The idea that feminism ever claimed “men and women are the same” is a distortion that only works when the movement’s actual purpose is forgotten. From its beginnings, feminism has meant something concrete: women’s insistence on access to the same vocations, institutions, and civic rights long reserved for men. It arose not from a belief that the sexes are the same or interchangeable, but from the recognition that difference had been used as a gatekeeping tool.
What feminists challenged was the presumption that biology justifies exclusion—that a woman’s smaller stature, reproductive role, or social conditioning automatically disqualified her from medicine, law, science, public office or law enforcement, for example. To demand the chance to study, work, and govern on equal terms was never to claim that females are the same as males, only that all women are fully human and therefore entitled to prove what their individual capacities actually are.
The charge that feminism “denied sex differences” mistakes the rejection of barriers for the rejection of biology itself. In fact, feminist thought has long grappled with how to understand difference without turning it into destiny. The goal was not sameness but freedom from confinement by stereotype—the freedom to pursue any path one’s talents allow, irrespective of sex.
Seen in that light, the accusation collapses. Feminism did not erase sexual difference; it simply refused to let difference determine a woman’s horizon.
It is valuable to examine what "feminine" and "masculine" ideals mean, how they can benefit society and how they can be detriments. In the end, of course, and I think this is your point, we have to figure out how males and females, masculine and feminine people, all of us, can make the most of our combined tendencies, strategies, talents and strengths while minimizing our weaknesses.
And, like they say in the Serenity Prayer, we need to recognize the difference -between "strength" and "weakness" without trying to shortcut the analysis by pointing to "masculinity" or "femininity" as the culprit of wrongdoing. It's not that simple. Sometimes feminine ideals are strengths, if applied correctly, and sometimes masculine ideals are strengths if applied correctly. Let's start working together to make the most of our strengths.
I knew we were going to a bad place when there were songs like "Girls Are Gonna Rule The World" because the goal should not be to pass power from males to females, but to have a shared responsibility (and, as you also pointed out, we need adults - not children - to rule the world).
Lastly, I agree with the article in this respect. I don't think every industry has to be 50/50 in its male/female distribution. We need equal opportunity, not equal distribution. If less women want to be engineers, or less men want to be nurses, that's perfectly fine as long as we aren't forbidding the crossover! Maybe we will have a female president someday if she is the right woman, but we shouldn't force the issue. Right now, we need to prevent extremism - stop the unreality and harms of gender ideology, and also prevent a dumb bully from overtaking our government and thwarting democracy.
I think acknowledging the toxic ways in which boy culture and girl culture can manifest is an important step towards finding balance in a society so we can play to our strengths and weaknesses, but of course we can’t have nice things in America so we’re doomed to ping pong back and forth between ever widening extremes —always blaming the opposite side (or, in this case, sex) for all our problems.
Such grownups tend to be very boring and conservative in the technical sense, acting to preserve received institutions The kind of people who are successful in the cultural/tech innovation of social media despise such people. Perhaps a concerted effort by "open" people such as myself to value the vast majority who just want to know the rules as we flail about trying to change them will diminish the conflict.
Thanks for this. It’s stressful to hear all the blaming along with posturing and self righteousness. When we get so dug in with our various tribes that we can’t see our own flaws we end up looking pretty dumb. There’s lots of stupidity to go around at the moment.
There is an imbalance. Take any situation right now that doesn't involve sports, prisons, bathrooms....and swap how females and males are treated.
I don't think someone can easily push back on "be kind" and the cancel culture right now without my party throwing you out. It's still the party of women know best. Women are better. Women can do anything. Women rule the world. The future is female. Replace that with "men" and see how it lands!
There are destructive aspects of both characteristically male and female (in our culture, of course) ways of dealing with competition, deciding what is prioritized, etc.
I think our culture has ways of containing the destructive aspects of whatever you want to call it, male style aggression, better--when those tendencies (which of course women have too) are out of control indeed we get Tate, wars, etc...our culture has worked hard to channel aggression of this sort into constructive avenues.
I am not sure one can easily and publicly try to contain the "female" aspects as well right now. One gets called a bigot or sexist. The cancel culture isn't being contained. There is an emphasis on keeping everyone at the same level. One cannot talk about "toxic femininity" easily, can one? Look what you said about the woman who brought it up... :). I don't know how but I think it is a problem.
Heather Heying has a great talk on this from an earlier genspect conference.
These are really good points. Still, I feel the problem is adults using schoolyard tactics to govern, whether those are female- or male-typical schoolyard tactics...
So how do we get voters to vote for adults? (Jonah Wheeler, for instance?! )
But I think we are breaking the structures we had built, as a society, to go forward with. Coddling of the American Mind style.Maybe that isn't necessarily female-coded, but it seems like the same issue to me.
As far as being grownups, I don't know how we give the floor in politics and public life back to the grownups. Maybe we stop rewarding childish behavior, just like with toddlers. I do think the addiction to clicks of the news agencies (NYT, for instance) is not helping.
But... you don't have to agree with me **at all,** you know :). Happy to argue and either learn something or convince you! Win win.
Lisa, you are a feminist warrior for truth. As you said, this argument has been going on for a while, though she certainly made it particularly well. She's a persuasive writer in making the points about sex-based differences overall between men and women, points which were wrongly denied or tragically ignored by several flavors of feminism. Personally, wrestling with that bit over the past few years has caused some major rethinking of my worldview and some deep grief for me, but that's another story. (Really? Men are THAT much stronger?) Also, institutionalized gender ideology was encouraged by that denial with terrible results. And I can see that the tilt of professions in female direction has had effects, some good some bad. And I do agree with her about returning to merit-based hiring, since women have been so successful in these professions long denied to us.
She was far less persuasive for me in the interview with Meghan Daum, where her true colors and her personality come out more clearly. As you say, SHE gets to be the gender non-conforming girl playing with the boys, defending the boys, defending male dominance. What does that remind you of? Girls choosing to be "non-binary" so they don't have to conform to female stereotypes, throwing their "binary" sisters under the bus. Defending Phyllis Schlafly as one of her heroes. Um, no. Suggesting we "ladies" just MIGHT have been better off in the 1950s.
No, boys are not doing well, and men are not doing well, but really, neither are girls, neither are women. Humans are not doing well. Neither is our home, our planet. After thinking about this since the article came out, I came to a similar conclusion as you: we need to grow up, see that our problems are human problems, created by the two different kinds of humans that exist.
Do you mean her overall thesis that women taking over majority numbers in these professions has "feminized" them? Or do you mean that her numbers/percentages aren't solid?
Isn’t it interesting how so many have jumped to applaud this editorial by a woman blaming women for everything wrong in the world? Judging by the uptick in misogynistic writers coming out of the woodwork, I’d say she’s getting just the response she hoped for. Thanks for bringing some balance to the argument, Lisa.
If you had been following Lisa at all, you would know that she generally avoids blaming one side or the other. We are all in this mess and we need to figure out together how to get out of it.
I mean, I guess I blame the left/Dems/liberals, for going so far to the left that the overcorrection to the overcorrection is tradwifism. Except I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with traditional gender roles if that's what you dig. I just feel like our country and institutions are run by people who cannot exert grace under pressure, can't take in multiple perspectives and figure out the best decision. It's already so difficult inside my own brain. I would love to feel secure in the knowledge that grownups are in charge!
All the talk of The Great Feminization has a ring of default-ism; that is, assuming that how men behave is the standard, and how women behave is a strange variance. We see this most clearly in the charge that women are "too emotional" to be leaders, even while Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a gigantic cat-fight last spring because Musk made the mistake of assuming that the administration had room for a SECOND tremendous ego.
Men are just as emotional as women, but since that emotion often manifests as anger, it has been cast as just normal ambition, or something. In women that emotionality may manifest as tears, and in men as rants, but either way, it ain't rational.
I'm not making a blank-slate argument in terms of how men and women behave, but I find that both sexes often engage in the same behavior, even if it appears different on the surface.
I'm not sure it's fair to men to use Trump, a narcissistic sociopath developmentally stuck in toddlerhood, as representative of men in general. His use of power to silence his critics is not so much the mirror image of "feminine cancel culture", but the rage of the bully on the playground beating up the younger kids because he feels excluded by the cool crowd.
I just read Andrews' essay and it largely rang true with me, even if it's obviously an oversimplification. As someone who has always had an instinctive discomfort with women quotas, and whose first revulsion at Judith Butler's ideas back in the 90s was driven not by anything related to trans, but by her denial of innate differences between the sexes (in which I have always believed even while thinking that women should be allowed to become anything they are capable of), I fundamentally agree with Andrews' argument that laws that force gender parity in all organizations cannot lead to good outcomes.
I also agree with her general characterization of women as more consensus-driven and group-oriented, while men are more into open debate and more individualistic. I don't think this is controversial. Yes, those are stereotypes, and I personally don't fit them, which is probably why my best friends have always been men, and I've never done well within groups of women.
I am also the mother of two sons (and no daughters), at least one of whom (the more typically masculine one) has noticed the way girls tend to be favored by teachers, and typical boy behavior is being punished, since elementary school. He has always done better with male teachers, and lamented the scarcity of those. In both of my sons (even the feminine one who is often mistaken for a girl), I see the political backlash against "wokeness". They are both sick of it, as they are both individualists who, just like their mother, care more about speaking their mind on what they think is true, than about conforming to the group consensus and being agreeable.
One of my favorite paragraphs in the article was this:
"You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?"
It made me glad, once again, that I got out of there just before wokeness went full steam.
True, that's certainly how he thinks of himself, and many seem to fall for the shtick. It's a mystery to me, just like any other aspect of his appeal to many millions of Americans.
The referenced article was quite a piece of work, but agree with the author here. No sex and no time has had a patent on cancel culture, tantrums, and poor governing style. I constantly have the feeling everyone was born yesterday and has no concept of history left.
Two of my favorite authors are Nathaniel Hawthorne - just the name alone - and Shirley Jackson. One of the best of Hawthorne is “The Scarlet Letter”, and by Jackson is “The Lottery”. I don’t feel in need to explain The Scarlet Letter, but The Lottery has a more oblique reference to Anne Hutchinson who was persona non grata with the Puritans.
Shunning is a powerful social tool, as the Catholic Church well knew with excommunication.
These are all hundreds of years (millennia old) methods of “cancelling”, linked back of course to in Christian theology, Adam and Eve cast out of Eden.
That is, “cancelled”.
No coven of woke feminists…
Which brings us back to God(s) the most capricious and tantrum-icious of entities.
King David orders a census, so “God” destroys 70,000 Israelites?
And goodness - Israelites moan about the heat in the desert, and you get “God” sending a firestorm to torture people.
Well at least the Ancient Greek and Roman gods were more personal - Apollo challenged by a Satyr to song contest, and because he was almost as good as Apollo, he was flayed alive (Marsyas).
Hera of course was notoriously thin-skinned - Hercules spent his life tortured by her grudges.
Humans are not rational robots, and are governed more by emotion than reason.
The adults have also gone missing in Australia, where the issue du jour is the attempt by the Leader of the Opposition to foment a moral panic about the Prime Minister wearing a rock band T-shirt.
Also in Australia, nine high schools in Brisbane have been teaching their senior students about Augustus Caesar when they should have been teaching them about Julius Caesar, throwing the final exams into chaos.
This does pose the question of whether the course on Julius Caesar teaches that Publius Clodius Pulcher affirmed their gender at the Bona Dea, whether Caesar's wife really was above reproach because she was actually engaging in gender-inclusive empowerment of Publius Clodius, and whether Caesar's mother Aurelia was the original TERF because she enforced a sex-based conception of womanhood.
I haven’t read the Lewis article, and as time is finite, I don’t plan to do so. I appreciate all the more that you and others commenting here have done so, have thought about these issues so thoughtfully, and have stepped up to offer a much more intelligent approach that what I generally see on offer. There are so many lines you’ve written that I could pick out to stress, it’s hard to choose. I will go for this one: “We could also stop insisting that there’s a man or boy or woman or girl crisis, and focus on the best way to be human in this very strange iteration of the world.” Thank you for all you do and all you are, with such openness, humility, and grace.🙏❤️🙏
The idea that feminism ever claimed “men and women are the same” is a distortion that only works when the movement’s actual purpose is forgotten. From its beginnings, feminism has meant something concrete: women’s insistence on access to the same vocations, institutions, and civic rights long reserved for men. It arose not from a belief that the sexes are the same or interchangeable, but from the recognition that difference had been used as a gatekeeping tool.
What feminists challenged was the presumption that biology justifies exclusion—that a woman’s smaller stature, reproductive role, or social conditioning automatically disqualified her from medicine, law, science, public office or law enforcement, for example. To demand the chance to study, work, and govern on equal terms was never to claim that females are the same as males, only that all women are fully human and therefore entitled to prove what their individual capacities actually are.
The charge that feminism “denied sex differences” mistakes the rejection of barriers for the rejection of biology itself. In fact, feminist thought has long grappled with how to understand difference without turning it into destiny. The goal was not sameness but freedom from confinement by stereotype—the freedom to pursue any path one’s talents allow, irrespective of sex.
Seen in that light, the accusation collapses. Feminism did not erase sexual difference; it simply refused to let difference determine a woman’s horizon.
It is valuable to examine what "feminine" and "masculine" ideals mean, how they can benefit society and how they can be detriments. In the end, of course, and I think this is your point, we have to figure out how males and females, masculine and feminine people, all of us, can make the most of our combined tendencies, strategies, talents and strengths while minimizing our weaknesses.
And, like they say in the Serenity Prayer, we need to recognize the difference -between "strength" and "weakness" without trying to shortcut the analysis by pointing to "masculinity" or "femininity" as the culprit of wrongdoing. It's not that simple. Sometimes feminine ideals are strengths, if applied correctly, and sometimes masculine ideals are strengths if applied correctly. Let's start working together to make the most of our strengths.
I knew we were going to a bad place when there were songs like "Girls Are Gonna Rule The World" because the goal should not be to pass power from males to females, but to have a shared responsibility (and, as you also pointed out, we need adults - not children - to rule the world).
Lastly, I agree with the article in this respect. I don't think every industry has to be 50/50 in its male/female distribution. We need equal opportunity, not equal distribution. If less women want to be engineers, or less men want to be nurses, that's perfectly fine as long as we aren't forbidding the crossover! Maybe we will have a female president someday if she is the right woman, but we shouldn't force the issue. Right now, we need to prevent extremism - stop the unreality and harms of gender ideology, and also prevent a dumb bully from overtaking our government and thwarting democracy.
Beautifully stated. Thank you.
I think acknowledging the toxic ways in which boy culture and girl culture can manifest is an important step towards finding balance in a society so we can play to our strengths and weaknesses, but of course we can’t have nice things in America so we’re doomed to ping pong back and forth between ever widening extremes —always blaming the opposite side (or, in this case, sex) for all our problems.
Such grownups tend to be very boring and conservative in the technical sense, acting to preserve received institutions The kind of people who are successful in the cultural/tech innovation of social media despise such people. Perhaps a concerted effort by "open" people such as myself to value the vast majority who just want to know the rules as we flail about trying to change them will diminish the conflict.
Thanks for this. It’s stressful to hear all the blaming along with posturing and self righteousness. When we get so dug in with our various tribes that we can’t see our own flaws we end up looking pretty dumb. There’s lots of stupidity to go around at the moment.
There is an imbalance. Take any situation right now that doesn't involve sports, prisons, bathrooms....and swap how females and males are treated.
I don't think someone can easily push back on "be kind" and the cancel culture right now without my party throwing you out. It's still the party of women know best. Women are better. Women can do anything. Women rule the world. The future is female. Replace that with "men" and see how it lands!
There are destructive aspects of both characteristically male and female (in our culture, of course) ways of dealing with competition, deciding what is prioritized, etc.
I think our culture has ways of containing the destructive aspects of whatever you want to call it, male style aggression, better--when those tendencies (which of course women have too) are out of control indeed we get Tate, wars, etc...our culture has worked hard to channel aggression of this sort into constructive avenues.
I am not sure one can easily and publicly try to contain the "female" aspects as well right now. One gets called a bigot or sexist. The cancel culture isn't being contained. There is an emphasis on keeping everyone at the same level. One cannot talk about "toxic femininity" easily, can one? Look what you said about the woman who brought it up... :). I don't know how but I think it is a problem.
Heather Heying has a great talk on this from an earlier genspect conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVbN6tIySc
Of course everyone has both aspects.
I agree we need the grownups...!
Thank you!
These are really good points. Still, I feel the problem is adults using schoolyard tactics to govern, whether those are female- or male-typical schoolyard tactics...
agree 100% .
So how do we get voters to vote for adults? (Jonah Wheeler, for instance?! )
But I think we are breaking the structures we had built, as a society, to go forward with. Coddling of the American Mind style.Maybe that isn't necessarily female-coded, but it seems like the same issue to me.
As far as being grownups, I don't know how we give the floor in politics and public life back to the grownups. Maybe we stop rewarding childish behavior, just like with toddlers. I do think the addiction to clicks of the news agencies (NYT, for instance) is not helping.
But... you don't have to agree with me **at all,** you know :). Happy to argue and either learn something or convince you! Win win.
Thank you :).
Lisa, you are a feminist warrior for truth. As you said, this argument has been going on for a while, though she certainly made it particularly well. She's a persuasive writer in making the points about sex-based differences overall between men and women, points which were wrongly denied or tragically ignored by several flavors of feminism. Personally, wrestling with that bit over the past few years has caused some major rethinking of my worldview and some deep grief for me, but that's another story. (Really? Men are THAT much stronger?) Also, institutionalized gender ideology was encouraged by that denial with terrible results. And I can see that the tilt of professions in female direction has had effects, some good some bad. And I do agree with her about returning to merit-based hiring, since women have been so successful in these professions long denied to us.
She was far less persuasive for me in the interview with Meghan Daum, where her true colors and her personality come out more clearly. As you say, SHE gets to be the gender non-conforming girl playing with the boys, defending the boys, defending male dominance. What does that remind you of? Girls choosing to be "non-binary" so they don't have to conform to female stereotypes, throwing their "binary" sisters under the bus. Defending Phyllis Schlafly as one of her heroes. Um, no. Suggesting we "ladies" just MIGHT have been better off in the 1950s.
No, boys are not doing well, and men are not doing well, but really, neither are girls, neither are women. Humans are not doing well. Neither is our home, our planet. After thinking about this since the article came out, I came to a similar conclusion as you: we need to grow up, see that our problems are human problems, created by the two different kinds of humans that exist.
I didn't think she had compelling data—not enough to establish causation!
Do you mean her overall thesis that women taking over majority numbers in these professions has "feminized" them? Or do you mean that her numbers/percentages aren't solid?
That just because there are more women in these roles doesn't mean they caused all the changes!
I'd like to reassure you that I am a woman doing well.
Isn’t it interesting how so many have jumped to applaud this editorial by a woman blaming women for everything wrong in the world? Judging by the uptick in misogynistic writers coming out of the woodwork, I’d say she’s getting just the response she hoped for. Thanks for bringing some balance to the argument, Lisa.
My apologies. I'm so used to seeing sarcasm everywhere, I totally misinterpreted what you were saying!
Thanks, Michele.
If you had been following Lisa at all, you would know that she generally avoids blaming one side or the other. We are all in this mess and we need to figure out together how to get out of it.
I mean, I guess I blame the left/Dems/liberals, for going so far to the left that the overcorrection to the overcorrection is tradwifism. Except I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with traditional gender roles if that's what you dig. I just feel like our country and institutions are run by people who cannot exert grace under pressure, can't take in multiple perspectives and figure out the best decision. It's already so difficult inside my own brain. I would love to feel secure in the knowledge that grownups are in charge!
I think this writer agrees with your balanced approach too:
Beware the New Battle of the Sexes
Conservatives shouldn’t make their own version of the left’s gender mistakes.
by Ivana Greco / October 25, 2025
The Dispatch
https://thedispatch.com/article/great-feminization-sex-workplace/
(Alas, this is behind a paywall, but free subscribers get access to 3 articles/month)
BTW, the author is "a homemaker and homeschooling mother of four from Connecticut."
Brava, Lisa. All so very well put. I welcome the return of the "good citizen" grown ups. Can't happen fast enough!
Thanks for this.
All the talk of The Great Feminization has a ring of default-ism; that is, assuming that how men behave is the standard, and how women behave is a strange variance. We see this most clearly in the charge that women are "too emotional" to be leaders, even while Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a gigantic cat-fight last spring because Musk made the mistake of assuming that the administration had room for a SECOND tremendous ego.
Men are just as emotional as women, but since that emotion often manifests as anger, it has been cast as just normal ambition, or something. In women that emotionality may manifest as tears, and in men as rants, but either way, it ain't rational.
I'm not making a blank-slate argument in terms of how men and women behave, but I find that both sexes often engage in the same behavior, even if it appears different on the surface.
I'm not sure it's fair to men to use Trump, a narcissistic sociopath developmentally stuck in toddlerhood, as representative of men in general. His use of power to silence his critics is not so much the mirror image of "feminine cancel culture", but the rage of the bully on the playground beating up the younger kids because he feels excluded by the cool crowd.
I just read Andrews' essay and it largely rang true with me, even if it's obviously an oversimplification. As someone who has always had an instinctive discomfort with women quotas, and whose first revulsion at Judith Butler's ideas back in the 90s was driven not by anything related to trans, but by her denial of innate differences between the sexes (in which I have always believed even while thinking that women should be allowed to become anything they are capable of), I fundamentally agree with Andrews' argument that laws that force gender parity in all organizations cannot lead to good outcomes.
I also agree with her general characterization of women as more consensus-driven and group-oriented, while men are more into open debate and more individualistic. I don't think this is controversial. Yes, those are stereotypes, and I personally don't fit them, which is probably why my best friends have always been men, and I've never done well within groups of women.
I am also the mother of two sons (and no daughters), at least one of whom (the more typically masculine one) has noticed the way girls tend to be favored by teachers, and typical boy behavior is being punished, since elementary school. He has always done better with male teachers, and lamented the scarcity of those. In both of my sons (even the feminine one who is often mistaken for a girl), I see the political backlash against "wokeness". They are both sick of it, as they are both individualists who, just like their mother, care more about speaking their mind on what they think is true, than about conforming to the group consensus and being agreeable.
One of my favorite paragraphs in the article was this:
"You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?"
It made me glad, once again, that I got out of there just before wokeness went full steam.
Fair point. But he is often conceived of as an alpha male, and I think that's a big part of his appeal.
True, that's certainly how he thinks of himself, and many seem to fall for the shtick. It's a mystery to me, just like any other aspect of his appeal to many millions of Americans.
Adults yes, of course. Yet NYC is about to end up with a mayor who is cunning but promises gift like a Santa Claus............no adult there.
The referenced article was quite a piece of work, but agree with the author here. No sex and no time has had a patent on cancel culture, tantrums, and poor governing style. I constantly have the feeling everyone was born yesterday and has no concept of history left.
Two of my favorite authors are Nathaniel Hawthorne - just the name alone - and Shirley Jackson. One of the best of Hawthorne is “The Scarlet Letter”, and by Jackson is “The Lottery”. I don’t feel in need to explain The Scarlet Letter, but The Lottery has a more oblique reference to Anne Hutchinson who was persona non grata with the Puritans.
Shunning is a powerful social tool, as the Catholic Church well knew with excommunication.
These are all hundreds of years (millennia old) methods of “cancelling”, linked back of course to in Christian theology, Adam and Eve cast out of Eden.
That is, “cancelled”.
No coven of woke feminists…
Which brings us back to God(s) the most capricious and tantrum-icious of entities.
King David orders a census, so “God” destroys 70,000 Israelites?
And goodness - Israelites moan about the heat in the desert, and you get “God” sending a firestorm to torture people.
Well at least the Ancient Greek and Roman gods were more personal - Apollo challenged by a Satyr to song contest, and because he was almost as good as Apollo, he was flayed alive (Marsyas).
Hera of course was notoriously thin-skinned - Hercules spent his life tortured by her grudges.
Humans are not rational robots, and are governed more by emotion than reason.
I recommend Nina Paley's SEDER-MASOCHISM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Yk59fZZ0I
Speaking truth to hysteria-driven society! (And to whatever the male counterpart is to the wandering uterus.)
The adults have also gone missing in Australia, where the issue du jour is the attempt by the Leader of the Opposition to foment a moral panic about the Prime Minister wearing a rock band T-shirt.
Also in Australia, nine high schools in Brisbane have been teaching their senior students about Augustus Caesar when they should have been teaching them about Julius Caesar, throwing the final exams into chaos.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/29/queensland-high-schools-taught-wrong-caesar-topic
This does pose the question of whether the course on Julius Caesar teaches that Publius Clodius Pulcher affirmed their gender at the Bona Dea, whether Caesar's wife really was above reproach because she was actually engaging in gender-inclusive empowerment of Publius Clodius, and whether Caesar's mother Aurelia was the original TERF because she enforced a sex-based conception of womanhood.
I haven’t read the Lewis article, and as time is finite, I don’t plan to do so. I appreciate all the more that you and others commenting here have done so, have thought about these issues so thoughtfully, and have stepped up to offer a much more intelligent approach that what I generally see on offer. There are so many lines you’ve written that I could pick out to stress, it’s hard to choose. I will go for this one: “We could also stop insisting that there’s a man or boy or woman or girl crisis, and focus on the best way to be human in this very strange iteration of the world.” Thank you for all you do and all you are, with such openness, humility, and grace.🙏❤️🙏