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The Emotional Toll of Living With Institutional Betrayal
Written by Soraya Chemaly | Originally published by Dame Magazine - (source) | February 23, 2026 | 7 minutes | Fisked 2 times
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“I have a sick feeling in my stomach all the time,” a friend said to me at dinner last week.“I’m having trouble sleeping,” said another during a recent work phone call.“And I’m so, so angry.”Within minutes of looking at social media, on any given day, my feed is filled with people expressing similar sentiments: disgust, contempt, fear, rage, sadness, and outrage.We have been going through a wash-rinse-repeat cycle of egregious harm, institutional denial, and evidence of impunity.
The past several weeks, the primary catalyst for people’s heightened despair has been exposure to the horrifying contents—text, photographs, videos—of newly released Epstein files, coming fast on the heels of deadly ICE encounters in Minneapolis.These, in turn, sit on top of years of live-streamed genocidal wars, scenes of mass starvation, gruesome stories of sexual violence, and other widespread crises.
How could Jeffrey Epstein’s vicious crimes, his elite network, and the near-total lack of accountability on display not traumatize the public?How could watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement tear families apart, detain children, and cause preventable deaths—all while government officials deny, deflect, and attack critics—not break something in us?
Images of sexual violence against children, racist policing, family separation, and mass killing aren’t simply “news” or “content” that informs us, but rather knowledge that is rewiring us.The triggers might differ, but the wounds inflicted by the content we are consuming are the same: emotional distress and plunging people into the risk of trauma—insidious, secondary, and vicarious—and, for millions, re-traumatization.These responses aren’t aberrations; they’re humane and predictable responses to witnessing horrors.
When Protectors Become Perpetrators
In many ways, what we are all living through today is made legible by two events that took place in 2005.In March of that year, the Palm Beach police department began investigating Epstein after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported he’d molested her at his home.This was the beginning of the first major criminal investigation into Epstein’s crimes, ultimately leading to his 2006 arrest and his now infamous 2008 plea deal.
That same year, Dr. Jennifer Freyd published a paper that would lead to her theory of “institutional betrayal,” as an extension of betrayal trauma theory.While interpersonal traumatic events are often the most harmful, those that involve betrayal of a trusted or depended upon relationship or institution are uniquely harmful.It’s no surprise that her work centered on the experiences of victims of sexual violence.
The failure of trusted institutions to do what we expect them to — keep people safe, protect them, hold bad actors accountable — deepens trauma and its costs to individuals and collectives by eviscerating social trust.The trauma stems not only from interpersonal violence but also from the awareness that a collective body purporting to be just and protective is the opposite, instead more likely to punish the vulnerable than to help them.
DARVO: The Favorite Weapon of Institutional Self-Protection
Freyd’s work also led her to another concept with incredible value and usefulness today, DARVO.DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.It’s a pattern Freyd identified in how perpetrators of violence respond when confronted.However, institutions also use this strategy, and they often have more power and resources, allowing them to be more effective than individuals.
Today, DARVO is a weapon wielded against the public by people and institutions meant to represent and protect us as citizens.The handling of the Epstein files, for instance, follows the classic abuser’s playbook identified by Freyd: the obstruction, and then slow-walk, of selectively redacted release of information (Deny); the constant discrediting and threatening of survivors (Attack); the protection of powerful men’s identities, reputations, and privacy (Reverse Victim and Offender).Asymmetrical power and the government’s use of “transparency” have exposed victims’ identities while masking those of the powerful.At various points, their names.Faces.Bodies.Addresses.Families.
This is what a system protecting itself does.DARVO, in the Epstein case, has consistently made victims the face of the crimes and ensured that the network that enabled Epstein remains an abstract force.
For many women, especially women of color who have never had the luxury of trusting these systems in the first place, the Epstein situation is confirming our worldview.The distress we are feeling isn’t borne of surprise or even outrage, but deep grief and rage.It’s the exhausting weight of living in a world that continues to tell women that we don’t matter, not even as children.What the Epstein case is doing, however, is showing many more people that the men most likely to talk about protecting “their” girls and women are the ones most likely to feel entitled to do to girls and women whatever they please.
What This Does to All of Us
I’ve focused this piece on the dynamics of the Epstein case, but the same patterns apply to ICE killings, racist policing violence, xenophobic expulsions, government abandonment of the most vulnerable people in our society, the course of genocidal wars around the world, and more.All represent forms of institutional betrayal and of moral injury: having to act in ways that violate your ethics and morality.
Moral injury and institutional betrayal aren’t abstract concepts.They are visceral, existential challenges that result from our experience of a shift in our worldview.The experience of a slow-motion dismantling of our social trust has a specific pattern: Dread.Anger.Alienation.Despair.Disgust.Hopelessness.Apathy.Resignation.Outrage.Shame.Fear.Endless discussions of Epstein’s network abusing minors, coupled with no major accountability for perpetrators or enablers, leave the public feeling vulnerable to, trapped in, and complicit with broken systems.
For Black and Brown Americans, Indigenous people, working class people, and many others, institutional betrayal and moral injury are not new realizations or experiences.They are realities that no one can afford to ignore.History is the proof.What history will this episode shed light on?
The Antidote: Institutional Courage
The perpetual risk of institutional betrayal and moral injury is that we become exhausted and withdraw from civic life and stop demanding change and accountability.If your vote doesn’t matter, if your outrage changes nothing, if the powerful always win, why stay engaged?
The antidote to institutional betrayal, Freyd writes, is institutional courage, a concept she has built an organization and expanding community around.Freyd identifies specific approaches, policies, and actions designed to restore trust and deliver justice.Valuing whistleblowers.Respond sensitively to disclosures and centering victims.Bear witness, being accountable, and apologizing.Going beyond simple compliance.Engage in constant self-review.Genuine transparency.Committing real and meaningful resources: budgets, full-time staff, and time.
The problem, however, is that many of these assume there are people within institutions with the power to fight for what is right.It’s an assumption we cannot make.Contexts where institutions are the perpetrators of violence represent, in Freyd’s terms, Institutional Betrayal by Commission.Think, for example, of police brutality, the damage of government negligence, and systemic sexual violence.These require a fundamental dismantling and re-envisioning of institutional identity.This looks like truth and reconciliation, reparations, independent investigations, people losing power, and the end of public gaslighting.It might mean abolition.
In today’s political environment, however, these outcomes are even more difficult.Institutional courage is the remedy, but institutional capture requires qualitatively different interventions and, sometimes, institutional abolition.The question now is not only, “How do we make institutions better?”but “Do these institutions deserve to exist in their current form?”Ask any prison abolitionist how they came to their work.The courage required takes political will.
For members of the public, courage now means not only pressing institutions, but shifting people, money, time, and attention to exerting massive external, public pressure on captured institutions.It means not giving up on the fact that powerful people should and will face consequences.It means becoming trangressive in the understanding that the institutions we rely on don’t represent us or our interests.
We have the capacity to envision what it means to build new practices and systems that can deliver accountability from the outside: independent investigations, preserving data and information that might disappear, protecting witnesses, whistleblowers, and survivors.New social contracts that ensure justice and mean that when consequences are necessary, they are commensurate with the severity of harms to individuals and to society.
We can’t let institutions that have failed us and are complicit in widespread injustices overwhelm us to the degree that we stop expecting and demanding change.Institutional courage never actually starts with institutions, but with people’s stubborn refusal to look away and insistence that the truth still has the power to change the world.
Before you go, we hope you’ll consider supporting DAME’s journalism.
Today, just tiny number of corporations and billionaire owners are in control the news we watch and read.That influence shapes our culture and our understanding of the world.But at DAME, we serve as a counterbalance by doing things differently.We’re reader funded, which means our only agenda is to serve our readers.No both sides, no false equivalencies, no billionaire interests.Just our mission to publish the information and reporting that help you navigate the most complex issues we face.
But to keep publishing, stay independent and paywall free for all, we urgently need more support.During our Spring Membership drive, we hope you’ll join the community helping to build a more equitable media landscape with a monthly membership of just $5.00 per month or one-time gift in any amount.
The Emotional Toll of Living With Institutional Betrayal
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Abuse, denial, and political impunity are eroding social trust and creating cognitive dissonance. What is the antidote?
Soraya ChemalyFeb 12, 2026
This article was made possible because of the generous support of DAME members. We urgently need your help to keep publishing. Please join us for as little as $1.00 a month or make a one-time gift in any amount!
“I have a sick feeling in my stomach all the time,” a friend said to me at dinner last week. “I’m having trouble sleeping,” said another during a recent work phone call. “And I’m so, so angry.” Within minutes of looking at social media, on any given day, my feed is filled with people expressing similar sentiments: disgust, contempt, fear, rage, sadness, and outrage. We have been going through a wash-rinse-repeat cycle of egregious harm, institutional denial, and evidence of impunity.
The past several weeks, the primary catalyst for people’s heightened despair has been exposure to the horrifying contents—text, photographs, videos—of newly released Epstein files, coming fast on the heels of deadly ICE encounters in Minneapolis. These, in turn, sit on top of years of live-streamed genocidal wars, scenes of mass starvation, gruesome stories of sexual violence, and other widespread crises.
How could Jeffrey Epstein’s vicious crimes, his elite network, and the near-total lack of accountability on display not traumatize the public? How could watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement tear families apart, detain children, and cause preventable deaths—all while government officials deny, deflect, and attack critics—not break something in us?
Images of sexual violence against children, racist policing, family separation, and mass killing aren’t simply “news” or “content” that informs us, but rather knowledge that is rewiring us. The triggers might differ, but the wounds inflicted by the content we are consuming are the same: emotional distress and plunging people into the risk of trauma—insidious, secondary, and vicarious—and, for millions, re-traumatization. These responses aren’t aberrations; they’re humane and predictable responses to witnessing horrors.
When Protectors Become Perpetrators
In many ways, what we are all living through today is made legible by two events that took place in 2005. In March of that year, the Palm Beach police department began investigating Epstein after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported he’d molested her at his home. This was the beginning of the first major criminal investigation into Epstein’s crimes, ultimately leading to his 2006 arrest and his now infamous 2008 plea deal.
That same year, Dr. Jennifer Freyd published a paper that would lead to her theory of “institutional betrayal,” as an extension of betrayal trauma theory. While interpersonal traumatic events are often the most harmful, those that involve betrayal of a trusted or depended upon relationship or institution are uniquely harmful. It’s no surprise that her work centered on the experiences of victims of sexual violence.
The failure of trusted institutions to do what we expect them to — keep people safe, protect them, hold bad actors accountable — deepens trauma and its costs to individuals and collectives by eviscerating social trust. The trauma stems not only from interpersonal violence but also from the awareness that a collective body purporting to be just and protective is the opposite, instead more likely to punish the vulnerable than to help them.
DARVO: The Favorite Weapon of Institutional Self-Protection
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Freyd’s work also led her to another concept with incredible value and usefulness today, DARVO. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a pattern Freyd identified in how perpetrators of violence respond when confronted. However, institutions also use this strategy, and they often have more power and resources, allowing them to be more effective than individuals.
Today, DARVO is a weapon wielded against the public by people and institutions meant to represent and protect us as citizens. The handling of the Epstein files, for instance, follows the classic abuser’s playbook identified by Freyd: the obstruction, and then slow-walk, of selectively redacted release of information (Deny); the constant discrediting and threatening of survivors (Attack); the protection of powerful men’s identities, reputations, and privacy (Reverse Victim and Offender). Asymmetrical power and the government’s use of “transparency” have exposed victims’ identities while masking those of the powerful. At various points, their names. Faces. Bodies. Addresses. Families.
This is what a system protecting itself does. DARVO, in the Epstein case, has consistently made victims the face of the crimes and ensured that the network that enabled Epstein remains an abstract force.
For many women, especially women of color who have never had the luxury of trusting these systems in the first place, the Epstein situation is confirming our worldview. The distress we are feeling isn’t borne of surprise or even outrage, but deep grief and rage. It’s the exhausting weight of living in a world that continues to tell women that we don’t matter, not even as children. What the Epstein case is doing, however, is showing many more people that the men most likely to talk about protecting “their” girls and women are the ones most likely to feel entitled to do to girls and women whatever they please.
What This Does to All of Us
I’ve focused this piece on the dynamics of the Epstein case, but the same patterns apply to ICE killings, racist policing violence, xenophobic expulsions, government abandonment of the most vulnerable people in our society, the course of genocidal wars around the world, and more. All represent forms of institutional betrayal and of moral injury: having to act in ways that violate your ethics and morality.
Moral injury and institutional betrayal aren’t abstract concepts. They are visceral, existential challenges that result from our experience of a shift in our worldview. The experience of a slow-motion dismantling of our social trust has a specific pattern: Dread. Anger. Alienation. Despair. Disgust. Hopelessness. Apathy. Resignation. Outrage. Shame. Fear. Endless discussions of Epstein’s network abusing minors, coupled with no major accountability for perpetrators or enablers, leave the public feeling vulnerable to, trapped in, and complicit with broken systems.
For Black and Brown Americans, Indigenous people, working class people, and many others, institutional betrayal and moral injury are not new realizations or experiences. They are realities that no one can afford to ignore. History is the proof. What history will this episode shed light on?
The Antidote: Institutional Courage
The perpetual risk of institutional betrayal and moral injury is that we become exhausted and withdraw from civic life and stop demanding change and accountability. If your vote doesn’t matter, if your outrage changes nothing, if the powerful always win, why stay engaged?
The antidote to institutional betrayal, Freyd writes, is institutional courage, a concept she has built an organization and expanding community around. Freyd identifies specific approaches, policies, and actions designed to restore trust and deliver justice. Valuing whistleblowers. Respond sensitively to disclosures and centering victims. Bear witness, being accountable, and apologizing. Going beyond simple compliance. Engage in constant self-review. Genuine transparency. Committing real and meaningful resources: budgets, full-time staff, and time.
The problem, however, is that many of these assume there are people within institutions with the power to fight for what is right. It’s an assumption we cannot make. Contexts where institutions are the perpetrators of violence represent, in Freyd’s terms, Institutional Betrayal by Commission. Think, for example, of police brutality, the damage of government negligence, and systemic sexual violence. These require a fundamental dismantling and re-envisioning of institutional identity. This looks like truth and reconciliation, reparations, independent investigations, people losing power, and the end of public gaslighting. It might mean abolition.
In today’s political environment, however, these outcomes are even more difficult. Institutional courage is the remedy, but institutional capture requires qualitatively different interventions and, sometimes, institutional abolition. The question now is not only, “How do we make institutions better?” but “Do these institutions deserve to exist in their current form?” Ask any prison abolitionist how they came to their work. The courage required takes political will.
For members of the public, courage now means not only pressing institutions, but shifting people, money, time, and attention to exerting massive external, public pressure on captured institutions. It means not giving up on the fact that powerful people should and will face consequences. It means becoming trangressive in the understanding that the institutions we rely on don’t represent us or our interests.
We have the capacity to envision what it means to build new practices and systems that can deliver accountability from the outside: independent investigations, preserving data and information that might disappear, protecting witnesses, whistleblowers, and survivors. New social contracts that ensure justice and mean that when consequences are necessary, they are commensurate with the severity of harms to individuals and to society.
We can’t let institutions that have failed us and are complicit in widespread injustices overwhelm us to the degree that we stop expecting and demanding change. Institutional courage never actually starts with institutions, but with people’s stubborn refusal to look away and insistence that the truth still has the power to change the world.
Before you go, we hope you’ll consider supporting DAME’s journalism.
Today, just tiny number of corporations and billionaire owners are in control the news we watch and read. That influence shapes our culture and our understanding of the world. But at DAME, we serve as a counterbalance by doing things differently. We’re reader funded, which means our only agenda is to serve our readers. No ads, no both sides, no false equivalencies, no billionaire interests. Just our mission to publish the information and reporting that help you navigate the most complex issues we face.
But to keep publishing, stay independent and paywall-free for all, we urgently need more support. During our Spring Membership drive, we hope you’ll join the community helping to build a more equitable media landscape with a monthly membership for as little as just $1.00 per month or a one-time gift in any amount.
SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA Become a member!
After years of unsatisfying relationships, the writer had reason to believe that sex with men could never be equitable. But the hot, sexy new HBO series about a secret romance between two male hockey rivals has given her hope.
Jennifer StewartJan 20, 2026
I’ve been reluctantly celibate for almost ten years. Yes, ten years. That is not a typo. Before that, whether I was hooking up or in committed relationships, I fake-moaned my way through a mostly unsatisfying sex life. Eventually, I shifted my energy toward my careers, hobbies, and loved ones, and away from bad sex. I never declared it as a feminist action, but that’s exactly what it was: I simply forfeited sex — and the pursuit of sex — because, as a straight woman, I’d rather have no sex than wade through more years of bad sex. I chose to wait for lightning to strike in the form of a decent, sexually capable man. At least this is what I thought I was waiting for before watching the hot, horny, humbly produced Canadian streamer Heated Rivalry, available in the U.S. on HBO.
Heated Rivalry is based on author Rachel Reid’s best-selling romance novel about two rival professional hockey players, the Russian Ilya Rosanov (Connor Storrie) and Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), who are carrying on a clandestine sexual affair over a decade, and find themselves falling in love. Vulture reported that Heated Rivalry s urpassed 324 million streaming minutes by December 26 (though some sources have reported 600 million minutes of viewing in the week of January 12), with women comprising most of its diverse viewership. It’s not a tough sell for straight women to watch two men made of God’s finest marble embrace in soft mood lighting that highlights flexed triceps and defined butt cheeks. But even the most chiseled abs can’t explain the mounting fandom that is materializing in bar viewings, tattoos, and merch. Stuck in my own elder millennial ways, I rarely watch anything current and I am immune to the binge-watching model, but I’ve viewed the entire Heated Rivalry series six times (and counting). Heated Rivalry is a cinematic guide for those of us hoping to experience carnal, equitable love and desire.
From my late teens through my 30s, most of my sexual encounters could be described as measured. Whether the sex was good or bad, casual hookups or sex within a committed relationship, I could always hear the sound of a No. 2 pencil checking things off a list in my male partner’s head. If we kissed before hooking up, he drew a tally mark for each peck as if to meet a minimal kissing requirement that, once reached, would allow him to get on with vaginal jackhammering he’d been waiting for. Kissing afterwards? Always a bonus based on his calculations for how much he enjoyed his orgasm and how paranoid he was that I might think our sex meant something more.
Heated Rivalry’s much-discussed sex scenes are raw and passionate, and I was shocked to realize I’d dismissed the fact that sex could (should) be hot, steamy, and reciprocal. Rozanov and Hollander’s first hookup begins with generous kissing and clear, sexy, sincere inquisition about what Hollander would like to do. Each frame could be dissected to show a version of sex that exists between these two that simply wouldn’t for a typical heterosexual, male-dominated sexual encounter, but nothing crystallized it more than the moments after Hollander first makes Rozanov orgasm. Rozanov does a quick wipe, exhales, and pretends to prepare to leave. If this episode were modeled after my own sex life, the credits would have rolled in that instant. Hollander is incredulous, until Rozanov rolls back over and says, “Oh, I would not leave you like that.”
Most of my sexual encounters did leave me hanging like that. While my partner was either poking his gnarly feet into his jeans to leave or yawning before drifting off into his deep orgasmed REM sleep, any concern about my orgasm was in the post-mortem: “You came, right?”
Plenty of women have partnered with men who insist that both parties orgasm, but they’re probably a lucky statistical minority given that men are socialized to prioritize their own orgasms, rooted in a fundamental sexist belief that men are superior to women. I’m not naïve enough to believe that all same-sex couples circumvent this reality by eliminating gender difference as a variable since the patriarchy forces its tentacles into every pairing. But Rozanov and Hollander’s fictional pairing gives us a titillating case for what sex and intimacy — from “Hollander and Rozanov” to “Shane and Ilya,” casual hookup to committed partnership — can look like when two people believe the other to be equal. I’m most reminded of this in an unexpected portrayal of their equality: the gut-wrenching last scene of Episode 2, when Hollander types “we didn’t even kiss” in a text message before deleting it. He didn’t say “you didn’t kiss me” or “I kissed you, but you didn’t kiss me back.” Even when intimacy gets messy in their fictional bond, its origins are rooted in equality.
As the series progressed, I stirred in my seat and, inexplicably, my heart. I couldn’t believe how much Heated Rivalry activated a palpable, undeniable yearning within me. I yearned for this fictional world unburdened by gender expectations that inundated all of my love lives. Scott Henderson didn’t expect Kip to keep house while he was away at work the way my unemployed partner expected me to do after I came home from work. I shudder every time I think about all the pandemic wives who balanced work, remote school, laundry, and dinner while the husbands did Crossfit workouts in their garage gyms. The division of labor didn’t impact Heated Rivalry relationships, nor did body politics. Yes, it’s probably easier to achieve body neutrality when both parties have bodies that contain 0.2 percent body fat. But there’s no way to think about the equality of these relationships without noting the psychic relief of watching each couple enjoy one another’s bodies without effusive ogling or complaining. I bite my own lip all over again just thinking of what this must feel like.
Each subsequent viewing summoned a yearning that rendered me high and sober all at once. I was inebriated with the mutual respect within both couples, which is rooted in their socially equitable partnerships. Their airtight bonds aren’t penetrated by lethargic conversations about being the breadwinner, whose turn it is to make the pasta salad (chicken, no feta), the presumed prioritization of the dominant male’s pleasure, or of the other common burdens of heterosexual partnership that most frequently plague women.
I was probably on my third viewing before my yearning faded into discouragement. That’s when my own reality sank in, that the odds of partnering with a man who believes that I am his equal — as illustrated by Shane and Ilya or, perhaps more accurately, Scott and Kip — are slim to none.
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I could feel myself collapsing under the weight of this reality. The Heated Rivalry universe felt so real it seemed like I ought to touch it. Instead, what I can actually touch is my own past relationships and situationships. Where my base pay was eye-contactless missionary and my bonus was metered kissing, reluctant oral sex, and maybe dinner on one tab instead of a defiant 50/50 split. Conversations with past partners weren’t filled with earnest, sexy banter, and clear supplications for consent. (Though my sex life wasn’t great, it was gratefully consensual.) Conversations were drenched in insecurity that he made less than I did. That he perceived his penis to be literally and figuratively smaller than the guys in class or at work. That, somehow, me not keeping house was a threat to his manlihood. That me wanting a partner in a relationship, not a male leader in a relationship was a threat to the “natural order” of our union. Or, one of the most ridiculous quips from my first situationship, that “eating pussy is for pussies.” That’s the universe I can touch. By the time we see Shane placing a blanket over Ilya’s cold shoulders overlooking the cottage lake or Ilya accompanying Shane to reveal their relationship to his parents, their union is the best example of being equally yoked, a phrase that would never describe my own past.
As sobering as my reality is, the allure of an equal partnership kept bringing me back to the Heated Rivalry universe. My sexual experiences as a straight woman have not been great, but what I want — steamy equal partnership — can’t be that hard. If it can be imagined in a Canadian gay hockey romantic-sex series, surely some semblance of it can be attained. Some days I catch myself thinking that if I keep watching it, something will click. Is this how manifesting works? Am I calling in my sexy equitable man from the universe from the comfort of my couch, Apple TV remote in hand?
Some fans have started talking about “ Heated Rivalry derangement syndrome,” the way our brains are forgetting the hobbies, activities, and identities we all had before Heated Rivalry. Mine is showing up in a way that I don’t ever want to ever go away, to quote our Russian fave from the cottage couch, just before Shane and Ilya’s toes touched. Perhaps my brain is like the MTA replacing signals at 23rd Street while old wiring and subsequent delays persist at West 4th Street. Each episode replaced an old belief, assumption, or expectation of how equitable sex and intimacy work, one station at a time. My entire system hasn’t updated and my new signals haven’t been tested, but I’m getting there.
Most importantly, instead of giving in to the oft-understood realities of 21st century dating, I’ve let Heated Rivalry propel me to try. I am trying to live again, from making friends at Heated Rivalry viewing parties to actually engaging with men in real life and on the cursed dating apps. I don’t have the Shane to my Ilya or the Scott to my Kip, but I’ve got something just as good: a will to try again.
Before you go, we hope you’ll consider supporting DAME’s journalism.
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LGBTQ people — especially trans people — shouldn't feel guilty for choosing not to spend the holidays with the people who support the regime that wants to eradicate them.
Brynn TannehillDec 18, 2025
The holidays are supposed to be a fun, family-oriented time. For many LGBTQ Americans, however, it can be anything but, especially now. Transgender people are often told they’re not welcome unless they effectively detransition. Spending the holidays around conservative family members can be hurtful when someone inevitably uses the wrong name and/or wrong pronoun. Not to mention attempts at encouraging, or even inducing the trans family member into conversion therapy, with the underlying message being there is something fundamentally wrong with them as a person. People in queer relationships are often told not to bring their partners or spouses, or that they will have to sleep in separate rooms.
Unsurprisingly, this leads to many queer people deciding it’s not worth visiting family over the holidays. Some even cut off their family altogether.
Conservatives are quick to point out that liberals are more likely to cut off family members than conservatives, and crow, “So much for the tolerant left!” They argue that by cutting off conservative relatives, liberals may unintentionally reinforce the notion that political differences are insurmountable. Open communication between individuals with differing viewpoints can help bridge ideological divides, they claim. Cutting off conservative relatives can lead to feelings of isolation, loss, and regret for all parties involved. By maintaining these connections, liberals can continue to foster empathy and compassion, even when disagreements arise.
None of this is true when it comes to LGBTQ people, and trans folks in particular. Nothing a transgender person can say or do will change the minds of MAGA family members, other than to perhaps convince them that their queer family member is “one of the good ones.” Women and minorities throughout history have experienced this form of intensely unpleasant soft bigotry. It’s similar to “I have a Black friend,” and implies that they tolerate you when they otherwise wouldn’t because you are an exception to “those people.”
Some believe that giving up on communication is a form of failure, because they think that both sides can be moved to meet in the middle. When an LGBTQ person decides to cut off contact with family, it typically happens after years of attempts to “bridge the gap” in this way as they try to reach a place where they can bear being around their own family.
But, when one side of the argument is, “You people shouldn’t exist,” and the other is, “I should be allowed to exist and go about my life,” you cannot meet in some middle ground of “only half of you should exist, but you’re the exception.”
Then there’s the matter of emotional pain. Every LGBTQ person has weighed the pros and cons of being around family, and decided that as much as being apart from them hurts, the mental harm they will suffer if they continue the relationship is worse. For those with partners, spouses, and kids, a quiet holiday spent at home and with chosen family is a far safer, more relaxing, and enjoyable experience. Queer people consistently choose the more pleasant option when dealing with family members hostile to LGBTQ people, or who are supportive of policies that treat them as damaged, inferior, second-class citizens … or even worse.
For trans folks, being around conservative family members in the age of Trump is HIGHLY unpleasant. The conservative movement in the U.S. has openly declared that trans people should not exist, and the government is working to make that happen. We — including myself and a lot of my longtime friends — are fleeing the U.S. like it’s 1933. Asking us to interact with conservative family members is like asking a Jewish person to spend time around Nazis.
When asking whether trans people are wrong for cutting family members out of their lives, imagine the following scenario: It’s Germany, in 1933. You are either a convert to Judaism, or have married a Jewish person. Many of your family members are supporters of Hitler and the Nazis, and they were warned of what would happen to you and your family if he was elected.
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Now all those predictions are coming to pass, and you are fleeing to the United States with your spouse and children. Your family members express sympathy for your plight, and are sad they will not see you or your children again, but continue to support Hitler. They believe that what is happening is what is best for Germany and the world. When confronted with the fact that the policies they support harm you, they respond with “you people did a lot of bad things, and what is coming to pass is only a natural consequence of your decisions. Your suffering is your own fault.”
This is almost word for word the conversation I had with my father this past April. It shook me to my core, because I had heard his exact talking points in books I had read while writing American Fascism.
The view that Jews had done something to deserve the misery and horror inflicted on them by the Third Reich was pervasive in the U.S., Europe, and Germany, both before and after the war. In In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson’s biography of American ambassador William Dodd’s time in Hitler’s Germany, Colonel Edward M. House expressed the common American sentiment in 1933 that Jews should not be allowed to “dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin.” After the war, journalist Milton Mayer interviewed regular Germans, the herrenvolk, who supported the Nazis. One of them, under the pseudonym Karl-Heinz Schwenke, told Mayer: “They [Jews] had it [The Holocaust] coming. You see what their ‘democracies’ did to us.”
Comparing modern American conservatives to Nazis is often dismissed as hyperbolic, or unfair. However, from the perspective of transgender people in the U.S., it is a very accurate analogy. The dehumanizing language used to describe transgender people is very similar, including open talk of “eradicating transgenderism” and the use of involuntary institutionalization (camps) as a solution to “treat” the transgender population. MAGA’s blaming of transgender people for national woes and moral rot is identical to Nazis blaming Jews for the same thing. The Trump campaign hung transgender people around the neck of VP Kamala Harris the exact same way that the Nazis associated Jews with then-German president Paul von Hindenburg, whom Hitler was running against in 1932. The Trump policies targeting transgender people in the U.S. track closely with the policies meant to push Jews out of Germany, and transgender people are fleeing the U.S. just as people fled Germany.
I’ve had family members lecture me on how it is socially unacceptable to be angry at someone for how they voted. But with the U.S. in the throes of a fascist takeover by a government targeting transgender people and immigrants for literal concentration camps, you absolutely have a right to be angry at the people who voted them into power. Especially if you’re directly affected, and especially if the person who voted to destroy the lives of their own family members is completely unrepentant for the harm they have caused.
The expectation that anyone should suffer socializing with people who voted for their exile from public life and possible eradication is laughable. When parents are told directly, “If Trump wins we will be forced to leave the country and you will never see me or your grandchildren again,” and they do it anyway, they have forfeited any claims to familial loyalty or bonds. This is especially true when all the dire predictions come to pass, their family leaves, and they still have no regrets about their decision.
Everything that is being done to transgender people is complete, gratuitous, performative cruelty. To continue the metaphor, it’s like paying a bully to verbally abuse, humiliate, and beat shit out of your kid while you, the parent, cheer the tormentor on. It takes epic levels of chutzpah to pearl clutch when your child wants nothing to do with you ever again after such betrayal.
Conservative relatives may point out that when you voted for a democratic president, they didn’t cut you off. But when Obama and Biden were president, no one fired the military for being conservative, took away your dad’s erectile dysfunction medication and your mom’s HRT, made your uncle wear dresses, or threatened to put them in mental institutions for being left-handed. No one banned their religion or took away their ability to go out in public forever. No one revoked their driver’s licenses or passports. No one made them go to a same-sex wedding. Their lives went on exactly the same as before.
When Trump became president, hundreds of thousands of transgender people — myself included — had our lives as we knew them come to a sudden, horrific end under a wave of policies that did to us in three months what Hitler did in three years.
Many of us cut off family members, especially around the holidays and especially this year, to preserve our sanity. Standing up to people who think you owe them for merely tolerating your presence is fundamentally an act of dignity and self-respect. Who would subject themselves to breaking bread with people who tell them that they are an anathema to a nation, and their suffering is a public good they’ve brought on themselves? How do we maintain an ounce of dignity and self-respect by pretending that “eradicating transgenderism” and “I just want to live” are two equally valid and acceptable points of view?
Some transgender people feel they have to grit their teeth and power through a week of self-degradation, humiliation and appeasement because they’re still reliant on family for financial support. Some just find it easier to humor fascists who tolerate them as “one of the good ones” because they can spend a week zonked on Klonopin and lean into disassociation for all it’s worth. Needless to say, this isn’t healthy.
A lot of Conservative cisgender people aren’t going to like what I have to say, but get used to it, you asked for this. You have spent the better part of a decade bemoaning how your queer kids don’t want to spend the holidays with you. It’s going to be even worse this year.
So, to my LGBTQ siblings, this is my Christmas present to you: When your family demands to know why you’re not spending the holidays with them, you can send them this article. And then you can explain in no uncertain terms why there isn’t enough Klonopin on Earth to make you willingly spend one more minute with their condescending, hypocritical, fascist apologist keisters. You can then put your phone on mute and be safely with your chosen family, with a clear conscience. You can bask in the comforting knowledge that somewhere far away the family who voted you off the island is staying warm and cozy with their incandescent, and impotent, rage directed at someone who no longer gives a **** what they think after they made it clear through their words and actions that you, and even their grandchildren, mean nothing to them compared with their love of their sexually abusive orange savior.
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From Scott Galloway to Tucker Carlson, the panic over endangered manhood isn’t helping boys — it’s enforcing the same rigid gender rules that harm everyone.
Noah BerlatskyDec 16, 2025
“If we can’t convince young men of the honor involved and the unique contributions inherent in expressing what makes them male, we’ll lose them to niche, rabid online communities,” writes marketing guru and podcaster Scott Galloway in his new guide to manliness, Notes On Being a Man. Galloway’s is the latest best-selling statement of the “crisis of masculinity” — the fear that boys no longer fully inhabit and embrace their cultural and biological heritage of manhood. Men, Galloway argues, should be protectors, procreators, providers; they need to be strong successful heterosexuals, competent and powerful. That is what masculinity is, and the crisis is that the culture no longer values it as it should. Men, Galloway insists, must not be shamed for being men!
As the father of a trans daughter who didn’t come out until she was 17, I am skeptical. Is our culture really telling boys that they shouldn’t be “boys”? Are boys more likely to be punished — by friends, by teachers, by parents — for being interested in sports rather than cosmetics? I think the answer there is pretty obvious — which means that doubling down on the idea that masculinity is good and right and proper may well hurt, rather than help, people of all genders.
More, More, More Masculinity
I didn’t mention cosmetics there by accident. In retrospect, one of the early tip-offs that my trans daughter was trans was her love of makeup. In seventh grade, some years before she came out and transitioned, my daughter came home from hanging out with a bunch of girlfriends with her face completely done up: lipstick, eyeliner, foundation, the works. “Oh my god!” she said. “That was so much fun!” She was about as happy as I’d ever seen her.
My wife and I told her she looked great. My wife helped her remove the makeup when she was ready to take it off. We absolutely did not tell her that there was anything wrong with her. If she was pleased, we were pleased. We didn’t yet know she was trans, but we knew that she should have the right and the opportunity to explore her own gender expression. If that meant wearing makeup, then it meant wearing makeup.
I don’t know for sure how Scott Galloway would have responded in this situation — he doesn’t express the kind of venomous sentiments toward trans people that fellow masculinity-minder Jordan Peterson does. He doesn’t really talk about trans people, men or women, at all, just as he doesn’t have much to say about any expression of femininity, by people of any gender — except insofar as femininity is the unexpressed creeping danger which might come for you as a man if you aren’t doing sufficient protecting, procreating, and providing.
Mistrust of femininity and concern that it might be eroding masculinity is by no means unique to Scott Galloway. California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom hit many of the talking points recently in a CNN appearance where he argued that men are facing high suicide and dropout rates because Democrats “walked away from this crisis of men and boys.” Right-wing pundit Ross Douthat chimed in, arguing (in line with an essay by his guest Helen Andrews) that “feminism has failed us because it’s made our institutions too feminized, driving men and masculine virtues out.” Tucker Carlson claims that we can save masculinity if only more men and boys would start tanning their testicles to increase their testosterone.
None of these arguments holds water, though. Newsom fails to talk about the connection between guns and male suicide, which undermines his argument that Democratic priorities, like gun control, fail men. Douthat had to change the title of his article from “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” because the original made the misogyny too obvious even for the ghouls in editorial at the New York Times. And as for Tucker Carlson — no, tanning your testicles does not make you more of a man. Not sure what else to say about that. For pity’s sake.
In any case, the point-by-point refutation is less important than the common ideological ground. Whether Democrat, vaguely respectable Republican, bizarre conspiracy theorist Republican, independent podcaster, all agree that men are harmed when masculinity is denigrated or questioned or when it is shifted from the center of politics and culture. We must cease being “averse to identifying and celebrating what’s good about men and masculinity,” in Galloway’s words. Instead we should “acknowledge how extraordinarily important, skilled, strong, and decent most young men were carrying out the roles they played in helping create the world we live in.”
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Are we really lacking in male role models and examples of masculine virtue, though? There are still an awful lot of action movies in which manly men do manly things, often with guns, sometimes with super powers. All our presidents have been men; 90% of billionaires are men, as are 93% of Nobel laureates. The most high-profile professional athletes overwhelmingly are men, despite the growth of women’s soccer and basketball. It sure seems like men have a lot of masculine role models compared to women. If masculinity is so denigrated, why are men the ones with disproportionate power and representation?
In her classic 2007 book, Whipping Girl, transfeminist and biologist Julia Serano argues that, in fact, masculinity is not denigrated. Masculinity is worshipped; it is femininity that people hate. Douthat’s worry that femininity is corrupting the workplace and Galloway’s insistence that masculinity can never do harm are not some sort of brave contrarianism; they’re the status quo.
As Serano points out, femininity is seen as “weak, artificial, frivolous, demure, and passive”; to be feminine is to be debased, broken, subordinate, decadent. She argues further that the demand to revere masculinity is itself driven by the loathing of femininity. “Male pride is not really about pride,” Serano writes. “It’s about fear—the fear of being seen as feminine. And that’s why ‘girl stuff’ [like, say, cosmetics] is so dangerous. And as long as most men remain deathly afraid of it, they’ll continue to take it out on the rest of us.”
The hyperbolic fear that trans women will harm cis women in bathrooms, the hyperbolic fear that trans women will harm cis women in women’s sports (both of which have no basis in fact) are presented as being based in fears of masculinity, but they are in fact a terror of femininity overtaking and subverting male identities. Femininity out of place, femininity overwriting masculinity, is the danger — which is why trans women are seen as the threat, even though cis men are much, much more likely to assault cis women (or cis men, or trans people, for that matter.)
Masculinity Oppresses Everyone, Including Men
The idea that masculinity in all its forms (strength, decisiveness, cars, action movies, basketball) is better than femininity (perceived weakness, domesticity, dolls, romcoms, ballet) affects everyone. But it becomes even more visible than usual when you have a trans daughter.
My wife and I were both very aware of trans and queer issues before my daughter came out. Even before we knew she was trans, we tried our best to assure her that we wanted her to be herself, whoever that self happened to be.
Parents aren’t the only influence on kids, though, and my daughter, like all children, had to navigate a lot of pressures and ideas from peers and other adults about what her gender was supposed to be. In elementary school, when she was watching Frozen with a couple of friends, one boy complained that the protagonist was a girl. Our daughter, we were glad to hear, argued that girl protagonists were good.
In sixth grade, our daughter’s male friends were all obsessed with who did and did not have six-pack abs — my daughter did not, and was somewhat sheepish about it. In seventh grade, the kids mostly gender segregated their friend groups — except for my daughter, who hung out with both the girls and the boys in about equal measure. In eighth grade, the class put on a performance of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream—and my daughter begged for the part of Hermione.
We were thrilled to have our daughter play Hermione and to have her hang out with the girls as well as the boys; we were supportive when she began to occasionally wear dresses a couple years later. She suggested she might be queer a couple years before coming out as trans, and we talked about queer and trans issues with her, watched queer romcoms with her, let her know that her mother was bisexual and had had positive experiences with queer community; advocated for queer-friendly policies at her school.
But despite all of that, my daughter still spent years in misery because the cultural demands to be masculine were so rigid and powerful. She was concerned that being trans would damage her theater career and make it more difficult for her to get the leading Shakespeare roles she dreamed of performing. (She was right about that.) And she agonized over how she imagined her peers would react. In fact, when she began to test the waters and tentatively came out to a trans male friend, he dismissed her, telling her she was not really a woman. My daughter was hurt, and tried to figure out why he would say such a thing, later speculating that he may have felt that being surrounded by too many trans people made him feel less special. Trans people are also affected by the cultural devaluation of masculinity, and by the idea that no one should want to be a woman. In any case, my daughter went back in the closet for a year. (So much for trans contagion theories.)
My daughter did eventually, and courageously, come out, and she is much happier for it. I’m sure many people would dismiss her experiences as atypical or as irrelevant to boys’ experiences of masculinity.
But my daughter is hardly the only person to have been made miserable by her refusal to conform to masculinity. It isn’t just trans women and girls who are targeted by the cultural devaluation of masculinity. Gay men and boys are, since they (supposedly) fail to fulfill that masculine demand to dominate women and procreate. Obese men and boys are, since they don’t conform to that six-pack sixth-grader image of masculine bodies. Disabled men and boys are, since they (supposedly) fail to fulfill that masculine ideal of strength. Boys, like me, who aren’t very good at sports are often considered to have failed at masculinity. Boys and men like me, who didn’t date much (or at all) in high school and college are considered to have failed at masculinity. And what about boys who have breasts, who are intersex, who are trans? They are teased, or despised — or written out of conversations on masculinity altogether. Thus, while trans women are hypervisible, trans men are often ignored or erased.
Men — and not just men! — have a wide variety of bodies, personalities, aptitudes, and interests. Yet, the patriarchal ideal of masculinity judges them all by the same standard. That makes so many of us miserable. Think of the kids who were bullied when you were growing up. Were they singled out for being too masculine? I know I was bullied for being too intellectual, too Jewish looking, too neurodivergent, insufficiently athletic — all things coded, to one extent or another, as feminized and unmanly.
Boys — and, one more time, not just boys — are under a great deal of pressure to conform to and perform masculinity. The crisis of masculinity panic is not a solution to that; it is an extension of it. Maybe instead of repeating over and over, louder and louder, that boys need to be masculine, we could instead let all kids know that they are allowed to express their gender in a whole range of ways.
If that’s playing sports, great! If it’s wearing makeup, great! If it’s wearing makeup while playing sports, that’s great, too. But we shouldn’t let Gavin Newsom or Scott Galloway or Ross Douthat or (god forbid) Tucker Carlson or anyone dictate that it’s more acceptable for boys to play baseball than to wear a dress. It is not. Which means that the moral panic over the devaluation of masculinity is just another way to enforce patriarchy, and to demand that boys, and everyone, shore up the same structure that has brought us here, to this moment, when we are ruled by the worst orange patriarch in the world.
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A series about scorned women could have interrogated misogyny; instead, it lets Kardashian cosplay liberation in couture and clichés.
Scarlett HarrisDec 9, 2025
“When are we gonna do revenge?” asks Naomi Watts’s character, Liberty Ronson, in All’s Fair, the Hulu vehicle Ryan Murphy built for Kim Kardashian that has its two-part season finale tonight, December 9. This is Kardashian’s second foray into TV acting — her first was in Murphy’s American Horror Story: Delicate — this one has her helming an all-female law firm that represents scorned women, often by abusive men. Murphy bestows Kardashian with a critically acclaimed A-list supporting cast — Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson, Judith Light, and Glenn Close (who is new to the Murphyverse) — that desperately tries to salvage a dismal script and get something resembling human emotion out of a wooden, dead-eyed Kardashian.
Many of the casting choices appear to be deliberate, especially the guest roles, which include Elizabeth Berkley Lauren, Jessica Simpson, and Brooke Shields, each of whom have had past struggles in the public eye: In 1995, the Saved By the Bell co-star Berkley Lauren, was supposed to break out in a star-making turn in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. But at the time, it rendered her a Hollywood pariah — though the erotic thriller has since become a campy cult hit, which Berkley Lauren is sporting enough to revel in. Simpson shot to fame, not for her singing chops but for her real-life role as the ditzy bride to fellow pop star Nick Lachey on the celebrity reality show Newlyweds. Everything from her body to her highly publicized sex life — she was a proud virgin before marrying Lachey — to not knowing the difference between chicken and fish were eviscerated in the tabloids, led to her struggle with substance abuse, all of which she wrote about in her 2020 memoir, Open Book.
Shields has been outspoken about being sexualized as a child star and model in two memoirs, as well as the 2023 documentary Pretty Baby, which takes its title from the 1978 film starring Shields as a young girl forced into sex slavery.
Murphy, who began working with Kardashian in American Horror Story, appears determined not only to make her his latest muse but to legitimize her. It’s not just that he’s trying to elevate her from reality-show star to leading lady — and as she demonstrates in All’s Fair, she is no actress, no matter how much brilliant talent you surround her with (in fact, it just highlights how stilted she is). It’s that there is something perverse about the creator of The People vs. O.J. Simpson building this kind of vanity project for Kardashian considering her father’s associates: Robert Kardashian was not only best friends with O.J. Simpson, a violent domestic abuser; he was a member of Simpson’s defense team in the notorious trial for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Goldman’s father was recently awarded $58 million in a civil suit, from the estate of the late O.J. Simpson, who died in 2024.) And Kim has been on a years-long quest to become a lawyer like her dad, who Robert, together with Johnny Cochran, earned the late football legend an acquittal. As Murphy’s series reminded viewers, the case captured the attention of the nation, and engaged us in ongoing conversations and arguments about race relations, misogyny, and intimate partner violence.
Kardashian herself is no stranger to notoriety: While the family name was initially associated with her father, it was Kim who catapulted to fame when she capitalized on the leaking of a sex tape in 2007. She and her family parlayed that into a popular reality show, leading theirs to become one of the most recognized bloodlines in the world. Her profile rose further with her marriage to her third husband, rapper-turned-fascist Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), which ended in 2022. Though Kardashian has remained largely closed-lipped about what went on in their relationship, his treatment of his current wife, Bianca Censori, is concerning and wouldn’t be out of place as an All’s Fair story arc.
So why does this soapy series exist? And why is Murphy so set on redeeming Kardashian in a Dynasty-like show about dumped-on women getting their due? The show had the opportunity to flip the script on these women’s narratives, joining the recent spate of rehabilitations of maligned women of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Framing Britney Spears and the star’s subsequent memoir, The Woman in Me.
After all, it seemed pitched as an exercise in women’s empowerment, replete with Kardashian going full Lemonade, taking a baseball bat to a sports car in a yellow gown à la Beyoncé in her cathartic adultery anthem “Hold Up.” But this is a dream sequence centering on her husband’s mistress (played by a wasted Teyana Taylor after her Oscar-buzzy role in One Battle After Another), rather than an outward expression of anger toward a man.
“We wanted the women to win in the end,” Murphy said about the show on Vogue’s “The Run Through” podcast. But instead of getting mad at the patriarchy, All’s Fair really just wants women to get even — in the superficial, materialistic sense of the word. “The best revenge is a life well lived,” Liberty tells Allura, placating her with this platitude. Everything is a transaction in this show. If one girl bosses close enough to the sun, they will be inculcated against harm from men by the armored shoulders of their power suits and the blinding light reflected from the bling they got in the divorce, as in Judith Light’s storyline.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Kardashian’s own lawsuit involving diamonds. The most recent episode of Kim’s other Hulu show, the eponymous The Kardashians (the seventh season of which functions as spon-con for All’s Fair and all manner of other brands the family shills), deals with the Paris trial of the men who attacked and burgled Kardashian in Paris in 2016, stealing $13 million in diamonds, most of which was never recovered. “I just don’t care about that stuff anymore,” Kim said in the aftermath of the robbery — a far cry from last week’s Kardashians episode which shows her dripping in diamonds, including a 22-carat diamond ring she bought to replace the one stolen from her, in defiance of the Paris court. “They’re not gonna take my power,” she says in the episode.
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Kim details the powerlessness she felt during the robbery, which no doubt was a motivating factor in her quest to become a lawyer and her involvement in the justice system. Now that is an All’s Fair storyline I’d like to see which, to the show’s credit, is imbued in Allura’s backstory, one that uncannily echoes a real-life account of Kim’s friend Paris Hilton, who spent her adolescence in abusive residential treatment centers. Try as she might to elicit emotion in that scene, All’s Fair quickly cuts to her post-sob sesh, mascara staining her face. Kim’s robotic stoicism, which The Kardashians positions as calmness in the face of danger and two decades of being under a microscope, might be an asset to her budding law career but it is a detriment to her budding acting career.
Instead, it’s the materialism of the Kardashians’ existence and the world within All’s Fair that wins out again.
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