The Inevitable Downfall of Drew Afualo

From the popularization of trad content to the downfall of the "lean-in" era girlboss , modern feminism has been having a bad year. But nothing is as good an indicator of the state of modern feminism as the question at the center of a current internet debate: Are men better at being women than women? Yes, you read that correctly. The controversy started when a podcast clip of popular influencer Drew Afualo went viral. The clip resurfaced from an interview with non-binary actress ER Fightmaster on Afualo's show, "The Comment Section." In the clip, Fightmaster stated that trans women often "have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is" than "cis women." Afualo agreed. Her followers certainly did not. Fightmaster stated that trans women often "have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is" than "cis women." Comments ranged in their criticisms. Some agreed that biological males can truly "experience" womanhood but rejected that their experience was "better" or "more beautiful" than the experience of biological women. Others complained about the term "cis woman," referring to it as a derogatory label. And, of course, there are the defenders , Afualo included. She took to her TikTok account and (in a characteristically aggressive tone) reprimanded her followers for being offended by the video. Equating womanhood with the ability to give birth or have periods is, she says, a shameful way of "reducing" women down to their wombs, a central "tenet of patriarchy." She urged her followers to inform themselves about the context of the clip before they accused her of being a bad feminist. The context in question was a discussion about transgender bathroom access. Fightmaster brought up critics who are afraid of "men in dresses," claiming that the real threat is male violence, not "trans women." She continued that biological women are left with an understanding of womanhood that is tied to their patriarchal oppression. "Your womanhood is not your role, not your status in society, and not your vulnerability to sexual assault," she said. In other words, Fightmaster rejects that womanhood is defined by social, political, or biological realities. That doesn't make her a bad feminist; it makes her a textbook one. In the 1960s, feminists drew a crucial separation between sex and gender. They argued that gender was a social construct drawn from the artifice of sex differences between men and women and used to keep women subordinate to men. Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of modern feminism, articulates this idea in her work "The Second Sex": "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She continues, "no biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine." Feminists like Beauvoir rejected limitations imposed on women by biology or society, which are, to use Fightmaster's language, "programmed" into women from birth. They sought to transcend the arbitrary and oppressive construct of gender. It's easy to see, then, how feminism found its culmination in transgenderism, which, like feminism, seeks to create a world "beyond gender." A world beyond gender thus accepts men as women, and even, as in this controversy, as better women. Liberated women. This is why Fightmaster asserts that trans women often have a more "expansive" understanding of womanhood: because it isn't a status that is conferred on them by society, but rather one they willingly chose and defined on their own terms. "When trans women talk about their womanhood, they talk about it in this beautiful, expansive way," Fightmaster said. She continued that they describe womanhood as "this feeling I've always had ... it's this truth I've always known ... it's the most beautiful parts of me ... it's my softest self." Feminists sought to move beyond gender, to transcend and reconstruct it on different terms. In so doing, they laid the groundwork for our current transgender moment. Feminism began with a desire to "liberate" women, and it did so by liberating them from the limits of biology and society, arriving at a definition of womanhood so expansive that it ceases to be a definition at all: A woman is anyone who "feels" like a woman. Feminism has deconstructed womanhood to the point of offering nothing more than an empty, circular definition, void of any substance or meaning; feminism has created a world after women. Feminism has deconstructed womanhood to the point of offering nothing more than an empty, circular definition, void of any substance or meaning. Drew Afualo's "cancellation" offers us an opportunity to reconsider society's feminist commitments. If feminism requires us to believe that some biological males can have a "better" understanding of womanhood than biological females, then perhaps it isn't our offense that is the problem. Maybe the problem was feminism all along. This brings us to a question: Will we continue to entertain the absurdities of a feminist post-gender world, or will we reconsider the commitments of modernity and forge a new path? If we choose the former, we'll walk the path of Afualo: screeching at the insinuation that womanhood is in any way connected to childbirth, the communal experience of our first menstrual cycles, the distinct hormonal fluctuations of our bodies, or the unique vulnerabilities posed by our physiology as a "bigoted" expression of "patriarchy." Or we may choose the latter path: one that honors motherhood as a unique experience of women that is incommunicable to biological men who cannot menstruate, birth, or breastfeed. One that sees no insult in the space our wombs possess for children. One that sees the distinctiveness of our biology not as a problem to be solved, but as a quality to be protected and honored. The choice is ours: Will we embrace feminism after women, or become women after feminism?