I used to enjoy drag. Not tolerate it politely. Enjoy it as the adult entertainment it once was. Priscilla Queen of the Desert made me laugh. Eddie Izzard in heels and makeup was clever and charismatic and genuinely funny. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a rite of passage, and there were dozens of classic comedy routines, movies, and shows that played on the humor of men pretending they were female. Back then, men “performing” womanhood was understood as what it was: performance. The boundary between reality and exaggeration was intact, and the audience, male and female, was in on the joke.
That’s not what’s happening now. Over the last decade, something fundamental changed — not in me, but in the cultural expectation attached to the performance. What used to be theater is now treated as metaphysics. What used to be camp is now framed as authenticity. When I see a man in women’s clothing today, the reaction hits hard and fast: a coil in the gut, a warning snap of instinct, visceral rejection. I can't even look at them anymore. It isn’t outrage; it’s an involuntary signal that something is pushing across a boundary that once kept women safe.
The difference is simple: It stopped being an illusion you were allowed to enjoy and became a claim you are required to believe. And women feel that shift in our bodies long before we articulate it in words.
The Body Knows a Boundary Violation
Women’s instincts didn’t develop in a vacuum. For all of human history, we’ve lived beside a physically stronger sex. Our nervous systems learned to detect threat, intrusion, and deception instantly. A woman in a bathroom stall does not alarm other women; a man walking in does. That’s not social conditioning — it’s survival memory.
This is why the jump from “I’m parodying womanhood” to “I am a woman, and you must treat me as one” hits so sharply. The demand requires women to suppress instincts that have protected us for millennia. When someone insists his identity supersedes your perception, your boundaries, and your caution, your body recognizes coercion long before your mind organizes the argument.
And that recognition ties directly into dignity because women’s boundaries aren’t just about safety. They are part of the dignity of being a sex class with a real, grounded nature.
What Dignity Means
“Dignity” gets thrown around today like a therapy word, but it has a precise meaning. Dignity isn’t a feeling, and it isn’t produced by affirmation. It arises from the truth of what you are: your nature, your vulnerabilities, your boundaries, and the protections built around them. You cannot honor the dignity of a being while denying its essence.
Consider how the Civil Rights Movement used dignity. Black Americans demanded recognition of the truth of what they already were: human beings and full citizens. Their dignity claim strengthened reality; it did not require anyone to deny it. Women are in the same position now. Their dignity is rooted in reality. Their category has a nature. Their boundaries matter. And like Civil Rights leaders, women are not asking society to invent something; they are asking it to stop denying what already exists.
Womanhood is an embodied category defined by female reproductive reality, by physical vulnerability relative to men, and by a long historical record of needing boundaries for safety and recognition. Women’s dignity rests on this truth. It doesn’t rest on identity or costume. When men identify themselves into womanhood, they aren’t just borrowing a label. They are stepping into a sex class built on female realities they do not share and can never viscerally understand, and in doing so, they erode the foundation that makes women’s dignity intelligible.
This is why women react so strongly to the claim that “a man can become a woman.” It’s not semantic. It’s existential. A category without boundaries has no meaning, and a category without meaning cannot be dignified. If “woman” can include biological males, then “woman” becomes a mood rather than a sex, and women lose the ability to defend any structure predicated on female vulnerability.
This is also why activists’ use of “dignity” is dishonest. They insist that acknowledging biological sex “erases the dignity” of transgender-identifying males. But dignity cannot depend on universal agreement with someone’s internal fantasy. Telling the truth about someone’s sex does not erase their dignity. Demanding that others lie does.
The true dignity claim in this fight belongs to women: Recognize what we are, and stop forcing us to pretend otherwise.
When “Dignity” Becomes a Demand for Delusion
Daniel Radcliffe recently declared, “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people.” His formulation turns dignity into emotional dependency, a thing that exists only if everyone else agrees to someone’s self-perception. That isn’t dignity. That’s coercion.
Real dignity never requires other people to deny reality. Civil Rights leaders did not ask America to pretend black Americans were something other than human. Radcliffe’s claim requires the public to pretend male bodies are female, even in contexts where biology matters for safety, fairness, or truth.
Women’s dignity depends on our society recognizing sex-based truth. If a man can claim womanhood by declaration, then womanhood has no reality left to protect — and women become ornamental, optional, or symbolic rather than a real class of humans with real vulnerabilities.
The fallout for women isn’t theoretical. Women lose fairness in sports when male bodies compete in female categories. Women lose safety when male prisoners are placed in female facilities. Women lose privacy when men enter shelters and locker rooms. Women lose recognition when male bodies claim female awards. Women lose accurate medical care when sex-based data is blurred into identity-based categories. Women lose their vocabulary when “mother” becomes bureaucratic jargon to avoid offending males. Any society that pretends sex is a feeling guarantees that women will bear the cost.
Though few will admit it, transgendered people are also harmed when society accepts their assertions as fact. They do not get the appropriate medical care, for instance. Their psychological well-being becomes dependent upon the willingness of others to accept their delusions. They are locked into medicalization for any actual changes they make in their bodies forever, and those treatments may harm their health. And most brutally, they are denied treatment for the psychological conditions that actually underlie their claim to be the opposite sex. The activists are helping no one while doing a great deal of harm.
Adults can dress how they please, modify their bodies, and live with whatever aesthetic suits them; that is personal freedom. But personal expression does not obligate society to pretend a male body is female or to dismantle sex-based protections. Transgender individuals can be treated with ordinary courtesy without being given access to female-only institutions. They can receive separate accommodations without requiring women to surrender their safety or language. Respect does not require surrendering truth. And genuine respect helps protect transgender people as well as women.
Related: The New Definition of Blackness: When Race Stops Meaning Race
A Coherent Argument
It's difficult, but not impossible, to assert reality in an atmosphere of activism that wants to shut you down, call you a bigot, and weaponize emotion. Here are some things you can try.
- Start with sex: “A male cannot become female.” Everything else follows from this truth.
- Define dignity correctly: “Dignity is grounded in truth, not in forced validation.” No one’s dignity depends on your cooperation with a lie.
- Use the civil rights contrast: They demanded recognition of reality, not denial of it.
- Highlight the asymmetry: Only male-to-female claims dismantle the boundaries women rely on.
- Expose the actual cost: Women lose safety, fairness, language, and recognition every time men are added to their category.
- Protect language: If you give up “woman,” “female,” “mother,” you have no tools left to describe what’s being taken from you.
- Keep debate structural, not psychological: Focus on consequences, definitions, and boundaries, not motives.
- Separate courtesy from compliance: You can be polite to individuals without rewriting reality for them.
Everything in this debate comes down to whether society is willing to affirm the obvious: Women are female. Women’s dignity rests on that truth — their embodiment, their unique vulnerabilities, their needs, and their boundaries. When men insist that womanhood is a costume or an internal feeling, they demand that women erase their own dignity to sustain someone else’s identity. The civil rights framework shows the path forward: Dignity begins with truth, not with flattery, and not with forced belief.
Women do not owe anyone a lie. Their reality is non-negotiable. And the dignity that flows from that reality is worth defending without apology.
