It was 2008. I was twenty-five and reading a feminist blog when I saw a photo of a male writer with a female name. The dissonance grabbed my attention.
In the accompanying essay the writer explained why he, a man who described himself as a “trans woman,” was just as much of a woman as a cis woman. Reading on, I learned that “cis woman” meant a woman who was “assigned” female at birth and who identifies as a woman. The article’s main argument was that biology had nothing to do with womahood.
An alarm went off in my head.
I had been a feminist since I was old enough to know the meaning of the word. Growing up in the ‘90s, the era of Girl Power and Riot Grrrl, I thought being a feminist was simply being on the side of the good and decent. I knew that to be a woman was to be an adult human female, a person whose body is organized around the potential production of large gametes - eggs. While being a man was to be an adult human male, a person whose body was organized around the potential production of small gametes – sperm. Two gametes, two sexes.
The idea that biological reality had no bearing on womanhood was so absurd I thought the essay would be laughed off the internet.
Instead, I watched as gender ideology first took hold of feminism and then much of mainstream American culture. In less than a decade, within progressive spaces, being a woman was untethered from reality and became nothing more than a personal identification with nebulous concepts.
The feminism I had known was about questioning the stereotypes that dictated how women had to behave, not being defined by them. But now, the message was shifting; instead of saying girls could do anything, this new ideology implied that if someone did “girly” things, they might be a girl.
Freedom from Reality
In the name of this ideology, men entered women’s bathrooms, crisis centers, prisons, and hospital wards, endangering women and girls. Men also entered women’s sports, robbing women of more than 900 medals. This ideology dictated our language; women were no longer women, we were “uterus-bearers” or “cervix-havers.” In schools, children were taught that if they were a boy who liked to play with dolls they might be a girl, or if they were a girl who liked to play in the mud they might be a boy. Feminists who objected faced harassment, assault, cancellation campaigns, and even death threats.
Watching this unfold, I realized with dismay that gender ideology had sprung from contemporary feminism itself.
Feminism began as a movement to secure women legal protections, the vote, and access to education. Once those objectives were met, feminism addressed the roles of men and women in middle-class America. Second wave feminists came to believe that a man’s work outside the home gave him a path to freedom and self-fulfillment, while a woman’s work inside the home forced her down a path of domestic servitude.
Initially feminists fought for a woman’s right to choose between a career and motherhood, but like all of liberalism’s supposedly neutral frameworks, one option was invariably portrayed as superior. Eventually motherhood itself was likened to a trap. The advent of the hormonal birth control pill gave women the ability to escape this trap and, if it didn’t do so perfectly, feminism demanded abortion be available as a fail-safe. And so, as Mary Harrington has observed, the feminist movement transformed from its original fight to secure legal protections for women into a fight to free women from biology.
The next generation of feminists expanded upon the idea of biology as a prison to unravel the reality of the body altogether.
Third wave feminists blurred the concepts of male and female into vague notions that could never be soundly articulated. Without biological reality as a foundation, there was nothing left but regressive cliches, so that a person’s womanhood or manhood was determined by the very stereotypes feminism once sought to undo. In this way, as Abigail Favale has detailed, mainstream feminism changed from a movement that fought to gain rights for women, into a movement that now fights to dissolve the category of “woman” altogether.
Freedom’s Fallout
In 2011 I watched a new phenomenon sweep Western feminism: Slutwalks. In these protests, women marched in revealing clothing to insist that no matter how a woman dressed, she should not be blamed for male violence. But Slutwalks didn’t just argue that a woman should not be blamed for sexual violence committed against her (which is true), they reflected the idea that promiscuity is something women should pursue in the name of self-actualization.
As my peers and I came of age at the turn of the millennium, America was awash in what has been termed “raunch culture.” Women’s magazines, television series, and films showed us that a liberated woman was empowered in the office - and in the bedroom. By the Slutwalk era, sexual restraint had become an outdated relic, while one night stands were celebrated as self-discovery.
But in transforming what it meant to be a modern woman, liberal feminism also transformed what it meant to be a modern man.
First wave feminists had typically been opposed to abortion and viewed contraception as something that would ultimately serve the interests of men. This outlook appears to have been prophetic because in a culture where women increasingly delayed or even rejected commitment in favor of autonomy, men adapted. Freed to pursue consequence-free pleasure without having to bear the societal stigma that had once tempered these choices, men no longer needed to take on the responsibilities of adulthood and be capable and devoted to seek intimacy with a woman.
But this paradigm, set in motion by the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and reaching societal saturation by the Slutwalk era, failed to usher in a blissful utopia of free love. Instead, it left people lonelier than ever.
Across social media today, young women lament the caliber of men in the dating pool. They complain that men juggle multiple women and refuse to commit. These empowered women often find themselves with money and independence but no one to share it with, while the men they could have married are content to keep swiping through dating apps.
Some women blame “the patriarchy” for this bleak reality, as if men decided to stop being worthy partners out of a misogynistic conspiracy, when in reality these men are living the lives of hedonistic autonomy that liberal feminism championed for everyone.
Feminism’s Reckoning
I care about the well-being of women, which is why I grieve the loss of women’s spaces and the young children taught they were born in the wrong body. I recognize that what many of us feminists called freedom ultimately became detachment from ou ownr bodies and, eventually, reality itself.
Most early feminists did not seek to abolish the family, but to ensure the dignity of women. They did not see the female body or motherhood as an impediment to self-fulfillment, but a wondrous reality to be cherished. It was decades later that the corrosive mindset of liberalism, which seeks to dissolve all limits and dismantle natural ties in the name of “freedom,” hijacked feminism’s original purpose. Feminism became part of the larger societal battle to break apart the things that once gave life meaning – family, community, faith – without offering anything substantial to take their place.
Now people are not thriving, they are lost.
We were promised liberation, but what we got was disintegration. Now, many of us are left with nothing solid to stand on, no shared truths, no stable relationships, no reverence for our own bodies. This feminist delusion was not born from malice but from misplaced faith; we believed in abstraction over reality and autonomy over connection.
Now, women are waking up from that delusion. They are reclaiming womanhood not as a feeling or a performance, but as a profound, embodied truth. They are speaking out to reveal how easy it is for young women to be caught up in movements that promise them the world while destroying their place in it. As we leave this collective delusion behind we can recognize that well-being does not emerge from the ceaseless unraveling of tradition, nor can human nature be forced to fit an abstract utopian vision. Mutual respect and shared purpose between men and women are not oppressive relics to cast aside, but integral parts of a flourishing society.
Now, the task ahead is to acknowledge what is real, reclaim what is good, and offer a vision of life that is not driven by disconnection but rooted in deep belonging.
Painting is Melancholy by Constance Marie Charpentier