All women are in danger right now. Our rights, the ones we have left, are under attack. Our bodies are being legislated. Our stories are being erased from history, and government websites like NASA. Whether you’re a white straight women in Boston, trans woman in Florida, a Black mom in Illinois, a disabled activist in Texas, or a bi woman like me in Colorado. We’re just trying to breathe in a world that wants to flatten us, we’re all living in a time where silence equals surrender.
This isn’t just a cultural moment. This is a god damn crisis. And we don’t have the luxury of pretending we’re not involved.
I’m about to offend some of you. So let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m a white woman, but I’ve never been a Stepford wife, and I never wanted to be.
I was the girl in an evangelical church in a wealthy suburb who got called a dyke behind her back and a “bad influence” to her face. I was the teenager who came out as bi and got thrown out by her mother and abusive step dad on her 18th birthday. I am a survivor. Not just of domestic abuse, not just of religious trauma, but of the quiet, suffocating violence of suburban womanhood weaponized against anyone who doesn’t fit the mold.
So when I say this next part, know it comes from someone who has been burned by the system: Fellow white women, we need you. But we need all of you all in! Not just the part that posts about Girl Power on International Women’s Day.
Who Gets to Be a Hero?
Fem Friday has always been about celebrating women who fight for justice. But here’s the truth: any woman can be a Fem Friday hero. You don’t need a hit record or a viral moment penned by Pat Green in his nostalgia time machine. You just need the courage to stop standing by while your sisters and others get hurt. You need to be willing to name racism when you see it. To stand up for trans women. To call out microaggressions. Even when they’re committed by your friends, your book club, your church, your family. Especially then.
You don’t get to wear the hero badge for your meme or your pink pussy hat selfie from 2017 if you’re silent when the neighbor makes a joke about “those people.” You don’t get to pat yourself on the back for voting Democrat if you turn your back on Black women, on LGBTQIA+ women, on disabled women. Feminism is not a brunch with your girlfriends that look like you. It’s a bloody, beautiful revolution and we need all hands on deck.
We’ve All Got Our Villain Moments
Before you think I’m just a bitch, let’s talk honestly. I’ve had my villain moments, too. Moments when I kept quiet to stay safe. When I bit my tongue because I was outnumbered. But I knew it was wrong. I felt it in my chest, in that place survivors feel truth like a bruise.
The problem isn’t that we’ve made mistakes. The problem is when we refuse to acknowledge them. When white women say, “I’m not racist,” and then vote for politicians who strip away reproductive rights and then buy books from writers who mock trans lives. When women say, “I support equality,” but roll their eyes when a Latina woman shares her experience. When moms say, “I love my gay nephew,” but still send their kids to private Catholic schools that ban LGBTQIA+ books so they get a “better” education. These aren’t minor slip-ups. They’re complicity.
Third and fourth wave feminism exist because the first two waves left so many behind. My own life proves why we needed those next waves. My mother weaponized her white Christian womanhood to control, shame, and discard me. My father, a gay man, picked me up and gave me a home.
I know the cost of traditional family values in the suburbs.
Intersectionality Is How We Save Ourselves
Let me be crystal clear: intersectionality is about survival. If your feminism doesn’t include Black women, Indigenous women, trans women, women with disabilities, immigrant women, working-class women, then your feminism is a paper doll. And when the storm hits, and it’s already here, that doll will not save you. 30 of those dolls won’t save you.
Every time you link arms with another woman who lives in a different skin, walks in different shoes, or carries different trauma, you build something stronger than the patriarchy ever expected us to. When we fight for each other, we’re not just protecting someone else, we are creating the only real chance we’ve got at saving our own skin.
I’ve been saved by intersectionality more than once. My friends are a mix of middle aged and millennial punks, poets, butches, femmes, and brilliant broken girls like me. My two besties are a woman who’s deaf and a Cuban immigrant. My found family gave me shelter when white evangelical suburban society spit me out. These weren’t people who looked like the white, sanitized image of “safe” womanhood. And they are the reason I’m here, writing this now. Alive. Unapologetic. Still fighting.
Intersectionality is triage. And every time we fail to apply it, we lose another sister.
Join Us! But Come Correct!
This is your invitation, white women. And straight women. And cis women. You are wanted in this fight. You are needed in this fight. But we are not just there for ourselves. It is all women or none of us survive. We are fighting for our lives but we are also allies. That means listening. That means learning. That means unlearning a lot of what you were taught to believe about what womanhood looks like. That idea of womanhood is an image given to us by misogyny.
You don’t have to be perfect. I sure ain’t. But you do have to show up. You do have to take risks. You do have to sit with the discomfort of realizing you might have caused harm even if you didn’t mean to. Especially if you didn’t mean to.
A Final Word From the Madonna Fan
I’ve never stopped fighting. Not when they called me names. Not when I got out of a marriage that mirrored the control I’d escaped as a teenager. Not when I sat in rooms full of women who claimed to love other women; just not all of them.
But I’m tired. And I need more of you to rise. The truth is, we can’t win this alone and we were not always in the fight. Trans women, LGBTQIA+ women, women with disabilities, Black and Indigenous women carried this movement on their backs when you thought you were safe because a Democrat was in office and we could live our suburban illusion of privileged safety. We were never safe. They knew it and suffered silently without our voice. The revolution is calling, and it’s not asking for polite applause.
So no, I’m not your Stepford sister. But I am your mirror. Look into it. Love yourself even with the blemishes. Do better. Be the hero.
See you next Friday.
Buy Pat Green’s Book
Hearts of Glass Living in the Real World is an amazing book. 3 misfits in the 80’s meet at a mall and survive together. It’s a YA novel, but if you’re a woman who remembers malls and life in the 80’s and 90’s it will take you back. But it takes you back honestly and beautifully and horrifically. He sets a backdrop, envelopes you into that world like Stranger Things does, but the monsters are men and the upside down is DV and SA and exists in the world of smoothies and Depeche Mode.
Get it in paperback or digital at: https://www.barnstormerpublishing.com/
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