Why I No Longer Identify As a Feminist
I am not anti-feminist.
I am not interested in the kind of politics that argue women are too emotional to lead, that they belong primarily in the home, that reproductive rights should be rolled back, or that sexual harassment is exaggerated hysteria. I am not aligned with the men’s rights grifter economy that treats every conversation about sexism as an attack on men’s existence. I am not nostalgic for a world where women needed a husband to open a bank account or were expected to tolerate abuse quietly for the sake of social order.
What am I, then? I am an egalitarian.
For a long time, calling myself a feminist felt obvious because feminism, to me, meant equal legal rights, equal opportunity, and freedom from rigid gender expectations. It meant acknowledging that women had been historically sidelined and working to correct that imbalance. It meant bodily autonomy and a culture that took consent seriously.
Those goals are not controversial to me. They are baseline fairness.
What changed is not my belief in equality. What changed is my sense that the word “feminist” no longer describes what I see being advocated in many mainstream spaces.
Increasingly, I encountered rhetoric that moved beyond equality and into something else — the suggestion that women are inherently more ethical leaders, more peaceful decision-makers, more socially evolved. The implication that if women simply replaced men at the top, society would self-correct.
At some point, it stopped sounding like equality and started sounding like a pitch for matriarchy.
I am not interested in the kind of politics that argue women are too emotional to lead, that they belong primarily in the home, that reproductive rights should be rolled back, or that sexual harassment is exaggerated hysteria. I am not aligned with the men’s rights grifter economy that treats every conversation about sexism as an attack on men’s existence. I am not nostalgic for a world where women needed a husband to open a bank account or were expected to tolerate abuse quietly for the sake of social order.
What am I, then? I am an egalitarian.
For a long time, calling myself a feminist felt obvious because feminism, to me, meant equal legal rights, equal opportunity, and freedom from rigid gender expectations. It meant acknowledging that women had been historically sidelined and working to correct that imbalance. It meant bodily autonomy and a culture that took consent seriously.
Those goals are not controversial to me. They are baseline fairness.
What changed is not my belief in equality. What changed is my sense that the word “feminist” no longer describes what I see being advocated in many mainstream spaces.
Increasingly, I encountered rhetoric that moved beyond equality and into something else — the suggestion that women are inherently more ethical leaders, more peaceful decision-makers, more socially evolved. The implication that if women simply replaced men at the top, society would self-correct.
At some point, it stopped sounding like equality and started sounding like a pitch for matriarchy.
My first real sense that something was off didn’t come from political theory. It came from my own life.
I came out as a trans man in 2013. I began living as male in 2014. And I am specifically a gay trans man.
Before transition, I moved through feminist spaces as someone assumed to be part of the in-group. After transition, the temperature changed.
There is an overt strain of feminism that is openly hostile to trans people. That is easy to name and reject. What was harder to process was the quieter hostility — the TERF-adjacent posture of people who claim to support trans rights in theory while treating trans men, especially gay trans men, as suspect.
Trans women are often framed, even by critics, as victims of patriarchy. Trans men are framed as defectors. As if we abandoned something sacred. As if we crossed enemy lines.
If you are a trans man who is unapologetically male — who does not constantly foreground your former categorization, who does not treat your masculinity as a tragic consequence of oppression — you are treated as though you have aligned yourself with male power. And if you are a gay trans man, the suspicion sharpens. You are not just male; you are male and attracted to men. In certain feminist spaces, that is read as betrayal layered on betrayal.
That experience forced me to see something I had not fully understood before.
When I began living as a man, I experienced the way patriarchy punishes men. I experienced the pressure of toxic masculinity — the expectation to be stoic, to be self-contained, to not be soft. I experienced the subtle shift in how vulnerability is received. I saw firsthand how quickly empathy narrows once you are perceived as male.
But I also experienced something else: the way cultural matriarchal rhetoric demonizes men as a category.
Women can say sweeping, vicious things about “men” — that men are trash, that men are inherently violent, that men are inherently rapists, that men are emotionally stunted, that men are morally deficient — and those statements are often laughed at, shared, or excused as catharsis. If men spoke about women in equivalent generalizations, it would (rightly) be called misogyny.
There is a double standard there.
We hear constantly about toxic masculinity. And it exists. I have felt its pressure, in trying to move through the world and be seen as "a real man". But having been socialized female as an AFAB trans man, I can also tell you about toxic femininity — the gossip, the whisper campaigns, the social exclusion tactics, the petty cruelty, the obsessive appearance-shaming. Women police other women’s bodies relentlessly. They dissect weight, skin, clothing, aging. They enforce beauty hierarchies with surgical precision. They can destroy reputations without ever raising their voices.
Pretending those dynamics do not exist because they complicate a narrative about male toxicity is dishonest.
I also saw how quickly political disagreement became moral indictment.
When I said I disliked Hillary Clinton, I was called a misogynist. I was called a “Bernie Bro.” The assumption was that my critique must be rooted in sexism — that my discomfort with her candidacy could only be explained by hostility toward women in power.
It did not matter that my objections were grounded in policy and lived experience. I grew up in a working-class factory town that was gutted in the wake of NAFTA. I watched jobs disappear. I watched families destabilize. I watched economic security collapse in slow motion.
It also did not matter that the welfare reforms of the 1990s — policies championed during Bill Clinton’s administration — continue to shape the assistance landscape today. As a disabled person navigating public benefits since the 2000s, I live with the residue of those decisions. The restrictions, the scrutiny, the punitive assumptions baked into the system — those did not appear out of thin air. They were codified. They endure.
When I said I preferred Bernie Sanders in the primary, it had nothing to do with him being male. It had everything to do with his platform. He spoke directly about structural inequality. He spoke about healthcare as a right rather than a marketplace commodity. He spoke about strengthening social safety nets rather than tightening them. His campaign centered economic policy in a way that resonated with my history and my present reality. He strongly supported LGBT rights since the 1970s, whereas Bill Clinton had been the author of Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Reducing that preference to “you just don’t like powerful women” erased everything I had lived through. It flattened policy disagreement into gender loyalty. It turned material concerns into moral suspicion.
And in 2024, I went even further. I got up before dawn in freezing temperatures and stood in a massive line that wrapped around the building and into the parking lot for two hours to vote for Kamala Harris. I was in physical pain for days afterward. I did it willingly. Yes, the idea of the first Black female president would have been exciting. Representation matters. But more importantly, she was qualified. She had the résumé, the experience, and the capability.
That is why the current push to run a woman in 2028 “because women” alarms me.
Twice now the Democrats have run a female candidate for president and lost. The country is not ready for a female president. That is sexism in action. It is ugly, and it is real. But pretending that reality does not exist is political malpractice.
Insisting on running another woman anyway as a statement — prioritizing gender as the defining qualification — risks handing power to someone like JD Vance and driving the country even further backward. That is not principled defiance. It is strategic blindness.
I see people calling for AOC to run for president in 2028, despite the fact that she could do more durable good in the Senate right now and pursue a presidential campaign later. I see gender being treated as a corrective virtue rather than asking who can actually win and begin undoing the damage of two Trump terms.
If someone like Andy Beshear has a stronger electoral path and a better chance of winning in the current climate, then running him is not betrayal. It is realism. If the goal is to feel morally pure instead of actually win, then fine. But I’m more interested in stopping JD Vance than in empty platitudes about "centering women" when real women will be harmed by yet another term of MAGA.
After living on both sides of gendered socialization, I cannot ignore what I have seen. Patriarchy harms women. It also constrains men. And a cultural shift toward female supremacy and framing men as inherently suspect or morally inferior does not create equality. It creates a new moral hierarchy.
That is part of why the label no longer fits.
Another fracture point for me has been class.
We are told, constantly, that women as a category are the most oppressed group in society. But that framing collapses under scrutiny the moment you look at power through more than one axis.
A white woman in the professional-managerial class — a corporate executive, a media figure, a tenured academic, a nonprofit director — holds enormous structural power. She may encounter sexism. That is real. But to pretend she is more oppressed than a Black man navigating systemic racism at any income level, or a rural or working-poor white man experiencing financial hardships, is not serious analysis.
Power is not distributed evenly among women.
Class does not disappear because gender is present.
Yet much of contemporary feminist discourse treats PMC women as the primary victims of the social order. The glass ceiling becomes the defining injustice. The boardroom becomes the battlefield. The assumption is that if women dominate high-status professional spaces, equality has advanced.
But that lens centers the concerns of a very specific demographic: educated, credentialed, urban women who are already near the top of the social hierarchy.
Meanwhile, the women who clean those offices, stock those shelves, work those night shifts, or stay home raising children rarely headline the movement’s priorities.
The rhetoric of “having it all” is a good example.
Second-wave feminism was right to challenge the expectation that women must remain in the home. Opening access to careers and financial independence was necessary. But the cultural shift did not eliminate expectations; it multiplied them.
Many women who work full-time are still expected to be the primary caregivers. They carry the invisible labor of managing children’s schedules, elderly parents, emotional regulation in the household, and domestic logistics. They work outside the home and then come home to a second shift. The pressure did not disappear. It doubled.
At the same time, women who choose to be stay-at-home mothers are often treated with suspicion or contempt in feminist spaces — as though opting out of the workforce is a betrayal of the cause. As though choosing domestic labor invalidates decades of struggle.
If feminism truly supports women’s choices, that must include the choice to prioritize family life without being treated as regressive. It should also champion stay-at-home fathers or men who cook and do housework without mocking them or suggesting "they just do it to get laid."
There is another asymmetry that rarely gets honest attention.
Access to combat roles in the military is open to women. So are positions as firefighters, sanitation workers, oil rig operators, loggers, roofers, and other physically demanding and high-risk jobs. The barriers to entry have largely been dismantled.
And yet participation remains overwhelmingly male.
This is not an argument that women should be forced into those roles. It is an observation that equality of opportunity does not translate into equal participation across all domains.
When disparities exist in corporate leadership, they are framed as urgent injustice. When disparities exist in dangerous or physically punishing labor sectors, they are treated as natural preference.
If we are going to talk about equality, the conversation cannot only move upward toward prestige. It cannot only focus on who occupies elite professional spaces. It has to account for who takes on risk, who performs physical labor, and who is invisible.
My critique is not that women should not succeed in professional life. It is that feminism often defines success almost exclusively in professional-managerial terms.
It says it supports equal opportunity.
In practice, it frequently centers the advancement of PMC women while ignoring the broader landscape of class, labor, and risk.
That narrowing of focus is part of why the label no longer fits me.
Egalitarianism looks at the whole picture. It does not reduce social analysis to women versus men. It asks who has power, who lacks it, and why — and it includes class, disability, race, geography, and economic vulnerability in that assessment.
It recognizes that a white woman with institutional authority and wealth occupies a very different position than a disabled man navigating a punitive benefits system, or a Black man dealing with systemic discrimination, or a working-poor family in a hollowed-out rural town. It does not flatten those differences into a single axis of oppression.
Equality, to me, means refusing to treat gender as the master key that explains everything.
It means acknowledging that class stratification can override gender privilege in material ways. It means recognizing that disability can erase social capital overnight. It means understanding that power is layered and uneven, not neatly divided into male oppressors and female victims.
If we are serious about justice, we have to be serious about complexity.
That is what I mean when I say I am an egalitarian.
If the goal is to defeat MAGA and stop the slide into authoritarian grievance politics, we have to be honest about something uncomfortable: most men are not going to rally around a banner that looks, to them, like it asks them to diminish themselves.
When feminism is promoted as female supremacy, as moral suspicion of men, as a movement that treats men as the problem rather than as participants in a shared society, it becomes politically radioactive. You cannot build a durable majority while openly alienating half the population. Telling men to sign up for an ideology that frames them as inherently suspect is not a winning strategy.
That does not mean pandering to sexism. It does not mean retreating from women’s rights. It means reframing the fight in a way that includes everyone.
Egalitarianism does that.
Egalitarianism does not ask men to accept moral inferiority. It asks everyone to reject hierarchy. It does not pit women against men; it looks at the full structure of power — gender, class, race, disability — and insists that no one’s dignity is negotiable.
If we want to build a coalition capable of defeating MAGA and actually governing, we need language and principles that invite people in rather than sorting them into villains and saints.
I believe in equality. I believe in equal rights. I believe in dismantling systems that harm women.
But I no longer believe that feminism, as it is currently practiced and policed in many spaces, is the best vehicle for that work.
Egalitarianism is.
And that is why the label changed.
