Five years ago yesterday, apparently, I was arguing with a then-friend about whether a convicted child sex offender should be entitled to state-funded “sex-reassignment” surgery. I know the date because Timehop reminded me.

The timing was interesting because about two weeks before, I was on a Zoom panel talking about the period when my views on gender identity began to change. That conversation already produced Woman Enough to Exploit, Not Woman Enough to Protect, but there was another moment I hadn’t finished thinking about: realizing that the transgender-identified people I knew personally weren’t necessarily all that different from the radical trans-activists online. As an example, I recalled a usually level-headed transgender-identified female friend nearly cursing me out over my objection to the Adree Edmo case.

Then Timehop handed me the screenshots. My memory had embellished the profanity a little, but not the substance.

Adree Edmo was an Idaho prisoner serving a ten-year sentence for sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy. Edmo sued the state for sex-reassignment surgery, arguing that denying the procedure constituted inadequate medical care under the Eighth Amendment. The federal courts ultimately agreed, and Edmo received the surgery in July 2020 before later being transferred to a women’s prison. After years of additional litigation, a federal judge in 2025 also awarded Edmo’s attorneys nearly $2.44 million in fees and another $45,000 in expenses.

At the time, the story had been shared in the Facebook group of a local “gender-expansive” organization I was affiliated with, where people I actually knew were celebrating the outcome. Apparently, I reached out privately to a trans-identified friend I was particularly close to because I genuinely wanted to understand why.

Reading the conversation five years later, her reasoning was actually more considered than the one profane line I remembered. She told me she had initially been “heart reacting to the headline,” but supported the decision more broadly because of what it could mean for other “transgender prisoners.” She believed inmates should have access to good medical and mental-health care and worried about establishing a legal principle under which some prisoners could be deemed undeserving of it.

“If you’re drawing the line,” she asked, “who gets to decide what that line is?”

Then came the part I did remember: “ultimately I don’t care fuck all about a pedophile but I care about inmates’ rights and trans rights at large.”

Her reasoning was not as quite as ridiculous as I remembered. Prisoners retain constitutional rights, and rules established around an unsympathetic prisoner can affect more sympathetic ones later. Five years later, I think she asked an important policy question: Who gets to draw the line?

Government does. Legislatures, courts, agencies and administrators constantly draw lines between competing rights and interests. What strikes me now isn’t that my former friend cared about Edmo’s rights, but who disappeared from the analysis once Edmo became the vulnerable person who needed defending.

The women in prison were inmates, too. Once a male prisoner convicted of sexually abusing a child was transferred into a women’s correctional institution, female prisoners became stakeholders in that decision. Yet their interests never appeared after my then-friend’s concern for “inmates’ rights and trans rights at large.”

I recognize that mode of thinking because I once shared it: identify the marginalized person, identify what they are being denied, and assume expanding access is the compassionate position. Public administration requires us to follow a policy outward—to its costs, tradeoffs and foreseeable risks, including those imposed on people other than its intended beneficiary.

Five years ago, I was asking what Edmo should receive. Today, I’m asking something else: Who bears the risk? Sometimes what we call compassion is really a transfer of risk—and that risk tends to travel downward.

Who gets to escape the consequences?

The people most exposed to the consequences of public disorder are rarely those with the greatest ability to shape public policy. A well-paid professional can support permissive policies and drive home. A woman dependent upon public transportation cannot simply opt out of the train station.

I confronted a version of this question in June, after 66-year-old Margaret Swan was randomly stabbed to death aboard a MARTA train. In Representation and Protection, I asked what public institutions owe people who cannot simply opt out when public systems become unsafe.

Atlanta received another grim example this weekend. Twenty-nine-year-old Ramon Harris was fatally stabbed on the BeltLine near Ponce City Market; police arrested Jonathan Hamby, a convicted felon Mayor Andre Dickens said had 30 prior arrest cycles and a history of mental illness. Hamby had cycled through arrests, probation, mental-health evaluations and treatment requirements. His family says they had spent years trying to get effective help and had been “desperately fighting a broken system to prevent this exact tragedy.”

We cannot know which intervention would have prevented Harris’s death. But we do know the risk was not invisible. Government had encountered Hamby repeatedly, recognized both his mental illness and dangerous behavior, and still failed to interrupt the cycle before another member of the public encountered him.

The victim in that case was male, so the policy failure I’m interested in isn’t exclusively female. But public disorder does not distribute risk equally by class or sex. Women face an additional increased possibility: that an encounter with a violent or unpredictable man can become sexual. Physical differences between the sexes matter whether progressive politics finds them convenient or not.

That is why another developing story in Athens caught my attention.

Athens, again

In Athens, police are investigating the possible sexual assault of a 20-year-old University of Georgia student who awoke near City Hall after a period she could not remember, with an unknown man reportedly masturbating behind her. Police listed an unnamed homeless person as a suspect, although no arrest had been announced as of Tuesday morning. Two other homeless men helped her get home—a useful reminder that homelessness itself is not synonymous with dangerousness.

The story comes amid an ongoing debate over how Athens manages its public spaces. Earlier this month, the Athens-Clarke County Commission rejected, 6–4, an ordinance that would have prohibited camping, sleeping and lying on sidewalks. Critics argued that the measure effectively criminalized homelessness. After the student’s report, State Rep. Houston Gaines blamed local officials for allowing homelessness and encampments in public spaces to grow.

I don’t think “criminalize homelessness” versus “do nothing” is a serious policy framework. Athens-Clarke County has committed millions in federal funding to supportive services, outreach, encampment services and low-barrier shelter…and good on them for doing so. Homelessness is itself a form of vulnerability and government should pursue ways to get people off sidewalks and into stable housing.

But compassion for one vulnerable population cannot require pretending another population has no vulnerabilities of its own. What obligation does government have to the people who use those public spaces while those interventions are being pursued? A city can owe something to the person sleeping on its sidewalk and to the woman who needs to walk down that same sidewalk. Compassion should require government to take both seriously, not declare one person vulnerable and quietly assign the other the risk.

That question is too often treated as evidence that someone lacks compassion. I increasingly think the opposite is true. A policy is not compassionate merely because its intentions are compassionate toward the person at its center. The people living with its consequences count, too.

Compassion for whom?

“Vulnerable population” is an important concept in public policy. But I’ve become increasingly interested in who gets recognized as vulnerable in the first place. Progressive politics has developed an elaborate vocabulary for describing the vulnerability of prisoners, homeless people, migrants, addicts, people with mental illness and transgender-identified people. Many genuinely are vulnerable and deserve humane treatment, but vulnerability can become a hierarchy rather than a description and the people whose interests conflict with the designated vulnerable population can fade from view.

Women present an especially uncomfortable problem for this politics because taking our vulnerability seriously sometimes requires acknowledging things contemporary progressivism would rather make negotiable: sex, physical differences between men and women, patterns of male violence, and the legitimacy of female boundaries. A woman in prison cannot identify her way out of the physical asymmetry between herself and a male prisoner. A woman waiting for a train cannot make male violence less sexed by adopting more inclusive language. A college student walking through a public space cannot make herself equally capable of defending against a larger male stranger because acknowledging that difference has become politically unfashionable.

This is part of what I was getting at in Woman Enough to Exploit, Not Woman Enough to Protect. Women—and Black women especially—can be extremely useful to progressive politics as symbols of vulnerability. Our histories can establish the moral urgency of somebody else’s claim, but when protecting actual women requires a boundary that conflicts with another progressive priority, our vulnerability suddenly becomes much harder to see.

Women aren’t the only people who disappear this way. The elderly woman who depends on public transportation, the low-wage worker who cannot Uber home, and the prisoner who cannot choose her cellblock all have vulnerabilities of their own. Yet politically, they share a disadvantage: their vulnerability does not necessarily advance the policy being sold as compassionate.

This isn’t an argument against compassion. It is an argument against compassion that sends someone else the bill. There is nothing particularly compassionate about improving one person’s circumstances by quietly transferring foreseeable danger to someone with less ability to escape it. If a policy protects the person whose vulnerability is politically legible while making another vulnerable person less safe, we should at least be honest that compassion has not been expanded, merely rationed.

And the ability to escape that rationing is itself unequal. Wealthier people can buy distance from public disorder through cars, safer neighborhoods, controlled-access buildings or simply the ability to leave. The woman taking MARTA because she cannot afford another option cannot. The prisoner cannot. The student living where she attends school cannot always. Policies made in the language of compassion can therefore produce a peculiar inversion: the people with the fewest options are asked to absorb risks created by people with considerably more options.

A politics does not become compassionate simply by identifying someone to have compassion for. The test is what happens to everyone else once that compassion becomes policy.

When does “unintended” stop meaning anything?

This is where I’ve found myself entertaining a darker thought. Sometimes I wonder whether any of this is actually by design.

I don’t mean that politicians are sitting around plotting to get women assaulted or strangers stabbed. I have no evidence for that and public administration gives us a more useful standard anyway…foreseeability.

The first time a policy produces an unexpected consequence, perhaps policymakers genuinely didn’t anticipate it. But then there is data, another incident, testimony, another victim…at what point does continuing to make the same tradeoff become a policy choice?

Hamby’s history illustrates the distinction. Intent matters morally, but it cannot be government’s only measure of responsibility. A harm need not be desired for the risk that produced it to have been repeatedly accepted. There is a difference between intending an outcome and repeatedly deciding that its foreseeable risk is an acceptable cost.

The question I should have asked five years ago

Looking at those screenshots now, I know my friend wasn’t evil. She was doing something I once did myself: beginning with the person society had designated vulnerable and reasoning outward from there.

Five years ago, she asked who gets to draw the line. Government does, inevitably. The better question is whether the people drawing it are willing to account for everyone on both sides.

That’s the question I didn’t know how to ask then. Not simply Who deserves compassion? Not even Who has rights? Who bears the risk? Because when government has been warned about a foreseeable consequence again and again, “nobody intended this” becomes an increasingly inadequate defense. Eventually, the question is not only who receives compassion, but who is repeatedly asked to absorb its risks.

Last week, during a recorded panel discussion about Millennial and Gen Z Black women and gender identity ideology hosted by , made an observation that Black women are often used as a rhetorical entry point for gender ideology because we are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. I agree that we are the women whose history can be invoked to make almost any argument about inclusion sound morally urgent. Question whether a man can become a woman, and eventually someone will reach for us: If trans women aren’t women, then Black women aren’t women.

I have seen variations of that argument more times than I can count, but something clicked for me during that conversation. I have watched this happen from two directions. I am a Black woman and I am also a fat woman, and in both spaces I have watched women’s bodies, histories, insecurities, and hard-won social gains repurposed to make an argument for including men in something women built for ourselves.

But there is a problem with the familiar analogy about Black women. Black women were never oppressed because society didn’t see us as female. In fact, much of our oppression depended on the fact that it did.

Our Femaleness Was Never Ambiguous

American slavery provides perhaps the most brutal example. Enslaved Black women’s reproductive capacity had economic value, and children born to enslaved women inherited their mothers’ enslaved status. Black women could be denied bodily autonomy, sexual innocence, protection from male violence, and the privileges of respectable femininity, but their femaleness was never ambiguous. Quite the opposite…Black women were female enough to exploit while being denied many of the protections supposedly attached to being female.

That distinction matters because gender ideology repeatedly collapses two very different propositions: that society has narrow ideas about what a woman should look like and that there is therefore no objective reality to what a woman is. Those are not the same thing. I’ve written before, in Beyond Tokenism and From Representation to Erasure, about the use of Black history and Black female imagery to lend gender ideology moral weight. The message to Black women is always some variation of: You of all people should understand.

But understand what, exactly? That stereotypes about Black women were wrong? Absolutely. That femininity should not be synonymous with whiteness, thinness, submissiveness, delicacy, or conventional beauty? Of course. That those stereotypes somehow prove male people can be women? No…never.

Black women never needed the definition of woman expanded to accommodate us. We needed the definition of femininity loosened enough to stop punishing women who didn’t conform to it. And I know that because I have watched essentially the same maneuver happen to fat women.

I explored the same pattern in Hijacked Sanctuaries, this time in plus-size women’s spaces. The histories are obviously different, but the rhetorical maneuver is familiar. A movement built around the proposition that women’s bodies come in many forms quietly becomes transformed into the position that any body can be a woman’s body. Those statements sound superficially similar, but they aren’t. Neither fat women nor Black women needed womanhood redefined to include us. We needed the stereotypes and hierarchies imposed upon female bodies dismantled.

And there may be no better illustration of what gets lost when those distinctions disappear than something I watched happen on reality television a few years ago.

When Violence Becomes Entertainment

Sometimes popular culture reveals a hierarchy more clearly than an academic paper ever could. In Episode 37 of Love After Lockup season four, Gabby Nieves discussed violence she suffered at the hands of her husband, Chris. The assault occurred off the show but the show appropriately treated her account seriously, displaying information directing viewers experiencing domestic violence toward help, including a hotline number.

Seven episodes later, Monique Robinson—a fat Black woman—became involved in a physical altercation with the “sisters” of Derek, the man she was dating. One of those siblings, “Elizabeth,” is male and identifies as a woman. This confrontation was actually shown, advertised as an “explosive first meeting” and packaged as the kind of chaotic spectacle reality television knows how to sell.

During the fight, “Elizabeth’s” lingerie shifted and his penis became exposed, requiring the editors to blur it. The male body itself became impossible for television to ignore because the network literally had to censor it.

The circumstances were not identical: Gabby was describing brutal intimate-partner violence, while Monique’s confrontation involved Derek’s male sibling. I don’t know what reasoning went into the producers’ decisions, but the contrast is worth examining. The show had already demonstrated a sensitivity to male violence against women. What happens to that sensitivity when acknowledging the physical reality on screen would also require acknowledging that the person fighting women is male?

That question has stayed with me because the political abstraction suddenly had a body: a fat Black female body. Monique sat at the intersection of the two groups whose experiences I had already watched being used to make gender ideology sound more inclusive. But when a fat Black woman’s physical vulnerability requires recognizing that the body confronting hers is male, those same boundaries become inconvenient.

Woman Enough for the Analogy

Black womanhood is extraordinarily valuable as a rhetorical resource. Our history establishes the moral stakes, our experiences supply the discrimination analogy, and our exclusion can be invoked to demand somebody else’s inclusion. We are woman enough for the analogy.

But what happens when recognizing our vulnerability requires acknowledging the very biological distinction we have been told is exclusionary? What happens when the Black woman’s interests conflict with those of a male person claiming a female identity, or when the plus-size woman says body acceptance does not mean male bodies belong in her changing room? Who is expected to move? Increasingly, it seems to be the woman.

That is why I am less interested in deciding who sits at the bottom of the totem pole than I am in asking another question: Which women are easiest to convince that having boundaries is a form of cruelty?

Black women know what racism and exclusion look like. That history should make us perceptive; it should not obligate us to pretend that every boundary is segregation or surrender our ability to distinguish one form of oppression from another. Racism is not sexism, and sex is not race. Neither Black women nor fat women require a theory of gender identity to explain why we fall outside narrow ideals of femininity. We merely require a definition of woman broad enough to encompass every kind of female person without becoming so broad that it ceases to mean female at all.

During Friday’s panel, another thought stayed with me: as Black women, sometimes we’re all we’ve got. I don’t take that to mean retreating into ourselves or refusing solidarity with anyone else. I take it as a reminder that solidarity cannot require self-abandonment. There is nothing progressive about teaching women that our boundaries are immoral or liberating about invoking Black women’s oppression to support an ideology that asks us to pretend sex has no political significance when so much of our history demonstrates precisely the opposite. Our foremothers did not suffer because female biology was meaningless; their female biology shaped some of the particular forms their oppression took. Our bodies matter because material reality matters.

When society recognizes our womanhood when it needs our history, our bodies, or our moral authority to advance someone else’s cause—but suddenly finds our sex negotiable when we ask for boundaries of our own—we should notice. Black women have always been woman enough: woman enough to labor, woman enough to reproduce, woman enough to suffer misogyny, and woman enough to become everybody else’s civil-rights analogy.

We should not have to become useful to someone else’s politics before we are woman enough to protect.

Watch the Conversation

This essay grew in part from a conversation I had with other Black women about these questions. “Are Millennial and Gen Z Black Women Coerced Into Accepting Gender Identity Ideology?” premiered today.

As I said during the panel: Solidarity without boundaries becomes just becomes self-erasure.

There is something that has become refreshingly ordinary about a mid-30’s woman freezing her eggs, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently revealed that she had just done. However because nearly everything involving AOC becomes partisan immediately, it didn’t take long for the commentary to turn to her age, her career, her choices, and whether she should have simply had children sooner.

I’m not in the habit of defending AOC, but I’m not sure what there is to mock here. A woman in her mid-thirties knows she may want children later and also knows her fertility won’t wait indefinitely for her to make up her mind. She made a decision accordingly. There is nothing shameful or anti-feminist about that. A woman can spend her young adulthood pursuing an education, building a career, making art, traveling, getting involved in politics, or doing whatever else gives her life meaning while understanding that her reproductive system is operating on its own ‘biological clock’.

Women can decide when—or whether—we want children, but we cannot decide for our ovaries to remain 25 forever. Saying so isn’t misogyny or conservative propaganda. It’s just a fact of living in a female body.

What interests me is how selectively comfortable our culture has become with facts like this. Female biology is readily acknowledged when a woman is sitting in a fertility clinic hoping medicine can help her work around its limitations, but mention the significance of that same biology in another context—particularly one where sex creates a boundary—and suddenly the subject becomes much more uncomfortable. Female biology has a way of exposing the limits of treating sex as negotiable.

More Than Our Bodies

For generations, feminists fought against the idea that biology was destiny. Women could be mothers without motherhood being the entirety of a woman’s existence. We could enter professions once reserved for men, build businesses, hold office, and construct lives that were not dictated entirely by our reproductive capacities. None of that required denying that men and women are biologically different.

Somewhere along the way, though, “biology is not destiny” started to morph into biology itself becoming almost impolite to mention. Saying women are more than our bodies increasingly seems to come with an expectation that we pretend our bodies tell us nothing meaningful about what women are.

But “more than” does not mean “unrelated to.” A woman is obviously more than her reproductive system, chromosomes, physical strength, or ability to become pregnant. She still inhabits a sexed body and sometimes that matters a lot.

Fertility medicine makes that especially hard to ignore. Reproductive technology can give women options previous generations didn’t have, but it cannot abolish biological sex. An egg and sperm perform different reproductive functions. Ovaries and testes are different organs. Male and female fertility do not age in the same way. And regardless of how technologically sophisticated reproduction becomes, pregnancy still requires a female body. Medicine can help us work with or around some biological realities but it cannot make them cease to exist.

Until Biology Becomes Inconvenient

Only days after writing about Sophie Cunningham and the strange partisan sorting around women’s sports, there’s been another development. The WNBA has reportedly started and will be continuing discussions about “transgender” eligibility.

Mind you, there is a Women’s National Basketball Association because elite male and female athletes are separated by something more substantial than identity. Sexual dimorphism affects height, muscle mass, bone structure, strength, speed, and power…the physical consequences of male puberty don’t disappear simply because acknowledging them has become politically uncomfortable.

Without a female sporting category, women would lose meaningful opportunities to compete. That is the entire reason the category exists. Yet we have somehow reached a point where saying what makes that category necessary can itself be treated as controversial.

That’s what makes the juxtaposition with the AOC story stand out to me. When a 36-year-old woman worries about her future fertility, nobody seriously disputes that her sex matters enough to shape the medical decisions available to her. Put a female athlete on a basketball court, though, and recognizing bodily differences suddenly becomes exclusionary. Female biology is real enough to freeze eggs over, real enough to medicate and monitor, and real enough for women to spend thousands of dollars trying to preserve her reproductive possibilities…yet in another setting, it can apparently become too impolite to define.

This isn’t as much about basketball as it is about when our culture permits sex to matter. There seems to be little discomfort acknowledging biological sex when technology is helping women overcome one of its constraints. The discomfort appears when recognizing sex means drawing a boundary. But reality doesn’t become less real because one of its implications is inconvenient.

When Women Become Functions

That selective relationship with biology also shows up in the language of modern reproduction. Assisted reproductive technologies have given families possibilities previous generations scarcely could have imagined. But the language surrounding these technologies can reveal something unsettling about how institutions increasingly talk about women’s bodies.

A woman can become an “egg provider”, another becomes a “gestational carrier.” Pregnancy—the months-long process in which a woman’s body grows, nourishes, and ultimately delivers another human being—can start sounding like a service performed by a body assigned a reproductive function.

I understand why clinical terminology exists. Medicine needs precise language and complicated reproductive arrangements sometimes require terms that distinguish one person’s role from another’s. However, language also shapes how we think about the people being described. Calling a pregnant woman a “gestational carrier” can make the woman and the pregnancy sound strangely separable, as though her body is simply the location where someone else’s baby happens to be developing.

Pregnancy itself tells us otherwise. The pregnant woman’s health, hormones, blood, nutrition, medications, illnesses, and environment all have the potential to matter. Her body isn’t merely containing the pregnancy, it is actively sustaining it. Reproductive technology may allow eggs, sperm, embryos, and gestation to be divided among different people, and commercial arrangements may assign legal roles to each of them, but none of that makes the biological relationship between a pregnant woman and the developing child imaginary.

This is where I think liberal feminism should be especially wary. A culture supposedly concerned about reducing women to our biology has become remarkably comfortable describing women by individual biological functions while sometimes hesitating to use the word woman at all. We get egg provider, gestational carrier, birthing person, lactating person, body with a uterus.

There’s something very backwards about that. Women were once warned against allowing ourselves to be defined by our reproductive organs; now, in the name of inclusion, institutions can avoid defining women while describing us almost entirely through those organs.

The Truth Is Not an Insult

None of this means every woman should become a mother, that women belong in the home, that women who pursue careers are somehow less devoted to their families, or that a woman’s worth declines along with her fertility. What women deserve is truthful information about the bodies in which we actually live.

That matters to the woman who never wants children and to the woman wondering whether she should freeze her eggs. It matters to the woman struggling with infertility and to the woman who is pregnant. It matters to the female athlete who wants a fair competition, and it matters to girls who deserve to understand their bodies before they are old enough to confront any of these questions themselves.

Acknowledging female biology does not diminish girls, nor should women have to pretend not to notice our bodies to prove that we are more than them. We are embodied people. Our bodies don’t dictate our personalities, intelligence, ambitions, talents, interests, or the lives we choose to build, but neither are they incidental vessels carrying some truer, disembodied version of ourselves through the world.

Sometimes being female matters. A woman may discover that when she watches her reproductive window narrow while deciding whether motherhood belongs in her future. An athlete encounters it when she steps onto a basketball court. A pregnant woman lives it every day as her body sustains another developing human being. And none of these realities make women smaller.

Yet modern institutions have become remarkably adept at producing new words and abstractions whenever biological categories create an inconvenient boundary. Reality is less cooperative: ovaries age, male puberty changes the body, human gestation still takes place inside a female body.

That shouldn’t embarrass feminism. It should remind us of something feminism once understood perfectly well: women are more than our bodies, but liberation was never supposed to require pretending we don’t have them.

It is worth pausing over what, exactly, is supposed to be objectionable about that statement.

Cunningham did not argue that “transgender” people should be denied their civil rights. She did not express hatred toward anyone. She did not call for exclusion from public life. She simply said she wanted girls to have fair competition and female-only locker rooms. Until very recently, those would have been regarded as entirely ordinary observations. Today, they are enough to earn a professional athlete the nickname “MAGA Barbie.”

In fact, some commentary barely engages Cunningham’s statement at all. One recent essay in The Guardian portrays Cunningham as a culture-war figure whose popularity is intertwined with conservative politics and racial polarization, devoting far more attention to her race, presumed audience, marketability, and motives than to the substance of what she actually said.

That rhetorical shift is the story worth examining.

The most revealing aspect of the backlash is not disagreement but how quickly the conversation moved away from Cunningham’s actual claim. Rather than asking whether girls deserve female-only sports and locker rooms, critics began asking different questions altogether. Why hadn’t Cunningham spoken more forcefully about Black WNBA players receiving abuse? Why hadn’t she publicly condemned every instance of harassment within the league? Why had she chosen to speak about this issue instead of another?

Those may be worthwhile conversations in their own right. They are also red herrings.

None of them answer the question Cunningham actually raised. Instead, they shift attention from whether her argument is true to whether she has earned the moral right to make it. As I’ve written before, changing the story often changes our moral instincts. Once the discussion becomes about Sophie Cunningham rather than girls’ sports, people begin evaluating her character instead of her argument and the girls quietly disappear from the center of the story.

That is why the label “MAGA Barbie” matters. It is not merely an insult directed at one athlete but a rhetorical device. If protecting girls’ sports and locker rooms can be branded as “MAGA,” then the principle itself becomes politically suspect. The goal is no longer simply to malign Sophie Cunningham. It is to make ordinary, commonsense observations appear partisan, encouraging people to hesitate before saying aloud what they have long understood to be true.

The irony is that Cunningham’s position is hardly revolutionary. The WNBA’s own Collective Bargaining Agreement states plainly that only women are eligible to play in the league. That provision has never been regarded as discriminatory because the league exists to preserve athletic opportunities for women. Women’s sports are not an exception to equality but one of the ways equality is achieved. Female athletic categories exist because average biological differences between the sexes affect speed, strength, power, and endurance. Protecting those categories is not an attack on anyone else. It is the reason women have a league of their own.

Even if every criticism of Cunningham’s activism were true, it still would not answer her argument. At most, it would suggest she has been inconsistent in her advocacy. But inconsistency is not the same thing as being wrong. Whether Cunningham has spoken often enough about racism, online abuse, or every other controversy within the WNBA has no bearing on whether girls deserve female-only sports and locker rooms.

Underlying much of the criticism is another expectation that deserves examination: the idea that women must first prove themselves advocates for everyone before they are permitted to advocate for themselves. Men are rarely expected by other men to demonstrate equal commitment to every other constituency before speaking on behalf of their own. Women, by contrast, are routinely asked to pass that test.

We all belong to multiple affinity groups. As a woman, I write about women’s rights. As a Black American, I write about issues affecting Black Americans. As a mother, I write about the world we are leaving our children. Healthy civil society depends upon different people carrying different concerns while respecting one another’s efforts. I do not expect every person outside those groups to risk their livelihood, personal safety, or even comfort fighting my battles. My expectation is much simpler: don’t stand in my way while I fight them myself.

Voluntary solidarity is admirable. Mandatory solidarity is an impossible standard.

That principle also shapes how I think about political coalitions. I am under no illusion that agreement on one issue produces solidarity on every other. Conservative spaces can harbor anti-Black prejudice. Gender-critical and radical feminist spaces can too, often in forms that are less overt but no less real—racial paternalism, cultural ignorance, or assumptions born from unfamiliarity…Progressive spaces are hardly immune to anti-Blackness either. Because many liberals understand racism primarily as something practiced by their ideological opponents, they can also be resistant to recognizing racial blind spots within their own movements.

Black women deserve to have our concerns taken seriously because they are our concerns—not because they can be summoned whenever someone needs to invalidate another woman’s argument. As I’ve argued before, Black people are not rhetorical devices.

No political tribe has a monopoly on either virtue or vice. Precisely because I recognize those limitations, I have never expected ideological allies to become champions for every aspect of my identity. I do not need conservatives to become experts on Black life before defending women's sports, just as I do not need radical feminists to become experts on race before defending women's sex-based rights. I simply ask that people not undermine causes that belong to communities other than their own or insist that others earn permission to advocate for themselves by first demonstrating commitment to every unrelated cause.

None of this requires turning Sophie Cunningham into a heroine. She is a professional basketball player, not a universal moral authority. Nor should she be held personally responsible for every ugly thing said by strangers who happen to agree with her on one issue. Individual responsibility still matters, even in an age of guilt by association.

Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Cunningham says less about one athlete than it does about the way we now conduct public debate. Rather than asking whether an argument is true, we increasingly ask whether the person making it has passed an ever-expanding test of ideological purity. Rather than engaging common sense, we attach political labels designed to make common sense seem shameful. That is how many people learn to silence themselves long before anyone else has to do it for them. The social cost of saying obvious things becomes the lesson.

That should concern all of us, regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum. A society that teaches people to fear saying obvious things is not becoming more tolerant. It is simply becoming better at policing which truths may be spoken aloud.

Last week I turned thirty-eight, beginning the slow transition from early adulthood toward middle age.

On that same day, my daughter had spent exactly as much time in the world as she had spent growing inside me: thirty-seven weeks. My newborn little nephew, also on that same day, was four weeks into his own journey outside the womb.

Birthdays have a way of making us think about time, but motherhood has changed what I measure. I find myself thinking less about the years behind me and more about the decades ahead—and about what I can do with them for the betterment of women and children, especially the children whose futures are no longer anonymous to me.

For years, I’ve written about protecting women and children. I’ve argued that girls deserve fair athletic competition, that women deserve sex-based spaces, that parents deserve honesty from schools, and that children deserve the chance to grow up before making irreversible medical decisions. Those convictions long predate my daughter’s birth.

Motherhood didn't change what I believed, but it did change who I picture every time I write. When I think about girls' sports, I don't picture an anonymous athlete anymore. I picture my daughter. When I think about elementary school policies, I imagine the classrooms she or my nephew may one day walk into. When I think about children's healthcare, I think about the trust parents place in doctors to help their children flourish rather than follow cultural trends.

And when I think about the future, I see it a little differently now. The questions I've spent years writing about still concern every child, but they also have familiar faces. I see my daughter. I see my nephew. The future has become more personal to me and that has quietly changed the way I read politics.

Recently, I read the results of a nationwide survey conducted on behalf of Women's Liberation Front (WOLF) on some of the country’s most contentious cultural issues. At first glance, the questions seemed familiar: women’s sports, parental rights, youth gender medicine, school policies, prison housing, pornography, artificial intelligence…the same debates that have dominated headlines for years.

But this time, I noticed something different. These weren’t really separate debates at all; they were different ways of asking the same question.

What responsibilities do adults owe the next generation?

Should schools withhold information from parents? Should children be encouraged to adopt new names, pronouns, or identities before they are old enough to understand the consequences? Should girls continue to have athletic competitions reserved for themselves? Should life-altering medical interventions wait until adulthood? Should technology companies be allowed to generate fake nude images of real people—including children—without consent? Should children have unrestricted access to online pornography?

We often treat these as isolated political controversies, but I no longer think they are. They’re all about whether adults are willing to create boundaries that protect children—even when doing so is unpopular, inconvenient, or politically unfashionable.

That may be why one finding in particular struck me.

Despite the polarized tone of our politics, the survey revealed something surprisingly consistent. Large majorities favored defining women according to biological sex, prioritizing women’s rights when they conflict with gender identity policies, preserving girls’ sports, delaying medical interventions for minors until adulthood, requiring honesty with parents, and protecting children from online exploitation through measures like age verification and restrictions on AI-generated explicit imagery.

People will debate the details of those policies, but what interested me was the common thread running beneath them. The respondents weren’t simply expressing opinions about transgender issues, education, or technology. They were expressing expectations about adulthood: that adults should protect children before affirming every impulse, that parents should be trusted rather than bypassed, that women and girls deserve recognition as a distinct class worthy of legal protection, that technological progress should not come at the expense of human dignity.

Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, the pattern is difficult to miss. It’s less a collection of policy preferences than a philosophy of stewardship.

That word has come to mean more to me since becoming a mother. Stewardship is what you practice when someone else’s future depends on your judgment. Every parent understands this instinctively.

It is waking up in the middle of the night because a tiny person cannot care for herself. It is making decisions she can’t yet make. It is accepting that love sometimes requires saying “not yet,” “not this,” or “this boundary exists because I am responsible for you.”

Politics, at its best, asks us to exercise that same kind of stewardship on a larger scale. Not because government is a parent, but because every generation inherits the consequences of the generation before it. For mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, and everyone helping to raise the next generation, I think this polling offers a few encouraging reminders.

• First, many concerns that can feel isolating in public discourse are, in fact, widely shared. If you’ve ever hesitated to speak because you assumed you were alone, the data suggests otherwise.

• Second, lead with children rather than ideology. People may disagree about partisan labels, but many share an instinct that children deserve protection, honesty, and time to mature. Beginning there often opens conversations that slogans can’t.

• Third, don’t keep these conversations confined to your own home. Share the polling with friends. Bring it to your community groups. Ask your legislators how they think about balancing the rights of adults with the responsibilities owed to children. Public opinion matters most when it becomes public participation.

• Finally, remember that culture is built long before it is codified in law. It is shaped in conversations between neighbors, among parents at school events, in churches and civic clubs, around dinner tables, and anywhere women gather to talk about the world their children are inheriting.

Last week I celebrated another birthday. My daughter won’t remember her thirty-seventh week and my nephew won’t remember his first four weeks…but I will.

Because somewhere between thirty-seven weeks of pregnancy and thirty-seven weeks of motherhood, I realized that motherhood hadn’t given me new convictions, it had simply given those convictions names and faces. They were always about children, but now, when I advocate, I picture two in particular.

The world I leave behind is not an abstract idea. It is the world waiting for a little girl who has been here for just thirty-seven weeks and for a little boy who has been here for four.

That's what thirty-eight means to me—not simply another birthday, but another year of trying to leave behind a world worthy of the children who will inherit it.

On July 11, Senator Lindsey Graham died. His passing reminded me of an email I sent to his office ten summers prior.

At the time I was in graduate school and had helped found a local “gender expansive” social group. Our meetings were held just down the road from Senator Graham’s district office. I wrote asking if he would meet with our group because I believed something very simple: if Republicans just met transgender people, they would change their minds. Compassion, I believed, naturally led to affirmation and that opposition was largely the product of distance and unfamiliarity. Conversation would solve things.

He never responded.

Now I wonder whether he had already seen questions that I hadn’t yet learned to ask. Not because I believe every politician is wise, but because I eventually discovered that the disagreement was never about whether transgender-identified people deserve dignity. It was about whether public policy should stop recognizing sex.

The gravity of that distinction took me years to fully understand.

I considered myself progressive. I volunteered in social justice work. Most of my closest friends came from LGBTQ and other social activist circles. I accepted gender identity as an unquestioned moral good because everyone around me did. In my Unitarian Universalist and activist circles, there was little distinction between being compassionate and being affirming. To question one often felt like abandoning the other. I believed that supporting transgender identities represented compassion in action.

Then I began noticing something that no one around me seemed willing to acknowledge. Whenever gender identity conflicted with women’s rights, women were always expected to give something up—our language, our sports, our spaces, our boundaries. The conflict was never resolved by balancing competing rights. Instead, women’s rights themselves became negotiable.

I didn’t fully allow myself to question those assumptions until I left my college-town bubble. Outside that environment it became easier to distinguish between what everyone around me believed and what was actually true. Once I stepped outside that culture, I realized that the gender racket wasn’t simply about individual identity. It was about prisons, shelters, schools, medical ethics, and the law. Ultimately, it was about whether sex still mattered anywhere government made decisions.

That realization changed the trajectory of my life. I eventually co-authored statements for the WDI USA Black Women’s Caucus, submitted testimony to the Georgia legislature, launched The Peachy Perspective, and recently had the privilege of contributing to She Holds the Line. None of that happened because I began disliking transgender-identified people. It happened because I realized that if ordinary women remain silent, policies will continue to be written as though women, as a sex class, no longer exist.

I also came to reject the increasingly common assumption that speaking truthfully about sex—or defending the rights, safety, and well-being of women and girls—is somehow an act of cruelty simply because someone else experiences it that way. Kindness and honesty are not enemies, and neither should require women to surrender the protections that exist because we are female.

Before I experienced censorship, I experienced something far more powerful. Self-censorship.

The most effective censorship isn’t punishment; it’s anticipation. Long before anyone tells you to stop speaking, you begin editing yourself. You avoid certain conversations, stop sharing certain articles, and convince yourself that now simply isn’t the right time. By the time I had become gender-critical, nearly all of my social circles were progressive. I knew exactly what would happen if I spoke honestly.

When Magdalen Berns passed away, her final appeal—that women keep speaking the truth after she was gone—stayed with me. She wasn’t asking women to be fearless. She was asking us to decide whether fear should make our decisions for us.

Unlike many women, I occupied a fortunate position. I was self-employed. Speaking publicly wasn’t likely to cost my career or my family’s health insurance. Many women aren’t so fortunate. I realized I had been quietly hoping braver women would carry risks that I was uniquely positioned to take myself.

Deleting my Facebook account and starting over the day after the world lost Berns felt easier than explaining to most of my friends why my views had changed. For a while I remained only silently gender-critical, but by the summer of 2020, silence stopped feeling morally neutral, and I began openly sharing gender-critical writing.

The costs arrived almost immediately. Friendships disappeared. Former colleagues from social justice circles publicly mocked me. One man I had known through activist work sarcastically asked whether I believed “trans women are invading women’s spaces.” After I shared feminist quotations defending women’s rights, he responded, “Jesus Christ you really are a f*****g s**t.” Women were generally less overtly hostile, but no less clear. They’d either just ghost me or attempt to get me to recant, call me a TERF when I didn’t, then block me immediately. Whether expressed through profanity or silence, the message was the same: my views made me no longer welcome.

The institutional consequences followed. In 2024, after gaining enough confidence to begin publishing essays under my own name, Medium permanently revoked my membership and account after I criticized policies that allowed a male offender into a women’s shelter, where he stabbed a female shelter worker with a sword after being asked to leave. The next year, while pregnant with my first child, I found myself banned from pregnancy groups for defending what should have been the least controversial observation imaginable: motherhood is an exclusively female status. The feelings of men who were not even members of those groups ultimately carried more weight than a first-time pregnant woman’s need for access to information.

Looking back, I realize my own experience wasn’t unusual. It was simply smaller. The same pattern that operated within friendships, activist circles, and online communities eventually reached some of our largest institutions.

That is why recent events involving Amnesty International UK matter far beyond one organization. Amnesty recently withdrew a report after widespread backlash over its decision to characterize numerous gender-critical organizations—including charities, victim-support groups, evidence-based medical organizations, and grassroots volunteer networks—as part of an “anti-rights movement.”

What struck me wasn’t merely the report itself but how familiar the underlying logic had become. First disagreement becomes prejudice. Then prejudice becomes harm. Then harm becomes justification for excluding dissent altogether. Once disagreement itself is treated as harm, dialogue is no longer necessary.

The remarkable part is not that Amnesty published such a report. The remarkable part is that it had to retreat. Organizations including For Women Scotland, Sex Matters, LGB Alliance, Gay Men’s Network, Children of Transitioners, and others refused to quietly accept being defamed. Rather than apologizing simply for being accused, they demanded evidence, accountability, and a return to genuine human rights principles. They insisted that human rights organizations defend pluralism instead of ideological conformity.

That shift bolsters my hope.

It also struck me that all of this unfolded during an unusually reflective week. Within days of one another, Senator Lindsey Graham passed away, Amnesty International found itself retreating from an attempt to delegitimize gender-critical advocacy, and Bonnie Atwood quietly left us after a lifetime of feminist work.

I didn’t know Bonnie personally, though I had the pleasure of hearing her speak during several Zoom meetings, and I know women whose lives she touched much more directly than mine. One of the early voices of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she spent decades writing, organizing, advocating, and insisting that women’s lives deserved to be described honestly—even when those truths challenged powerful institutions or prevailing orthodoxies.

Reading about her life again this week, I was struck by how little the central responsibility of feminism has changed. Bonnie’s generation fought to create a language for realities polite society preferred women not discuss. My generation has inherited a different set of taboos, but a remarkably similar obligation. Every generation of women eventually discovers that there are truths society would rather we leave unsaid.

Looking back, I think about that unanswered email to Lindsey Graham and how for years I believed the answer to disagreement was simply getting people into the same room. I still believe conversations matter, but I’ve learned that conversation alone cannot answer the central question. People can hear the same facts, meet the same people, and arrive at different conclusions because they begin from different understandings of justice.

The real question is not whether someone has met transgender-identified people. I had, and many of my friends were. The real question is whether women’s rights remain rights when they conflict with someone else’s identity. That was the question I couldn’t yet see when I wrote that email.

I no longer believe that speaking truthfully about sex, motherhood, or women’s rights is an act of unkindness simply because someone else experiences it that way. Nor do I believe that defending women and girls requires apologizing for doing so.

Ten years ago, I thought one conversation with a senator might change the course of this debate. Today, I think lasting change happens differently. It happens one woman at a time deciding that the cost of silence has finally become greater than the cost of speaking.

If recent events—from the Supreme Court to Amnesty International’s retreat—are any indication, more women are making that same decision. I hope Bonnie Atwood would recognize that as progress.

Last week, in What the Supreme Court Decided for Our Daughters, I argued that the Supreme Court had resolved the legal question surrounding Title IX while leaving a more difficult cultural question unanswered. Why had so many institutions become willing to reinterpret a law enacted to expand opportunities for girls as a mechanism requiring girls to surrender those same opportunities? I suggested that the answer lay beyond constitutional doctrine. It lay in a culture that too often rewards the appearance of compassion more than the exercise of responsibility.

I did not expect the first answer to that question to arrive so quickly.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in B.P.J. v. West Virginia and Little v. Hecox devoted the majority of seventy-seven pages to explaining why Title IX transformed educational opportunities for women and girls, why biological sex remains a meaningful legal category in athletics, and why female athletic classifications continue to serve the very purpose Congress intended when it enacted the statute in 192. The opinion repeatedly returned to equal opportunity, competitive fairness, and safety—not as abstract principles, but as the primary reasons girls’ sports exist.

Much of the reporting that followed, however, described a different story. The Associated Press announced, “Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and women from school athletic teams.” The New York Times alerted readers that the Court had “allowed states to bar transgender female athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.” CNN summarized the ruling as “Supreme Court lets states ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports.” NBC News likewise reported, “Supreme Court upholds bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.”

None of the headlines I saw adopted the Court's own description of the question before it. The opinion consistently framed the dispute as whether states may preserve women's and girls' sports for biological females. Much of the reporting, however, framed it as whether states may ban “transgender” athletes. Those descriptions arise from the same legal rule, but they are not the same story.

A decision about preserving opportunities for girls became, in the public telling, a story principally about the people who lost. That is not merely a difference in emphasis, but in moral perspective.

Justice Kavanaugh begins not with gender identity but with history, recounting the dramatic disparity in athletic participation before 1972 and explaining that separate female athletic categories were created not as exclusions from equality but as one of the principal means by which equality could finally be achieved. From that premise, the rest of the opinion follows naturally. If Title IX exists to remedy female disadvantage, then preserving meaningful opportunities for girls necessarily requires recognizing biological sex. Athletic competition is inherently zero-sum. A roster spot, a scholarship, a medal, or a championship awarded to one athlete is unavailable to another. Allowing males to compete in female categories therefore affects not only those seeking admission, but the girls whose opportunities Title IX was enacted to secure.

Last week, I wrote that we live in a culture that increasingly treats women's boundaries as negotiable whenever maintaining them risks appearing insufficiently compassionate. The reaction that followed points to something more fundamental. Increasingly, the boundaries themselves are no longer treated as the principal subject of the discussion. Public attention shifts instinctively toward the disappointment of those excluded rather than the interests those boundaries were created to protect.

The pattern extends well beyond athletics. Debates over women’s prisons frequently begin with the circumstances of the men seeking admission. Discussions about domestic violence shelters often center on the exclusion experienced by males who identify as women. Questions about women’s organizations increasingly ask whether membership restrictions make others feel unwelcome before asking why those organizations were created in the first place. The institution may exist because of women’s material realities, yet public attention is repeatedly drawn toward those seeking exceptions to its governing purpose.

This is not simply a matter of journalistic framing. It reflects a broader shift in our culture’s moral imagination. Increasingly, the measure of a women’s institution is not whether it fulfills the purpose for which it was created, but whether anyone experiences exclusion from it. The beneficiaries of sex-based protections gradually disappear from the center of the narrative, even when those protections themselves are reaffirmed.

It is difficult to imagine this instinct applied so consistently to other civil-rights laws. If a court reaffirmed legal protections against racial discrimination, we would not ordinarily frame the decision primarily through the disappointment of those denied an exception. We would begin with the purpose of the law and the class it was enacted to protect. Yet Title IX is increasingly treated differently, as though the central question is no longer what women need to achieve equality, but how preserving those protections affects males.

The Supreme Court did more than uphold state laws preserving female athletics. It restored women and girls to the center of a statute enacted on their behalf. Whether the culture is prepared to do the same remains in question.

The Court remembered why Title IX exists.

The headlines revealed whose interests our culture instinctively prioritizes.

Six months ago, I wrote What the Supreme Court Is About to Decide for Our Daughters and argued that the cases of B.P.J. v. West Virginia and Little v. Hecox represented far more than a dispute over school athletics. They were a constitutional test of whether women remained a legally coherent class and whether the protections secured through Title IX would continue to mean what generations of women believed they meant.

Today, we have an answer. It is a legal answer, but it carries cultural implications that extend far beyond athletics.

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court held that schools may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females and that doing so violates neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause. The Court concluded that Title IX’s use of the word “sex” refers to biological sex and that schools may determine eligibility for female sports accordingly. It further held that states have important interests in preserving safety, competitive fairness, and equal athletic opportunities for women and girls.

The legal significance of this decision cannot be overstated, but neither can its cultural significance.

The Court Has Reaffirmed What Title IX Was For

The opinion opens by acknowledging something that has too often been forgotten in recent years: Title IX transformed American life because it recognized the reality of female disadvantage and sought to remedy it. The Court notes that before Title IX, girls’ participation in sports was a fraction of boys’ participation and that sex-segregated teams were not a form of discrimination, but a mechanism for ensuring equal opportunity.

This matters because much of the public debate over women’s sports has been conducted as though female-only categories were arbitrary exclusions in need of justification. The Court rejected that framing.

Instead, it recognized what women have been saying for years: separate female sports exist precisely because the sexes are physically different and because, absent those categories, girls’ opportunities would be diminished. The Court expressly acknowledged concerns about both safety and competitive fairness and recognized that allowing males to compete in female sports can displace girls from rosters, playing time, medals, and other opportunities.

In other words, the Court did not merely permit states to maintain female sports. It recognized the reason female sports exist in the first place…and that is no small thing.

A Legal Victory Does Not Erase a Cultural Problem

There will undoubtedly be celebrations today, and understandably so. Women and girls have won an important legal victory. But legal victories often create the illusion that the work is finished. It is not. The fact that these cases reached the Supreme Court at all should concern us. And a court opinion cannot restore every opportunity already lost or undo every social cost borne by the women who spoke up.

The question before the Court was whether protections created to remedy female disadvantage should be reinterpreted to require female disadvantage. That argument was serious enough to divide lower courts. It was persuasive enough to gain national institutional support. And it was advanced in a culture that increasingly treats women’s boundaries as negotiable whenever maintaining them risks appearing insufficiently compassionate. The Court has now answered the legal question. The cultural question remains.

The decision may also prove consequential beyond athletics. A Court willing to reaffirm that sex is a legally meaningful category and that female protections can serve important governmental interests has done more than preserve girls' sports. It has reminded the country that laws recognizing sex are the means by which women secure equal opportunity and safety.

Why were so many people willing to entertain the proposition that a law enacted to create opportunities for girls should be used to compel girls to surrender those opportunities? That answer lies beyond constitutional doctrine.

It lies in a culture that too often rewards the appearance of compassion more than the exercise of responsibility.

Silence Creates Vacuums

One of the central arguments of my earlier essay was that this ideology survives largely in silence. I think that remains true. Many mothers held (and still hold) private concerns about these issues but hesitated to express them publicly. They worried about social friction, professional consequences, or being labeled intolerant. That hesitation created the illusion that concern for women’s rights was rare.

It wasn’t.

The last several years have demonstrated the opposite. Twenty-seven states enacted laws preserving female sports for girls and women. Major sporting bodies, including the NCAA, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the International Olympic Committee ultimately adopted policies grounded in biological sex. The Supreme Court itself noted this convergence in its opinion.

When people speak, they often discover they are not alone. This is true in legislatures. It is true in communities. And it is true in families.

Mama Bears Were Never the Problem

When I wrote about these cases in December, I argued that mothers of daughters were being asked to subordinate their children’s material interests to ideological conformity. I argued that we needed more mama bears and fewer shrinking violets, and I believe that even more strongly today.

Because the women who spoke up about this issue were frequently told they were overreacting, hateful, or on the wrong side of history. Mothers who raised concerns about fairness in sports, privacy in changing spaces, or the long-term implications of redefining sex-based rights were often treated as obstacles to progress rather than citizens participating in a democratic debate.

Yet today’s decision demonstrates something important: these concerns were not fringe. They were not irrational. They were not invented. They were rooted in realities that the Court itself ultimately recognized.

That should give many women permission to trust their own judgment a little more. And perhaps, next time, to speak a little sooner.

The Lesson for Mothers

I write this today as I wrote six months ago: not only as a citizen concerned with civil rights law, but as a mother raising a daughter who will inherit the precedents and cultural assumptions of this moment.

The Court’s decision means my daughter will grow up in a country where Title IX still recognizes her as part of a legally meaningful class: girls. That matters.

But rights survive not only because courts recognize them. Rights survive because ordinary people insist they remain worth defending. The lesson of these cases is not that mothers can now relax, but that mothers were right to speak up in the first place.

They were right to write their legislators. Right to testify. Right to challenge the false consensus in their schools, churches, and social circles. Right to insist that girls deserve opportunities designed for girls.

Lawmakers still need to hear from real women rather than only from professional advocates and well-funded organizations. Communities still need mothers willing to say aloud what many privately believe. And girls still need adults willing to bear the social costs of protecting their interests.

The Supreme Court has spoken. Now the culture must decide whether it has learned anything from the last six years, because today's decision did not create the need for mama bears—it merely proved why we needed them all along.

Every year, as Juneteenth approaches, social media fills with event flyers, business promotions, and celebratory graphics. Increasingly, those graphics share a common feature: red, black, and green. The Pan-African flag has become so ubiquitous in Juneteenth marketing that one could easily assume it is the official flag of the holiday itself.

It is not.

This may seem like a minor issue of aesthetics, but symbols carry meaning. Flags tell us who a celebration belongs to, what history it commemorates, and what story future generations are being invited to remember. When a distinctly Black American holiday is consistently represented through Pan-African imagery, the meaning of the holiday subtly changes. A commemoration of Black American emancipation becomes a generic celebration of the Black diaspora, and in the process, the people whose ancestors actually lived this history become less visible within their own story.

Juneteenth is not a Pan-African holiday. It is a Black American holiday.

That distinction matters because Juneteenth commemorates a specific historical event involving a specific people in a specific country. On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that enslaved people there were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued. The day became a celebration of delayed freedom finally reaching those who had been denied it.

Texas, however, was not unique in having its own emancipation date. Florida commemorates May 20 as Emancipation Day because Union forces announced and enforced emancipation there nearly a month before Galveston. Floridians learned of freedom on May 20, 1865, and have celebrated “May Day” or “The Twentieth of May” ever since.

Both days are part of the story of millions of Black Americans whose ancestors endured slavery in this country and lived to see freedom finally arrive. These commemorations are not celebrations of the Black diaspora in general, nor are they generic observances of Blackness. They are markers on the journey of a particular people from bondage to freedom.

That specificity is precisely why the colors of Juneteenth matter.

The official Juneteenth flag was created in 1997 by activist Ben Haith, known as “Boston Ben.” He deliberately chose red, white, and blue. The colors were not selected accidentally, nor were they chosen to imitate the American flag. They were chosen because, in Haith’s words, “Our ancestors made this country great.”

That statement reflects a profound truth about Black American history. Our ancestors built wealth they could not keep, cultivated land they did not own, and contributed immeasurably to the economic and political development of the United States while being denied the rights and privileges of citizenship. Juneteenth commemorates not only emancipation but also the long struggle to claim a birthright that should never have been denied in the first place.

The holiday is fundamentally about freedom and citizenship. Juneteenth marks the moment emancipation finally reached the last large population of enslaved Black Americans still held in bondage in the former Confederacy.. It is the story of a people who were denied the promises of this nation and then fought to claim them. In many ways, Juneteenth is one of the most distinctly patriotic observances in Black American life because it celebrates a people finally being permitted to claim the promises of a country they had already spent centuries building.

The late Opal Lee, known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” spent decades fighting for national recognition of the holiday because she believed the story of emancipation belonged within the American story itself. Her advocacy reflected the belief that Juneteenth commemorates both freedom and citizenship—the moment when a people long denied the promises of the nation began claiming them as their own.

That is why the red, white, and blue of the Juneteenth flag is so important. It symbolizes that Black Americans are not merely a diaspora population living in the United States. We are an American people. Our ancestry on this continent often stretch back centuries, frequently further than those of many later-arriving immigrant groups. Millions of Black Americans can trace their roots in North America to periods before the large waves of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigration that reshaped the country’s demographics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Our American-ness is not borrowed. It is ancestral.

Yet there remains a curious discomfort with this idea. Black Americans are often encouraged to reject the red, white, and blue because those colors are associated with America itself, as though there is something contradictory about being proudly Black and proudly American at the same time. No one expects Haitians to reject their flag because it shares its colors with France’s flag. No one suggests that Irish Americans abandon their symbols because another nation uses similar colors. Only Black Americans are routinely asked to distance ourselves from our own national inheritance.

The increasing use of Pan-African colors for Juneteenth reflects, in part, this discomfort. For some Black Americans, it may stem from a kind of national insecurity or low national self-esteem—a reluctance to embrace our identity as an American people because we have been taught that patriotism belongs to everyone except us. But for others, particularly those outside the Black American experience, there is sometimes an impulse to fold every Black history into a single global narrative.

I have increasingly come to think of this as a kind of destiny swapping.

A holiday commemorating the emancipation of Black Americans becomes recast as a celebration of the global Black diaspora. The particular becomes universal, and in that process, the descendants of enslaved Americans become an afterthought in our own story.

This tendency is especially striking given contemporary discussions surrounding reparations. Ghana’s Presidential Envoy for Reparations, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, has been among those advocating for reparative justice concerning the transatlantic slave trade. Yet history also requires us to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that various African kingdoms and merchants also participated in the capture and sale of human beings into that trade.

None of this diminishes the horrors of American slavery, nor does it absolve the United States of its responsibilities; but it does make it particularly strange to watch a distinctly Black American emancipation holiday become symbolically detached from Black Americans themselves and reframed under banners representing movements and identities that played no role in the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States.

This year I noticed another irony. The University of South Carolina, a predominantly white institution in my home-state, used the correct colors in its Juneteenth graphics. Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black institution in the state that I now call home, did not.

Perhaps some will dismiss this as a trivial matter of design. I do not think it is trivial at all. Symbols teach. They shape memory. If future generations come to believe that Juneteenth is simply another celebration of the global Black diaspora, then something important will have been lost.

Juneteenth is not a celebration of everywhere. It is a celebration of here. It commemorates the moment when millions of Black Americans emerged from slavery and began the long work of staking their claim to the full rights of citizenship in the nation their ancestors helped build. The Juneteenth flag is red, white, and blue because our ancestors made this country great too. Its symbols should reflect that reality.

That story deserves to remain intact.

There is a peculiar assumption embedded in modern political activism: that disagreement can only move in one direction.

When a Republican legislator is pressured by activists, we are told this is democracy. Constituents are organizing. Accountability is working. Elected officials are being reminded that they answer to the people who sent them to office. When the same pressure is directed at Democrats who depart from activist orthodoxy, however, something different is happening. The goal is often not persuasion but correction. The purpose is not to understand why an elected official voted as they did, but to ensure they do not do it again.

A recent post by a publication called Transitics provides a useful example. The project identifies approximately 200 Democratic elected officials across the country who have supported, voted for, or declined to oppose legislation related to women’s sports, sex-separated spaces, or restrictions on gender-related medical interventions. Activists are encouraged to contact these officials and hold them accountable for what the project describes as “anti-trans” positions.

Among those listed are several Georgia Democrats, including State Senators Ed Harbison, Tonya Anderson, Elena Parent, Nikki Merritt, Randal Mangham, and Sonya Halpern, as well as State Representatives Al Williams, Mack Jackson, Patty Marie Stinson, and Tangie Herring. Some voted for legislation involving women’s sports, some simply supported restrictions related to prison policies, and some abstained on measures activists considered important.

The details matter less than the larger question their inclusion raises: what exactly are these legislators being punished for?

In several cases, even the voting record requires additional context. Some Georgia lawmakers were listed because they abstained on legislation concerning gender-related medical interventions in prisons. Yet those abstentions were not necessarily expressions of support for the bill.

During debate on House Bill 185, many Georgia House Democrats staged a walkout in protest, arguing that the measure affected only a handful of inmates while more pressing legislative business remained unfinished. The bill ultimately passed in their absence. Regardless of whether one agrees with that strategy, it reveals something important about the standards being applied. Some lawmakers who actively protested the legislation are still categorized as opponents because they did not cast the vote activists wanted.

At that point, a difficult question emerges: what level of disagreement is actually permissible?

If voting for a bill is unacceptable, abstaining is unacceptable, and protesting the bill while refusing to participate in the vote is also unacceptable, then the issue is no longer merely accountability. It is conformity. Democratic coalitions are supposed to be held together by persuasion, not unanimity. The moment every deviation from activist expectations becomes evidence of moral failure, disagreement ceases to be part of politics and becomes grounds for discipline.

To activists compiling the list, these lawmakers have failed a moral test. They have sided with Republicans on issues affecting transgender individuals and departed from what activists increasingly regard as non-negotiable commitments within Democratic politics.

To many ordinary voters, however, these legislators did something else entirely. They represented concerns that remain widespread across the political spectrum.

The public conversation surrounding these issues often proceeds as though the questions have already been settled. Women’s sports must be organized according to “gender identity”. Sex-separated spaces must be redefined. Medical interventions for gender-distressed minors must be treated as ordinary healthcare. Significant opposition is often presumed to originate from ignorance, fear, or prejudice.

Yet the voting records highlighted by Transitics suggest that even within the Democratic Party, many elected officials continue to encounter voters who are uncomfortable with those assumptions. This should not be surprising. Concerns about fairness in women’s sports and irreversible medical interventions for minors did not originate with political activists. For many people, they arise from ordinary intuitions about fairness, risk, and safeguarding.

Whether one agrees with those concerns is ultimately beside the point. The more interesting development is what happens when Democratic elected officials respond to them.

Increasingly, they find themselves accused of betrayal.

The creators of Transitics argue that these lawmakers should be held accountable to the values they promised to uphold. Fair enough. Accountability is a normal part of democratic politics.

But accountability cuts both ways.

Elected officials are not accountable solely to activist organizations. They are accountable to the voters who elected them. In many districts, those voters do not align perfectly with the priorities of national advocacy groups. That reality helps explain the emergence of organizations such as Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender.

Its members are not Republicans who wandered into Democratic politics. Many are lifelong liberals, feminists, parents, healthcare professionals, and gay and lesbian advocates. What they share is a growing discomfort with the expectation that disagreement on questions of sex and gender must be treated as moral failure.

For years, these voters have been told they do not exist. Yet legislators keep voting the wrong way. Perhaps the more plausible explanation is that elected officials are hearing from constituents whose views are more complicated than activists are willing to acknowledge.

That possibility creates a dilemma for the Democratic Party. A political coalition can tolerate disagreement, or it can enforce ideological conformity. It can treat dissent as evidence that a conversation remains unresolved, or it can treat dissent as evidence that someone needs to be disciplined.

The watchlist approach points firmly toward the latter.

And that may prove shortsighted. Many of the positions now being classified as unacceptable are not fringe views. They are held by substantial numbers of Americans, including substantial numbers of Democrats.

The lesson for these lawmakers may be simpler than they realize. Activists are free to demand complete agreement. That is their right. But elected officials serve constituents, not ideological scorekeepers. If the standard for avoiding condemnation is absolute conformity, then condemnation becomes inevitable. The more useful question is not whether every activist will be satisfied. It is whether legislators are faithfully representing the people who elected them—including the many voters who continue to believe that women deserve sex-based rights, that children’s medical care warrants careful scrutiny, and that disagreement on these questions should not be treated as a moral offense.

The existence of these watchlists reveals something important about the current moment. Not that a handful of Democratic lawmakers have become conservative, but that many voters remain unconvinced by activist claims that these debates have already been settled.

The real question is whether there is still room within Democratic politics to admit that fact.

Two years ago, while helping coordinate the 2024 WDI USA 3rd National Women’s Convention in Atlanta, I recommended MARTA as a transportation option for attendees.

The recommendation was hardly controversial. Atlanta traffic is legendary, and MARTA offered a practical way for visitors to navigate the city. The guidance described it as a convenient transportation option, noting only that travelers should remain aware of line closures and service hours. It was the sort of advice countless Atlantans have given visitors for decades.

Today, I would not make that recommendation.

That realization has weighed on me in the days since the death of 66-year-old Margaret Swan, the Atlanta grandmother who was stabbed to death while riding a MARTA train. According to authorities, the attack was random and unprovoked. Swan had been caring for her grandchild before boarding the train. She was not engaged in a confrontation. She was not participating in risky behavior. She was simply traveling through the city she called home.

At a vigil held in her honor this weekend, her daughters spoke through a grief few parents or children should ever have to endure. One daughter pleaded for greater security on the system. Another spoke of the surreal pain of reaching for the phone to call her mother before remembering she was gone. Taking in coverage of the vigil, I found myself returning to a question that extends beyond this single tragedy.

What exactly do public institutions owe the people who depend on them?

The answer should not be particularly complicated. Citizens fund public transit. They are encouraged to use it. City leaders promote it as an essential component of urban life. In return, the public expects a reasonable degree of safety. Not perfection. Not guarantees. But a system in which an elderly woman can board a train without becoming the victim of a fatal attack.

Margaret Swan upheld her side of that bargain. The question now confronting Atlanta is whether the institutions responsible for public transit have upheld theirs.

Her death did not occur in isolation. It followed a series of troubling incidents that have raised questions about safety throughout the MARTA system. Earlier this year, passengers witnessed shootings, stabbings, and violent assaults across the network. In one recent incident, gunfire erupted at a Midtown station during rush hour. In another, a stabbing left passengers scrambling for safety. Over the weekend, another shooting left a teenager injured at a Midtown station.

Yet what makes these incidents particularly concerning is that federal regulators were already asking questions before Margaret Swan was killed.

On June 3, the Federal Transit Administration launched an audit of MARTA's safety practices. According to federal officials, MARTA's rate of personal security incidents resulting in death or injury has been nearly twice the national average since 2024. On rail lines, the figure was reportedly three-and-a-half times the national average in fiscal year 2026.

No single crime proves institutional failure. Large transit systems inevitably confront crime because they serve large populations. But confidence is not lost because of a single event. It erodes through accumulation. It erodes when warning signs begin to form a pattern.

That erosion of confidence has unfolded alongside years of instability within MARTA itself. Since the death of CEO Jeffrey Parker in 2021, the agency has struggled to establish consistent leadership. The 2025 departure of CEO Collie Greenwood amid questions regarding his immigration status and work authorization only deepened perceptions of institutional uncertainty. Today, MARTA remains under interim leadership while searching for a permanent chief executive.

None of these developments caused Margaret Swan’s death. Yet stable institutions inspire confidence because they project competence, accountability, and direction. Institutions experiencing recurring leadership turmoil inevitably invite questions about whether they are capable of meeting the responsibilities entrusted to them. Still, the aspect of this tragedy that I find most revealing has less to do with MARTA’s executive offices than with the way political attention is distributed.

To be fair, there has not been complete silence. State legislative leaders have demanded answers from MARTA. Governor Brian Kemp has indicated that state resources are available if needed. Federal regulators have launched an audit of the system’s safety practices. Yet it remains difficult to ignore how differently political energy is often allocated.

Atlanta is not a city lacking political voices. Georgia is not a state lacking elected officials eager to comment on matters of justice, equity, representation, or public safety. Politicians routinely issue statements on events occurring hundreds or even thousands of miles away. They weigh in on legislation in other states, court decisions in Washington, and controversies dominating social media.

Yet a Black grandmother was murdered while using public transportation in Atlanta and, as of this writing, I have been unable to find public statements from either of Georgia's United States Senators addressing her death, despite their frequent engagement with issues supposedly affecting Black communities. The point is not that every elected official must comment on every crime. They cannot. The question is why some tragedies generate sustained public attention while others quickly fade from view.

Margaret Swan was Black. She was a woman. She was a senior citizen. She relied on public transportation. If public policy ultimately exists to improve the lives of ordinary people, it is difficult to imagine a victim who more clearly reflects the communities political leaders regularly claim to champion.

Conversations about justice often focus on representation. Who has a seat at the table? Who has a voice? Who is being recognized? Those questions matter. But representation is only one obligation of public institutions. Protection is another. An elderly woman riding public transit should not need a national conversation about identity to merit concern. The expectation that she arrives home safely should be enough. Yet her death has generated nowhere near the level of sustained political attention devoted to other issues.

Perhaps because some tragedies fit comfortably within existing political narratives while others do not. Perhaps because random violence committed against ordinary people offers fewer opportunities for ideological point-scoring than disputes over elections, legislation, or national controversies. Perhaps because institutional failures are often more difficult to confront than partisan opponents. Whatever the explanation, the disparity is difficult to ignore.

As Georgia’s political class increasingly turns its attention toward the 2026 Senate and governor’s race, voters are hearing plenty about the future of the state. Candidates are discussing economic development, education, healthcare, housing, voting rights, and transportation infrastructure. These are important conversations…but before we discuss expanding systems, we should ask whether existing systems are fulfilling their most basic obligations. Before we celebrate ridership projections, we should ask whether passengers feel safe. Before we market Atlanta to visitors arriving for the FIFA World Cup, we should ask whether residents trust the transit system enough to recommend it to their own families.

Public transportation remains essential to the functioning of a major metropolitan area. Cities need transit systems. Working families depend upon them. Economic growth depends upon them. But public confidence is not created through marketing campaigns, economic projections, or political speeches. It is earned through competence and maintained through trust.

Trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.

Margaret Swan was not a visitor passing through Atlanta for a weekend event. She was not a tourist attending a sporting match. She was not a convention guest relying upon a recommendation from a local organizer. She was a resident. A mother. A grandmother. A woman going about her ordinary life.

In the end, the most important question raised by Margaret Swan's death is not whether MARTA can transport hundreds of thousands of visitors during a global sporting event. It is whether the people who depend upon the system every day can trust it to get them home.

For a city preparing to welcome the world, that seems like a question worth answering first.

Political succession is often discussed as though it were simply a matter of replacing one set of names with another. A retirement. A death. A primary. A runoff. One politician exits the stage, another steps forward, and the machinery of politics continues uninterrupted.

But succession is rarely that simple.

The more consequential question is not who replaces whom. It is what kind of political culture produces the next generation of leadership. That question has been hanging over Georgia for months.

The passing of Congressman David Scott exposed a transition already underway within the Democratic Party. Scott belonged to an older generation of Southern Black political leadership, one shaped by faith communities, local institutions, family networks, and tangible concerns such as jobs, housing, and economic mobility. Whether one agreed with his politics or not, he emerged from a political tradition that still permitted a wider range of viewpoints and disagreements within the party.

The candidates who followed him represent something different. Dr. Jasmine Clark’s primary victory reinforced a trend that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: the next generation of Democratic leadership is operating within a far narrower ideological lane. It is no longer enough to support women, advocate for equality, or champion civil rights. Increasingly, participation requires affirming a specific framework around sex and gender, even when that framework conflicts with the concerns of many women.

Keisha Lance Bottoms made this dynamic particularly visible during the gubernatorial primary when she stated that she would have vetoed the Riley Gaines Act. Bottoms is accomplished, intelligent, and experienced. That is precisely the point.

The narrowing within Democratic politics is not occurring because candidates lack qualifications. Quite the opposite. Even highly capable leaders appear constrained in what they are politically incentivized to prioritize when those priorities conflict with prevailing party expectations. What makes this particularly striking is that the narrowing persists even when public opinion points elsewhere. Opposition to male participation in women’s sports is not a fringe position in Georgia, nor is it confined to Republicans. Yet many Democratic politicians increasingly behave as though acknowledging those concerns carries greater political risk than ignoring them.

At the same time, Republicans are experiencing a succession crisis of their own. The Senate runoff between Derek Dooley and Mike Collins is not merely a contest between two candidates. It is a reflection of the political incentives that have come to dominate the Georgia Republican Party.

For nearly a year, I have argued that the party has developed a habit of rewarding loyalty before judgment, visibility before scrutiny, and spectacle before substance. The recent revelations surrounding Collins’ staff only reinforce the concern: a campaign manager forced out after mocking a woman who had publicly accused a prominent media figure of rape, ethics questions involving senior aides, and a chief of staff explaining his participation in a group chat that included prominent white nationalists and Holocaust deniers. In the first case, the woman had also spoken publicly about a subsequent suicide attempt, making the episode especially difficult for many voters to dismiss as ordinary campaign roughness.

Republicans already learned this lesson with Herschel Walker. Or at least they should have. Instead, the party continues to operate as though attention is evidence of leadership and proximity to Donald Trump is a governing philosophy.

What makes this moment politically significant is not that Democrats and Republicans disagree with one another. Political disagreement is normal. The more striking reality is that both parties increasingly punish independent judgment.

Democrats reward ideological conformity. Republicans reward personal loyalty. The subjects are different. The mechanism is remarkably similar.

A Democratic politician who departs from party orthodoxy on sex-based rights risks professional isolation. A Republican politician who departs from Trump risks political extinction. In both cases, the incentive structure discourages independent thinking and rewards obedience. That leaves voters facing a problem that neither party seems particularly interested in acknowledging.

Demographic representation and political independence are not the same thing. Representation without independence eventually becomes performance.

This matters because both parties continue selling voters a version of politics rooted in symbolism rather than substance. Democrats point to diversity, historic firsts, and demographic milestones. Republicans point to outsiders, fighters, and anti-establishment credentials. Yet neither guarantees what voters are actually looking for: leaders capable of exercising independent judgment when it matters.

Georgia women are routinely told to overlook concerns about sports, privacy, language, and sex-based rights in the name of broader progressive goals. At the same time, they are asked by Republicans to overlook conduct and judgment they would find unacceptable in almost any other context, simply because defeating Democrats is deemed more important.

Neither offer what many women are seeking.

The consequences of these patterns are already visible. Democrats continue narrowing the range of acceptable opinion while Republicans struggle to produce alternatives capable of earning broad trust.

When voters are repeatedly told to choose the lesser of two evils, the problem is not simply electoral. It is cultural. Political participation depends on more than fear of the other side. It depends on the belief that at least one option is worthy of support. A healthy political system produces candidates people want to vote for. An unhealthy one increasingly relies on convincing voters whom they must vote against. That dynamic can sustain elections for a time, but it is far more difficult to sustain enthusiasm, trust, or civic engagement. Eventually, voters begin to notice when politics feels less like a choice and more like an exercise in avoidance.

Democrats increasingly package conformity in the language of professionalism. Republicans increasingly package conformity in the language of populism. Independent voters are left choosing between different forms of obedience while searching for evidence of genuine leadership.

As Georgia’s political succession continues, the more important question is not who comes next, but what kind of leadership the parties are producing. Can either party still tolerate independent judgment? Can a Democrat defend women’s sex-based rights without professional consequences? Can a Republican challenge Trump without political consequences? Can either party reward discernment more than loyalty?

For Georgia women, that uncertainty is not abstract. It shapes the choices placed before us every election cycle. We are repeatedly asked to choose between teams when what many of us are looking for is something far simpler: leaders willing to place reality above ideology, judgment above loyalty, and the interests of the people they represent above the demands of the political tribe to which they belong.

As both parties undergo their own succession struggles, that may be the quality in shortest supply.

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.