Venting

Before the issue of gender identity broke into my life—dividing my friends, disrupting my work and activism—I volunteered with a handful of organizations to advocate for women's reproductive rights. Just five years later, these organizations have all forgotten what women even are.

I resent the time I’ve sunk into this issue. Every minute I’ve spent trying to understand this, trying to push back on this, has been stolen from my advocacy to meet the real needs of women and girls. Every minute *every woman* has spent on this contrived attack on our rights, our ability to organize, and our very language has been a theft of time and energy that could have gone somewhere—anywhere—else.

Men do not need women’s rights. Men do not need women’s spaces. Men do not need women’s words. The outlandish claim that transwomen are in any sense women should have been drowned out by laughter, not taken up as a banner.

Instead, here we are, insisting we exist, insisting sex matters, something every adult on the planet knows first hand, though many find it fashionable to pretend otherwise. What a fucking heist.

The push to overwrite sex with gender identity has been incredibly costly: tearing families and friends apart, turning the missions of vital organizations inside-out, distracting policymakers from real problems, and shredding the solidarity and credibility of the left.

The fact is that I would love to just be a human being who happens to be a woman. But for women that has never really been an option. Whatever you do, you’re marked in advance. I would love to be put out of work as an activist. That's not on the cards either. But can't we at least snap out of this sick reverie and let women move on from defending our most basic right to be recognized as a sex class so that we can focus on issues that matter? Nobody gets to choose the times they're born into or the challenges that arise. But do our battles need to be so astonishingly stupid?

Our planet is burning up. In too many countries, corpses have greater rights to bodily integrity than living women and girls. Too many girls' educations end when their periods start or when they find themselves married off or pregnant against their will. And we're arguing over whether or not women exist as a sex class, outside the fever dream of men's fantasies and delusions? Give me a break.