Serious matters

The New York Times seems to think there's something entertaining, certainly unserious, about Republican South Carolina Congresscritter Nancy Mace trying to bar her new colleague Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride from the House bathrooms. As you might know, McBride is trans.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

Nancy Mace is a a bigoted attention-seeking pig. Full stop. And should be confined to remedial kindergarten. 

Congresswoman Crockett knows what really matters -- as she usually does.

The NYT finds a Democratic Congresswoman who sticks up for McBride (there were others):

“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”

So the reporter gives the last word to a male Republican: 

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day. “I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.

Very cute, the whole story. Except to the woman who has to live inside it. 

Presumably McBride has seen it all before. You don't win a statewide race for Congress without well-honed toughness. But the sheer lack of courtesy and willed ignorance from the Republicans reminds, as if we needed reminding, that these people aren't mature enough to be in government.

• • •

By far the most insightful effort to unpack the issues around transwomen participating in youth and adult womens' sports I've ever encountered comes from Parker Malloy. This is a terrific instance of READ THE WHOLE THING.

Since we're, once again, focused on the fraught matter of bathrooms, here's a section of this article I found particularly lucid: 

What laws around things like restrooms and restrictions on updating identifying documents do is to create a world in which trans people are obligated to out themselves as trans to people all day, every day. 

Should a trans woman have to announce to bouncers and bartenders that she’s trans before getting a drink? 

Should a trans man have to decide whether to break the law by using a men’s restroom or loudly signal to everyone in a restaurant that his birth certificate says “female” by walking into a women’s restroom?  

Because that’s what these bills are advocating for: a world where trans people have to essentially wear a big neon sign disclosing their medical history to everyone around them. That sort of extremely private information is not the type of thing strangers two tables over have any inherent right to know. If someone isn’t your doctor or romantic partner, there’s no legitimate argument for why that person has any right to know what kind of genitals you were born with. That’s just the truth.

When you create a legal system in which trans people are forced to repeatedly out themselves, you’re creating a system designed to never fully accept them as people.

In 2016, a Wisconsin school reportedly forced a trans boy to wear a bright green wristband to ensure that school security guards (who had been instructed to be on the lookout for “students who appear to be going into the ‘wrong’ restroom”) could catch him if he used the boys’ restroom. This is about surveillance and social exclusion.

As someone, not trans myself, who routinely gets yelled at by blue-haired ladies in public bathrooms -- accused of being in the wrong one for my apparent gender -- I feel this to my core. And, nowadays, at 77, in still-civilized California, I snap back at my accusers, politely if they seem merely confused, furiously if they are aiming to erase me. It's always been my schtick that "this is what a woman looks like -- get used to it." If I'm feeling accommodating, I'll cede that "this is one way a woman looks." There seem to be a close to infinite supply of these women with a bathroom problem. Now that is serious.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.

Muscle memory kicks in; "we already know how to do this"

On Bluesky, Rebecca Traister, journalist and chronicler of women's persisting demands for our freedom and full humanity observes: 

New generations waking up to fury and grief is how we move forward and extend centuries worth of (often circular, often maddening, often unsuccessful) work to make this country a more just and equitable place for more of the people who live in it. (Re Naomi Beinart's oped in the New York Times - gift.)

Traister's reflections for New York Magazine on the Trump election win are deep; I don't know how to share as a gift article so here are some instructive fragments:

The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?

The women who set out to bury Donald Trump are doing things differently now. ...

... derision of the merchandized detritus of first-stage resistance organizing often worked to obscure the seriousness of what was happening among many Americans who had never before been politically active and who had been both appalled and galvanized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The first big public gathering, the Women’s March [of 2017], wasn’t just an Instagrammable party. It was spiky and contentious, bringing together Hillary heads and Berners, leftists and moderates, hard-core activists and wide-eyed newbies, as well as the grifters and profiteers who adhere to any mass movement. ...

... From there, women broke in a dizzying array of organizing directions. Some helped drive the wildcat teachers’ strikes that spread in 2018 across Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. Others disrupted Republican-lawmaker town halls, helping to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal in Trump’s first year in office, and harried administration officials responsible for the family-separation policy.

The shared fury of women led to the Me Too movement, which resulted in powerful and abusive figures losing positions of institutional authority, and to sexual-harassment walkouts at companies including McDonald’s and Google. A historic number of women ran for office, flooding candidate-training groups like Emerge and Higher Heights. Others got to work organizing on their behalf in municipal and local races, creating Democratic infrastructure in places that the party had left unattended for generations. 

This organizing produced material results all over the country. This iteration of the resistance was the force that flipped the House to Democratic control in 2018, staved off a red wave in 2022, and won majorities in Michigan and Minnesota, where laws were subsequently passed to protect abortion access and LGBTQ rights and ensure free school lunches. It helped secure State Supreme Court seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and a streak of ballot referenda on abortion rights post-Dobbs, including in blood-red Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas — ensuring that, for a while at least, tens of millions more Americans have had access to health care they would otherwise not have had. ...

... The urge to demonize and dismiss these women, despite their impact, is strong from both party and press, neither of which has ever been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women, unless they are of the right-wing Moms for Liberty variety.

There has been little acknowledgment that the almost entirely volunteer efforts of regular-degular women in communities around the country — not just the recent exertions of previously disengaged white women but the electoral labor performed unrelentingly by Black women for generations — has done more to preserve and repair the broken Democratic Party at state and local levels than the efforts of the well-paid, expensively dressed, smooth-brained Democratic consultant class or the political press, both of which tend to obsess over the shiny highest offices, forget local- and state-power building, fly quadrennially into local communities about which they know nothing, and advise candidates against embracing issues that turn out to be more popular with voters than the candidates who listen to consultants’ advice.

... Leah Greenberg [from Indivisible] said that she doesn’t mind watching the resistance being written off as dead, at least for now: “It is a very funny instance of overwhelmingly D.C./male pundits and reporters rushing to declare that things they aren’t personally paying attention to are not happening, while the actual work happens in a thousand homes across the country.” She acknowledged that there are real questions about strategy moving forward. “But our folks ... They don’t give up.”

The legacy of the past eight years is not simply a gutting presidential loss. There are tools and mechanisms in place: shield laws and sanctuary states. People new to engagement now have had practice at losing and getting back up again; that is crucial. 

“The muscle memory has kicked back in as the grief and shock has worn off,” Amanda Litman [from Run for Something which processed 7000 inquiries after Trump triumphed two weeks ago] told me. “It feels more clear-eyed about how hard this will be. But there is also a history of winning against him.”

The Resistance has now experienced both the overturn of Roe and the electoral victories that followed in its wake; they have learned about abortion funds, read Project 2025, and have some idea of what might be coming next. Nothing has to be the same this time because we are not the same.

“I think the 2016 resistance is dead and that’s a good thing,” said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party. “That style of resistance was an on-ramp for a lot of people, and a lot of people took it. Now, it is more like, Let’s get to work.... There’s an advocacy infrastructure that’s grown, an electoral infrastructure, a legal infrastructure.”

Or as Litman put it, “This time we can all jump right in without building the plane while we fly it.”

And it's not only activated women that already know how to stand up and stand together against the budding autocracy. 

When Erudite Partner went off to Nevada to work to hold that battleground state for the Dems, I stayed home, knowing I was physically too limited to work in the center of the campaign, though I could and did work the UniteHERE union phonebank. I could be confident that this would be what I call a "hot-and-cold-running-volunteers" election, drawing from the multiple activist bases that people built in the Trump years. It was; the E.P. trained 1400 canvassing volunteers in that tiny corner of the national effort. The Harris-Walz campaign did not lack for people; it lacked for a way to overcome the generalized discontent and distrust of a population thrown off center by the pandemic and the failure -- over a couple of decades -- of governments to deliver.

These activist volunteers come out of the vast infrastructure that, often, began with the 2017 #resistance and has matured into para-campaigns like Seed the Vote, the rare effective Democratic Party like Ben Wikler's WisDems, some NGOs -- and of course the more effectual parts of organized labor like UniteHERE and the United Auto Workers. 

How much of this will survive the current authoritarian challenge we don't know. But what comes now is almost certainly more widespread, more hardened, more inventive, and more durable than oblivious pundits can imagine.

"New occasions teach new duties ..."

The headline refers to James Russell Lowell's essay The Present Crisis and hymn lyrics from the America of the 1840s. That crisis was the nation's enthrallment to human bondage, to organizing itself around holding millions of humans in chattel slavery. Lowell saw clearly that this crisis would not be resolved without disruptions and death -- as the slave system was death in life.

Yesterday a small crowd gathered at Manny's in the Mission to hear and meet Marshall Ganz, practitioner and theorist of organizing of the latter part of the last century. (Like me, but teaching at Harvard.) Marshall has a new book.

I love what the man has done and built and inspired. He was vital to Cesar Chavez in the best days of the United Farm Workers Union and movement in the 1960s/70s. He's taught many organizers. 

But I couldn't help feeling he was out of touch with too much that is contemporary in the best of current organizing ... mostly led by women, almost always prominently Black women. 

The terrible Trump regime ahead is a new occasion and the fight back will be new. That's what I know these days.

On keeping the dimmer switches turned up as far as possible

During the previous Trump horror show, I paid considerable attention to what Ben Wittes of the Washington Brookings Institution think tank was churning out -- the legal insights and later his delightful escapades such as projecting the Ukrainian flag on the Russian embassy in DC in April 2022.

With Trump's election. it's time to come back to Wittes' serious legal insights, found in posts headlined The Situation at Lawfare alongside many other contributors. He's not sanguine about the prospects for the existing constitutional system of ostensible "checks and balances" weathering the Trump storm well.

... political courage is precisely what the framers cannot bequeath us. 

... Put simply, we will work to cut through the noise and help guide people as to what issues are genuinely of concern and how to understand those issues on a granular level.

Somehow, I don't think his pious incantations of non-partisanship and legal expertise are likely to be enough to keep a Matt Gaetz-led Justice Department from coming after Brookings, but these folks do have a lot of friends in DC places. 

Anyway, here's Wittes's opening salvo on the role he envisions for lawyers trying to protect the rule of law: 

What are we to do about the lawful democratic assaults? There is no simple answer to this question—only the vaguest of guideposts. But I will offer a few of those guideposts. 

First, litigation is an important instrument. Justice delayed is justice denied, goes the old saying, and the same is true of injustice. Tying things up in court doesn’t always make them stop. But it often ameliorates them, and the delays themselves can be salutary. ...

Second, litigation is an insufficient instrument and is emphatically not a substitute for politics. In the end, the fundamental problem here is that more than half of American voters asked for what they are now going to get. Somehow, those of us who see this decision as a profound blow to a democratic system need to persuade others of that. ...

Third, every one of these lawful predations is different and will require a different strategy. A bad nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security [subsequently this became Kristi Noem, no qualifications governor of North Dakota best known for shooting her dog] is not the same as a corrupt pardon. An executive order implementing Schedule F is not the same as an investigation of a political opponent motivated by animus. And none of these are the same as a tax break to wealthy people passed through a Congress whose Republican majority loves to pass tax breaks for wealthy people and would do it with any Republican president. ...

One final note: There is no single marker of success here. There’s no simple test I can articulate that will tell us we have succeeded. Democracy and the rule of law are not binaries, light switches that get turned on or off. They are more like dimmer switches, which can be turned up or down. The goal here is not to let the dimmer be turned down too low, to not let the light go out, to fight for every lumen, and to do it honestly and with a constant awareness that not all democratic values run in the same direction.

My emphasis.

Friday cat blogging

The local cats get a week off this Friday. But I think someone has taken a hint from them.

I wonder, which would be the candidate, which the publicist? Mio is loud about food. Janeway makes herself annoying around meal times. We are slightly restrictive for fear that the big fellow would balloon if he got all he could eat. Yet I often observe his little friend actually eats most of what we offer. What I won't do is try to referee this ...

We needed some good news ...

Today we learn that The Onion has acquired the defunct hate site Infowars, formerly the property of conspiracy monger Alex Jones. Jones was forced into a court ordered fire sale after Sandy Hook parents won a massive judgement for his lies about their murdered children. 

The sale and acquisition led the San Francisco Chronicle to highlight that the new owner is Jeff Lawson. He's the kind of successful entrepreneur who used to make the city an interesting place before many members of the current generation of tech-bros burned out on ketamine and rightwing fantasies, seeking to use their power to play at politics.

The Onion, and now Infowars, are primarily owned by San Francisco tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson, who is known locally for donating to efforts to fight homelessness and publicly defending the city.

While many of San Francisco’s tech leaders have fled the city in recent years or criticized its troubling street conditions, Lawson has been a notable exception.

The Twilio founder has garnered attention for philanthropic donations to fight homelessness and provide assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April his high-flying tech career took an unexpected turn, as he led a group that bought the fabled Onion website for an undisclosed price, pledging to invest in its growth.

... In 2018, as San Francisco residents debated a business tax to fight homelessness, Lawson publicly supported the  effort, and announced that Twilio was donating $1 million to local homelessness programs. 

A year later, the Lawsons signed the “Giving Pledge,” the initiative backed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage wealthy businessmen and women to donate their fortunes to charity.

That same year, he and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff donated to an effort to bring a homeless shelter to the Embarcadero. 

Two years later, he publicly defended the city as tech entrepreneurs who were fleeing to other cities heaped abuse on it.

“This is the time when we should be thinking about, 'How do we give back? How do we help take care of our communities and the people around us who may not be faring as well? '” he told the Chronicle.

As we drift into Trump's kleptocratic revival of the late 19th century Gilded Age, it's nice to learn that, now as then, some of our robber barons attempt to make themselves somewhat useful to the City.

Musing on a couple of maps

Seven states voted for reproductive freedom -- that's significant. It's particularly good to see Missouri among the places where abortion rights won; at every level, the state is blood red Republican, but women still had their say.

The losses in South Dakota look to have been about strategic/tactical misfires. The Florida loss, where abortion freedom got 57 percent of the vote, came from the state's unusual 60 percent requirement to pass a measure. Look for more GOP states to try to implant that.

But all in all, this was more demonstration that women, of all political inclinations, don't want the state telling us what we may do with our bodies. 

All these initiatives don't make legal abortion safe though. With the Republicans in power across the federal level, it's a sure thing that many of them will come after reproductive health care... To be continued. ...

• • •

Meanwhile, here's a picture of the fact that elections mostly don't end in split verdicts any more. The states in yellow each have one US Senator from each party. The others are solid Blue or Red.

... only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.

Yet there's still some mixing at the presidential level. Michigan, Georgia and Arizona went for the the Reps this time, but they send two Dem Senators to Washington. 

We know why Maine is a mixed bag -- Susan Collins refuses to go away. She's safe until she retires. In 2026, Dem Senators in Georgia and Michigan will be up for re-election. Can Dems put any other states in play? Possibly North Carolina, but winning back the Senate will be a stretch.

Hell yes, grassroots campaigning still counts!

In campaign postmortems, there's the usual angst-filled punditry out there that says nothing the Dems did, and especially nothing the grassroots did, mattered at all. 

Bull-bleep. As the season geared up, I described what we were going to see as a "hot and cold running volunteer" election and I stand by that. Vast numbers of people turned out to do the difficult job of direct voter contact in various forms. That's what happens when people really care and/or feel truly threatened.

And their efforts show up in the results. Where there wasn't much of a Harris-Walz campaign -- in the reliable blue states which saw only national ads and online media -- the shift toward Trump from 2020 was in the 6 percent range. Lots of Dems and Dem leaners didn't vote. But in the battleground states where money was invested and activism thrived, the shift was closer to 3 percent. Still too much obviously, but quite different. Yes, there was a red tide coming in, but some places Democratic (and small "d" democratic) activism came much closer to stemming that tide.

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, sent out an informative message which aims to describe what party efforts, including at the grassroots, meant in his state. Some of what he saw:

... The shift here was just one quarter the size [of the national deficit]: a 1.5% swing from 2020. Not because Trump was weaker here than elsewhere, but because we were stronger.

Thanks to tens of thousands of heroes—our candidates, the campaign, party infrastructure, allies, and volunteers—we persuaded and turned out even more voters for Harris than we did for Biden in 2020. We lost Wisconsin by just 0.9%—the smallest margin of any state in America.

2024 was a high turnout year, second only to 2020 nationwide. But in most states, turnout went down slightly. In Wisconsin, overall turnout went up—by 1.3%, the most in the country. 

He describes the configuration of forces, groups, and miscellaneous people who made up the Wisconsin campaign: 

... Roughly 100,000 volunteers this year took part in the fight in Wisconsin.

The presidential campaign in Wisconsin and the WisDems core team worked together, hand in glove, on a constant basis. That integration was the product of years of work, relationships, and strategy. It was also made possible by the powerhouse Coordinated Campaign. ...

Every one of the 100,000 people who volunteered, including tens of thousands who knocked on doors and made phone calls in Wisconsin this year, helped Tammy Baldwin win Wisconsin, helped make huge gains downballot, and helped ensure that Harris came closer to winning here than any other battleground state.

The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. ... Enormous thanks to all the groups involved in mounting an absolutely blockbuster field and communications operation in Wisconsin. 

Elections rely on a three-legged stool: the candidate campaigns, the party and volunteers—and allied groups. ...

Wikler's picture of the three-legged stool may be particular to Wisconsin. He heads one of the most effective Democratic parties in the country. In much of the country, especially bluer states, the three legged stool of progressive campaigning probably looks more like 1) candidates and party infrastructure of varying quality; 2) union workers where such exist; and 3) para-campaign and civil society groups like Seed the Vote, the ACLU, and enviros who've internalized that they have to play in elections to survive. 

But whatever organizational form that the wider democracy campaign assumes in the future, it will demand what Wikler enjoins:

... we organize in every corner and every community in Wisconsin, year-round.

Under-recognized is that the experiences and connections made when literally millions of people are activated in a campaign changes many of the people who participate. As legendary California organizer Fred Ross asserted: 

No good organizing is ever lost.

The period ahead may seem bleak, but there are a hell of a lot of us, we've seen each other, and we can get organized and feisty.

Ukraine thrown to Putin's mercies

Unlike many of my friends on the generally progressive side of things, I've long believed that US support for the flawed, but democratically legitimate, Ukrainian state was a right action. This is the first US intervention I've supported in a lifetime of rejection of US imperialism, yet support for Ukraine feels the natural continuation of a long trajectory. Russia's war is an imperial war, seeking to subjugate and absorb a people who want the freedom to define their own way. Yes, I'm something of a quasi-pacifist -- but Russia's crimes against an occupied population are heinous and should not be minimized.

The election of Donald Trump presumably means that Ukrainians are to be thrown to Putin's mercies. Europe is unprepared to step up and replace us. This is a crime much akin to western democracies' abandonment in the 1930s of the Second Spanish Republic to Hitler and Mussolini's pet local strongman, Francisco Franco. That betrayal did not slake the appetite of that era's fascists -- this abandonment won't today either. And we in the United States are even less prepared or even able to recover from our folly than we were then. Bad times indeed. 

• • •

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army. He writes a substack of military analysis.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?: The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

... when the combined wealth of NATO’s five biggest members (U.S. Germany, UK, France and Canada) is twenty times that of Russia, and their military outstrips Russia in technology, size and capability, is a searing indictment about the strategic thinking, execution and will in what is currently known as ‘the west’.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

There is an old Chinese saying: strangle the chicken and frighten the monkey. It is a saying that a PLA General used with a friend of mine one time. In essence, if you wish to shape the behavior of a big competitor, attack and destroy a small ally of the competitor.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO ‘strategy’ for Ukraine over the past three years, as well as their strategic impatience and inclination to enter into negotiations with a Russia that has the strategic initiative, means that the West instead has ‘fed the chicken and encouraged the monkey’.

We will regret this. And so, eventually, will our citizens.

• • •

In 2015, the British journalist Tim Judah, veteran observer of too many wars including the agony in the Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s, published In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. This is a little book of vignettes from the early stages of the war between Ukrainians engaged in forming their European national identity and others who supported the continuation of life within the Russian imperial sphere. Long before the Russian invasion of 2022, Judah shed light on the creativity and resilience of so many in this benighted part of the world.

Despite being such a big country, Ukraine, for most of us who live the western part of the continent, is, or was, somewhere not very important. ...The aim of this book is not to record a blow-by-blow account of the events that led to the Maidan revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, or the war that followed. ...

What I thought was that between journalism and academic books there was not much that explained Ukraine, that made it a vibrant place full of people who have something to say and tell us. Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy people were to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think. Often when they started to talk, you could hardly stop them. If we listen to people who can understand why they think what they do, and act the way they do.

In Ukraine ... people have been taken for granted for so long, as voters or taxpayers or bribe payers, that when finally the rotten ship of state springs leaks and begins to list, everyone is shocked. But they should not have been. ... This book is about what I saw, what people told me and also those parts of history that we need to know in order to understand what is happening in Ukraine ...

Judah might not find the same openness to conversation today, two years into a devastating, existential war. Or perhaps he might. Ukraine has long surprised us. We do not know yet how the next chapter plays out.

"I never knew how much they hated us."

That was the conclusion of a brave and brilliant young woman who worked with Erudite Partner on the campaign just concluded.

This was an election which confirmed the existence of a wide gender gap. And for the youngest voting group, this wounds and can morph into righteous rage.

Jessica Valenti, who writes Abortion Every Day, communicates this aspect of our recent catastrophe:

The Fury Gap
Young women were radicalized overnight

If you thought the gender divide was bad before, you haven’t seen anything yet. Donald Trump’s win this week, bolstered by online shitposters and billionaire misogynists, has shifted something fundamental in young women. And while we’ll see plenty of ink spilled in election post-mortems about the online radicalization of young white men—as there should be—it would be a mistake to miss the story of how this election is doing something similar to their female counterparts.

Over the last two days, I’ve watched as young women’s TikToks and social media posts went from inconsolable shock to pure, hot rage. I saw in real time as those in their teens and 20s—some of whom voted for the first time—realized the depths of their country’s disdain for them. 

For those of us in middle age or older, there wasn’t anything revelatory about the election; we’ve lived that betrayal for years. But to understand for the first time that America would rather elect a rapist than a woman is soul-crushing. Even worse: Realizing just how many men voted for Trump not in spite of his sexual predation—but because of it.

As difficult as that epiphany is to bear, it did not take long for this younger generation of women to respond with a resounding fuck that and fuck you. ...

... This is a generation of young women who grew up online, steeped in a world of social media misogyny and trolls who comment on their bodies and demand they “make me a sandwich.” And that’s on top of getting the same lessons that women my age did—told to watch what you wear, when you walk, and who you trust.

So I have to imagine that after a lifetime of being expected to eat shit, waking up on Wednesday morning knowing that the men in your lives voted away your humanity made the decision to leave them behind pretty easy.

Especially considering how many took the mask off immediately after the election was called: Since Tuesday, young men have flooded women’s mentions with “your body, my choice”—a phrase that some even started shouting at little girls at school just a day later.

It’s that Republican-enabled impunity that will keep young women furious. Why put up with even a minute of it? ...

Let's those of us who thought we'd grown beyond having to scrabble to be recognized as fully adult and human in a man's world, figure out how to be there for these young ones who newly feel the pain we hoped we'd put behind us.