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I’m probably going to get a lot of hate for this, but here goes nothing:

In the midst of everything going on in the world right now, in the midst of all of the amazingly important fights being fought for incredibly essential causes, can we please, please, please take a bit of a step back from the “future is female” rhetoric, or at least take a serious, hard introspective look at the ways it’s incredibly binary and gender essentialist (and often cyclically misogynist) itself?

It absolutely crushes me that I feel like I’ve had an incredibly hard time participating in recent vital social conversations, but every time I see rhetoric used like “if only girls ruled the world, we would already have world peace,” I can’t help but recoil a bit. If by “the future is female,” you mean that you’re campaigning for a world where we don’t need to even have conversations anymore about equal rights regardless of gender, I am with you more than I can express, and please keep on fighting, and I’ll keep on fighting right beside you even harder. But so often, that doesn’t seem like what’s meant by “the future is female,” or at least it’s not how it’s coming across, always.

“If girls ruled the world, we would already have world peace” is not feminism, full stop. End of debate.

It’s Ryan-Gosling-feminism-lite, where women are special snowflake beings of pure virginal light who no man could ever hope to hold a candle to the moral piety of. It’s a slippery slope to the view that gender roles are essential and innate, so that men can hold doors open for women and always pay the bill at the restaurant out of chauvinistic chivalry. It’s a slippery slope to propping up the white, middle-class, straight, Christian, enforced-picket-fence-child-rearing-nuclear-family-unit kyriarchy just as hard on our side as on theirs.

It’s more of the same “girls girls girls are just the bestest and so soft and sweet and wonderful and made of sunshine and flowers and rainbows and unicorn sparkles and hair braiding while giggling drunkenly in a bathroom at a party” that turns all possible relationships between women into bestie BFF friendship bracelet making therapy sessions, which is especially erasive of the queer female experience, and more broadly, female sexuality, and more broadly even than that, female productive and creative energy in general, and its ability to exist outside of the presence of a man. It’s horrifically TERF-y and makes trans boys and other nonbinary individuals (including all the ones out there in red-state middle America who will never have the words and safe space to say that out loud or to identify that that’s what the unease inside them is) internalize a shit ton of self-hatred that maybe their identity is only a product of their internalized misogyny. It’s horrifically white feminist, see: the white female election vote debacle.

It’s incredibly erasive of the complexity of women as, you know.

People.

Not pure virginal white light vessels or soft unicorn rainbow sparkle hair-braiders or moon children witches with a special connection to mother earth or sassy bad bitches doing it for the sisterhood or whatever other ways we as feminists make ourselves into one dimensional stereotypes all on our own.

Fuck that noise.

Women are humans.

Listen: I’ve unfortunately known a lot of shitty, abusive, toxic people in my life. And a great deal of them were women, since as full and proper humans and not emblems of pure middle-school-BFF white light, women have the capacity inside them to be terrible, or wonderful, or terrible and wonderful all at once. And while our society at large so often excuses terrible men for heinous acts, which is the entire point of so many conversations happening right now, our society also so often pretends that – in ways that all stem back to misogyny just the same – equally terrible women just don’t exist full stop.

And that lets terrible women slip under the radar and hide under the sheepskin of the patriarchy. That allows us, in liberal social justice conversation circles, to decry the actions of a violent abusive man as an emblem of everything that’s wrong with the patriarchy, but too often, when a woman (especially a white, able-bodied, gender-presentation-conforming, physically attractive one) takes equally violent actions, we prop it up as the “sisterhood” finally getting “karmic justice” on the patriarchy, which isn’t any better than female rapists and pedophiles being tongue-tutted at with a wink by grown men as “naughty naughty girls” their fourteen-year-old libidos wish they had as a high school teacher. That allows – in something I’ve personally experienced in my life, and I know I can’t be the only one – for judicial and law enforcement officials, social workers and children’s services employees, and so many others in positions of authority across the country to dismiss cases of female-on-female violence as something that can surely be hugged out over a good talk and a cup of tea.

That so often allows us to not recognize, not even know how to begin to recognize, abusive behavior when it comes from a source with a body our society genders as female. Especially when that abuse is being directed at another person with a body recognized as female, especially if that abuse isn’t the kind we societally gender as masculine (physical force, neglect, aggression) but is the kind we gender as feminine (emotional and psychological abuse, hypersurveillance, gaslighting). Especially if that relationship isn’t a sexual one where someone wears the lip gloss and someone has the buzz cut. Especially when that relationship is a parent/child(-of any gender) one where the “unending purity and graciousness of a mother’s love” allows unfathomable numbers of women to abuse children and get away with it completely unrecognized.

If conceptually reclaiming your womanhood (or, same at you, dude feminists, reclaiming the womanhood of people you love) in some way is important to you and your identity, that’s incredible, and I support you wholeheartedly with whatever you need to do for that. And it should go without stating that I’m 1000% onboard and then some with dismantling the garbage of the patriarchy that got us here to the hot mess that is 2017. And women’s marches and declarations of feminist identity and all are so unbelievably, unbearably important right now, in the face of so many civil rights dangers, and please don’t misinterpret that I’m advocating against them somehow.

But before you tangle up your “girls run the world” rhetoric into fighting this fight we’re right now, please stop and consider all the people who have been abused by terrible women, too. Please stop to consider what your strong independent white feminism is doing to women of color, queer women, the trans/nonbinary community, victims of female abusers, and others whose experiences are too intersectional to conform with a single idea of reclamative womanhood.

If women (exclusively, hierarchically, systematically, in isolation) ran the world, we wouldn’t have world peace – we’d probably be in just as much of a mess, albeit maybe in different ways, than we are right now, because people are people are people, full stop, end of debate.

Let’s all run the world together, please? That’s the only way it’s going to get any better.