes legislative change. But if the problem is delayed care—if it is hesitation, diagnostic failure, or institutional breakdown—then the solution lies elsewhere. It requires examining medical training, hospital protocols, risk tolerance, and the ways in which providers interpret legal boundaries in high-pressure situations. It requires asking why women, particularly Black women, continue to have their symptoms under-evaluated or dismissed until it is too late.

Those are harder conversations. They do not lend themselves to clean slogans or campaign messaging. They implicate systems that are less politically convenient to confront.

But they are also the conversations that might actually prevent the next death.

Shanette Williams wants her daughter’s death to matter. That desire is both understandable and justified. No parent should have to bury a child and then search for meaning in the aftermath. The question is whether the meaning being constructed reflects what actually happened, or whether it reflects what is most useful to those amplifying the story.

Because if we continue to use these deaths as evidence of care being denied, when the evidence points to care being delayed, we are not honoring these women. We are obscuring the conditions that led to their deaths. And obscured failures are repeated failures.

If there is any responsibility owed to women like Amber Thurman and Adriana Smith, it is this: to tell the truth about what failed them, even when that truth is less politically satisfying. It is not enough to demand access on paper if, in practice, women are left waiting for care that should have been immediate. It is not enough to invoke their names if doing so diverts attention away from the very systems that broke down when they needed them most.

The story they keep telling is simple, and that is why it spreads. But the story they won’t tell—the one about hesitation, confusion, and delayed care—is the one that might actually save lives.

Until that becomes the focus, nothing changes.

Every election cycle now comes with the same warning: democracy is under attack, Black voting rights are being gutted, and America is sliding backward toward Jim Crow.

The language is powerful because the history is real. Black Americans do not have to imagine political exclusion. Our communities still carry the weight of poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, violence, and the long fight to secure a basic right that should never have been denied in the first place.

But that history also makes us politically vulnerable to manipulation, as the left increasingly treats any reduction in Democratic power as if it were a reduction in Black political power. Every lost district becomes disenfranchisement. Every shift in political advantage becomes voter suppression. Partisan losses are reframed as racial crises.

But Black Americans are still voting…so what, exactly, was taken away?

Earlier this year, I wrote that a voting bloc that never moves does not have to be persuaded. It only has to be managed. The reaction to recent redistricting battles has only reinforced that point.

That question matters because voting rights are too important to be collapsed into partisan panic. There is a difference between losing the right to vote and losing a district that helped one party maintain control. There is a difference between Black Americans being denied political participation and Democrats losing a political structure they had come to depend on. Those are not the same thing but pretending they are serves a specific purpose.

For decades, Black voters have been treated as the moral face of Democratic urgency. When the party needs emotional force, our history is invoked. When it needs legitimacy, our struggles are placed at the center. When it needs fear, our past is pulled forward and presented as the future waiting just around the corner. The result is a familiar pattern.

Black Americans are asked to feel existentially threatened whenever Democrats lose institutional advantage. But lost Democratic power is not automatically lost Black power.

That distinction is especially important in redistricting fights. District lines are political tools. They can shape outcomes, protect incumbents, weaken opponents, and preserve party control. Both parties understand this. Both parties use the process strategically when they can. What matters is whether every electoral shift that weakens Democratic certainty should automatically be framed as an ck voting rights.

If Black citizens can still register, still vote, still organize, still persuade, still run candidates, and still participate in elections, then the issue is not whether Black people have been erased from democracy. The issue is whether one party has lost a favorable arrangement. And that is a political problem, not a civil rights crisis.

None of this means race is irrelevant or that history no longer shapes political outcomes. Nor does it mean Black communities should be naïve about power. But it does mean we should be careful when partisan actors use our history as emotional packaging for their own losses. Because there is something deeply revealing about a political system that only talks about Black power when Democratic power is threatened.

Where is that urgency when Black communities ask for safer neighborhoods? Better schools? Serious economic investment? Protection for women and children? Actual accountability from leaders who have taken our votes for granted for generations? The emergency seems to arrive on schedule when party control is on the line…and that should tell us something.

When one party believes it owns the Black vote, and the other party assumes it can never win it, Black Americans are left with very little leverage. Political power is built through competition. A vote that can move must be courted. A vote that is guaranteed can be praised, photographed, and emotionally flattered while being materially neglected. That is political captivity!

If Black political power depends entirely on preserving predictable Democratic outcomes, then it is worth asking what kind of power that really is. A community whose votes are permanently assumed is no longer being courted as citizens to persuade, but managed as electoral property.

A competitive political environment is not inherently anti-Black. In fact, it may be the only thing that can force both parties to stop treating Black voters as settled territory. If Democrats had to earn Black votes instead of assuming them, they would have to deliver more than symbolism. If Republicans believed Black voters were actually reachable, they would have to do more than write us off. This kind of competition would make Black voters more powerful…not less.

But the current arrangement benefits too many people. It benefits Democrats, who can invoke Black history while relying on Black loyalty. It benefits Republicans, who can avoid serious engagement by assuming Black voters are permanently unavailable. And it benefits media institutions that know racial fear remains one of the most effective ways to produce political compliance. It does not benefit Black Americans.

It especially does not benefit Black women, who are often expected to serve as the emotional and moral guardians of the approved political narrative. We are praised when we reinforce the story. We are corrected when we question it. Our independence is treated as dangerous because it threatens the illusion of unity.

Radical feminism teaches us to notice when a group is being used symbolically while being denied material accountability. Women know this pattern well. We are turned into slogans, signs, and sentimental appeals while our actual needs are pushed aside. Women are often expected to absorb instability quietly in order to preserve institutional harmony. Black voters are often expected to perform a similar political function: remain loyal, remain emotionally available, and remain morally useful regardless of material return.

We are invoked constantly, but not necessarily heard. That is why this issue deserves more skepticism than the mainstream framing allows. Black Americans are not powerless children who must be politically managed for our own good. We are citizens. We can weigh competing interests. We can distinguish between actual disenfranchisement and partisan inconvenience. We can honor the blood-stained history of voting rights without allowing that history to be used as a leash.

The right to vote matters, but the right to think independently matters too. Black political power does not disappear the moment Democrats lose control. If anything, genuine power begins when our votes can no longer be assumed.

A community that can move is a community that must be answered.

A voting bloc that must be earned is a voting bloc that matters.

Six days after giving birth, with a spinal headache that outpaced every other kind of pain, I finally opened my laptop.

My daughter was asleep. I was finally feeling well enough for me to think, maybe I can do this now. Before she was born, I had imagined something very different—writing in the hospital, or in those early quiet days at home. I even had my husband bring my laptop back from the house on his first trip to check on the pets, as if I would be casually drafting essays between newborn snuggles. In hindsight, naïve doesn’t begin to cover it.

I did not touch my computer until six days later. And even then, it was not because things had settled. It was because something in me could no longer hold the words. For months, I had known what I wanted to write. The idea sat with me through pregnancy—forming, sharpening, waiting—but I was unsure where it belonged.

I had written about gender ideology before: how I came to see its harms after once supporting it; the patterns among young women attempting to escape womanhood after trauma, abuse, or alienation; the pressures placed on mothers; the quiet encroachment into women’s spaces. But this piece resisted that frame. It was not analysis or critique. It was not something to be written from a distance.

This time, I wanted to write from the body—through pregnancy, through birth, through the clarity that comes when abstraction collapses into lived reality. Holding my daughter made something even more unmistakable. Arguments about “womanhood,” once theoretical, had become immediate, material, undeniable.

Months earlier, I had come across the call for She Holds The Line: Black Women Speak on Gender Ideology. It invited Black women to share personal accounts of how gender ideology had shaped our lives—naming, directly, what so many of us are discouraged from saying: silencing, backlash, male intrusion into female spaces, and the weaponization of Black womanhood. I read it once, then again, and the answer came quickly. This was where the piece belonged.

By the time I finally opened my laptop, the essay had been living in me for months. When it came, it did not arrive slowly. It moved. I wrote through the pain, aware that the moment had come and that the words had already waited long enough. The next day, I would end up in the emergency room twice and end up staying overnight for observation. But by then, the piece was finished.

And what it gave shape to was something I had been circling throughout my pregnancy, but could only fully grasp after becoming a mother.

Somewhere along the way, the meaning of “FTM” was displaced. It never ceased to mean first-time mom, but it ceased to be heard that way. My essay, “The Real FTM: Holding the Line as a Black Mother in a World That Erases Women,” is an attempt to recover that meaning—through pregnancy, birth, and the reality of becoming a mother in a culture that increasingly treats womanhood as something to be redefined rather than recognized.

It is, at its core, about the tension between lived experience and ideological language: carrying life while being told that motherhood is merely an identity; becoming a mother while watching the concept itself loosen from its material grounding; holding a daughter and recognizing, with a clarity that resists reinterpretation, that some truths do not bend.

This is one part of why the anthology matters.

As Nevline Nnaji, the editor, describes it, She Holds The Line is “a groundbreaking anthology” examining the impact of the transgender movement on the lives of Black women. It brings together thirteen contributors—mothers, artists, lesbians, bisexual women, detransitioners—whose accounts reflect both personal cost and broader social consequence. Many of us have faced backlash for speaking plainly. Taken together, our stories “shatter common stereotypes” about who holds dissenting views, and why.

But the marginalization our voices address is not confined to one arena. Black women have often had to navigate this conversation without a stable place to land—discouraged from speaking plainly in mainstream spaces, and not always fully recognized within gender-critical ones. Not out of malice, but out of a gap in attention and understanding. Yet the realities we face, shaped by both sex and race, are not peripheral to this issue. They are central to it.

This is part of what She Holds The Line offers: not simply a platform, but a correction. It situates Black women’s voices where they belong—not as supplementary, but as integral to any serious understanding of the present moment.

When I first began advocating for women’s sex-based rights, I often framed it in terms of a future daughter. Now she is here. And the work looks different. It looks like writing when it is necessary, even when it is difficult—six days postpartum, in pain, in a body still catching up to what has just occurred. It looks like refusing to wait for ideal conditions to say what needs to be said.

Because the line does not hold itself. It is held.

My essay appears in She Holds The Line: Black Women Speak on Gender Ideology, now available for purchase. For those familiar with my work, the themes will be recognizable. But the vantage point is not the same. This piece is more personal, more grounded—written from the other side of something I had previously only approached in theory.

And for those concerned with where this conversation is going—particularly for Black women, and for the girls who will inherit its consequences—the anthology offers something rare: not consensus, but clarity; not abstraction, but lived experience; not distance, but proximity to what is at stake.

We are still here and we are still holding the line.

There is a particular kind of irony in watching political succession unfold in real time. Not the theatrical kind—the speeches, the statements, the carefully worded condolences—but the quieter kind that asks what actually changes when the names do.

The passing of Congressman David Scott has created more than an electoral vacancy in Georgia’s 13th District. It has precipitated a deeper transition—one long underway, but now difficult to ignore. Not simply a generational shift, but an ideological one.

Scott’s life tells a story that still resonates in the South. Born in segregated South Carolina, raised between rural labor and northern migration, shaped by faith, discipline, and a belief in steady progress—his trajectory mirrors a broader Southern Black experience. It is a story rooted in material reality: land, labor, church, family, and incremental advancement against real barriers. For many of us with roots in South Carolina, that story is not abstract, but familiar.

And yet, by the end of his career, there was a growing sense that he had stayed longer than he should have. His health was visibly declining. Questions about his ability to serve were no longer whispered—they were obvious. Still, he remained.

At first glance, that looks like stubbornness. Or denial. But it may be something else: a recognition—perhaps unspoken—that what comes next is not simply new leadership, but a different kind of politics altogether.

The contrast becomes clearer when looking at the field now stepping forward. Dr. Jasmine Clark, widely seen as the Democratic frontrunner for GA-13, is accomplished, educated, and a mother—the kind of candidate often cited as evidence of progress. Yet her legislative record points in a more complicated direction: opposition to the Fair and Safe Athletic Opportunities Act.

A similar dynamic appears in the gubernatorial race, where Keisha Lance Bottoms has emerged as a leading figure. In a recent debate, she acknowledged that differences between males and females exist in sports, but dismissed the issue as a lower priority and indicated she would have vetoed the Riley Gaines Act, deferring instead to athletic associations.

Taken together, these are not isolated positions. They may point to a broader pattern—one in which even highly capable, institutionally fluent women operate within a framework that makes it difficult to center sex as a material reality when doing so conflicts with prevailing ideological expectations.

If that is the case, then the shift is not simply about policy outcomes. It is about the terms of participation.

It is no longer enough, within Democratic politics, to support women, or even to be one. There appears to be an expectation—often unstated but clearly enforced—that one must also affirm a set of ideas that detach identity from biology, language from meaning, and policy from common sense. And not tentatively, but openly and without qualification.

This narrowing is not hypothetical. It can be seen in how quickly dissent disappears. In my recent piece, The Democrats Who Broke Ranks Are Disappearing, I traced how the few Georgia Democrats willing to depart from party orthodoxy on issues affecting women and children are now leaving the legislature or have already been pushed out. What remains is a smaller, more tightly defined space for acceptable positions.

Scott’s own record was not untouched by these pressures. His vote against legislation such as H.R. 28, which sought to protect women and girl’s sports, suggests that consolidation within the party was already underway. What may once have appeared as alignment on specific votes, however, now seems to have hardened into something more expansive: an expectation not only of agreement, but of explicit and public affirmation.

Seen in that light, Scott’s late-career persistence takes on a different meaning. It may not have been simple reluctance to step aside. It may have reflected an awareness—however unarticulated—that what was coming next would not merely replace him, but redefine the space he had occupied.

That distinction matters. Because if the framework itself has changed, then who fills the seat is only part of the story.

For women and girls, the implications are direct. Representation, on its own, offers no guarantee of protection. The presence of more women in office does not necessarily produce policies that recognize or defend female boundaries, spaces, or experiences. When the governing framework requires the de-prioritization of sex as a material reality, even female leaders are constrained in what they can acknowledge, much less safeguard. Under those conditions, the language of empowerment does not disappear—it persists—but it does so alongside, and at times in service of, the erosion of sex-based rights.

For voters, the implications are similarly consequential. A narrower ideological lane means fewer genuine choices, even when elections appear competitive. Positions that once invited debate risk being treated as settled, and the distinction between representation and alignment becomes harder to discern.

For those of us with roots in places like South Carolina—where political life has long been shaped by tangible realities rather than abstract frameworks—the shift is particularly noticeable. The language has changed. The assumptions have shifted. And the distance between lived experience and political expression has widened.

Scott’s career belongs, in many ways, to an earlier chapter—one in which progress was pursued within acknowledged constraints, and disagreement did not automatically invite exclusion. What follows is less certain, but no less significant.

The seat will be filled. The titles will change. The speeches will continue. But the deeper shift—the one that determines what can be said, what must be affirmed, and what is no longer permitted to be questioned—may already be complete.

There has been a steady drumbeat of names over the past few weeks: Dr. Cerina Fairfax, Pastor Tammy McCollum, Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer, Barbara Deer, Ashanti Allen—among others. These women lived different lives in different places, some highly visible in their communities, others more private. Taken together, their deaths do not read as isolated incidents. They read as variations on a pattern.

And yet, alongside this pattern, another claim continues to circulate with increasing confidence: that feminism is no longer necessary. That whatever battles once justified it have already been won. That what remains is either excess or overreach.

That claim requires a certain kind of blindness. Not to individual cases, which can always be explained away, but to the structure that connects them.

What the Pattern Actually Shows

Across the United States and globally, women are most often killed by men they know—partners, former partners, or family members. According to UN Women, an average of 137 women and girls are killed every day by intimate partners or family members. The most common site is not the street, but the home. The most consistent predictor is not randomness, but prior control.

These are not fringe cases. They are not statistical outliers. They are the most common form of lethal violence against women.

If feminism were no longer necessary, this pattern would not be so stable.

Why This Keeps Getting Minimized

Part of the reason this pattern is so easy to dismiss is that it does not present as a single, unified crisis. It appears as a series of personal failures: a bad relationship, a troubled man, a situation that escalated. Each case is treated as its own contained story, disconnected from the others.

That fragmentation allows the structure to remain unnamed.

A framework that treats each instance as individual cannot explain why the same dynamics repeat across geography, class, and culture. It can describe what happened. It cannot account for why it keeps happening.

Where Softer Frameworks Fall Short

This is where the difference between liberal and radical feminism becomes less theoretical and more practical.

Liberal feminism tends to locate the problem in gaps—unequal pay, representation, access, opportunity. Its solutions follow from that: inclusion, advancement, visibility. These are not trivial gains. They matter.

But they do not fully address a pattern in which women are most at risk inside intimate relationships, regardless of status, education, or visibility. A woman can be professionally successful, publicly respected, and still be killed by someone with direct access to her life.

That is not a gap in opportunity, but a problem of structure.

A framework focused on individual advancement struggles to explain why proximity itself can be dangerous. It assumes that increased autonomy resolves risk. In many cases, particularly at the point of separation, that autonomy can increase it.

What a Material Analysis Makes Visible

A radical feminist framework starts from a different premise: that women are a sex class, and that certain risks are tied to that reality in ways that cut across individual differences.

This does not require rejecting relationships, family life, or motherhood. It requires looking clearly at how those relationships are structured and where power sits within them.

When you do that, the pattern becomes easier to see.

Women are most often harmed by men who have:

• access to them

• established relational authority

• the ability to monitor, restrict, or escalate

The home is not just a private space. It is a space where those conditions converge.

This is not about assuming every relationship is abusive. It is about recognizing that the risk is patterned, not incidental.

When Control Cannot Be Maintained

There are cases that make this structure more difficult to ignore because they extend beyond a single victim.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, a man killed multiple members of his own family across two locations before being killed by police. The violence occurred in the context of an ongoing separation, with a court date imminent. By that point, the relationship had already entered a formal process of dissolution.

Research has long established that separation is one of the highest-risk periods for lethal violence. The issue is not the act of leaving itself, but what it represents within a relationship where control is a defining feature. When that control cannot be maintained, the response is not always withdrawal. In some cases, it escalates.

In incidents like this, the violence extends beyond the partner to others within the same relational sphere—children, relatives, anyone positioned within that structure. The scale changes, but the underlying dynamics do not.

This is often described as a “domestic incident,” a term that reduces the scope of what is being observed. The reality is that it reflects the same pattern seen in smaller-scale cases, intensified rather than altered.

Why This Still Matters—Even Now

The persistence of this pattern complicates the idea that feminism is outdated. It suggests that the underlying conditions it sought to analyze have not disappeared, even as other areas have changed.

What has shifted is how those conditions are discussed. There is more emphasis on identity, on expression, on individual autonomy as the primary measure of progress. Those conversations are not irrelevant, but they can pull attention away from material realities that have not moved as much as we might prefer to believe.

A framework that avoids naming sex-based patterns of risk will struggle to address them. It can adapt language, refine tone, and expand definitions, but it cannot resolve what it does not clearly identify.

The Question Beneath the Argument

At a certain point, the question is not whether feminism is still needed in the abstract. It is whether there is a framework willing to describe what is happening without softening it into something more comfortable.

A version of feminism that cannot account for why women are most at risk in intimate, domestic contexts is not incomplete by accident. It is incomplete by design.

This gap is not new. I’ve written before about how a feminism that prioritizes ideology over material reality struggles to meet women’s actual needs—particularly around family, motherhood, and safety. In Beyond the Ballot: How Radical Feminism Can Lead the Fight for Women’s Rights, I argued that what women need is not a broader definition of empowerment, but a clearer one. The need for clarity has not changed. Only the willingness to confront it has.

What Remains

The pattern has not disappeared. It has become easier to ignore.

As long as that pattern persists—across regions, across classes, across cultures—the need for a framework that can name it clearly remains.

The issue is not whether feminism is still necessary. It is whether the version being offered is capable of doing the work.

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?”.