“You think if you’ve got no uterus and no breasts, you’re still technically a woman?”
Gender-policing conservatives may think that this quote is describing a transgender person, but they would be wrong. This line comes from one of my favorite movies of all time, Erin Brockovich. A cisgender woman, who has just been diagnosed with a serious illness presumably caused by contaminated water, asks the poignant question to Erin as she thinks about medical treatments she will have to endure. Erin tries to comfort the woman with a joke about missing out on maxi pads and underwire bras, but she still breaks into sobs.
I think about this scene often as conservative politicians try to legislate who can and can’t be a woman. Only a heartless jerk would tell the character in Erin Brockovich that being female requires a person to have breasts and a uterus, but that’s the message the right is sending to all women in the country.
When he returned to the Oval Office, Donald Trump spent his taxpayer-funded time signing multiple executive orders to oppress transgender and nonbinary people. With his authority over federal institutions and resources, Trump’s orders are aimed at preventing trans folks from serving in the military, starting medical transition as minors or as 18-year-olds, modifying their name and pronouns as school students, and competing in sports.
Some of the executive orders are framed as protecting and defending cisgender women and girls whose gender identity matches the label they were assigned at birth. Make no mistake — attacking trans people won’t uplift cis women. In fact, cis women will find it harder to exist outside the bounds of the right’s idea of perfect femininity.
Consider the controversy that surrounded Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who won a gold medal in women’s boxing at the 2024 Olympics. Khelif is a cisgender woman, but that didn’t protect her from being harassed online. Her gender was scrutinized after she won a match against an Italian boxer, who quit the fight in under a minute and cried when Khelif competed in the sport by the rules. Infamous transphobes J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk made things worse by platforming the lie that Khelif was a man participating in women’s sports. Look up Khelif’s photo and ask yourself what made her a target of scrutiny. Was it her skin color? Her body type and facial features? Her hair in cornrows? Are women only considered women if they look like Barbie?
Unfortunately, this kind of treatment is not only reserved for Olympic boxers. In the past few years, a woman in a Las Vegas bathroom, a girl competing in a Canadian track meet, a teenaged Utah basketball player, and a female powerlifter have all reported being harassed by people accusing them of being men or transgender. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama isn’t safe from “transvestigating” as Elon Musk’s father came out of nowhere to misgender her in a recent podcast interview. These stories of gender policing are a warning to women to stay inside the lines of traditional femininity by not cutting our hair short, by not having muscles, and by not being a race other than white.
The oppression of transgender and nonbinary people was never about protecting cisgender women and girls. The goal has always been control. Conservatives want us women — trans and cis — under their rule to mandate how we can express ourselves and what choices we make for our bodies and health.
The way we can stop this oppression is through cisgender women uniting with transgender women to demand gender liberation. Leaders on the right want to divide us by spreading disinformation about trans women being a threat to cis women. Cisgender women fall into this trap when we fail to find common ground, but the truth is trans and cis women are more alike than different. We all feel the pressure to meet the impossible expectations of performing womanhood perfectly and the inevitable failure when we fall short. Nobody can be Barbie, and there is freedom in being able to express gender in an unlimited number of ways.
What defines a woman? We can’t let Donald Trump decide that for us.
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
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