BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
One of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to issue an executive order entitled, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” This was followed up by another, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which he rather dramatically signed in front of a sea of grateful-looking women and girls.
Some saw this as a transphobic canary heading to the coal mine of fascism, while others lauded Mr. Trump as “a feminist president.” This is the same Donald Trump, recall, who entered the 2024 Republican National Convention to the James Brown song, It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.
The provisions themselves are broadly in line with what American people want – even the ones who didn’t vote for him. A January New York Times/Ipsos survey found that 94 per cent of Republicans and 67 per cent of Democrats think transgender women “should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.” Only 37 per cent of Democrats – and a mere 5 per cent of Republicans – think “society has not gone far enough in accommodating transgender people.” The Trump campaign had intuited that the Democratic incumbent administration was to the left of most of the country on these issues, and capitalized on it with the cruel, effective slogan, “Kamala’s agenda is for they/them, not you.” And here he is, in office, doing what he said he would, and a bit more besides.
Wherever you personally fall on gender topics, Mr. Trump’s outreach to women in this manner ought to be called what it is: patronizing pandering. I don’t see how you could take seriously the claims of uplifting women when they come from a beauty-pageant owner turned coup-adjacent President: one who has been convicted of sexual abuse plus a felony that involved sending hush money to a porn performer, and who picked as his Vice-President someone who had called his opponents “childless cat ladies.”
This is a regime that has domestic-violence victims potentially steering clear of shelters and staying in dangerous situations lest they be deported. It’s an administration that ran on the continued dismantling of American women’s reproductive rights and doing the same globally. Indeed, it was Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to be such a good “protector” of women that we would “no longer be thinking about abortion.” Some feminism!
But what I’m asking here, on International Women’s Day, isn’t whether Mr. Trump will set back Americans’ quality of life, starting with the most vulnerable, and foment turmoil abroad. (Yes, my answer on this is yes.) Rather, it’s this: how did feminism – the civil-rights movement for half the population – come to be discussed in terms of how to classify the infinitesimal part of the population that is in any way ambiguous on the sex-and-gender front? Because it’s not just conservatives fixated on edge cases. It’s everyone.
At some point, the question of how to fight for women, especially in the U.S., switched to a contentious and ultimately distracting argument over how to define us, with both sides treating the answer as a zero-sum game that would leave some with rights and others without.
How did we get here?
Whether you were a man or a woman used to determine your lot in life. And it still matters, even in progressive environments. But each successive wave of feminism chipped away at its importance. Some of feminism was about creating safe spaces without men in them, but mainly the idea was for women to lead full lives in general society. As Marie Shear put it, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”
And so, in the name of feminism, there’s less of the whole “Sir” or “Madam” talk these days. One finds gender-neutral washrooms at museums and unisex clothes at the mall. Thanks to a confluence of feminism and the gay-rights movement, many straight people now also use “partner” to refer to their opposite-sex spouse. School communications go to parents and caregivers, not just “Mom.” Waiters are servers and stewardesses are flight attendants, facilitated by the fact that in English, nouns don’t have grammatical gender (the more curvaceous ships notwithstanding). Some of these shifts are now associated with transgender advocacy or gender fluidity, but are properly understood as a broader, feminist-derived movement aimed at letting people just get on with it, without having to pronounce at every turn whether they were the lady spouse or the lady doctor or the lady toilet-user.
The contemporary transgender rights movement comes out of the same principles as feminism and gay rights: that what you’re born with bits-wise shouldn’t determine how you present yourself or spend your days.
As mentioned, some will insist there’s no zero-sum element to ciswomen’s feminism and trans-rights activism. Gay marriage didn’t take anything away from straight people who wanted to get married, right? And if you’re a feminist, surely you care about the misogyny trans women face?
In the abstract, this could be how it goes – overlapping membership and aims, common enemies, but different causes. And I suspect this is how it would have gone, had the question of trans inclusivity been what it sounds like on the box: including trans women in the category of women.
When I first heard the terms “trans inclusive” and “trans exclusionary,” I assumed that was the meaning. By extension, I figured you could be a trans-inclusive feminist simply by saying “women” and clarifying, if asked, that you meant a population consisting almost entirely of cisgender women, but of transgender women as well. This was and is how I use the term.
I assumed everyone was on the same page, that feminism was the women’s movement, and yes, exclusionary of anyone who is not a woman – that the differences were over who counted as a woman, and not over whether inclusivity mandated reaching beyond womankind.
That’s not how it played out. Instead of accepting that a handful of women arrived as such via transition, inclusivity has meant “women-plus,” a feminism whose mission is to offer something to everyone who is not a cisgender man.
While the underlying debates about trans inclusivity within feminism have a long history, mainstream organizations shying away from the catch-all term “woman” is extremely recent. The 2017 #MeToo movement – while not flawless in all ways – didn’t shy away from the W-word in its condemnations of sexual assault and harassment. Its slogan – ”Believe Women” – wasn’t denying the existence of male or non-binary sexual-abuse victims, nor was it saying women never committed sex crimes, nor indeed saying that women lack the capacity to lie. It meant that men’s misconduct, in the aggregate, gestures at sexist power structures.
To speak of sexual abuse as something men did to women was simplifying shorthand, but also politically essential. Men (on the whole) were bothering and attacking women (on the whole). (Were, and still are!) This is not because men alone have sex drives that sometimes direct them at people who don’t reciprocate. Rather, it’s that – for cultural and biological reasons – men are far likelier to find themselves in situations where they feel entitled to just take what they want, without consequences. #MeToo was about saying there should be consequences.
Somewhere between 2017 and 2025, the progressive consensus became that using “women” without qualifiers gave off trans-exclusionary vibes. Enlightened entities now spoke of women+, sometimes women*, or even womyn (to avoid ending the word with “men” entirely), terms that gesture at not just accepting trans women as women (except, can’t the word women also do that, she asks into the void?), but also at including everyone other than cisgender men in whichever undertaking. One heard tell of “women and femmes,” though that phrasing has gotten pushback for excluding transgender men and masculine non-binary people.
Much has been made, by those of various ideologies, of the symbolic significance of trans women entering women-only spaces. And I know some people are genuinely worked up about this, on both sides. (I predict that the comments to this article, which is not about that, will be about that.) But I suspect feminist anxieties are fundamentally about something else: No longer an oppressed class relative to men, assigned-female-at-birth women (that is, nearly all women) found ourselves recast, within feminism, as a privileged one, as compared to the gender-diverse. We got a new name: cisgender women.
Feminism had been about addressing the discomfort of virtually all women with at least some feminine gender roles. The new feminism didn’t outright deny that cis women can chafe at stereotypes and demands, but our relative comfort with womanhood became the more salient thing about us. This is unsettling, because it effectively redefines our oppression – knowing ourselves to be the women society knows us to be – as a form of privilege.
This new framing emerged in a feminist movement that was already undergoing a self-audit of sorts regarding inclusivity toward racialized women, working-class women, women with disabilities and so on. (Remember “intersectionality”? I presume the term will have been banned in the United States by the time this appears, but it was once a thing.) It makes sense for feminism to help the most women possible, and to channel resources to the women most in need. Alas, feminism’s socially aware turn of the 2010s often amounted to personal essays by middle-class or well-off white women, explaining that whatever angst they were having with their emotionally distant husbands, they knew how privileged they were relative to their more marginalized counterparts. I mention privilege-awareness disclaimers here because they explain how feminism itself was already primed toward deferring, toward pairing every righteous declaration with equivocation about how, actually, it’s not that bad.
And so feminist inclusivity came to mean something above and beyond reaching all women. The Canadian Women’s Foundation declares its vision to be: “Every woman, girl, and gender-diverse person has the power, safety, support, and rights to thrive, today and tomorrow.” A 2023 American Civil Liberties Union article, “Trans Rights Are Women’s Rights,” includes the mind-boggling line: “the Women’s Rights Project strives to represent people of all genders [emphasis added] – transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender – who face barriers based on their sex.” Context cues suggest this would not extend to cisgender men, but who can say?
Speaking of men: What you’re expecting here from me, the big feminist, is to say that the refusal to rebrand men as men+ is yet another case of men getting let off easy. But it’s more complicated. The redefinition of society as consisting of women-and-gender-minorities in one camp vs. men in the other has some men feeling left behind. These men have responded not by identifying as women en masse, but as leaning into men’s-rights activism, which has in turn been absorbed into mainstream right-wing politics.
At the very same moment the left determined “women” was an exclusionary term, and as feminism devolved into a crisis over whether using “pregnant people” was a requirement or amounted to erasure, a largely right-wing campaign emerged to shift the focus to dudes. Were they falling behind in school, or facing a loneliness epidemic? Young men are languishing, radicalizing in mom’s basement. (Why not dad’s basement? Rhetorical.)
And the culprit they land on? Women’s liberation. On X (née Twitter), there’s endless content about how important it is for women to stay home with their children. Just about every social-media platform, save for Bluesky, is rife with “trad-wife” influencers, with denigrations of working women as “girlbosses.” These men aren’t bothered about intra-feminist squabbles. They hate feminists of all stripes because they believe feminism is why they aren’t getting laid or hired.
This revenge-of-men political moment has a way of feeling like pushback against a takeover by women that never actually took place – a revolt against a Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris presidency that came dangerously close, where misogynists were concerned, but never actually happened.
A prevailing culture within feminism that has said women needed to acknowledge their privilege, to stop being so demanding, to not be a “Karen,” and to stop saying “woman,” has amounted to feminism shooting itself in the foot. Bare minimum, being able to say “women” is a crucial organizing strategy – one that feminists couldn’t have picked a worse time to abandon.
What do women actually need? Control of our reproductive health: that’s the big one. But we also need maternity leave – whether it’s called that or birthing-parent leave, I personally cannot be bothered. We need affordable child care. We need the ability – legal and logistical – to exit toxic relationships. We need safety from creeps (including everything from the legal prosecution of rape to a change in norms in industries where job interviews once meant drinks and hotel rooms). We also need recognition of women as adults with our own sexual and romantic desires, as full-fledged human beings whose sexuality consists of more than whatever it is we don’t want.
I say “we,” knowing that not each of these items will apply to every woman, and I say “need” without implying that all these things are best achieved via state intervention. We also have all the usual concerns – cost of living, housing, health care, the environment; The above is by no means comprehensive, but intended to give a sense of how much there is to consider that has zilch to do with contentious questions of who is or is not a woman.
The New York Times reported on June 8, 2022, that the abortion-rights movement had shied away from speaking of “women,” in the name of trans inclusivity. Later that same month, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And a cult of machismo might just destroy liberal democracies worldwide, most certainly not sparing our own.