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.