I still call myself a feminist, though I’m getting close to the end of my rope in doing so. For me, what it means, and has always meant, is that I believe in basic equality for women: We can vote, own property, get paid equally to men for equal work if we choose that path, and get credit cards without our husbands’ approval. We deserve access to safety, which means we have private spaces such as women’s shelters and can access no-fault divorce and leave men who abuse us.
That’s it.
When I say this, even in a room full of young women who scoff at and hate the word “feminist,” as I did at the Turning Point Young Women’s conference last year for which the tagline was “feminine not feminist,” people cheer. No one disagrees that women deserve these things. Whether or not they want to call that “feminism” is another story.
When I was in college in the late 1980s, there were tons of women who didn’t claim the word, even though they agreed with those basic principles. Why? Because they thought of feminists as hairy-legged, angry women marching to take back the night while hating men. The sorority girls didn’t want to be associated with such things.
Now these same women — professional, accomplished, left-leaning proud “liberals” — screech that “trans women are women,” suggesting that true feminism embraces men pretending to be women. They cheer for men stealing their opportunities in some bizarre form of Stockholm syndrome.
The more conservative young women, including those at the Turning Point USA conference, reject feminism’s rejection of gender roles. That’s not my thing. I embrace expansive definitions of gender roles. I’m ambitious and assertive, and I’m the breadwinner in my family. That doesn’t make me any less of a woman.
In a surprising turn of events, the old-school leftie feminists, including myself, who also champion expansive gender roles, are rejecting the term “feminist” as well, because it has been bastardized.
Now, to be a feminist means cheering for men in dresses stealing women’s opportunities and forcing themselves into women’s private spaces. It means celebrating men pretending to be women as a “different kind of woman.” And worse, it’s the elite, white women who are telling younger women to step aside and shut up to make room for men.
I reject this. Men in dresses are men. They have XY chromosomes, but they like cosplaying as women. In a retrograde antifeminist turn, these men saying they are women embrace what we old-school feminists rejected — they preen, wear lots of makeup, and prance around like dingbats.
Just take one look at Dylan Mulvaney’s new memoir Paper Doll. The book is bathed in pink gingham and leans hard into backward stereotypes that true feminists have fought against for years. Here’s an excerpt: “Day one of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times. I wrote a scathing email that I didn’t send, I bought dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and when someone asked me how I was, I said, ‘I’m fine’ when I wasn’t fine. How’d I do, ladies?”
I dare you to find a biological male who identifies as female who doesn’t lean into retrograde stereotypes about womanhood when describing why they’ve always felt like a girl. Celebrating decades-old “feminine ideals” soaked in pink and adorned with false eyelashes is not feminism. It’s misogyny.
Championing men for women’s awards and trophies is fake feminism.
When Imane Khelif, a male with a difference in sex development that caused him to present as female at birth who won a gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics, is nominated for Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, that is the opposite of feminism.
When Lia Thomas is nominated for NCAA Woman of the Year, that is nominating a man for a women’s award.
When ESPN celebrated Women’s History Month with a special about Thomas, that is saying that a mediocre male swimmer is more accomplished than NCAA All-American women swimmers.
All of these examples celebrate men who cheat as ideal women. It’s saying men make better women than women do.
When Martine Rothblatt, a biological male who identifies as female, is championed as the highest-paid female CEO in 2013 earning $38 million, it is a triumph for men, not women. And when Caroline Farberger “comes out” as Sweden’s first transgender CEO at the age of 49, it’s just celebrating another man being a CEO. It’s a dog-bites-man headline, not the inverse. Farberger enjoyed all the benefits of being a man for decades. Deciding to publicly wear a dress at close to 50 years old doesn’t change any of that.
When I was a young woman coming up in corporate America, these are some of the things I dealt with: drunken sales guys groping me at sales meetings; male executives overlooking me for promotions if I refused to flirt with them; spending two years longer in every role that I’d mastered than my male counterparts; being told, not once but twice, by two male executives that I’d never lead a marketing department as the chief marketing officer, that I lacked the creativity and “leadership” required so I should be happy to accept a position as the No. 2.
I did go on to become a CMO at Levi’s, and I was named one of Forbes’s Most Influential CMOs two years in a row. I doubt Farberger and Rothblatt had to overcome such dismissals of their competence to rise to CEO status.
We live in a world where men now win men’s awards and they win women’s awards. This pushes women out of the spotlight and downgrades their achievements as less than men’s. It feels like we are living in the 1950s, when actual women are, once again, relegated to cheering for men from the sidelines.
This is misogyny and there is no other word for it.
Champion men in dresses as something else if you want: as gender-nonconforming men who enjoy the benefits of being male — no career breaks for having babies, no assumptions of caring more about family than professional trajectory, no minimizing of ability or intellect or being told they are “too emotional” — who climb to great heights in the corporate world.
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But do not tell me this is an achievement for women. And certainly, I will not accept that men, who are stronger and faster than women, winning women’s trophies are courageous. They are cheaters. That’s it.
I may shed myself of the “feminist” identity soon. It’s become so twisted as to have no meaning anymore. But I’m stubborn, and for now, I continue to fight for its true meaning: women, actual women, being deserving of equal opportunity, safety, privacy, and fairness.
Jennifer Sey is a USA champion gymnast (1986), producer of the 2020 Emmy Award-winning documentary film Athlete A on Netflix, and founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.