Women have spent generations being told to sit back and relax while somebody else decided where the road was going. Some of us like to see the map.
Women have spent generations being told to sit back and relax while somebody else decided where the road was going. Some of us like to see the map.
Of course somebody said it. It was almost predictable.
There are only seven.
Only seven trans-identified males competing in women’s sports, or some similarly small number offered as though arithmetic had settled the entire question. Look how few there are. Look how unreasonable women must be to care. Surely something affecting so few people cannot justify all this concern.
Women have heard versions of “only” before.
Only a few incidents.
Only one threat.
Only once.
As a court advocate, I stood right beside the women in court trying to explain, explain, explain. Only to hear:
He has never actually hurt you.
He only said it.
Well, how did he say it?
There isn’t enough evidence.
Give him another chance.
Think about what this accusation could do to his life.
When women speak early, people call us alarmists. When women speak after something terrible happens, people ask why nobody saw the warning signs.
Minimizing women’s concerns is not new. It is so old that women can recognize the melody even when somebody changes the words.
And some of the women who heard those words are no longer here.
There are women who tried to save themselves before they were killed. Women who reported stalking, threats, escalating violence and frightening behavior. Mothers who tried to protect their children. Women who sought restraining orders, called police, told relatives, contacted professionals, documented what was happening or begged someone with authority to understand that the situation was becoming dangerous.
Not every warning could have predicted what came next. Not every tragedy could have been prevented by one person listening better.
But far too many women understood that something was wrong before the people around them were willing to treat it seriously.
That history should have taught us humility.
Instead, women are still regularly asked to distrust themselves before anyone else is asked to reconsider.
That is why I pay attention when minimization enters a conversation about women’s boundaries, even when the subject is nowhere near homicide. I am not saying that a dispute about women’s sports is equivalent to domestic violence. It isn’t. I am saying something both narrower and deeper: teaching women that their concerns become illegitimate when other people consider them too small is a terrible social habit.
We should have learned that by now.
A woman saying no is not committing an act of cruelty against the person who wanted yes.
The seven athletes are not really the argument anyway. Women are watching a principle being rewritten.
We are asking whether female people may still organize certain boundaries, protections, categories, statistics, services, how they themselves are referred to, and institutions around sex when sex is relevant. We are asking who gets to determine when it is relevant. We are asking whether women are allowed to disagree with the answer.
Sports simply make one part of that argument unusually visible. Bodies are running, swimming, jumping, wrestling, lifting, striking and competing. There are records, rankings, scholarships, teams, and podium places. Physical differences become difficult to discuss as pure abstractions when everybody can see bodies doing measurable things in front of them.
But women’s questions extend beyond the track.
A boundary is not hatred. Distance is not hatred. Caution is not hatred. No, is not hatred.
Women have raised concerns about prisons, shelters, changing rooms, hospital wards, intimate care, searches, crime statistics, health information, scholarships, awards, lesbian boundaries and political representation. These situations are not interchangeable, and each deserves evidence and careful consideration appropriate to its purpose. Maybe those people didn’t hear those conversations? Or are choosing not to listen?
Still, something familiar keeps appearing beneath the disagreements.
When women say a boundary is important to us, who gets to decide whether our reason is good enough?
Now there is an old question. Women know what it is to be told that another person’s feelings should change our no.
Why won’t you give him a chance? He’s harmless. Don’t embarrass him. You’re making him uncomfortable. He’s a good guy. Why are you being difficult? Just be nice.
Girls begin receiving these lessons before they have enough life behind them to understand what they are being taught.
A girl feels uncomfortable around somebody and an adult immediately asks her why. That can be a perfectly reasonable question. But watch what happens next. If her answer fails to satisfy the adult, sometimes the project quietly changes from understanding her discomfort to persuading her out of it.
Maybe he didn’t mean anything.
Maybe you misunderstood.
Go give him a hug.
But, he loves you.
Don’t be rude.
And there it is.
She has just learned that her boundary belongs either wholly or in part to the committee.
Women have been taught to cross-examine our own discomfort while extending endless benefit of the doubt to the person causing it.
That lesson can follow a woman for years.
She can be sitting across from somebody on a first date when he begins pushing little limits, and instead of asking herself whether she wants to leave, she begins wondering whether leaving would be unfair to him. She can notice that a supervisor’s behavior changes when nobody else is around and spend months trying to decide whether she has accumulated enough evidence to trust her own discomfort. She can hear something strange in a partner’s voice, see an escalation she has never seen before, and find herself arguing against her own nervous system.
Maybe I’m making too much of this.
Maybe I misunderstood.
Maybe I should wait.
Maybe I need more proof.
Sometimes waiting is reasonable. Sometimes more information changes everything. Intuition is not magic, and fear is not evidence that another human being has done something wrong.
But intuition is information. That distinction could save somebody.
Your body may notice a pattern before your conscious mind has found words for it. Your discomfort may be telling you to slow down, create distance, ask another question, check something, call somebody, leave the room or simply refuse.
You do not have to turn another person into a monster before you are permitted to protect yourself.
That is one of the most important things we can teach women and girls.
A boundary is not a criminal conviction.
A no is not a diagnosis of somebody else’s character.
Walking away is not necessarily an accusation.
Sometimes a woman simply does not consent.
And she does not owe anybody an elaborate prosecution brief explaining why.
Compassion is a beautiful human quality. It becomes something else when women are expected to purchase it with pieces of themselves.
This is where I return to those seven athletes.
“Seven” is being presented as evidence that women should stop worrying about the principle because relatively few people are currently affected.
But boundaries do not become meaningful only after enough people cross them.
A safeguarding rule does not become sensible on victim number fifty. A locked door does not become reasonable after the twentieth unauthorized person walks through it. We establish principles precisely because waiting for large numbers can be a foolish way to decide what deserves protection.
Women understand this perhaps better than we wish we did.
Ask a Survivor about the first incident. Often it was small. Didn’t even seem like a big deal.
A strange comment. A hand where it shouldn’t have been. A password demanded. A joke that did not feel like a joke. A little isolation. A little humiliation. A refusal ignored. A frightening look followed by an apology so convincing she wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing.
Looking backward, she can sometimes see the road with heartbreaking clarity.
Standing at the beginning of it was different.
That is why one of the deepest skills we can give women is the ability to recognize direction.
Where is this going?
What principle am I being asked to accept?
What happens if I say no?
Am I free to disagree?
Why am I being pressured to override my discomfort?
Why is everybody discussing his feelings while nobody seems curious about mine?
Those questions belong everywhere women live, work, love, worship, learn and move through the world.
And yes, they belong in political arguments too.
Women can support the safety and civil liberties of transgender people. We can oppose harassment, cruelty, employment discrimination and violence. None of that requires women to surrender our ability to recognize sex, discuss sex or argue that sex remains relevant in particular circumstances.
Human dignity does not require intellectual surrender.
Nor does compassion require female self-erasure.
People can examine the evidence and disagree about transgender participation in sport. They can debate eligibility requirements, competitive levels, age groups, governing policies and how competing interests should be balanced. Serious questions deserve serious arguments.
“There are only seven” isn’t one.
It is minimization dressed as mathematics.
And women should be especially suspicious when minimization is used to convince us that something is too small to notice.
We have buried too many women who noticed something.
Some noticed danger and told somebody.
Some tried to leave.
Some tried to protect their children.
Some asked institutions to intervene.
Some knew that the situation had changed before anybody around them understood how much.
Their stories do not mean women are always right. No group of human beings is always right.
Their stories teach something wiser.
Women deserve to be heard before catastrophe proves that they had something worth hearing.
That principle reaches far beyond violence.
It means we do not need a thousand women displaced before asking whether a sporting policy is fair. We do not need a packed shelter before asking whether a boundary protects its intended population. We do not need an enormous statistical trend before women are allowed to notice a policy’s direction and debate where it leads.
And we certainly should not teach girls that concern becomes legitimate only after enough people have been harmed.
There is a girl watching all of this.
She may never become an athlete. She may never participate in a political debate about sex or gender. She may not remember any of our names.
But she is learning something from us.
She is learning whether women may trust themselves.
She is learning whether a small warning deserves attention.
She is learning whether another person’s distress automatically outranks her discomfort.
She is learning whether kindness means moving her boundary whenever somebody feels excluded by it.
She is learning how long a woman is expected to wait before saying, No. I see where this is going, and I do not agree.
Teach her well.
Teach her to listen without surrendering her judgment. Teach her to investigate without abandoning herself. Teach her that intuition can invite another look without becoming an accusation. Teach her that she may be compassionate and cautious at the same time.
And when something inside her says, Pay attention, teach her not to immediately answer herself with all the reasons everybody else might be more important.
Too many women were taught to do exactly that.
Some survived it.
Some did not.
We cannot promise our daughters a world without danger. We cannot give them instincts that never misfire or knowledge that predicts every human intention.
But we can stop participating in the ancient training that tells women to make themselves smaller whenever their boundaries inconvenience somebody else.
We can teach them something better.
You are allowed to notice early.
You are allowed to ask questions while the number is still small.
You are allowed to protect yourself before everybody agrees that protection was necessary.
And you are allowed to care about what happens to women before the world has collected enough women to call it a pattern.
You do not have to wait until everybody else sees the danger to begin protecting the woman who lives inside your skin. Give yourself permission.