Georgia voters watched two debates this week featuring four candidates seeking two of the most consequential offices in our state. By the end, I found myself less concerned with who had won either debate than with how we had arrived at a point where these were our final choices.

There were substantive disagreements about healthcare, immigration, taxes, public safety, and the cost of living. There were also accusations, evasions, and the familiar effort to convince voters that whatever shortcomings one candidate possesses, the alternative is simply too dangerous to elect.

I have written before about the diminishing room for independent judgment in Georgia politics and the Republican Party’s failure to offer a credible challenge to Senator Jon Ossoff. These debates reinforced both concerns. Our parties have become remarkably comfortable asking Georgians to excuse their nominees’ deficiencies because the alternative is supposedly worse.

The Senate Race: A Better Debate Is Not a Better Record

Jon Ossoff was, in my estimation, the stronger performer against Republican Congressman Mike Collins. He appeared more disciplined, better prepared, and more capable of turning his opponent’s record into an argument about what Georgians should expect from a United States senator. That is an observation about the debate, not an endorsement.

I have serious objections to Ossoff’s record, particularly his votes against legislation intended to preserve female sports categories. I also remain frustrated by the Democratic Party’s difficulty confronting antisemitism within its coalition. When asked about growing anti-Israel sentiment among Democrats, Ossoff addressed Israel, Palestinians, and international humanitarian law without directly confronting the question of where legitimate criticism of Israel gives way to antisemitism.

These are precisely the issues I would want a credible challenger to press him on. Collins had that opportunity, but much of the debate instead illustrated why he has struggled to make the case that he should replace Ossoff.

To his credit, Collins has a meaningful legislative accomplishment in his work on the Laken Riley Act. I have written about the consequences of failures in immigration enforcement, including the deaths of women and children whose families must live with those failures. I am not inclined to dismiss legislation addressing immigration enforcement simply because I find fault with its sponsor.

But that accomplishment does not exempt Collins from scrutiny of his judgment, associations, or conduct. He entered this race carrying controversies involving his office, political associations, and public rhetoric. His denunciations of racism and antisemitism during the debate did little to resolve those concerns. Condemning hatred in principle is easier than demonstrating a willingness to confront it when doing so carries a political cost.

Then there is Donald Trump. Collins seems to believe that loyalty to Trump is sufficient reason for Georgians to send him to the Senate. Perhaps that works in a Republican primary, but Georgia has not been the reliably Republican state of 2014 for quite some time. Winning statewide requires persuading voters who did not support Trump, supported him reluctantly, or simply expect their elected officials to exercise independent judgment.

Collins has offered little indication that he understands this. The result is an incumbent Democrat who can spend much of his campaign highlighting his opponent’s liabilities rather than defending his own record. That may be effective politics, but it leaves Georgians who want Ossoff held accountable with little reason to believe Collins is the answer.

The Governor’s Race: A Different Republican Strategy

The gubernatorial debate presented a different dynamic. Republican Rick Jackson and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms both have records deserving scrutiny, and neither was my preferred choice from their respective primaries.

Bottoms served as Atlanta’s mayor during a period marked by serious concerns about violent crime and public safety. The difficulties of governing during an extraordinary period deserve acknowledgment, but they do not eliminate questions about her leadership. Voters are entitled to ask what she learned and what she would do differently as governor.

Her position on the Riley Gaines Act presents another obstacle. Bottoms has said she would seek to undo Georgia’s protections for female school sports. That is a consequential policy choice affecting girls across the state, not a cultural disagreement to be dismissed as a distraction.

Still, her proposals on Medicaid expansion, housing affordability, teacher compensation, and childcare deserve consideration on their merits. A candidate can be wrong about something important without being wrong about everything.

Jackson presents different concerns. As a healthcare entrepreneur whose companies have done substantial business involving state-funded programs, he should face rigorous questions about potential conflicts of interest. Voters deserve to know whether his healthcare proposals are workable and how he would separate Georgia’s interests from his own business interests.

I also want clearer answers about his companies’ recruitment of foreign healthcare workers and their employment practices. Are visa-based hiring programs addressing genuine workforce shortages or substituting for investment in American workers? Jackson should explain his practices, while his critics should distinguish documented concerns from allegations.

What interests me most about Jackson’s campaign, however, is the contrast between how he and Collins understand Georgia’s electorate.

During the Republican primary, Jackson emphasized his alignment with Trump. In the general election, he has increasingly presented himself as a Brian Kemp–style Republican willing to put Georgia ahead of national political demands. That is a politically astute adjustment, but it deserves skepticism.

Kemp’s reputation for independence was tested when Trump demanded things he would not do following the 2020 election. Jackson is borrowing the appeal of that independence without yet demonstrating that he would exercise it when doing so carried a cost.

Nevertheless, Jackson appears to recognize that winning a Republican primary and winning statewide require different arguments. Collins seems determined to conduct both as exercises in proving loyalty to Trump. Understanding what Georgia voters want to hear is not the same as possessing the judgment to govern them well, but at least Jackson seems to recognize that the state has changed.

When Voting Against Someone Becomes the Entire Argument

There is a difference between evaluating a candidate’s shortcomings and allowing those shortcomings to become the entire substance of an election.

I want to know whether candidates understand the responsibilities of the offices they seek, can distinguish Georgia’s interests from those of a party, president, or business enterprise, and possess the judgment to choose the responsible course when it is not the politically convenient one. Those questions should guide candidate selection long before voters encounter names on a general election ballot.

Instead, our parties seem to operate on the assumption that nominees need only survive a primary. Afterward, the argument becomes the danger of allowing the other party to win.

Democrats can rely on voters alarmed by the direction of the Republican Party. Republicans can rely on those alarmed by Democratic positions on immigration, sex and gender, and public spending. Those disagreements are real, but neither party should use them as an excuse to avoid producing better candidates.

This is especially frustrating for independent voters, whose refusal to excuse one party’s failures is often mistaken for support of the other. I can believe Ossoff outperformed Collins without believing he has earned my confidence. I can recognize Jackson’s more sophisticated campaign strategy without dismissing concerns about his businesses. I can agree with a Bottoms proposal while rejecting her position on girls’ sports. That is not inconsistency, it is what evaluating candidates individually ought to look like.

I do not expect to agree with every elected official on every issue. I do expect candidates to defend their records, answer uncomfortable questions, and recognize that public office is a responsibility rather than a reward for partisan loyalty. Above all, I expect political parties to take the quality of our choices seriously.

November will produce a senator and a governor regardless of whether Georgians are satisfied with the candidates. Those officials will make decisions affecting our families long after the campaign advertisements disappear. I am tired of being told that the stakes are too high to demand better candidates. The stakes are precisely why we should.

Georgia does not suffer from a shortage of capable people. It suffers from political parties too comfortable assuming voters will settle for whoever survives their nomination process. Until that changes, we may keep entering election seasons with plenty of reasons to vote against someone and far too few reasons to vote for anyone.

Three years ago, I wrote an essay I never published. It began with a deliberately provocative question: Can transgenderism, in some cases, merely be a consequence of sissyphobia?

The wording was intentional. In Black American culture, “sissy” has long been an oftentimes disparaging term for an effeminate man, carrying assumptions about homosexuality along with judgments about his failure to conform to masculine expectations. By “sissyphobia,” I was trying to name something more culturally specific than a general discomfort with gender nonconformity: the particular contempt directed at men, especially gay men, whose femininity makes their maleness socially uncomfortable for other people.

I had been thinking about effeminate men and a contradiction I could not quite reconcile. Our culture was supposedly dismantling restrictive ideas about masculinity and femininity at precisely the same time it seemed increasingly inclined to interpret gender nonconformity as evidence of another identity. A man could wear women’s clothing, behave flamboyantly, reject conventional masculinity, and perhaps discover that these things meant he was not simply an unconventional man after all.

Actor Alex Newell was one of the people who made me notice it.

I had not watched Newell on Glee. I was introduced to him years later through Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, where he played Mo, an effeminate, cross-dressing gay man whose gender nonconformity did not require him to stop being a man. Contemporary coverage described Newell as gay, cisgender, and gender-nonconforming. He was male. He was gay. He was feminine. None of those facts needed to cancel out another.

Only later did I learn that Newell had already spent years being asked, implicitly and explicitly, whether that combination was enough.

Newell joined Glee in 2012 playing Wade “Unique” Adams, a character who came to be portrayed as transgender. Newell himself did not identify that way. In 2013, while playing one of television’s most prominent transgender teenage characters, Newell explicitly identified as male and said the role had not changed how he understood himself.

And Newell was aware of the pressure surrounding his identity. In a 2018 interview with Vice, he described repeatedly being assumed to be transgender despite continuing to identify as a gay man. The assumptions apparently became persistent enough that he questioned himself: “You’re telling me that I am, so I guess I am.” He joked about feeling like a “trans poser” and even wondered aloud, “Maybe I should just be trans.”

Those comments stayed with me. Here was an effeminate gay man being told, from several directions and over several years, that simply being an effeminate gay man was somehow an incomplete explanation.

Then, in 2023, something changed. Newell appeared on Broadway in Shucked as Lulu. That spring, he was widely described as one of the first openly nonbinary performers nominated for an acting Tony, and when he won in June, he described himself from the stage as a “queer nonbinary fat black lil’ baby from Massachusetts.” That was when I started writing.

Newell alone knows why his understanding or description of himself changed, but the sequence crystallized a question I had already been asking. I had encountered Newell as a gay, gender-nonconforming Black man who resisted other people’s attempts to interpret his femininity as evidence that he was transgender. Eventually, the culture that had spent years struggling to leave that femininity inside the category of man celebrated Newell as a history-making nonbinary performer.

Why had an effeminate gay man required further explanation?

I returned to essentially the same question from the opposite direction earlier this year in “Girls Are Not Allowed to Be Girls Anymore.” There, I wrote about girls and women for whom femininity seemed to become easier to inhabit once it was separated from womanhood: female people identifying as men or nonbinary could return to dresses, makeup, camp, glamour, and exaggerated femininity and have those same things interpreted as subversive rather than conventional. I wrote then that the performance had not changed…the permission structure had.

Looking back, that essay and my unpublished one from 2023 were describing two sides of the same phenomenon. We were told that gender identity would free people from restrictive definitions of men and women. But what if, for some people, it did something closer to the opposite? Instead of making the categories wider, it provided an explanation for why people who did not fit comfortably inside the stereotypes might belong somewhere else.

The feminine man need not expand our understanding of men. The masculine woman need not expand our understanding of women. Human variation remains exactly where it was; we have simply developed new terminology for moving some of the people who embody it outside the categories they complicate.

And perhaps nowhere is that contradiction more apparent than in sexuality.

I was reminded of this recently while listening to a viral clip of a discussion on The Joe Budden Podcast. The panel was arguing about how to describe the sexual orientation of a man who dates transgender-identified males. Marc Lamont Hill argued from the premise that transwomen are women: if a man dates women, including transwomen, he can still describe himself as straight. Others in the room returned to the distinction Hill’s framework deemphasized: whether sexual orientation concerns the sex of the people to whom someone is attracted or their gender identities.

The exchange interested me because it exposes something about gender identity that receives less attention than pronouns or bathrooms: it can also provide a conceptual escape hatch from homosexuality. If a man can have sex with another male while preserving a heterosexual identity because that male identifies as a woman, he does not necessarily have to ask himself what attraction to another male means about his sexuality. Nor do the people around him necessarily have to reconsider how they understand him. A male friend uncomfortable with homosexuality can continue regarding his friend as straight because gender identity has transformed a same-sex relationship into an opposite-sex one without changing the sex of either participant. Gender identity can answer the uncomfortable question for everyone before anyone has to ask it.

Which brings me back to the “sissyphobia” I was trying to describe in 2023. Homosexuality was always embedded in it: contempt for the effeminate man has long been difficult to disentangle from discomfort with homosexuality. Perhaps gender identity did not create either discomfort so much as provide a modern vocabulary through which older ones can survive.

We no longer have to tell the feminine boy that he should toughen up and act like a man. We can affirm his femininity while entertaining the possibility that it means he isn’t one. We no longer have to tell the masculine girl that she needs to behave like a lady. We can celebrate her rejection of womanhood instead. And we no longer have to tell a man attracted to another male—or ask the people around him to accept—that he may be homosexual or bisexual. If the other male identifies as a woman, we can preserve heterosexuality by changing the category of one of the participants.

The language is different from what previous generations used. The underlying discomfort may not be.

That is why D. Smith’s announcement last month caught my attention. After years of publicly living as a trans-identified male, Smith announced that he will now live as a man and use he/him pronouns. One person’s decision cannot explain anyone else’s, and I have no interest in supplying Smith with motives he has not supplied himself. But I found myself thinking again about permission. What if a feminine or gender-nonconforming man can increasingly imagine another possibility…simply being a man?

Comedian Flame Monroe makes that question even more interesting. In 2019, while publicly identifying as transgender, Flame described being part of the LGBT community “only four hours a day,” when “the check” was involved, and elsewhere put it more plainly: “I am somebody’s daddy. This is my job.”

Earlier this year, Flame declared, “I ain’t even trans no more. I don’t even identify as trans.” More strikingly, in the same conversation Flame asked what had happened to tomboys and “little feminine boys,” arguing that being masculine or feminine should not automatically mean someone must be transgender.

Newell, Smith and Flame have taken very different paths, and none can explain the others. But together they illustrate how unstable the boundary between gender nonconformity and gender identity can become when the culture surrounding both changes.

Whether unconventional gender identities are actually declining matters less to me than what changing identities reveal about the role culture plays in how people understand themselves. For years, increasing LGBT identification among younger people was frequently explained through greater acceptance: people who had always existed finally possessed the freedom and vocabulary to identify themselves. There is surely some truth in that explanation. But culture does not merely give us words with which to describe ourselves. It can also influence which explanations of ourselves seem plausible in the first place.

By 2025, in “The Trap of Trans Activist Victimhood,” I was asking the other half of the question: not what makes someone enter an identity framework, but what can make it difficult to leave. Now I find myself wondering what happens when the surrounding culture changes enough to make another path visible.

The question is no longer simply whether people can leave transgender identities. It is whether we can build a culture in which fewer people need an identity to explain their nonconformity in the first place. That requires something more radical than another collection of labels. It requires making what comes to mind when we hear man and woman, bigger.

Men and women can be masculine or feminine, homosexual or heterosexual, bisexual, flamboyant or reserved, glamorous or androgynous. None of those characteristics changes their sex. That was supposed to be one of the liberating insights of rejecting sex stereotypes: personality does not determine sex. Somewhere along the way, we began treating personality as evidence of identity instead.

Perhaps D. Smith represents nothing beyond D. Smith, but the possibility that interests me is not whether more people adopt or abandon transgender identities. It is whether the permission structure changes again.

That a feminine boy does not need an explanation for his femininity. That someone who experiences same-sex attraction can confront that attraction without needing another person’s identity to convert it into heterosexuality. And that someone who once understood himself through gender identity can eventually say, without shame or political significance, that he understands himself differently now.

My unpublished essay in 2023 asked whether society’s discomfort with effeminate men might sometimes contribute to transgender identification. Three years later, I think the better question is broader. Did a movement that promised freedom from restrictive ideas about men and women instead give those restrictions somewhere new to hide?

If so, liberation does not require another identity. It requires restoring something much simpler…enough room inside man and woman for human beings to be complicated.

A few years ago, I came across a tweet from a woman explaining why she had stopped identifying as a radical feminist. “Honestly what made me stop identifying as a radfem was the coddling of TIFs,” she wrote. “Some of the most misogynistic people on earth are TIFs. They hate themselves because they hate women. They hate women so much that they don’t want to be women at all.” TIF is shorthand for “trans-identified female.”

I understood what she meant, then wondered whether I might be one of the radical feminists she was talking about.

I probably do extend more sympathy toward trans-identified females than I do toward trans-identified males. Some might consider that intellectually inconsistent. If I object to gender ideology because I believe sex is real and women are adult human females, shouldn’t I hold women who identify as men just as responsible for the ideology they perpetuate? But I have never been able to look at the two and see the same thing.

Some of that undoubtedly comes from my own history. I was once a trans-rights activist and helped organize a gender-expansive support group that was predominantly made up of female teens (accompanied by a parent) and young adults. I have written before about the guilt I felt over that work, particularly after recognizing how many of the young women I encountered had histories of sexual abuse, sex-based harm, internalized homophobia, or other experiences that shaped their relationship to being female. In 2024, I called my own role a journey “from compassion to complicity.” I still believe compassion can become complicity when it requires affirming something untrue, but I don’t believe avoiding complicity requires abandoning compassion.

I saw women negotiating the expectations attached to being female, homosexuality, gender nonconformity, trauma, and vulnerability, or simply the feeling that they had somehow failed at being the kind of woman the world expected them to be. I never believed becoming a man or non-woman was actually possible for them, but I understand why believing it was might have felt like an answer.

There was another side of those spaces, though. Sometimes adopting a male identity seemed to mean adopting a performance of masculinity along with it—and not always its better qualities. I encountered abusive lesbian relationships in which the female partner claiming manhood appeared to regard domination of the other woman as part of occupying the male role. Being the man meant being tougher, more aggressive, more controlling. In at least one relationship I knew of, it meant violence.

It wasn’t simply an escape from female subordination. Sometimes it looked like an attempt to cross from the vulnerable position to the dominant one—to imitate not merely the appearance of men, but some of the worst behaviors associated with masculinity.

If a woman has spent her life understanding femaleness as the position from which one is sexualized, controlled, violated or made vulnerable, I can understand the temptation: better to be feared than vulnerable; better to become the man than remain the woman. But feminism has to be able to understand that impulse without pretending women are incapable of cruelty.

In May 2025, a South Carolina story brought that question back to me. Jillian Johnell Maxner was arrested after investigators alleged that sexually explicit material involving a young girl had been uploaded from an account traced to Maxner’s home. Seeing Maxner’s masculine appearance, some people assumed this was a male person identifying as a woman.

I didn’t. “Pretty sure this is an actual woman,” I wrote. “Some women are just as predatory as the worst of men.”

The case was later dismissed without indictment, so I don’t offer Maxner as an example of a woman who committed the alleged crime. What interests me is my immediate reaction: I did not need Maxner to secretly be male…I knew women are capable of terrible things. Being a member of an oppressed sex class does not confer individual moral purity. Class analysis describes patterns of power; it does not divide humanity into a sex that sins and a sex that doesn’t.

That thought returned this month when former Michigan NICU nurse Kieran Ansley, a trans-identified female, was charged with child abuse after a premature baby girl was found with extensive bruising and multiple fractures. The allegations have not been adjudicated, and Ansley is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

My first thought was testosterone.

I don’t think that is an unreasonable connection to make. Testosterone is administered to women who identify as men precisely because it is a powerful androgen capable of masculinizing the female body, and hormones interact with the brain as well as the body. Research following trans-identified females after beginning testosterone is mixed, but a systematic review found increases in aggression-related measures in four of seven prospective studies, including increases in aggressive-response tendencies in three of the four studies that measured them. The science does not justify pretending the question is settled.

Nor does it make sense to acknowledge testosterone’s dramatic physical effects on women while treating possible behavioral effects as beyond discussion. That doesn’t mean testosterone explains any particular alleged crime, and I don’t know what happened in that NICU room. Hormones can influence behavior without eliminating human agency.

What interests me is the convergence. I have known women for whom adopting a male identity also seemed to mean adopting a performance of masculinity built around toughness, dominance and aggression. Medical transition can add a powerful androgen to that psychological and social transformation. A woman taking testosterone remains responsible for what she does, but recognizing her agency does not require treating testosterone as though it changes everything about her except anything happening between her ears.

Similar questions have surfaced around Jonathan McKinsey, a trans-identified female killed by her elderly in-laws in California this weekend amid a bitter divorce and custody dispute involving unresolved allegations of abuse. That complicated family tragedy cannot responsibly be reduced to a morality play about gender ideology.

But cases like these challenge our temptation to sort trans-identified females into two neat categories: victims or monsters, poor confused women or misogynistic traitors. A woman can have been harmed and still harm someone…she can suffer under expectations attached to her sex and later reproduce them against other women or children.

Accountability asks what you did. Understanding asks how you got here. Feminism ought to be capable of asking both.

I won’t pretend my feelings about trans-identified males are identical. They’re not. If there is a path by which gender-nonconforming, dysphoric or trans-identified men can reconcile themselves with being male, I think other men have an important role in making that path possible. Women should not have to surrender our boundaries to accomplish that work for them.

But refusing to surrender a boundary is not the same thing as hating someone.

A few years ago, I was leaving a hospital after outpatient surgery, still fairly doped up, when a male transvestite (I don’t know how he self-identified) stepped onto the elevator with my husband and me. He wore a long-sleeve black lace blouse and matching long skirt dressed like he was in mourning. He smiled at me. I’m pretty sure I smiled back instinctively.

That’s the whole story.

He wasn’t bothering me or asking me to affirm anything, so I behaved pleasantly toward him. My feminism survived the elevator ride. Had he instead demanded access to a female changing room, my assessment of that demand would not have changed because we’d shared a friendly smile.

Civility toward an individual is not the same thing as surrendering a political boundary, just as compassion for a woman is not the same thing as absolving her behavior. Women are entitled to boundaries. Those boundaries don’t require cruelty.

Earlier this year (and still having a phone number with a South Carolina area code), I received a political text opposing a South Carolina bill concerning sex-segregated facilities. The message featured a photograph of a bearded trans-identified female and warned that the legislation would put “trans men, with beards like me,” into women’s and girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

“Do you want guys like me in spaces meant for your daughters?” the message asked. “I certainly don’t want to be in those spaces.”

I responded: “Female people belong in the girls’/women’s restroom. Welcome home, sister!”

It wasn’t a taunt. The beard was apparently supposed to make recognizing this person’s sex seem absurd, but that was precisely the point. A beard doesn’t make a woman male…neither does testosterone, masculine clothing, a masculine name or cosmetic surgery.

Two years ago, writing about the women I had known in gender-identity spaces, I argued that “we don’t need to run from womanhood to escape oppression; we need to fight back together.” I still believe that. But together is an easy word to write when you’re thinking about women who already agree with you. The harder question is whether female solidarity extends to the woman who insists she isn’t female at all.

“Welcome home, sister” means exactly that. Not welcome home once you look like a woman again. Not welcome home once you apologize or agree with me. There is still a home here if you ever decide you want it.

Perhaps that is the coddling some radical feminists object to…perhaps I am guilty of it. When I look at a woman who has tried to leave womanhood behind, I often find myself wondering what happened before I wonder what is wrong with her.

I think about things women I love have survived, things I have survived, and things I narrowly avoided. I think about what it means to grow up female and learn, sometimes very young, that your body can make you vulnerable before you have even figured out what that body means to you. It isn’t difficult for me to imagine a girl concluding that the safest kind of woman to become is no woman at all.

I can understand the logic without accepting the conclusion.

I also understand that a woman does not become incapable of misogyny because she calls herself a man and testosterone does not turn female aggression into male aggression. Female socialization does not make women immune to cruelty. Being harmed does not make someone incapable of becoming harmful and attempting to escape an oppressed sex does not confer membership in the dominant one.

But contempt offers these women very little road home and I want there to be a road home. Not because women who identify as men are helpless or because they should be excused when they hurt people, but because if I mean what I say when I say these are women, then I have to mean it even when they don’t want me to.

She remains female when testosterone deepens her voice, grows hair across her face and reshapes the body she was trying to escape. She remains female when she changes her name or has sex-trait modification surgeries. She remains female when she insists that I am her enemy for recognizing that fact, and she remains female if, one day, she decides she no longer needs to run from it.

There has to be something between affirmation and hatred. I can tell the truth about someone’s sex without humiliating her. I can understand the wound without excusing what she does with it. I can hold a woman responsible for harming another woman or child without pretending she somehow became male in the process. And I can refuse to call a woman a man while leaving open the possibility that someday she may no longer feel she needs me to.

Maybe that is coddling. I think it asks something more of us: refusing to make female solidarity conditional upon a woman first agreeing that she belongs to us.

In April 2024, I wrote an essay about Kyle Rittenhouse that was not really about Kyle Rittenhouse. His campus speaking tour was generating the predictable petitions, protests, and counter-protests, but I found myself thinking instead about the summer of 2020 and what had become of the Black Lives Matter movement. I had watched a movement that began with enormous public sympathy lose much of it amid riots and political radicalism that extended well beyond concerns about policing. In Portland and elsewhere, predominantly white anarchists attached themselves to racial-justice demonstrations and pursued their own anti-establishment objectives under the same banner. Whatever legitimate grievances had brought people there became increasingly difficult, in the public mind, to separate from everything happening around them.

The lesson I took from it was fairly simple: not all allies are good allies.

I called the essay “Rittenhouse and a Call to Clean House,” and argued that social movements have an obligation to scrutinize the people acting in their name. A cause can be legitimate and still attract people whose motives are not. A movement can begin with one objective and find itself providing infrastructure or legitimacy for another. I was thinking primarily about infiltration then—outsiders entering a movement and redirecting its energy toward purposes the ordinary person who joined it might never have endorsed.

More than two years later, I am not sure infiltration is always the right word.

I have been thinking about that old essay while watching the controversy engulfing Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour. At a September 4 show, Macklemore opened for Sheeran at MetLife Stadium and used part of his set to advocate for Palestinians, telling the audience that a significant reason he wanted to join the tour was the opportunity to stand in stadiums and say “Free Palestine.” What happened afterward is more complicated than some social-media retellings suggest: Sheeran says he did not personally fire Macklemore; according to him and tour promoter Messina Touring Group, venues hosting upcoming dates refused to proceed with Macklemore on the bill.

Macklemore, like anyone else, is free to express his political convictions. That does not resolve the separate question of whether an invited performer is entitled to use someone else’s tour and audience for political advocacy. The artists who withdrew are similarly free to decide where they will perform, just as venues can establish their own limits and Sheeran can want his concerts to remain largely apolitical. What interests me is what happened when those competing choices collided, because the resulting controversy looks less like a disagreement over one performer and more like something I have been watching develop around the Free Palestine movement for several years.

The political scientist in me keeps returning to a basic problem of coalition politics. Successful movements bring together people who agree strongly about one thing while disagreeing about many others. The contemporary Free Palestine coalition includes Palestinians and Muslims alongside secular Western progressives, socialists, antiwar activists, humanitarian organizations, students, supporters of a two-state solution, opponents of Zionism, and people whose primary concern is the conduct of the Israeli government in Gaza. Those constituencies do not necessarily share a worldview…they share an issue.

Broad coalitions therefore depend on boundaries: some understanding of what membership requires, what behavior will be tolerated in the movement’s name, and what people are allowed to disagree about while remaining allies. This is where my thinking has changed since 2024. Infiltration suggests outsiders entering a coherent movement and pulling it away from its purpose, but movements can transform without anyone infiltrating them at all.

A coalition can organize around a broadly sympathetic cause and gradually allow its most uncompromising members to determine what solidarity requires. The price of belonging rises incrementally. Sympathy becomes advocacy. Advocacy becomes allegiance. Allegiance becomes participation. Eventually, declining to participate is interpreted not as neutrality but as opposition, and people who agreed about the original grievance discover that agreement is no longer sufficient.

Increasingly, in Western political and cultural spaces, “Free Palestine” can operate as more than an expression of concern for Palestinians. It can become a loyalty test: Have you spoken about Palestine? Have you spoken enough? Did you use the right language? If you spoke about another humanitarian catastrophe, why did you not mention Gaza? If an artist advocates for Palestine from your stage, must you permit it? If you do not, what does your refusal mean?

The issue is no longer simply whether someone cares about Palestinians. The dispute becomes whether everyone else must demonstrate that care in the prescribed way.

That is what makes the insistence that “silence is complicity” politically consequential: it eliminates the neutral category. If silence itself constitutes participation in injustice, declining to join is not actually an available choice. There are only participants and opponents, with little room for someone who believes civilians are suffering but does not share the movement’s politics, knows too little to offer an informed opinion, or simply came to a concert to hear music.

Social movements have always tried to persuade neutral people that inaction has consequences, sometimes for good reason. But when that organizing tactic expands without limit, every institution becomes a potential political venue, every public figure is expected to speak, and even competing humanitarian concerns must be filtered through the movement’s priority issue. If disagreement over tactics or boundaries becomes indifference to suffering, the movement has also built an effective defense against internal criticism.

The Free Palestine coalition also presents a complication I did not fully explore when I wrote about Black Lives Matter in 2024: Western leftists and Islamist movements can share enemies without sharing political ends. Iran’s 1979 revolution offers an extreme historical example. Secular liberals and leftists joined the broader opposition to the Shah alongside a much more powerful Islamist movement, only for the Islamic Republic that emerged to repress many of those former fellow opponents. Contemporary Palestine activism may not be a replay of the Iranian Revolution, but the underlying coalition problem remains worth considering: opposing the same thing does not mean political allies are trying to build the same thing afterward.

How much of what Western activists understand themselves to be supporting is actually shared by Palestinian political factions, and how much is Western progressive politics projected onto a conflict with its own history, religion, nationalism, and competing political movements? When explicitly Hamas-sympathetic rhetoric appears within demonstrations organized around Palestinian civilians or self-determination, who within the coalition is responsible for saying it does not represent them?

Movements rarely enjoy policing their own side while they believe themselves to be fighting something worse. Internal criticism feels like disloyalty; drawing boundaries feels like weakening the coalition. Questionable rhetoric can therefore be explained away or ignored because preserving solidarity feels more urgent than examining what solidarity is becoming.

That was ultimately my frustration with Black Lives Matter after 2020. The coalition became very good at identifying enemies and considerably less interested in asking whether everyone standing beside it was actually a friend. I wrote then that activists had to protect “the integrity of their cause” against people whose intentions might not align with the movement’s goals.

I still believe that, but I would write the argument differently today because the danger is not limited to people with bad intentions. Sometimes the problem is people with perfectly sincere intentions who simply want something different from what everyone else thought they had signed up for.

I do not need to believe that Western activists are secretly working toward an Islamist political order to notice that some appear reluctant to scrutinize the politics of people they regard as allies. Nor do I need to establish that Palestinian or Hamas-linked organizers deliberately engineered the Western movement into what it has become. The broader political problem exists either way: a movement that cannot establish its own boundaries will eventually have those boundaries established by its most demanding participants.

Which brings me back to Ed Sheeran.

Macklemore’s politics were hardly a secret when he joined the tour, but his explanation of why the Sheeran dates mattered is revealing: part of the attraction was access to stadiums full of people. From an activist’s perspective, that makes sense…a crowd of tens of thousands is an opportunity to speak, but it was an audience somebody else built.

The dispute was therefore a conflict between two understandings of what the stage was for: Macklemore saw a platform capable of carrying a political message; Sheeran has described a concert environment he wanted to remain welcoming across political divides. The more interesting political question is what happens after someone says no.

If refusal itself proves complicity, boundaries become almost impossible to maintain. The venue cannot merely be a venue. The singer cannot merely be a singer. The audience cannot merely be an audience. Everything becomes another front in the political struggle and anyone unwilling to make it one becomes politically suspect.

That is not unique to Palestine. American politics has spent years turning consumer choices, entertainment, corporations, schools, sports, churches, friendships, and ordinary social interaction into opportunities to demonstrate political identity. We have seen similar dynamics when other movements have moved from asking for tolerance to requiring affirmation, until declining to adopt the movement’s language or assumptions is itself treated as hostility. But the Free Palestine movement offers an unusually concentrated example of what happens when one issue acquires enough moral urgency among its supporters that other institutions are expected to subordinate their purposes to it.

It’s similar to a lesson we’ve already seen unfold elsewhere. The gay-rights movement spent decades building public support around same-sex relationships, marriage, and protection from discrimination, only for many of its institutions to later bind those gains to far more contested claims about gender identity, sex-segregated spaces, sports, and medical interventions. Americans themselves appear to distinguish between the two: support for same-sex marriage remains a majority position even as majorities reject some policies advanced under the broader LGBT umbrella. Yet support for same-sex marriage has also slipped from recent peaks. That does not prove transgender activism caused the decline, but it raises a question movements ignore at their peril: when a successful coalition continually expands what agreement requires, can its new demands eventually place its older victories at risk?

I ended my 2024 draft by arguing that the strength of a movement lies “not in the number of its supporters, but in the integrity of their intentions.” Two and a half years later, I still believe that, but I think I left something out.

The health of a political movement can also be measured by the boundaries it is willing to maintain. Can it distinguish sympathy from allegiance? Can it accept an ally who agrees with its ends but not all of its methods? Can it tolerate someone who cares differently, cares less, or declines to organize his life around the cause at all? Can its supporters enter institutions they did not build without insisting those institutions reorganize themselves around their politics? And can people within the movement ask those questions without immediately becoming suspect themselves?

Black Lives Matter should have taught us what can happen when a movement becomes reluctant to scrutinize the people acting in its name. The controversy surrounding Ed Sheeran suggests another lesson: movements need boundaries not merely to keep hostile people out, but to prevent solidarity itself from becoming an ever-expanding obligation.

In 2024, I thought the warning was that not all allies are good allies. I still think that is true. What I understand better now is that a movement also has to leave room for people who are not allies at all—not enemies, not opponents, not immoral cowards waiting to be shamed into compliance, but people who simply decline to join. Because once a political movement decides that neutrality is itself an act of aggression, it creates a world with only two available positions: obedience and opposition. And at that point, the most revealing question may no longer be why someone refused to say the right words, but why saying nothing was no longer permitted.

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK is leaving the BBC. Depending on which corner of the internet you inhabit, this is either another devastating retreat from LGBTQ representation or long-overdue evidence that the culture has finally tired of subsidizing men’s caricatures of women. I am not entirely convinced by either explanation.

For one thing, the BBC has not announced some sudden feminist awakening. The broadcaster says it is making difficult programming decisions amid significant financial pressures, and Drag Race UK is not actually disappearing. After its current eighth series finishes on BBC Three and iPlayer, the franchise will move from the publicly funded broadcaster to the subscription service owned by the private company that produces the franchise. A new Drag Race UK All Stars is already scheduled to premiere there in autumn 2027.

But almost immediately after the announcement, I began seeing two familiar clips circulated as evidence of why the show deserved to go. Neither clip aired on the BBC…both came from the American All Stars series.

One was Jimbo’s infamous Fame Games talent exhibition on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8: an enormous-breasted caricature producing whipped cream from prosthetic nipples as part of an increasingly sexualized food gag. The other was Gottmik’s All Stars 9 runway, which turned a double mastectomy into high-fashion spectacle—surgical instruments, glittering red scars and fake breasts representing what had been removed carried in a clear bag. Gottmik described the latter as deeply personal art celebrating the surgery that changed her life. Fashion and LGBTQ media largely celebrated it accordingly.

I’m fairly certain I watched them both when they originally aired…because, for a long time, I was a Drag Race fan. That feels important to say before going any further. I did not arrive at this show as a radical feminist searching for misogyny. I watched periodically in my early twenties and more regularly in my late twenties and early thirties because I enjoyed it. I liked the costumes, ridiculousness and theatricality. I liked watching people take everything associated with glamour and femininity and turn the volume all the way up. Drag was camp…artificial by design. Nobody actually thought women walked around with three-foot wigs, waists cinched to cartoon proportions and enough rhinestones to become a traffic hazard.

The exaggeration was the joke and imitation was the highest form of flattery…at least that is how I experienced it. Of course, affection and misogyny are not mutually exclusive. A caricature need not be motivated by hatred to reproduce something degrading, and perhaps there were things I simply wasn’t seeing then. Over time, though, I sensed a change.

By the last several regular seasons I attempted to watch, I rarely made it very far. I would watch two or three episodes and lose interest because something about the humor felt more hateful than I remembered. I continued watching All Stars longer, perhaps because familiar queens connected me to the version of the franchise I had enjoyed.

I remember watching Jimbo and Gottmik and thinking some version of the same thing: Are women supposed to find this endearing? The question has become harder for me to dismiss because I am still not completely convinced that all drag is misogynistic.

That probably separates me from many radical feminists. I understand the argument. Drag relies heavily on exaggerated female stereotypes and there is something worth interrogating about men being applauded for performing traits for which actual women have historically been belittled. But parodying the conventions associated with a sex is not necessarily the same thing as despising that sex. Camp can mock gender roles precisely because everyone recognizes their absurdity. At its best, I think that is what I once found enjoyable about Drag Race.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, I began recognizing something beyond the exaggeration of femininity: the degradation of women. Radical feminism certainly gave me a vocabulary for noticing misogyny I once absorbed without examining closely. Getting older probably changed my tolerance, too. Jokes I laughed at in my teens and twenties land differently as a woman approaching forty, especially as a mother raising a daughter. Perhaps I simply learned to clock what had always been there. But I am not completely convinced of that explanation because I remember the camp without this much contempt.

There was always raunch, breastplates, exaggerated bodies, sexual jokes, and jest. RuPaul certainly did not build an empire on tasteful restraint…yet increasingly, female anatomy itself seems to function as the grotesque object: breasts as absurd props, vaginas as punchlines, pregnancy as caricature, menstruation as grotesque spectacle, and female embodiment generally as something simultaneously fetishized and mocked. Perhaps what feels different is not simply greater sexualization, but that the sexualization has acquired somewhat of a moral armor. What might once have been defended as an intentionally vulgar joke can now be presented as an expression of identity, liberation, or bravery.

Then there is the strange ideological inversion represented by Gottmik. I wrote earlier this year in Girls Are Not Allowed to Be Girls Anymore about a cultural pattern I keep noticing: femininity becomes more politically respectable the further it travels from women. A woman reveling in traditionally feminine aesthetics can still be dismissed as shallow, vain, unserious or trapped by patriarchal expectations. Put virtually the same performance on someone identifying as male, however, and femininity can suddenly become rebellious, boundary-breaking and brave.

Gottmik represents that contradiction almost too perfectly. Here is a female person who identifies as a man, underwent a double mastectomy, and then arrived to the Drag Race stage to perform an exceptionally elaborate version of femininity. On All Stars 9, the removal of the breasts themselves became part of the glamorous performance. The scars were decorated and fake breasts representing what had been removed became accessories…the result was celebrated as high art and transgender liberation.

I do not doubt that Gottmik sincerely experiences it that way. But viewers are allowed to consider what cultural messages exist beyond her intentions. I cannot stop thinking about the girls watching a culture in which female breasts can be surgically removed and their removal celebrated on a stage devoted to femininity, while femininity itself becomes more daring and culturally valuable precisely because it is being performed by someone who has rejected being a woman.

Keep the makeup. Keep the stilettos. Keep the corsets, wigs, and glamour. Lose the woman.

Femininity is not disappearing, what has become unfashionable is the idea that femininity might simply belong to a woman without requiring explanation. Which brings me back to drag itself. If campy imitation necessarily requires contempt for the sex being imitated, I would expect to encounter the same feeling watching drag kings. Generally, I do not.

Contemporary drag-king performances retain much of the same absurdity: exaggerated masculinity, painted facial hair, swagger, costumes, theatrical sexuality and deliberately overdone male mannerisms. Yet when I watch women parody men, I rarely come away with the sense that male bodies themselves are disgusting, that masculinity is being borrowed because women perform it better than men do, or that men as a class are the joke.

The camp survives without the cruelty.

That makes me wonder whether something besides drag is changing. Young men today are coming of age in a media environment where pornography, red-pill influencers, manosphere content and algorithmically rewarded hostility toward women are readily available. Gay men are not somehow raised outside of male culture merely because they are gay. Sexual orientation does not vaccinate anyone against sexism.

And Drag Race now exists within another cultural shift: the presence of performers who do not understand drag primarily as temporary gender play, but who identify themselves as women, men or something else according to gender identity. The older joke depended, at least partly, upon the audience knowing what was happening: a man was theatrically imitating femininity. The distance between performer and performance created the camp. But what happens when acknowledging that distance becomes offensive?

If a male performer must literally be understood as a woman, then criticizing his performance of womanhood is no longer criticism of a caricature; it risks becoming criticism of his identity. And when female performers identifying as men can return to femininity as something subversive, the relationship between drag and sex becomes stranger still.

At that point, I am not sure we are playing with gender roles anymore. Sometimes it looks more like we have reconstructed them and changed who is allowed to receive applause.

Which is why I find the reaction to Drag Race UK leaving the BBC more interesting than the relocation itself. The fact that American Drag Race clips are being circulated as evidence for a British programming decision says considerably more about the unresolved cultural argument surrounding drag than it does about the BBC’s stated rationale. But I also cannot join those mourning its departure. Partly because I no longer enjoy Drag Race and partly because, even setting my feminist objections aside, I am unconvinced that this sort of programming belongs on publicly funded television in the first place.

Equity, the UK performing-arts and entertainment union, made the opposing case, grouping Drag Race UK with I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, the cancellations I wrote about in my last Reality Bites. The union lamented that their loss takes LGBTQ culture away from “mainstream public service broadcasting” and onto a “niche subscription platform.” Its concern about performers losing work is understandable, but the statement also assumes something I am less willing to grant…that providing mainstream exposure to this particular expression of LGBTQ culture is itself an obligation of public-service broadcasting.

The BBC is not “government television” in the sense of being editorially directed by the British government. Its independence is protected by Royal Charter. It is, however, a public-service broadcaster funded through the television licence fee, creating obligations that do not apply in quite the same way to Netflix, Paramount+, WOW Presents Plus or another voluntary subscription service.

Someone who wants Drag Race should be free to watch it and someone who wants to produce it should be free to make it. However, I am not convinced that people who object to highly sexualized performances built around exaggerated representations of women should be required to subsidize it as part of a public broadcasting system. Moving the franchise to a service operated by the company that produces it strikes me as fairly unobjectionable…its audience can follow it there. Drag has hardly been banished from British culture.

I therefore do not greive Drag Race UK’s departure from the BBC, but I also do not mistake a budget decision for a feminist victory.

What I know is that camp does not require contempt and exaggeration does not require degradation. Playing with femininity does not require treating female bodies as grotesque props nor does liberation require celebrating the removal of the body parts that make women recognizably female.

I used to watch Drag Race and see men having fun with femininity. Increasingly, I found myself watching men—and sometimes women who no longer call themselves women—receive applause for versions of femininity in which actual women seemed required either to become the punchline or disappear entirely.

As Drag Race UK leaves the BBC, I am much less interested in bemoaning where the show is going than in asking how something I once enjoyed became something I no longer recognized. Maybe I learned to recognize the contempt or maybe the contempt became harder to hide. I suspect both can be true.

Long before Raven-Symoné asked us to imagine Raven Baxter as green, she played a little girl for whom color could never be incidental. In 1993, a six-year-old Raven appeared in Alex Haley’s Queen, the television adaptation of Haley’s novel about his paternal grandmother. Queen was born enslaved in Alabama, the daughter of an enslaved Black woman and the white son of a plantation owner. Fair-skinned enough that she could sometimes pass for white, Queen nevertheless discovered that she could not simply choose herself out of the racial world into which she had been born. Her racial ambiguity did not make race irrelevant…it made race inescapable.

Thirty-three years later, Raven is asking a very different question about another character she played. During an April episode of Tea Time with Raven & Miranda that recently went viral, actor and comedian Kalen Allen described Raven Baxter, the title character of Disney Channel’s That’s So Raven, as unmistakably Black. Raven interrupted: “Was she Black?” When Allen explained that he saw the Baxters as a Black family, Raven pushed the thought experiment further. Take away their color, make them green, and listen to the words. What color would they be then?

Allen has since explained that the project existed in an earlier form before Raven was attached and that he understood her to be talking partly about the character as originally conceived. Raven Baxter did not necessarily have to be Black before Raven-Symoné became Raven Baxter. Allen nevertheless maintains that the character audiences actually received was undeniably a Black girl living in a Black family on a show that sometimes addressed anti-Black discrimination explicitly.

That context makes Raven’s comment more understandable, but it does not make it less interesting, particularly because this is not the first time she has seemed uncomfortable with the significance other people attach to her Blackness. In a now-infamous 2014 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Raven resisted two labels at once. She did not want to be called gay, despite acknowledging that she was in a relationship with a woman; she wanted to be understood as “a human who loves humans.” Then came the comment that startled Oprah: Raven did not want to be called African American either. She was American.

Her explanation was more thoughtful than the controversy sometimes allowed. Raven said she did not know which African country her ancestors came from but she knew her roots were in Louisiana. She has since clarified that she never meant she was not Black and, truthfully, I find part of her argument compelling. A Black American whose family has been in Louisiana for generations does have a history distinct from someone who recently immigrated from an African country. Louisiana is not evidence that Raven lacks roots because she can not identify an African nation. Louisiana is part of her roots. Black Americans descended from the people who lived through slavery and segregation here and developed our own history and cultural memory here.

That actually makes Raven’s more recent impulse to make Raven Baxter green more strange to me, not less.

Her years on The View produced several other controversies involving race: questioning whether a comparison between Michelle Obama and a Planet of the Apes character was necessarily racist, preferring Rosa Parks to Harriet Tubman for the $20 bill, and infamously saying she would discriminate against an applicant with a name like “Watermelondrea,” for which she later apologized. Any one of those could be dismissed as a celebrity putting her foot in her mouth; however, taken together with the Oprah interview and her recent comments, they suggest something more interesting. Raven does not deny being Black but she seems resistant to the idea that Blackness should mean very much about her unless she decides that it does.

I actually understand part of that impulse. I am a Southern-born Black American myself, and Black American is the term I prefer to African American, and have little patience for the idea that my Blackness comes with an ideological instruction manual. I do not believe my race determines my politics, the causes I must support, the people I must vote for, or the conclusions I am permitted to reach. I am socially and politically Independent in part because I resent the assumption that anyone else gets to decide those things for me…but there is a difference between independence and disconnection.

That is why it interests me that Raven rejected “gay” and “African American” in essentially the same breath. Her answer was remarkably consistent: do not put me in your categories. I am a human who loves humans. I am an American. Seen together, those statements sound less like unrelated opinions about sexuality and race than a philosophy of identity: the categories other people perceive when they look at Raven should not determine the meaning of Raven.

There is something attractive about that kind of individualism but also something incomplete, because some identities are not merely labels we place on ourselves…they are inheritances. Raven did not have to identify as a descendant of the Black South for her Louisiana ancestors to have lived their lives there and Raven Baxter did not need to announce her Blackness every week for Black children watching Disney Channel to recognize something meaningful in seeing a Black teenage girl with a unique sense of style at the center of a successful show. Make the Baxters green if you like…the audience that encountered them was not.

I also wonder whether Raven’s sexuality helps explain why such individualism might be especially appealing, without suggesting that lesbianism somehow produces racial disconnection. For many Black children growing up, Blackness is not necessarily what initially makes us feel different. Blackness is home: our parents and grandparents, church, neighbors, food, language and history. For a lesbian, bisexual, or gay child in that environment, homosexuality may instead become the characteristic that marks difference within that belonging.

The identity you inherited may give you a community in which you belong while the sexuality you discover makes you different within it. Adulthood can then offer another community in which that difference becomes a basis for belonging. For someone who entered entertainment extraordinarily young and eventually moved through cosmopolitan celebrity circles, the distance between the world that formed her and the worlds in which she later found acceptance could become enormous.

I can not know how much of that explains Raven, nor do I think her biography proves some universal rule about Black lesbians, but it makes me wonder what happens when the community into which you were born communicates that something essential about you is to be hidden while another community tells you that same thing is worthy of celebration. What happens when leaving home feels like freedom…and what happens to your understanding of home after decades away?

Black American identity, particularly in the South, has historically been intensely communal: family, church, neighborhood…shared institutions and shared history. Modern gay and lesbian identity, by contrast, is often narrated through individual discovery: realizing who I am, refusing other people’s expectations, coming out, finding my people, living authentically. Those ways of understanding identity do not have to conflict, but Raven’s comments raise an interesting question about what happens when the individualist framework used to reject expectations imposed upon sexuality gets applied to an inheritance that exists whether or not we choose to emphasize it.

Perhaps that is why Alex Haley keeps nagging at me as I think about Raven. Haley’s work was obsessed with roots. He looked backward—toward ancestors, geography, slavery, family and inherited memory—to understand the people standing in the present. Raven-Symoné began her career portraying a child in one of those stories. Little Queen could not make herself green. Her appearance sometimes allowed other people to imagine her as belonging to one racial world or another, but neither her appearance nor her wishes could erase the history that made her who she was.

There is something strange about watching a descendant of the Black South discover a version of colorblindness after generations of her ancestors survived a country that never afforded them the same privilege, but the lesson is not that Black people should remain inside some prescribed racial lane. Blackness does not require political conformity, romantic segregation, living in the South forever, sharing our grandparents’ religion, or making every decision according to what other Black people expect of us.

Roots are not chains. They are the history beneath whatever direction we choose to grow.

That is ultimately what bothers me about asking whether Raven Baxter was really Black. Millions of Black children did not need an announcement to recognize her. Blackness was present not merely in Raven Baxter’s complexion but in her family, experiences, cultural context, and in the significance of a Black girl occupying that much space on the Disney Channel. The audience was not imagining something that was not there.

Perhaps that is the limit of radical individualism: we are not the sole authors of what we mean. We inherit things we did not choose, even as we should remain free to reject the expectations attached to them. Raven can call herself American rather than African American. She can refuse to let being Black or lesbian dictate her politics, relationships or the life she builds. None of that requires pretending the inheritance itself disappears.

Raven-Symoné has traveled a long way from the six-year-old girl who played Alex Haley’s Queen. In many respects, that is the American success story. We can refuse the politics people assign us, love people they never expected us to love, build lives almost unimaginably different from those available to the generations before us, and travel as far from other people’s expectations as our freedom allows.

Roots are not supposed to keep us from growing, but however far the branches reach, they still tell us something about where the tree came from.

Raven can leave the Black South…she just can not make it green.

Nearly two decades ago, when personal blogging was still its own little corner of the internet, I read a post from a mother that has stayed with me since. She had noticed a change in her preteen daughter. The family had recently gotten cable television and soon her daughter began mimicking the sarcastic, dismissive way children on television often spoke to their parents and other adults who were frequently portrayed as clueless, embarrassing, unreasonable, or simply obstacles to whatever the kids were trying to do.

The mother wasn’t having it. She reminded her daughter that what she saw children getting away with on television wasn’t going to fly in their house, and that if the behavior continued the child’s television access would cease.

I thought about that blog post again in March 2024, after Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV forced many Millennials to reconsider the entertainment we had grown up watching. I wrote about it then, wondering whether there was something worth examining in the way children’s entertainment portrayed relationships between children and adults. Two years later, I’m thinking about that mother-blogger again, but less because she corrected her daughter’s behavior than because she was paying attention. She knew her child well enough to recognize a change, wondered what might be influencing it, and remained close enough to intervene.

Last week, former child actress Raquel Lee Bolleau filed a lawsuit against Disney alleging that, while filming the 2001 Disney Channel movie The Poof Point, she was repeatedly sexually abused by an adult male employee involved in the production. Bolleau was just 14 years old.

According to the lawsuit, the alleged abuse occurred in a hotel room, where Bolleau says the man supplied her with alcohol before assaulting her, and also in ways she says should have raised alarms on set. She alleges that he fondled her and rubbed his genitals against her while giving her unsolicited hugs “in plain view” of others working on the production. She also alleges that the guardian assigned to her was separated from her for much of the workday.

Then, according to Bolleau, her behavior changed. Her demeanor shifted and her performance suffered. Her lawsuit alleges that Disney noticed those changes but, rather than recognizing them as possible signs that something was happening to the child in its care, executives blamed and threatened Bolleau and her mother. Disney has not publicly responded to the substance of the allegations and the claims have not been adjudicated.

The contrast with that mother’s story from all those years ago is difficult to ignore. A mother notices her daughter’s behavior changing and wonders what is influencing her child. An institution allegedly notices a child’s behavior changing and wonders what is wrong with the child. Somewhere in that contrast is something I was circling when I first wrote about children’s entertainment two years ago. The issue isn’t simply whether television taught children to be disrespectful to their parents. It’s what happens when the relationships and authority children depend on to protect them are weakened, absent, or fail.

Who Was Supposed to Be the Grown-Up?

There is also an eerie irony in the movie at the center of Bolleau’s allegations. The Poof Point was itself built around the kind of parent-child reversal I wrote about in 2024. Bolleau played Marie, one of two teenagers embarrassed by and somewhat disconnected from their scientist parents. After a malfunctioning time machine begins “de-aging” the adults, Marie and her brother are left to manage them, fix the machine, and ultimately save them before they disappear altogether.

The movie ultimately uses the experience to bring the family closer together, but viewed alongside Bolleau’s allegations more than two decades later, the role reversal takes on an uncomfortable resonance. At 14, Bolleau was playing a girl forced to take on more responsibility because the adults around her could not function as adults, while according to her lawsuit, the actual adults around her were failing to protect her. The fictional adults became children and needed Marie to save them. The real child, Bolleau alleges, needed adults to act like adults.

That trope was hardly unique to The Poof Point. I grew up on All That, The Famous Jett Jackson, The Amanda Show, Kenan & Kel, That’s So Raven and the whole late-’90s and early-2000s ecosystem of children’s television, where adults were often clueless and kids more perceptive than the grown-ups around them. There is nothing inherently sinister about children enjoying stories in which they outsmart adults. But Quiet on Set exposed a contradiction I hadn’t fully considered: while children’s television was making a joke of adult authority, the actual children producing that entertainment were deeply dependent on adults to protect them.

On television, incompetent adults were funny because the children could always save the day. Off camera, children needed the adults to be competent because the consequences of their failure were real.

Quiet on Set made that contradiction considerably harder to ignore. Drake Bell revealed that he had been sexually abused as a teenager by dialogue coach Brian Peck, who was later convicted of sexually abusing a minor, while other former Nickelodeon performers described inappropriate material and troubling working environments. Bolleau herself appeared in the documentary, speaking about her experiences as a young Black actress on The Amanda Show, though not about the allegations she is making now. She later said hearing Bell disclose his abuse had been retraumatizing for her.

That makes her lawsuit especially haunting because Bolleau isn’t just another former child star coming forward in the wake of Quiet on Set. She is one of the children we were watching. While we sat at home watching kids perform the carefree, mischievous childhood being sold to us, some of those children now say their own childhoods were being profoundly violated behind the camera.

Children Need Adults

There is a strange lesson we sometimes give children about growing up: that maturity means needing adults less. Eventually, of course, that is true. Childhood is supposed to prepare people for independence. But a 14-year-old is still a child and children need adults whose loyalty is actually to them.

An employer’s first concern may be getting the production finished. A network wants a successful show. A director needs the performance. A studio has schedules, contracts, budgets, and reputations at stake. A parent looking at her daughter and thinking, something is different about my child, has a fundamentally different interest.

Parents are not infallible and some fail their children terribly; but healthy parental attachment remains one of the most important protective relationships children have. A child who knows that Mom is going to ask where she was, who she was with, why that adult keeps texting her, or why her personality suddenly seems different isn’t merely being “controlled”; she is being watched over.

Now that I’m a mother myself, that lands differently than it did when I first encountered that blogger’s story all those years ago. Back then, what stood out was that she wouldn’t allow her daughter to disrespect her. Now what stands out is that she noticed. She knew what was normal for her child well enough to recognize when something wasn’t.

Safeguarding children is often that mundane: asking questions, knowing the adults around them, paying attention when their personalities change, and maintaining boundaries even when they think they’re unfair. That kind of attentiveness can easily be recast as overbearing, but the embarrassing mom asking too many questions isn’t necessarily the obstacle to the adventure, nor is the dad who wants to know where you’re going an idiot. Sometimes those are exactly the adults a child needs.

There is something haunting about The Poof Point in retrospect. Beneath all its silliness, it is ultimately a story about repairing the relationship between children and their parents. Yet Bolleau now alleges that while helping tell that story at 14 years old, she was being sexually abused in an environment where the adults responsible for her welfare failed to protect her. A movie in which children save adults was being made around a real child who, according to her lawsuit, needed saving herself.

Two years ago, I ended my essay by arguing that we should critically examine what children’s entertainment teaches young people about family relationships. I still believe that, but I would put it differently now. The lesson of Quiet on Set was never that children need fewer adults telling them what to do, and the lesson of Raquel Lee Bolleau’s allegations isn’t that children should learn to distrust grown-ups. Children are already vulnerable precisely because they have to trust adults.

The question is which adults we permit access to them and whether the people who genuinely love them remain close enough to recognize when something has gone wrong. Children don’t need a world without adult authority; they need adults worthy of it. And when they don’t have them, the adults are the problem.

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.