Okay. Now that we’ve got that out of the way.
By now you’ve probably seen the clip. It’s a year old, it resurfaced a few weeks ago, and it has once again split the internet down a very predictable line. Drew Afualo — TikTok’s self-appointed defender of women everywhere — sat across from E.R. Fightmaster, the non-binary Grey’s Anatomy actor, on her podcast The Comment Section, and agreed with the statement that trans women have “a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is” than women who were born women.
Let that sit for a second. Not the clip. The sentence.
E.R. went on to explain that womanhood isn’t a woman’s role, her status, or her “ability to be sexually assaulted.” Drew agreed, and when the backlash hit again this month, she didn’t walk any of it back — she doubled down, calling anyone who took issue with it a TERF, and arguing that tying womanhood to biology — periods, birth, menopause — is itself patriarchal. In her words, reducing womanhood to what your body does is a “pillar of misogyny” and a tenet of the patriarchy.
I want to sit with that claim for a minute, because it’s the one that actually matters here. Not the clip. Not the “context” everyone keeps insisting you didn’t watch. The actual idea underneath it: that biology is the patriarchy’s tool, and the women who center their womanhood in their biology are the ones who’ve been “programmed.”
Because here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud yet: the second you call disagreement “programming” instead of engaging with it, you’ve already told on yourself. You’re not making an argument anymore. You’re issuing a verdict. And that instinct — shut it down, don’t debate it — is exactly the pattern this whole post is about.
Biology Isn’t Patriarchal. Biology Is Just True.
Here’s my problem, stated as plainly as I can state it: a period is not a patriarchal construct. Menopause is not a patriarchal construct. Nine months of your body rearranging itself to grow another human, and the fear that lives in a woman’s chest walking to her car alone at night, are not things the patriarchy invented to keep us small. They are the actual, physical, non-negotiable terms of being born female on this planet. Naming them isn’t oppression. It’s the opposite — it’s the one thing about womanhood nobody can take from us, reframe for us, or explain to us like we haven’t been living it since we made our grand entrances into the world.
So when someone — anyone, no matter how good their intentions — tells a room full of biological women that our fixation on our own biology is the problem, that’s not liberation. That’s the patriarchy rebranding itself, not retiring.
And look — I want to be really precise here, because precision is the thing that gets lost the second something goes viral: I am not saying trans women aren’t women. I’m not saying they don’t deserve safety, dignity, healthcare, or a seat at every single table I’m sitting at. I consider myself an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community. I count myself within it. This isn’t a “trans women bad” post. This is a “you don’t get to explain my own lived experience back to me” post. Those are not the same sentence, no matter how badly some people want them to be — and no matter how many times “not the same sentence” gets flattened into “bigot” by someone who’d rather win the internet than have the actual conversation.
The “Cis” Thing, While We’re Here
Small tangent, but it’s not actually small: I hate the word “cis.” I’m not a “cis woman.” I’m a woman. Full stop. I have spent years being told, correctly, that respecting someone’s identity means using the language they ask for — their name, their pronouns, their terms. I’ve done that. I’ll keep doing that. It costs me nothing and it’s basic human decency.
So here’s the ask, and it’s not radical: extend me the same courtesy. I don’t need a prefix on my womanhood to make room for yours. “Woman” was never the exclusionary word here — “cis” is the one that got invented to put biological women in a subcategory of the thing we already were before anyone had a word for the alternative. If mutual respect is the whole point, it has to actually run both directions.
The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud: Male Privilege Doesn’t Disappear, It Just Changes Costume
Here’s the sentence that’s going to make people the most uncomfortable, and I’m saying it anyway: trans women, however sincerely and however painfully they’ve arrived at their identity, spent formative years of their life moving through the world with male privilege. That’s not an insult. It’s a fact about how bodies are read by strangers, by employers, by men in parking lots. And when someone transitions, they get to step into womanhood and select the parts of it that feel like belonging — the softness, the community, the aesthetic, the understanding — without ever having had to survive the parts that made womanhood a threat assessment instead of an identity. The fear. The vulnerability. The years of being underestimated, talked over, and physically overpowered by design, not by choice.
E.R.’s framing was that a trans woman’s understanding of womanhood is “more beautiful” because it isn’t tangled up in trauma and fear the way a lot of biological women’s is. But that’s exactly my point, and it’s the one getting missed: it’s not more beautiful. It’s incomplete.
You can’t opt into the pretty parts of an experience and skip the parts that built it, and then turn around and tell the people who lived the whole thing that they’re doing womanhood wrong. That’s not a more evolved understanding of womanhood. That’s the CliffsNotes version, graded on a curve the original author never got. In fact, that’s the truest form of misogyny there is.
“Raising Concerns” Is Not the Same Thing as Hate
This is the part of the discourse that actually makes me angriest, more than the original clip does: the immediate leap to calling anyone who pushes back a bigot, a TERF, an alt-right plant. Drew said the quiet part out loud when she told people the outrage was manufactured by “alt-right MAGA” accounts, as if the only possible reason a woman could have a problem with this framing is that she’s been radicalized by the right. That’s not an argument. That’s a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do: making disagreement so socially expensive that most women just… don’t. They scroll past. They keep their mouths shut. They let the conversation get had about them, without them.
I’m not doing that.
That is exactly what biological MEN have been doing to biological women for centuries. Defining our roles, weaponizing our femininity and our motherhood against us. Biological women are the first marginalized group of humans, and we are still fighting for our right to exist equally, without barriers, in a world predominantly run by men. Being a real ally to trans women doesn’t require me to agree that biological womanhood is a lesser, more “programmed” version of the real thing. Women have spent our entire existence having our bodies, our safety, and our spaces explained to us by people who don’t live in them. I am not interested in doing that dance again just because the person leading it this time says all the right things about intersectionality first.
And here’s the part I need you to actually sit with, not scroll past: every time “I have a concern” gets answered with “you’re a TERF,” you’re not protecting trans women. You’re proving the worst version of the argument right.
You’re handing ammunition to every biological woman who already suspected this was never about equality — that it’s just men, or male-coded aggression, finding a new angle to control the narrative around our bodies, our roles, our rights. Rage-baiting women into silence with a slur doesn’t win the argument. It just confirms the fear it was supposed to disprove.
Women Are Just Tired
I don’t think that’s an overreaction. I think it’s the honest, exhausted truth underneath a lot of this discourse. Women have spent decades — centuries — fighting for autonomy over our own bodies, our own safety, our own spaces, and our own language for our own experience. The hard-won ground on these issues is still in its infancy — and here comes another version of “let me explain what your experience really means,” just with better branding this time, and a faster trigger finger on the word “bigot.”
We’re allowed to clock that. We’re allowed to say “this feels like déjà vu” without it meaning we’ve stopped caring about trans people’s right to exist safely in the world. Both things are true at once, and if the current discourse can’t hold two true things simultaneously, that’s a flaw in the discourse — not in the women naming it.
So Here’s Where I Land
Trans rights are human rights. I believe that. But when “trans rights” gets stretched to mean biological women have to sit quietly while our lived experience gets recategorized as trauma, our biology gets recast as a patriarchal talking point, and our language for ourselves gets swapped out for a prefix nobody asked us if we wanted — that’s not equality anymore.
That’s patriarchy under new management, expecting a thank-you note for the takeover.
I’m not asking anyone to agree with me. I’m asking for the same thing I’d ask of literally anyone I disagree with: argue with the actual point, instead of defaulting to accusations about character, political views, or bigotry. Because the second “I disagree” automatically becomes “I hate you,” nobody’s actually having a conversation anymore. They’re just picking a side and waiting for the other one to shut up.
And that, more than the clip, more than Drew, more than any single TikTok, is the thing I actually want you to walk away from this post thinking about: when we insult the people who disagree with us, we invalidate our own argument — not theirs. You cannot claim to be inclusive, compassionate, and kind while being unable to survive a single conversation with someone who sees it differently. This explosive, rage-bait reflex — where questioning anything a trans person says makes you a TERF, a transphobe, a hater — isn’t protecting anyone. It’s actively convincing biological women that this was never a movement toward equality at all. It’s just men, still trying to control the narrative around women’s roles, rights, and autonomy — just wearing a new outfit to do it.
