Why I Was a Woman Who Oppressed Women
Born assigned female, I had developed into an uncouth, boyish 12-year-old when I suddenly found myself required to wear only dresses and skirts and behave like a lady.
I recently found myself trying — and failing — to explain to someone how I reacted when my mother discovered that extreme traditionalist Catholicism was alive and well, that home-schooling families with more than a dozen children each were modeling it, and that we could join them. I didn’t fight to retain my natural nonbinary identity but instead doubled down on the false identity my mother’s belief system forced on me, and I couldn’t find the right words to help someone else understand why.
But here’s why if I had to be “a true woman” with the role of homemaker, bearer of offspring, and caregiver, I would give over every fiber of my being to it. Not only would I feel safer under the patriarchal power structure if I made it trust and honor me as a shining example of compliance, I saw even more to gain by positioning myself as one of its enforcers.
I wouldn’t have had these words when I was young, nor any way to understand that I was adopting a coping strategy. It worked, in a way. As I married a man I didn’t want, submitted to him, and served as his vessel, I felt less oppressed and more like a “chosen one” with a special purpose.
That feeling of specialness was an illusion, of course, but giving the appearance of full consent to my own brainwashing helped me survive. I value this now as a story that illustrates why members of different marginalized groups start to model their oppressors, actively oppressing themselves and others like them. Taking the oppressor’s side seems like the smart, safe thing to do when you're in that position. You don’t consciously choose it. You do it without realizing that you’re playing a critical role in maintaining the hierarchical structure by making it more complicated and confusing to identify, analyze, and dismantle.
In 2018 I created an interactive digital artwork called “Woman on a Pedestal” to explore this aspect of my history. It contains excerpts from a speech I gave at my graduation in 1995 that was not unlike the commencement address Harrison Butker gave at Benedictine College in Atkinson, Kansas, in May 2024, in which he frames his beliefs about women’s God-given place in society.
Harrison Butker talks about “a woman’s role” from a cisgender male position of power. My speech conveys the same ideas as I am handing over my bodily autonomy to people like Harrison Butker. Instead of letting this create confusion, we can see now how my attempts to gain safety by aligning with my oppressors make the power structure more apparent.
