I was a feminist since I was old enough to know the meaning of the word, but over the last fifteen years I have watched America’s mainstream feminist movement embrace policies that endanger the vulnerable, distort reality, and demand allegiance to ever-shifting dogma, no matter how incoherent. I was also a lifelong Democrat voter, but over this same time I watched as the party came to oppose the most basic protections for women and girls by aligning themselves with an ideology that erases us altogether.
Earlier this month, Senate Republicans put forward the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, to ban male athletes who identify as transgender from women’s sports. But the Democrats in the Senate voted to prevent it from even being considered for passage, killing it before it could even be debated. By doing so, they reveal themselves to be woefully out of touch with America. A recent poll revealed that 79% of Americans, including 67% of Democrat voters, do not want men in women’s sports.
Once again, it seems the average American is more aligned to reality than those in Washington. Despite what gender ideology would have us believe, sex is not complicated and everyone knows it. Sex is binary. There are only two sexes. A person’s sex is determined by what gamete their body is organized to produce. Females are those whose bodies are organized around the production of large gametes - eggs. Males are those whose bodies are organized around the production of small gametes – sperm. Two gametes, two sexes. Intersex people have disorders of sexual development but are still either male or female. And (even when taking cross-sex hormones) the physical strength and speed differences between men and women is so significant that high-school boys routinely break track and field records held by female Olympians.
But because of the gender ideology pushed by Democrats, that says males are females if they say so, more than six hundred female athletes have been robbed of at least 890 medals by male athletes competing in female categories. This took place in over 400 competitions across 29 sports. Girls forced to compete against these trans-identifying males have had life-changing injuries, like Payton McNabb who had a volleyball spiked at her face by a male player when she was competing in high-school. She suffered a concussion, a brain bleed, partial paralysis, and vision problems. Because of the fantasy of gender ideology, women and girls have lost sports scholarships, team placements, dorm accommodations, and career opportunities, and when Republicans introduce legislation to stop it, Democrats refuse to even discuss it.
Taking action for the commonsense position held by the majority of Americans, President Trump signed an executive order barring males from competing in women’s sports, ensuring that federal agencies enforce protections for female athletes. Unlike the failed Senate bill, this executive order remains in effect, but it is vulnerable to legal challenges and could be overturned by a future administration, which would put women and girls at risk.
The State of the Union
Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was murdered by an illegal immigrant. After entering the country illegally, he was arrested but released because he was in a so-called sanctuary city and allowed to remain at large despite the fact that he had already committed a crime. He then went on to attack and kill Riley when she was out for a jog on her college campus. Riley’s harrowing death is an indictment of the Democrat’s open border immigration stance, as were the deaths of the other women and girls killed by illegal immigrants, like Jocelyn Nungaray and Rachel Morin. And it is not just Americans who are harmed by open border policies, but the women and children trafficked into the country - hundreds of thousands of whom are lost, unable to be located by authorities - and vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
The first bill President Trump signed into law in his second term mandates the detention of illegal immigrants who commit crimes that threaten public safety. This law is named the Laken Riley act and will no doubt save lives, but it is yet another law that should never have been needed. Just like it is commonsense that males should not participate in female sports, it is commonsense that illegal immigrants should not be arrested and then released.
Last week, during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, many Democratic congresswomen wore pink as a form of protest. This performance was meant to signal their commitment to women’s rights, yet when the time came to honor the memory of Laken Riley and the order passed in her name, these same Democrats sat in silence. They will wear pink for good optics but they refuse to protect women’s rights to safety, to dignity, to reality. And this, to my everlasting regret, is largely the result of modern feminism.
The Abolition of Woman
Feminism’s abandonment of reality and retreat into a fantasy world of luxury beliefs, is part of a broader ideological shift driven by postmodernism, which rejects the existence of objective truth in favor of the idea that reality is socially constructed. This philosophy, once confined to academia, has reshaped the mainstream left, leading it to abandon its historical commitments to basic reality, including the protection of workers and women. The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class, advocating for limited immigration to prevent the suppression of wages that benefits the rich at the expense of the worker. It also recognized that women’s oppression was rooted in biology, not identity.
But as postmodernist thinking gained ground, these priorities were cast aside in favor of abstract luxury beliefs that signal virtue rather than produce any tangible benefits. This is why self-identification now overrides biological reality to the detriment of women and open borders are seen as compassionate despite the harm to low-income workers and immigrants themselves.
Today’s feminism is less about the material realities of female existence and more about liberating people from the constraints of reality itself. What started as a movement to gain women the vote and legal equality, such as property rights and access to education and employment, has morphed into an ideology that defines freedom as detachment from the body, prioritizing sexual liberation, abortion, and gender dissolution over the realities of womanhood. Feminism is now less about securing rights for women and more about dissolving the category of “woman” altogether.
This is why mainstream feminism and trans activism are not, as some claim, uneasy allies. They are one and the same. The premise of contemporary feminism has become the notion that womanhood is just a collection of stereotypes, a flimsy social construct anyone can opt into. From that perspective, of course a man can be a woman; after all, what is a woman but a vague collection of traits?
But this belief doesn’t liberate anyone. It preys on the most vulnerable - children who are often traumatized or neurodivergent - by telling them the problem is not the world, but their bodies. This ideology also puts men in women’s spaces with predictable results - sexual assaults, harassment, and fear – that Democrats ignore so they can continue saying “it never happens.” Not only do the Democrats refuse to protect women from this violence, they enable it. They cheer as girls are forced to share locker rooms with boys, as battered women cower in shelters next to men, and as male predators are housed in female prisons. They have the gall to call it progress and that we are hateful for objecting.
This isn’t progress. This is a fantastical break from reality that prizes ideological conformity over real-world consequences and it is the most vulnerable among us who pay the price.
Further Reading:
The DNC and Feminism’s War on Women: A Review of Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender
The Abolition of Woman: A Review of Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington
The painting is Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais