I have spent more than 30 years working with women and children who have experienced abuse. And one of the things that experience has taught me is tha
I have spent more than 30 years working with women and children who have experienced abuse. And one of the things that experience has taught me is that people are not always who they present themselves to be.
I cannot tell you how many times a woman or child has tried to explain that somebody was not the person everybody else believed them to be.
Sometimes that person was charming. Sometimes respected. Sometimes they were the very person everybody insisted could be trusted. They had a good reputation, a convincing explanation, and people willing to defend them.
But the woman or child knew something was wrong.
And I have watched what happened when somebody finally listened, looked more closely, asked questions, and investigated. Sometimes what we discovered was far worse than what had originally been reported.
Those experiences stay with you. They should. Some of you may recall the story I shared about sitting in court with a highly educated woman leader. Her husband, who she told me was abusive and grifting (that’s why we were there that day), came into the courtroom in a wheelchair. The bailiffs and other people around were cordial and assisting him.
And then his phone rang inside the courtroom. That’s a hard no, and we all knew that. They had annnounced it. Cell phones were supposed to be off. He jumped up out of that chair and ran out of the courtroom to take the call. Everyone was astonished …..except her. She gave me a look like, “Didn’t I tell you?”
I believed her. We had a great rapport. But yes, I saw it for myself. And for her that was a relief because no one was living with him and seeing him as she did.
So you can imagine my fascination, skepticism, and growing impatience with this peculiar expectation that women should accept that men are women simply because they say they are, especially when it comes from “leaders.”
Since when did saying something make it so? And why, of all people, would you expect women who have spent their lives learning the importance of observation, situational awareness, evidence, and discernment to abandon those things? Our LIVES depend on listening to our intuition and paying close attention to what isn’t being said rather than just relying on what people tell us.
People are not in the habit of coming together to fight for women. If something happens to women, they call us a slur, say we should have known better, and carry on with their lives.
The World Has Never Been Short on People Who Insist They Are Something They Are Not
I have known people who insisted they were loving parents while terrorizing their children. People who called themselves protectors while making the people closest to them afraid. People who described themselves as honest while carefully managing what everybody else was allowed to know.
I have also known women who were dismissed as suspicious, difficult, unforgiving, and paranoid because they questioned those presentations.
We have entire systems devoted to investigating claims precisely because human beings are capable of misrepresenting themselves.
We verify qualifications. We investigate complaints. We examine evidence. We distinguish intentions from actions and allegations from findings. We do not ordinarily treat a person’s declaration as the final word on every relevant fact.
Yet somehow, when women raise questions about the distinction between male and female, we are expected to accept that self-identification settles the matter. I find that fascinating.
Even when I know that the other person is being as sincere as they know how to be, I still know that I better rely on what I know for sure.
Because sincerity does not automatically establish an objective fact, and it certainly does not settle what other people must believe.
Women Are Being Asked to Set Aside the Very Judgment We Have Been Told to Develop
For decades, those of us working to prevent violence have encouraged women and girls to pay attention. Observe behavior. Ask questions. Recognize inconsistencies. Do not ignore your discomfort merely because somebody else thinks a person is wonderful.
We have taught children that they are allowed to question adults. We have taught women that being polite is not more important than being safe.
And we have fought institutions that dismissed women because a man’s reputation was considered more credible than her experience.
Now I am watching another conversation unfold in which women are told that questioning a person’s self-description can itself be treated as a moral offense. I am not suggesting that identifying as another sex is evidence of abusive behavior. It is not. But neither does a person’s personal gender identity answer every question about biological sex, privacy, safeguarding, or access to female spaces.
Those are different questions, and women have every reason to insist that they be examined separately. I am particularly impatient with the idea that women must demonstrate kindness by withholding their own judgment. That never seems to end well for women. And people never seem to care enough about the real consequences when their advice is wrong.
I Want to Know When Independent Thought Became an Act of Hostility
Here is another part of this phenomenon that interests me. People can disagree about religion. We can question somebody’s political beliefs, spiritual experiences, professional credentials, or claims about their own character.
We can acknowledge that a person genuinely believes something without agreeing that their belief is true. That is a normal part of living among other human beings. Sometimes within the same household.
But when the subject is whether a male person is a woman, suddenly disagreement is sometimes treated as though it cannot possibly arise from reason, observation, or lived experience as a woman. What’s that about?
I am a woman. An adult female human being. I did not arrive at that understanding because somebody instructed me to believe it. Nor did I arrive at it because I was assigned a personality, a wardrobe, a set of interests, or a particular way of moving through the world.
I am not interested in having the meaning of woman reduced to stereotypes about femininity.
And I am certainly not interested in being told that recognizing the distinction between male and female means I have failed to respect another person’s humanity. I can recognize another person’s humanity without accepting their authority to define mine.
And What About the Women Who Have Already Paid the Price for Being Told Not to Question?
Women and children have paid terrible prices for being told to ignore contradictions between what someone says and what they observe. We have spent generations trying to get institutions to understand that a respectable appearance does not eliminate the need for scrutiny.
We have worked to establish better safeguarding practices because trust alone is not a safety policy.
And now, in some of the very institutions responsible for protecting vulnerable women, we are having arguments about whether a person’s declared identity should determine access to spaces established around biological sex. I want to know who is evaluating the consequences for women. Not the people in charge of the “naughty” and “nice” list.
Who is asking incarcerated women what privacy means when they cannot leave? Who is listening to women in shelters who have already fled violence? Who is considering girls who are still learning that they are allowed to have personal boundaries?
These questions deserve more than accusations about the women asking them. Policies can recognize the dignity and safety of transgender people while still examining the distinct needs of female people. But institutions have to do that work. They cannot simply announce a principle and expect women to absorb every consequence without discussion.
I Am Not Confused. I Am Asking Questions.
There is something almost astonishing about watching a society celebrate critical thinking in one conversation and discourage it in another.
We tell women to trust themselves, then become irritated when they do.
We tell girls that nobody is entitled to their agreement, then suggest that disagreement with somebody’s understanding of identity is inherently cruel.
We tell Survivors that they are allowed to establish boundaries, then sometimes act as though a boundary is legitimate only when nobody challenges it.
I have no intention of abandoning the lessons women and children have taught me. Those lessons were not theoretical. They came from listening carefully to people whose experiences had been dismissed. They came from learning that investigation sometimes confirms what a frightened child or an exhausted woman has been trying to explain for months or years.
That does not make every suspicion correct but, it does mean that questions deserve examination rather than automatic condemnation.
I am capable of treating people with dignity. I am capable of recognizing that people understand themselves in ways I may not share. And I am capable of saying that a person’s understanding of themselves does not create an obligation for every woman to adopt that understanding as her own.
My compassion does not require intellectual surrender. My experience does not disappear because a subject has become politically sensitive. And my understanding of what a woman is does not become less legitimate because someone else wishes to define the word differently.
After more than three decades of listening to women and children, I have learned to take the distinction between a claim and an established fact seriously.
Women have spent far too long fighting for the right to have our observations, knowledge, and judgment taken seriously. We should not have to surrender that right to prove that we are good people.
True Rights Protect—They Don’t Endanger Women and Children – WE Survive Abuse
Victimization, Victimhood, and the Right to Keep Naming What Happened – WE Survive Abuse