Rethinking Masculinity: On "How to Be a 'Real' Man" with Lilly Sing and Guest Nikhil Taneja

I am happy to learn about vlogger, Lilly Sing, whose body of work includes her powerful and timely conversations, including this one with Nikhil Taneja on How to Be a 'Real' Man. It’s a refreshingly honest deep dive into the weight of patriarchy—not just as a system that oppresses women and gender-diverse individuals, but as one that also harms men by stifling their emotional expression and humanity. 

Taneja, a writer, producer, and passionate mental health advocate, speaks with raw vulnerability about the crushing expectations of traditional gender roles and how they have shaped—and often warped—his understanding of self.

What stands out is how the episode reframes masculinity not as something fixed or biologically determined, but as a performance enforced through generations of social conditioning. Taneja reflects on how boys are taught to “man up,” to suppress fear, tenderness, and grief—lessons that often calcify into emotional repression. The courage it takes to unlearn this is not trivial. He articulates, with great sensitivity, the very real fear that comes with opening up: fear of being judged, dismissed, or worse, of facing social or even physical retaliation. The vulnerability of which he speaks is not only compelling—it’s transformative.

This episode also serves as a potent counter-narrative to the hypermasculine “bro culture” that continues to dominate media, politics, and everyday life. Such culture glorifies aggression, domination, and emotional detachment, perpetuating a narrow and ultimately destructive vision of what it means to be a man. In contrast, Singh and Taneja offer a liberatory path—one grounded in empathy, critical self-reflection, and emotional truth-telling.

This isn’t just about redefining masculinity; it’s about dismantling the toxic legacies we inherit and forging space for healing. Enough with the narrow prescriptions and hidden rules of culture that are so confining to all. Whether rooted in patriarchy, colonialism, or caste-based expectations, these scripts rob us of our fullness. This conversation is a call to dismantle them—for everyone’s sake. It reminds us that true strength lies not in emotional stoicism but in the radical act of being real—of being human.

-Angela Valenzuela

This episode is for every man who’s ever been told to “man up.”I sat down with writer and mental health advocate Nikhil Taneja to talk about something we don’t talk about enough: how the patriarchy is hurting men too! From emotional repression to performative masculinity, we unpack how outdated ideas of manhood are leaving so many men feeling lost, disconnected, and alone... and what real strength and healing actually look like. We cover: -Why vulnerability is a superpower -What healthy masculinity really looks like -How pop culture has failed our boys -And why men need safe spaces just as much as women do Share this conversation with every boy and man you care about! This episode of Shame Less with Lilly Singh is presented by my charity, Unicorn Island Fund. Follow us for BTS and exclusive snippets that won’t be posted anywhere else:   / unicornisland   Follow Nikhil: https://www.instagram.com/tanejamainh... Follow Lilly:   / lilly  

The Gospel According to Power: White Grievance Politics and Evangelicalism’s Break with Empathy

In their deeply illuminating article for Vox.com, Aja Romano offers a chilling account of how empathy—long a moral bedrock of democratic life and central to Christian teachings—has come under attack from the Christian right.

 Romano traces the phrase “empathy is a sin” from its origins in the theology of Joe Rigney to its broader diffusion across right-wing evangelicalism and into mainstream conservative discourse. What is particularly disturbing is how this narrative recasts compassion for the marginalized—immigrants, trans individuals, people of color—not as a virtue, but as a moral weakness or even a threat. 

Figures like Rigney and Doug Wilson, with long histories of misogyny and white supremacy, argue that empathy becomes sinful when it is “untethered” from so-called biblical truth—a truth they define in rigid, patriarchal, and

"If Empathy IS A Sin, Sin Boldly.” 

exclusionary terms. Through political figures like JD Vance and cultural influencers like Elon Musk, this framing has now entered the secular mainstream, transforming a faith-centered ethic of care into a defense of cruelty disguised as moral clarity.

Romano’s piece resonates powerfully with Tim Alberta’s recent book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (2023), where he details how white evangelical churches have forsaken the Gospel’s call for humility, justice, and mercy in pursuit of political power. 

Alberta shows how this moral unraveling has led to a culture of grievance, racial resentment, and an abandonment of the least among us—precisely those for whom empathy is most needed. 

What Romano calls out as a “demonization of empathy,” Alberta frames as a theological and cultural betrayal, one that undermines the very foundation of democratic life and religious integrity. 

Both authors reveal a broader retreat from shared humanity—a dangerous shift that prioritizes control over compassion, and ideology over justice. This is not just a religious crisis; it is a civic one, with profound consequences for how we live, lead, and care for one another in an increasingly pluralistic society.

All of this is so shameful—and even surreal. I was raised in the Baptist church, and this rejection of empathy is wholly incompatible with the teachings that shaped my upbringing in West Texas. 

This is not sustainable as an ideology. The attack on empathy may serve short-term culture war gains, but it is ultimately counter-productive. Today’s younger generations—more diverse, emotionally aware, and grounded in justice—recognize empathy as essential, not as weakness. As Aja Romano and Tim Alberta both argue, this rejection of compassion reflects not strength, but fear: a desperate attempt to cling to outdated systems of control. 

In a society that is inescapably moving toward greater inclusion and interdependence, any ideology that vilifies empathy cannot build community, sustain institutions, or inspire a just and democratic future. Those clinging to such views may win short-term battles, but they are on the wrong side of history—and of humanity.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Alberta, T. (2023). The kingdom, the power, and the glory: American evangelicals in an age of extremism. Harper.

Christian nationalists decided empathy is a sin. Now it’s gone mainstream. 

What wouldn’t Jesus do?

by Aja Romano

May 22, 2025, 7:00 AM CDT

An older woman and a younger woman hugging one another while sitting in a church pew in a large church with stained glass windows. Getty Images

Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.

It’s a provocative idea: that empathy — that is, putting yourself in another person’s proverbial shoes, and feeling what they feel — is a sin. 

The Bible contains repeated invocations from Jesus to show deep empathy and compassion for others, including complete strangers. He’s very clear on this point. Moreover, Christianity is built around a fundamental act of empathy so radical — Jesus dying for our sins — that it’s difficult to spin as harmful. 

Yet as stunning as it may sound, “empathy is a sin” is a claim that’s been growing in recent years across the Christian right. It was first articulated six years ago by controversial pastor and theologian Joe Rigney, now author of the recently published book, The Sin of Empathy, which has drawn plenty of debate among religious commentators. 

In this construction, empathy is a cudgel that progressives and liberals use to berate and/or guilt-trip Christians into showing empathy to the “wrong” people. 

Had it stayed within the realm of far-right evangelicals, we likely wouldn’t be discussing this strange view of empathy at all. Yet we are living in an age when the Christian right has gained unprecedented power, both sociocultural and political. The increasing overlap between conservative culture and right-leaning tech spaces means that many disparate public figures are all drinking from the same well of ideas — and so a broader, secular version of the belief that empathy is a tool of manipulation has bubbled into the mainstream through influential figures like Elon Musk.

What “empathy is a sin” actually means

The proposition that too much empathy is a bad thing is far from an idea that belongs to the right. On Reddit, which tends to be relatively left-wing, one popular mantra is that you can’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. That is, too much empathy for someone else can erode your own sense of self, leaving you codependent or open to emotional abuse and manipulation. 

That’s a pretty standard part of most relationship and self-help advice — even from some Christian advice authors. But in recent months, the idea that empathy is inherently destructive has not only become a major source of debate among Christians, it’s escaped containment and barreled into the mainstream by way of major media outlets, political figures, and influencers.

The conversation began with an incendiary 2019 essay by Rigney, then a longtime teacher and pastor at a Baptist seminary, in which he introduced “the enticing sin of empathy” and argued that Satan manipulates people through the intense cultural pressure to feel others’ pain and suffering. 

Rigney’s ideas were met with ideological pushback, with one Christian blogger saying it “may be the most unwise piece of pastoral theology I’ve seen in my lifetime.” As his essay incited national debate, Rigney himself grew more controversial, facing allegations of dismissing women and telling one now-former Black congregant at his Minneapolis church that “it wouldn’t be sinful for him to own me & my family today.” (In an email to Vox, Rigney denied the congregant’s version of events.) Rigney also has a longtime affiliation with Doug Wilson, the leader of the Reformed Christian Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. 

IN PRACTICE, WHAT RIGNEY IS TYPICALLY DECRYING IS ANY EMPATHY FOR A LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE OR FOR SOMEONE WHO’S PART OF A MARGINALIZED COMMUNITY.

Now well-known for spreading Christian nationalism, and for allegedly fostering a culture of abuse (allegations he has denied), Wilson’s infamy also comes from his co-authored 1996 essay “Southern Slavery: As It Was,” in which he claimed that “Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.” (“My defense of the South does not make me a racist,” Wilson said in 2003.) Rigney appeared on Wilson’s 2019 podcast series Man Rampant to discuss empathy; their conversation quickly devolved into decrying fake rape allegations and musing that victims of police violence might have “deserved to be shot.” 

In an email, Rigney told me that both he and Wilson developed their similar views on empathy from the therapist and Rabbi Edwin Friedman, whose posthumously published 1999 book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, has influenced not only family therapy but conservative church leadership and thought. In the book, Friedman argues that American society has devalued the self, leading to an emotional regression and a “low pain threshold.” Alongside this he compares “political correctness” to the Inquisition, and frames a “chronically anxious America” as one that is “organize[d] around its most dysfunctional elements,” in which leaders have difficulty making tough decisions. This correlation of emotional weakness with societal excess paved the way for Rigney to frame empathy itself as a dangerous weapon. 

Despite using the incendiary generalization, “empathy is sin,” Rigney told me that it is not all empathy that is sinful, but specifically “untethered empathy.” He describes this as “empathy that is detached or unmoored from reality, from what is good and right.” (An explanation that begs definitions for “reality,” “good,” and “right.”)

“Just as ‘the sin of anger’ refers to unrighteous or ungoverned anger, so the sin of empathy refers to ungoverned, excessive, and untethered empathy,” Rigney told me. This kind of unrestrained empathy, he writes, is a recipe for cultural mayhem. 

In theory, Rigney argues that one should be “tethered” to God’s will and not to Satan. In practice, what Rigney is typically decrying is any empathy for a liberal perspective or for someone who’s part of a marginalized community. When I asked him for a general reconciliation of his views with the Golden Rule, he sent me a response in which he brought up trans identity in order to label it a “fantasy” that contradicts “God-given biological reality,” while misgendering a hypothetical trans person.

The demonization of empathy moves into the mainstream

Despite receiving firm pushback from most religious leaders (and indeed most people) who hear about it, Rigney’s argument has been spreading through the Christian right at large. Last year, conservative personality and author Allie Stuckey published Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, in which she argues that “toxic empathy is a dangerous guide for our decisions, behavior, and public policy” while condemning queer people and feminists. “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary,” Josh McPherson, host of the Christian-centered Stronger Man Nation podcast and an adherent of Wilson and Rigney’s ideas, said in January, in a clip that garnered an outsize amount of attention relative to the podcast episode itself. 

That same month, Vice President JD Vance struck a nerve with a controversial appearance on Fox News in which he seemed to reference both the empathy conversation and the archaic Catholic concept of “ordo amoris,” meaning “the order of love.” As Vance put it, it’s the idea that one’s family should come before anyone else: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country,” he said. “And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” In a follow-up on X, he posted, “the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.” 

Vance’s statements received backlash from many people, including both the late Pope Francis and then-future Pope Leo XIV — but the controversy just drove the idea further into the mainstream. As part of the odd crossover between far-right religion and online reactionaries, it picked up surprising alliances along the way, including evolutionary biologist turned far-right gadfly Gad Saad. In January, Saad, applying a survival-of-the-fittest approach to our emotions, argued against “suicidal empathy,” which he described as “the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets.” (Who are the wrong targets according to Saad? Trans women and immigrants.)

In a February appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk explicitly referenced Saad but went even further, stating, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy — the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization” — the “they” here being the left wing. “I think empathy is good,” Musk added, “but you need to think it through, and not just be programmed like a robot.” 

By March, mainstream media had noticed the conversation. David French had observed the “strange spectacle” of the Christian turn against empathy in a column for the New York Times. In April, a deep-dive in the Guardian followed. That same month, a broad-ranging conversation in the New Yorker with Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, led to interviewer Isaac Chotiner pressing him about why empathy is bad. The discussion, of deported Venezuelan immigrants wrongfully suspected of having gang tattoos, led to Mohler saying that “there’s no reason anyone other than a gang member should have that tattoo.” (Among the tattoos wrongly flagged as gang symbols were the words “Mom” and “Dad” on the wrists of one detainee.)

The pro-empathy backlash is fierce 

The connective tissue across all these disparate anti-empathy voices is two-fold, according to Christian scholar Karen Swallow Prior. Prior, an anti-abortion ethicist and former longtime Liberty University professor, singled out the argument’s outsize emphasis on attacking very small, very vulnerable groups — as well as the moment in which it’s all happening.

“The entire discourse around empathy is backlash against those who are questioning the authority of those in power,” she told me, “not coincidentally emerging in a period where we have a rise in recognition of overly controlling and narcissistic leaders, both in and outside the church.” Those people “understand and appreciate empathy the least.”

“Trump made it okay to not be okay with culture,” Peter Bell, co-creator and producer of the Sons of Patriarchy podcast, which explores longstanding allegations of emotional and sexual abuse against Doug Wilson’s Christ Church, told me. (Wilson has denied that the church has a culture of abuse or coercion.) “He made it kind of cool for Christians to be jerks,” Bell said. “He made the unspoken things spoken, the whispered things shouted out loud.”

Prior believes that the argument won’t have a long shelf life because Rigney’s idea is so convoluted. Yet she added that it’s born out of toxic masculinity, in an age where stoicism, traditionally male-coded, is increasingly part of the regular cultural diet of men via figures like Jordan Peterson. That hypermasculinity goes hand in hand with evangelical culture, and with the ideas Rigney borrowed from Friedman about too many emotions being a weakness. In this framing, emotion becomes non-masculine by default — i.e., feminine.

“EVERYBODY’S SUPPOSED TO HAVE SYMPATHY FOR THE WHITE MALE, BUT WHEN YOU SHOW EMPATHY TO ANYONE ELSE, SUDDENLY EMPATHY IS A SIN.” -KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR, CHRISTIAN SCHOLAR

That leads us to the grimmest part of Rigney’s “untethered empathy” claims: the way he explicitly genders it — and demonizes it — as feminine. Throughout his book, he argues that women are more empathetic than men, and that as a result, they are more prone to giving into it as a sin. It’s an inherently misogynistic view that undermines women’s decision-making and leadership abilities. 

Though Rigney pushed back against this characterization in an email to me, arguing that critics have distorted what he views as merely “gendered tendencies and susceptibility to particular temptations,” he also couldn’t help reinforcing it. “[F]emale tendencies, like male tendencies, have particular dangers, temptations, and weaknesses,” he wrote. Women thus should recognize this and “take deliberate, Spirit-wrought action to resist the impulse to become a devouring HR department that wants to run the world.”

As Prior explains, though, Rigney’s just fine with a mythic national human resources department, as long as it supports the status quo. “Everybody’s supposed to have sympathy for the white male,” she said, “but when you show empathy to anyone else, suddenly empathy is a sin.”

What’s heartening is that, whether they realize what kind of dangerous extremism undergirds it, most people aren’t buying Rigney’s “empathy is sin” claim. Across the nation, in response to Rigney’s assertion, the catchphrase, “If empathy is a sin, then sin boldly” has arisen, as heard in pulpits, seen on church marquees, and worn on T-shirts — a reminder that it takes much more than the semantic whims of a few extremists to shake something most people hold in their hearts.

Friends,

On the topic of feminism and Beyoncé's personal evolution, read this brilliant piece by Janet Mock in defense of her feminism when she received the MTv Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award in 2014 where the word, "feminist" appeared unapologetically in the background.  Mock refers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2012 Ted Talk titled, "We should all be feminists," as something that perhaps Beyoncé viewed in her own exploration of it when exploring whether she was a "feminist," a term that for some, is inconsistent with "girly" representations of gender that could structure Beyoncé out of being one.

This brought to mind the words of Chicana feminist poet and friend, Vangie Vigil, who said that during the feminist movement of the early 1970s, she was criticized for wearing makeup. She responded critically to that view by insisting on her Indigenous ancestry as legitimating her choice to apply "war paint" as protection with the act of putting on makeup being a ceremonial act to prepare for yet another day of battle. That has forever stayed with me as I think of my own morning rituals and the importance of "me time" and my own daily and lifelong preparation for the day, together with my ongoing pursuit of the sacred harmony.

The best quote for me from Mock's essay that grapples with Beyoncé's own brand of feminism is the following:

"Among my duties as a feminist will be to protect our freedom to self-identify.  Our duty is not to police feminists, our duty is to use feminism as a tool to check systems that uphold racism and slut shaming and sex worker erasure and anti-trans woman bias and general policing of other people’s choices."

I'll interject here that It was fascinating in Kamala Harris' speech last week, that she never mentioned that when elected on November 5—I do anticipate that she'll win—that she'd be the first female U.S. president. Perhaps this is beyond obvious and is something that everybody knows. 

At least to me, what's cool is that it doesn't feel like the "elephant in the room" that must be expressed quietly in the kitchen or a private living area even if in some American homes, this is a source of strife. Most positively, I see this as a long-awaited and hard-fought cultural shift made possible by decades of activism, feminist knowledge production, and the persistent efforts of those who have challenged the patriarchal status quo. 

Did y'all see the movie, "Barbie," by the way? I highly recommend it. I'm hoping that the word, "patriarchy," is now etched into the American psyche as a major problem of society with notions of femininity and masculinity that impede progress and freedom. Treat yourselves to America Ferrera's iconic Barbie speech that sums up the central points of the movie.

What is also possible is that Kamala Harris has deliberately opted to not make this a campaign focus and in so doing, reshaping feminism in politics. Who cares about her clothes and wardrobe style beyond acknowledging that she is a very attractive woman and candidate for office atop being a lovely human being who speaks of, and manifests, joy? Geez, how refreshing!

As Mock and Adichie note, it's what we do to challenge systems of oppression that matter most, beginning with letting people be who they are. So yes, as Tim Walz says, "Mind your own damn business," but let's also continue to work toward a more just and caring world that respects and honors our differences, beginning in and with our own families and community. 

As we are all increasingly interconnected within the vast web of humanity on this planet called "Earth," we need each other now more than ever. And Mother Earth wants for this healing to be so, as well. A fresh reconciliation that brings redemptive ways of knowing and being in the world is good for the planet. 

And yes, we should all be feminists. Period.

-Angela Valenzuela

My Feminist Awakening: Beyonce’s Political Declaration by Janet Mock

I have a reluctant relationship to labels, especially when I feel forced to clothe myself in them to signify my identity. James Baldwin created this beautiful line about identity that I included in my book which speaks closely to how I feel about labels: “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.”

Trepidation is a solid word to describe my feelings surrounding terms like activist, spokesperson and feminist. I remember bell hooks, one of the most widely read black feminist thinkers, reading an interview I gave to Bitch magazine, in which I boldly state that I don’t personally identify as a feminist. Immediately, she called me for a longer explanation.

Was that a misquote? she asked. No, I said. Why aren’t you a feminist? she pushed. I told her that I felt I wanted to push past labels. Labels were given to me without my consent ever since birth. She asked me why I embraced trans to qualify my womanhood. I told her I believe it’s a political statement for me to declare that nothing is wrong with being a woman who is trans, and I chose trans because it was mine. She then pushed, “To say you’re a feminist is a political statement. So why not feminist?” Simply, I said, I never felt like feminist was mine as I felt that black and trans and writer and woman belonged to me, and as a black trans woman writer I never felt like I was centered by feminism. I never felt it was created for or by me.

“Well, I say it’s for you. It’s yours so claim it!” bell said before ending the call.

That conversation served as a catalyst for my own excavation as to why I was reluctant to embrace the term. And as every pop culture-soaked headline has claimed recently I am not alone in my reluctance. Many women of my generation are on similar journeys with the term feminist, from Lady Gaga to Shailene Woodley and Taylor Swift (who actually has since experienced her own feminist awakening, thanks to pal Lena Dunham). And even my own teen idol Beyonce Knowles had qualms about the label when British Vogue asked her if she was a feminist in spring 2013.

“I don’t know,” Beyonce said. “That word can be very extreme. But I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality. I do believe in equality and that we have a ways to go and it’s something that’s pushed aside and something that we have been conditioned to accept. But I’m happily married. I love my husband.”

Often, I wonder if it was the sound-biting of that interview (specifically her use of “very extreme” and the myth that marriage is something feminists rally against) that led Beyonce to research the term feminist, and I wonder if her research led her to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists” and if Adichie’s reciting of the dictionary’s definition of feminist (a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes) enabled the singer to say, yes, I can be a happily-married, bootylicious mama who believes in equality, yearns to be successful and sexy and calls herself a feminist — and this is flawless and I am going to sample Adichie’s words in my new song.

Since her self-titled album was released in December, I have seen the totality of that album as Beyonce’s feminist awakening, in which she boldly defines herself for herself — and for us all — a task which Audre Lorde reminds us is vital.

Last Sunday, I watched the MTV Video Music Awards solely because Beyonce was performing and would receive the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award (MTVs version of a lifetime achievement award). I was one of the fans live-tweeting, re-centering Beyonce with the hashtag #BeyMAs. But what I did not expect was for Beyonce to center herself, literally, as a feminist during her 16-minute performance. In a culture in which young women seem more and more apprehensive about the image, meaning and importance of feminism, Beyonce provided a mainstream audience and millennials everywhere with a clear definition of feminist, provided by Adichie whose words flashed behind an assembly line of women before FEMINIST overtook the background as Beyonce took her foreground.

To say I was emboldened by this image would be an understatement. It became the crescendo in my own feminist soundtrack, sparked by my conversation with bell months earlier. As a fan who grew up in front of the television with pop stars, VJs, and sitcom characters serving as my playmates, Beyonce was my No. 1 friend-in-my-head. On that VMAs Sunday, I watched Beyonce journey from Destiny’s Child to solo star, from Single Lady to wife and mother, from Independent Woman to feminist cultural icon. I cherished my relationship with Beyonce so much that I dedicated Chapter 14 of Redefining Realness to relay what Destiny’s Child and Beyonce meant to my coming-of-age and search for identity as a teenager.

Pop culture may be dismissed as lowbrow, but to me it is the culture that matters most. Popular culture helped raise me.

Beyonce Knowles and bell hooks and Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde carried me towards claiming feminist as my own, as one garment in which I drape my body to navigate this world. Feminist speaks to me because those women and their work have always spoken to me, and these are women who choose to wear this label and claim it as theirs.

But bell and Barbara and Audre have feminist cred, their work and commitment to feminism stands on solid ground, but Beyonce’s feminist awakening and stance has been widely questioned. Partly, it’s because she appears to be at the beginning of her journey. Partly it’s because her intentions are framed as a marketing ploy. Largely, it’s because her work is not viewed as “serious” work. Pop culture is never framed as a matter that matters. She’s often dismissed because her work exists outside the bounds of academia, outside the gravitas of letters, and solidly based in entertainment, media and music. I am in my 30s and was emboldened by Beyonce’s feminist stance on that stage, and can’t help but believe that that image will be equally as powerful to young people who witness that moment, whose first engagement with feminism will be that moment. Maybe, just maybe, Beyonce will serve as the bridge between pop culture and feminists like bell and Barbara and Audre, maybe some young woman bobbing her head to “Blow” or “Partition” or “Flawless” will do so while reading Ain’t I A Woman? or Homegirls or Sister Outsider.

So I applaud Beyonce and her feminist stance, a declaration of her own independence as a leotard-wearing, butt cheek-baring, Blue Ivy-toting, equal pay-advocating, Independent Woman-saluting, imperfect flawless feminist. And I thank her and our feminist foremothers for fortifying my own declaration as a feminist. Among my duties as a feminist will be to protect our freedom to self-identify. I believe we waste much of our efforts policing one another — one of the many workings of patriarchy is to busy us with policing each other’s choices rather than protecting them. Our duty is not to police feminists, our duty is to use feminism as a tool to check systems that uphold racism and slut shaming and sex worker erasure and anti-trans woman bias and general policing of other people’s choices.

Because of Beyonce, because of Audre, because of bell, because of Barbara and their feminist stances I no longer feel as if feminism is not for me. I will wear my feminism proudly as a crop top-wearing, curly hair-teasing, pop culture-obsessed, sex worker-embracing, LGBTQ-championing black feminist woman writer.

ps: I am not here for folks saying that a feminist owning her sexuality and adorning her body in clothes she chooses, makes her less of a feminist. The clip below is from AM Tonight, but I point you to Beyonce’s own defense: “[Being empowered] is exactly why I can [wear those outfits]!

Oaxaca's Third Gender—"Las Muxes: El Tercer Género de Oaxaca" [YouTube Video]

As we think in our own country of trans and LGBTQ rights, "Las Muxes" [pronounced 'MOO-ches'] from the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico—and specifically from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—remind us that gender is not only fluid but an unquestioned, accepted part of life in different parts of the world. Moreover, this is hardly a phenomenon that derives from our ostensibly "woke" moment, but is Indigenous and centuries old, predating Columbus' invasion of the Americas. 

I am readily reminded of Two-Spirit peoples and ways of knowing and being in Native North America about which there is a growing scholarly literature (e.g., Robinson, 2020). In short, what is today considered by some to be divergent is actually native to this continent. How cool is that?

If you listen below to the YouTube video (in Spanish), you learn that las Muxes are born into male bodies, but do not identify as men. Nor do they identify as women. Nor are they transexuals, transvestites, or homosexuals. Instead, they are considered a "tercer género," or "third gender." Their dream is to marry heterosexual men which is not easily achieved.

They live dignified lives in the context of their own community and society. As expressed by one of them, their primary problem occurs with respect to Mexican government policies that disallow them to attend secondary schools and to otherwise get formally educated. 

This becomes salient at the secondary level because it is by the age of 12 or 13 when they come into an awareness of their gender and schools don't allow them to dress like girls or women. Consequently, they are forced to take up roles associated with the care of the home and assisting with community festivities. They get relegated to gendered occupational roles like seamstresses, weavers, cooks, hair stylists, and so on. Moreover, the state's reinforcement of rigid gender identities constructs a specific kind of gender identity that alienates and excludes them from educational opportunities and that further lead to discrimination. sexual violence, and exploitation.

A text I've not read about the Muxe but quickly found is this one, researched by a former professor of mine, Dr. Alfredo Mirandé, titled, Behind the Mask: Gender Hybridity in a Zapotec Community (2019). There is also this wonderful movie on Netflix that embraces the complexities of Muxe identity titled. The Secret of the River (El Secreto del Rio) that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Scholars like Maria Lugones urge us in the modern era to consider gender from the perspective of how people that have been colonized, struggled historically not solely with the rigidity of gender categories introduced by Western European colonizers, but also how the introduction of race in the 1500s erased not solely the complex, situated understandings of gender throughout the Americas, but women themselves. 

With echoes of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?," Indigenous notions of gender were subjected to a system of racial classification that justified slavery, conquest, and all manner or racial and sexual violence. We live today the vestiges of that horrible history to which patriarchy is obsessively invested.

Before we construe this as a battle between the sexes, let's understand that patriarchal violence is as harmful to men as it is to women, if not more so. Personally, I find this liberating and fully compatible with our most powerful religious and spiritual traditions that center notions of love and acceptance, particularly, of those deemed "other," in a shared quest for a world where all diversity is embraced simultaneously with the notion that all human beings—by virtue of being human—are intrinsically worthy of dignity and respect.

Do view the video. Thanks to Dr. Martha Lengeling for sharing.

Happy pride month!

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186-219.

Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742-759.

Mirandé, A. (2017). Behind the mask: Gender hybridity in a Zapotec community. University of Arizona Press.

Robinson, M. (2020) Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity, Journal of Homosexuality, 67:12, 1675-1690.

Truth, S. (1851). Speech at women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric (s), 144-146. [pdf]

Sermon on "Abortion, Female Personhood and why Pro-Choice is Consistent with the Bible," by Texas State Rep. James Talarico

Friends:

Good morning. Happy Monday!

I am so inspired by Texas State Rep. Talarico's sermon that argues for women's full personhood instead of the second-class status that the denial of reproductive rights signifies.

I couldn't agree more Rep. Talarico's mother's perspective that "Women can never be free until they belong to themselves."

So much wisdom and clarity here. Thanks to George Hornedo for sending this video and message appearing below.

-Angela Valenzuela

***

Rep. James Talarico, the Texas Legislature’s youngest member, just posted a video of a sermon he gave at his hometown congregation in Texas. Rep. Talarico, currently in ministerial school, argued that Jesus Christ was a radical feminist and the Bible is a pro-choice document.

Rep. Talarico shot onto the national stage last year during the Texas Democratic quorum break in

opposition to voter suppression legislation when he challenged Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s lies in a primetime interview. Earlier this year, his speech to the Texas State Democratic Party went viral again as he called out national Democrats for "spineless talking points & soulless fundraising emails." Beto O’Rourke recently called him "the best politician working in the Texas Legislature right now." 

Rep. Talarico is available to talk about his sermon, fighting for a pro-choice Texas, and his role as the youngest member of the Texas State Legislature. Please reach out if you have interest in connecting with Rep. Talarico.

Watch the video here. Read the thread:

“This summer, more than half our population became second-class citizens. 

Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the State. 

And nothing is more un-Christian.” [...]

“The only way we can allow an embryo’s rights to trump a woman’s rights is if we believe a woman is not a full person—which has been the default belief for most of human history.”

“Being Christian and being pro-choice are absolutely consistent because Christianity is a feminist religion.” [...]

“When a mob of men threatened to stone a woman for adultery, Jesus called out their hypocrisy.

When a bleeding woman begged for help in a bustling crowd, Jesus stopped to heal her.

When a young woman wanted to do theology instead of housework, Jesus honored her choice.” [...]

“Jesus famously summed up his teachings into two commandments: love God and love neighbor. 

He gave no preconditions, no qualifications, no exceptions. 

Love thy neighbor regardless of race, class, or gender.” [...]

“The story of Mary is my favorite story in all of scripture…

We only have Jesus because a woman consented to creating him. 

The story of Jesus begins with a single, simple, extraordinary act of feminism.” [...]

Faith is deeply personal. And your beliefs might not be the same as mine. 

That's why we have a separation of church and state—no government can keep you from expressing your religion or force you to express theirs.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about our faith. [...]

For too long, pro-choice Christians have allowed anti-choice Christians to take over our faith and our country.

On this Sunday before Election Day, we must speak up.

Vote your values on Tuesday.