How Feminism Makes Everyone Transgender

This is an adapted version of a speech presented to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum 2024. Watch or listen to the speech here.

Since the 1960s, cultural leaders in media, Hollywood, academia, and politics have fiercely criticized men for expressing male characteristics, and have fiercely criticized women for expressing female characteristics. This has led some commentators on the right more recently to lambast what they call the “overfeminization” of society.

But are we really experiencing a cultural “overfeminization?” It looks to me like, instead, we have a swap. We have feminization where there should be masculinity, and masculinization where there should be femininity. Our women are pushed to act like men, and our men to act like women, and the resulting social transgenderism makes everyone extremely unhappy, not to mention dysfunctional.

Both sexes are out of whack. We are all transgender now.

Some try to address this by praising men’s positive attributes and criticizing women’s negative attributes. This is a good effort, but so far it has still largely left out praising women for female attributes and, to a lesser extent, criticizing men for feminine behaviors. It’s an improvement on the West’s long reign of feminist socialization, but I think it could use some more improvements.

Is America Really ‘Overfeminized’?

Before we get to those, let’s look at the more recent critiques of social “overfeminization.” One prominent critique of women has become a social media meme called “the longhouse.” It was explained in First Things by a man who goes by the name “Lom3z.” He uses the metaphor of a collective-living primitive longhouse, saying, “More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.”

Lom3z claims our anti-speech culture is a result of overfeminization, complaining about demands for “consensus” and that “the prohibition on ‘offense’ and ‘harm’ take precedence over truth.” “Further,” he says, “these speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups — social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force.”

He delivers a ringing indictment of “Safetyism” as a prime example of overfeminized norms, saying: “Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person — who is as often male as female — is the avatar of the Longhouse.”

The pro-abortion writer Richard Hanania defines America’s overfeminization problem as “nobody wanting to stand up to women crying.” Women win arguments because they cry when they lose, and nobody knows how to respond to that in a way that doesn’t make them look like a cad. So, he says, “The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism.”

In a 2023 video and essay, Chris Rufo mainstreamed the concept of a “Cluster B society,” a theme perhaps most deeply discussed by “Disaffected” podcaster Joshua Slocum. Cluster B is a group of four psychological disorders: narcissism, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial. Rufo and Slocum argue these personality disorders increasingly characterize our society.

Rufo describes bureaucratic cancel culture as “a Cluster B psychodrama,” in which “victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit; accusation replaces disagreement as the means of settling disputes; false compassion becomes the primary method of manipulating citizens into compliance; and the whole scheme is enforced with the threat of violence: obey, or suffer the consequences.” Slocum often notes how woke culture engages in the Cluster B habit of reversal — that is, smearing others with allegations they’re doing an evil thing that you are actually doing. An example is when transgender people claim they’re “unsafe” if they can’t undress in little girls’ locker rooms.

Rufo ties these pathologies to feminism, arguing “our female future” has a darker side: “Contrary to the messages one gets from elites, biological sex differences are real, and a societal imbalance between the two has negative effects for everyone. Taken too far, overly feminized leadership produces exactly the kind of Cluster B society we observe today: one in which identity is rewarded over merit, victimhood is prized over competence, and antisocial behavior goes unchecked. Moral narcissism becomes the coin of the realm, and political conflicts are settled through blackmail and manipulation.”

The researcher and author Heather Mac Donald has also complained about the “feminized university” spreading dysfunctional social dynamics. “The most far-reaching effects of the feminized university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy,” she writes. “This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and ‘inclusivity.’”

Further, she notes, “Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression.”

So: Are out-of-control women to blame for bureaucracy, campus-style hysteria that now extends everywhere through HR departments, manipulation and blackmail to obtain leftist social conformity, and the celebration of victimhood? I’d say partly, but also there are some things missing from these critiques.

Interconnected Male and Female Dysfunction

One big problem is that the administrative state — a fancy word for “bureaucracy” — is a male creation, both in history and in style. It was created in the modernist era by men under the masculine illusion of subject-matter expertise administering every facet of society. Not all control freaks are women, even though I think it’s fair to argue, and in fact do argue in my new book, False Flag, that identity politics maniacs have seized the administrative state to implement their policy goals.

Second, one can’t talk about women without talking about men, at least a little, and vice versa. We are each other’s human complement. Neither men nor women exist without the other, both literally and metaphorically. We are locked into a dance with each other, whether we like it or not.

So whenever one sees a woman gone wild, one should also start looking for what is less obvious: the men doing nothing about her hysteria. Whether it’s university or corporate bosses, her husband, boyfriend, or father, behind just about every crazy woman is a man somewhere abdicating his just and proper authority.

This in fact is the genesis of the modern feminist movement, as Carrie Gress documents in her 2023 book, The End of Woman. Since the beginning, leading feminists have all been women with chaotic relations with the opposite sex, from being beaten by their fathers to being abandoned by the fathers of their children. This is not a coincidence.

In fact, the Holy Bible establishes this dysfunctional dynamic as an archetype in its first book, Genesis. When Eve smashed the perfection of the world by disobeying God at the coaxing of the satanic snake, Adam was sitting right there the whole time. What was he doing? Nothing. And that’s the problem. As John Stuart Mill said, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

Weak Men Capitulate to Dysregulated Women

Of course I would never absolve women of responsibility for their actions. It’s not 100 percent Adam’s fault that Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Eve is also responsible. So also the women inflicting their inner chaos on the rest of us are absolutely responsible for their decisions to respond to interior suffering with malevolence.

What I am saying is that it takes two irresponsible parties to create the situations all these commentators describe — of the perpetrator and those who refuse to stop him. Even if cancel culture is the work of hysterical women and feminized men, it only works if weak men capitulate to it.

That’s the main power of masculinity, in fact: to protect the vulnerable against predators. If malevolent aggression goes unchecked, yes, it’s the aggressor’s fault, but also the fault of those who are responsible for stopping that aggression and aren’t.

Any men whining about women are acting like feminized men. Instead of complaining impotently, they should stand up and show how they can lead and protect the vulnerable from unchecked malevolent aggression. Rufo does so. He not only talks but seeks just authority and uses it prudently, for example as a trustee for New College of Florida. We need ten thousand more like him to take similar positions of authority and use them for society’s protection instead of its exploitation and enslavement.

So both men and women share the blame for our current situation. For if women get hysterical, it’s someone’s job to take the women home and give them a hot bath — after someone has told them to sit down and stop acting like a lunatic. Clearly one of those roles is for the father, and one is for the mother.

Alas, our society no longer cultivates either mothers or fathers. Instead, we have a mass of unparented children running around in adult bodies self-righteously victimizing each other. A lot of attention is placed on absent fathers, and rightly so; but we also need to place attention on the mothers whose absence, often in the workforce, is making Americans crazy.

Our Society Is Under-Feminized

That’s the next item I want to talk about: The still-missing element of encouraging women to be women instead of men. Our society is not so much “overfeminized” as it is under-fathered and under-mothered. It is underfeminized — or, if you like, overfeminized where it should be masculine and overmasculine where it should be feminine.

We have too many children in adult bodies cry-bullying everyone else because nobody will take the father’s role of giving those kids a spanking and nobody will take the mother’s role of nourishing those kids out of their deep wounds. Our society suffers from both male and female abandonment of their proper roles as the mothers and fathers of the people.

You see, the backbiting, tantrum-throwing, social ostracism, and intense anxiety these critics of women describe is infant and middle-school-girl behavior, as Mary Eberstadt outlined in her excellent book, Primal Screams. That’s not adult woman behavior at all. I know plenty of wonderful women who would never act like out-of-control babies. So are XX chromosomes the problem, or arrested development?

‘Be an Infertile Glorified Secretary’ Isn’t Pro-Woman

It’s preposterous to claim the last two decades of “social norms center[] feminine needs” when those same norms urge women into chemically and surgically neutering their bodies and killing their own children so they can compete in men’s economic terms. It’s preposterous for “feminist conservatives” to claim that voting and dramatically accelerated materialist careerism somehow compensate for the nuclear war our society wages on female bodies in the form of dehumanizing market pressures, eliminating women’s reproductive capacities, erasing marriage, and bombed-out local communities. Our feminist society does exactly the opposite of “centering feminine needs.”

What “centers feminine needs” is men marrying women and providing for them and their children, and women seeking the maturity that usually accrues to us from motherhood. Women who have a home, husband, and children, it turns out, are less likely to smother other people’s children and project their insecurities. Sure, some women are not fit to be mothers yet, and the minority of barren women must adopt children formally or informally, but both metaphorical and literal motherhood should be the general goal for all women.

Our culture says a lot of flattering sap about women, but it also seems our culture will talk about women positively only when they are acting more like men than like women. We now witness men posing as women beating women up in boxing matches. But why on Earth are biological women in boxing matches at all? I can think of nothing less womanly, except perhaps women enlisting as soldiers absent an existential threat the men can’t handle alone.

Most people discussing the “problem with women,” such as Lom3z, claim that women are highly successful by mentioning factoids such as the majority of degree-earners at all levels now are women, and that single women are overtaking single men in earnings in large cities.

But what if male standards are the wrong way to measure women? What if credentials and earnings are a masculine way to judge women? What if competing with men makes most women unhealthy and unhappy? And what if when women are unhappy and competing with men, they’re abandoning women’s duties and everyone thereby suffers?

If there are no homes for people to go to and come from, how can anyone be happy? Where else but in the home do people get parented out of baby behavior like tantrums and projection? What if the home is more important than the marketplace, because the point of the marketplace is the happiness and protection of the home?

Male Standards Are Inappropriate Measures for Women

Women are not looking that good if you examine us holistically. Nearly one-third of American women — 28 percent — are taking a prescription drug for mental health, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

A famous 2008 Wharton Business School paper’s title says it all: “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” It shows that as women increased in so-called “liberation,” their happiness has declined since the 1970s. Quite simply, just like we give ADHD drugs to some little boys simply for acting like little boys, women are medicated with SSRIs and antifertility drugs because we’re forcing them to be what they’re not.

The dramatic drop in marriage and childbearing is another major indicator that men and women are not doing well, because replicating oneself is a basic indicator of every organism’s health. In the 2020s, for the first time in American history the percent of childless, unmarried adults ages 18 to 55 rose above the percent of adults in those same ages who were married with children. Now 37 percent of American adults of prime parenting ages have no children nor spouse, compared to 33 percent who are married with kids. In 2023, 47 percent of Americans under age 50 who don’t have children told Pew Research they probably won’t ever have kids.

This is a major, major problem, and it’s an underfeminization problem, because healthy and happy women want children. And it’s not just a private problem, it’s a major civic problem that our society needs to address so we don’t go extinct.

Family dysfunction is at the root of all our civic dysfunction. As orphanages and maximum-security prison cells have taught us, isolation makes people insane. The sexes coming together in marriage is the most powerful loneliness buster in human history. The sexes warring together instead of making babies together really is going to destroy us all.

Unloved Women Vote to Destroy America

That’s why bringing peace to the war between the sexes is one of the most potent ways to stall or reverse our civilizational decline. Beyond fostering the extinction of a childless West, single women typically give Democrats their electoral margins of victory, a margin Democrats use to destroy our society. Yes, we really do need people to make love, not war — in their homes. If you have no homes, you have no society. It’s that simple.

This topic is at the core of Phyllis Schlafly’s legacy, which is why it’s so perfect we’re celebrating it this weekend. Mrs. Schlafly embodied uniquely feminine virtues that made her so effective, and a role model for women like me. Rather than isolating people, she brought them together. She was a community organizer for good. She was able to balance prioritizing her role as a wife and mother with outsized national impact. She didn’t have to kill her children or neuter her husband to do it, either.

American women need role models of positive femininity like Phyllis now even more than in the 1970s and 1980s, because we have even fewer such examples. Women are currently at a record high in workforce participation, a choice we know depresses their ability to create the families they want by delaying procreation past the years it happens most naturally for women.

Feminism has broken women because it has taken away their place in the world. Broken and unfulfilled women project their insecurities onto politics, ensuring extremist left rule that is seriously endangering our country’s security and flourishing. We need both men and women acting in their natural male and female capacities to properly address this threat.

Friendship and Mentoring Heals Primal Wounds

This would include women publicly discussing the vices women tend to fall into and strategies for avoiding them and picking ourselves back up when we allow our unchecked anxiety to hurt others. We shouldn’t leave self-policing and self-improvement to men to notice and implement.

We all need to hone our communication techniques and ability to mentor and counsel those willing to listen out of their sometimes self-inflicted suffering. Primal wounds from relationship dysfunction cannot be fixed quickly — they take a lot of time and effort.

We need women to befriend, mother, and sister each other, because with the decline in marriage, siblings, and cousins, women have fewer feminine mentors and encouragers in their lives. That’s been replaced with toxic female role models on social media, entertainment, and propaganda media. We need to reinstate social norms that truly support women, such as pursuing marriage and children with the same fervency we pursue a career, prioritizing time with and proximity to family, career flexibility, and not being ashamed to admit we want children and will meet their need for a present mother.

So no, contrary to widespread propaganda messaging, our society is neither “overfeminized” nor “pro-woman.” It is deeply anti-woman. And that’s not because we don’t give women enough affirmative action or treat them enough like men. It’s precisely because we pressure women to act like men. This feminist aspect of transgenderism is more insidious than the kind that chops off healthy breasts, because it’s harder to see. But it is no less destructive.

The response to this social transition of everyone into transgender ways of life has a simple solution, something the physically transgender people call “desisting.” Just stop. We all need to learn how to live again as men and women in our natural bodies and capacities, and to “lean in” to our biology. We need to get in touch with human nature, starting with our own, and then reaching out to the other in love.

For love will save the world from this war against humanity — our love for what we are made to be, and our love for what others are made to be. We all can find ways to express this love to ourselves and to others every day, to live in harmony with our given natures, respecting both male and female biology as a gift that gives life.

Make love, not war — not in our foreign policy, but in our homes and communities. That would be a true feminization project that makes both men and women happy, together.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.