Megan Rapinoe and How Feminism Helped Sell Identity Politics
One of the great sleights of hand in American politics has been the replacement of economic inequality with a never-ending competition for victimhood. And feminism helped lay the groundwork for it. By framing the relationship between men and women primarily as one of oppressors and the oppressed, particularly within radical feminism, the movement helped popularize a political framework in which group identity determined who held power, who suffered under it, and who was entitled to moral authority. Women were the oppressed, men were the oppressors, and the struggle for equality was increasingly understood through this division.
The various strands of feminism may have disagreed about the causes of women’s subordination, but they largely agreed on one thing: women were an oppressed sex class, and men were their oppressors. Whether history actually supports that sweeping characterization is another matter.
But this framework contained a contradiction that would eventually transform feminism itself. White women, who had long dominated the American feminist movement, were challenged by black women who pointed out that their experiences of oppression were not the same. Race complicated the tidy division between male oppressors and female victims. A white woman could enjoy racial privileges denied to a black man, while a wealthy woman could possess far more economic power than a poor man of any race. If oppression was the measure of moral authority, where did that leave white feminists?
Enter Intersectionality
Introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to explain how black women experienced discrimination that could not be adequately understood through race or sex alone, intersectionality offered a way to account for overlapping forms of disadvantage. But as the concept spread beyond its original legal context and was absorbed into the larger social justice industry, it also provided a framework for expanding the categories of oppression almost indefinitely. Rather than questioning the underlying division of society into oppressors and the oppressed, the framework became increasingly elaborate, accommodating more identities, more grievances, and more claims to victim status.
What began in American feminism as a struggle organized around the purported oppression of women had helped to create a much broader politics of identity, in which virtually every group could claim its own position within an expanding hierarchy of disadvantage. Victimhood became political currency, and the race to the bottom was on.
Those who were same-sex attracted claimed their place in the oppression hierarchy, indigenous people asserted theirs, and then black and indigenous people who were also same-sex attracted entered the competition for a piece of the oppression pie. The more categories of oppression one could claim, the greater one’s presumed moral standing, and that of those who supported them. What emerged was a kind of victimhood Olympics, with everyone competing not for the top, but for the bottom, where the greatest suffering supposedly conferred the greatest virtue. It was a bizarre game of one-upmanship, or perhaps more accurately, one-downmanship.
Enter Megan Rapinoe
Two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist Megan Rapinoe has been an outspoken supporter of allowing male athletes who identify as transgender to compete in women’s sports. This is a rather curious position for a woman who made her name, her fortune, and her considerable public influence competing in a sporting category created specifically for females.
But within the hierarchy of identity politics, her position begins to make a certain kind of sense.
Rapinoe is a white lesbian, which gives her standing within the intersectional framework, but not nearly as much as someone who can claim additional layers of oppression. By championing “transgender” inclusion in women’s sports, she aligns herself with a group widely portrayed within contemporary identity politics as especially vulnerable and marginalized. Her own sex, and the sex-based protections that made her athletic career possible, become secondary to demonstrating solidarity with those supposedly further down the oppression ladder.
Her whiteness is effectively whitewashed (no pun intended) by her lesbian identity and her support for those deemed more oppressed than herself. It would be even better, within this peculiar moral accounting, if she were black and lesbian. Better still, a black male athlete identifying as a woman and seeking admission to the women’s team.
The absurdity of this arrangement is that a female athlete can now acquire moral standing by advocating the dismantling of the very boundaries that protect female athletic competition. Supporting women as a sex class becomes less virtuous than supporting an identity category that claims inclusion within it.
Of course, Rapinoe might genuinely believe her position is fair. But her advocacy illustrates how the priorities of identity politics can come into direct conflict with the interests of women as a biological class. In a 2023 TIME interview, she said she would welcome a “transgender” woman onto the U.S. women’s national team even if that meant displacing a female player. In other words, she was willing to sacrifice a woman’s place on the team to accommodate someone whose claim to that place rests on gender identity rather than sex.
And she is hardly alone.
The Corporate Version of the Same Contradiction
Beth Brooke-Marciniak offers an equally interesting example, though hers played out primarily in corporate leadership and institutional policy rather than on the soccer field.
I wrote about Brooke-Marciniak in 2020 for Uncommon Ground, in an article titled Beth Brooke-Marciniak: Promoting “Inclusivity” at the Expense of Women’s Rights. Brooke-Marciniak is a remarkably accomplished woman who was named to Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful women ten times. As a senior executive at Ernst & Young, she held influential positions in global public policy and diversity initiatives, helping shape corporate approaches to inclusion and leadership. In 2013, she founded EY’s Women Athletes Business Network, a program designed to help elite female athletes transition into successful business careers. She also joined the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee board in 2019.
Her work advancing opportunities for women, particularly female athletes, is substantial and admirable. But Brooke-Marciniak, who is also an openly lesbian woman, has been deeply involved in advancing corporate LGBT inclusion policies. Her leadership roles and affiliations have included the Partnership for Global LGBTI Equality and Out Leadership (with the billionaire tech entrepreneur and gender identity advocate Martine Rothblatt), organizations that promote LGBT inclusion within business and institutional structures.
Here is the contradiction. Brooke-Marciniak has spent considerable effort helping women advance in society and sports while also supporting an institutional framework that recognizes gender identity as a category deserving protection and inclusion. Where gender identity is treated as superseding biological sex, these two commitments collide.
You cannot meaningfully protect sex-based rights, or rights rooted in same-sex attraction, while simultaneously making sex irrelevant to the legal and institutional categories those rights depend upon. This was the contradiction I explored in my earlier article about Brooke-Marciniak, and it remains unresolved.
Both Rapinoe and Brooke-Marciniak have achieved extraordinary professional success as women. Both have advocated for the social advancement of women, and both have embraced an inclusion framework that undermines the boundaries separating women from men.
Within the politics of intersectionality, however, the contradiction becomes less surprising. Their identification as lesbians, coupled with their support for another purportedly oppressed identity category, positions them as champions of inclusion, even when that inclusion conflicts with sex-based protections.
And their considerable wealth, professional standing, and institutional influence barely enter into the calculation. This is where the entire arrangement begins to look particularly strange.
The Oppression Olympics and the Convenient Villain
All the while, this expanding collection of virtuous victims needed a common enemy, and so an enormous, amorphous boogeyman was constructed out of the white, heterosexual, colonizing, capitalist male, the ultimate saboteur of everything good and just in the world. As a recovering radical feminist, I have to admit that I once helped perpetuate this ridiculous caricature myself.
Never mind that a poor white man might have far less power than a wealthy black woman, or that a billionaire feminist might have more influence over public policy than thousands of working-class men combined. In this ideological construction, identity increasingly determined one’s position in the moral hierarchy, while actual wealth and power became almost incidental.
And the beauty of this arrangement, at least for those at the top of the economic food chain, was that almost anyone could participate in the oppression Olympics without having to examine their own position within the economic hierarchy.
A wealthy lesbian corporate executive could be celebrated as a marginalized voice. A millionaire athlete could position herself as a champion of the oppressed. Meanwhile, an impoverished white heterosexual man could be assigned the role of oppressor simply by virtue of his sex, race, and sexuality.
And this inversion becomes even more apparent when we look at wealthy gay philanthropists such as Tim Gill and Jon Stryker. Both have used their considerable fortunes to fund LGBT advocacy organizations and political initiatives, helping build an influential network of institutions promoting identity-based policies. Here are men with extraordinary financial and political influence who nevertheless belong to a category routinely described as marginalized. If oppression is the measure of powerlessness, how exactly does that work?
Obscuring Wealth Disparity
The competition for victim status, which certain strands of feminism helped institutionalize, conveniently sidelined the one division that cuts across every identity category: wealth disparity.
Instead of organizing around the enormous concentration of wealth and economic power, people were increasingly encouraged to organize around an ever-expanding inventory of identities, each competing for recognition, resources, institutional favor, and market capture. Class was pushed aside in favor of identity, even though the wealthy and powerful exist in every racial, sexual, and cultural category.
And who benefited from this arrangement? Certainly the wealthy, who could enthusiastically embrace the language of social justice, fund its organizations, install DEI departments in their corporations, create products to attract myriad identity groups, and congratulate themselves on their moral enlightenment without having to surrender an ounce of their economic power.
In fact, identity politics offered corporations something even better than a public relations opportunity. It offered new ways of identifying, segmenting, and marketing to consumers. Every newly recognized identity could become another demographic, another constituency, another market to cultivate, and within the large NGO apparatus, funds to procure. The language of liberation could coexist quite comfortably with the business of selling products and accumulating capital.
Isn’t this precisely the strange juxtaposition represented by figures like Rapinoe and Brooke-Marciniak? Both have enjoyed substantial professional success and influence within corporate systems. Rapinoe’s public profile has attracted major commercial partnerships, while Brooke-Marciniak helped shape inclusion policies within one of the world’s most influential professional services firms. Both are celebrated for their advocacy on behalf of marginalized identities, even as their careers demonstrate how comfortably that advocacy can coexist with considerable wealth and corporate power.
This does not mean their advocacy is insincere. It means that sincerity and commercial usefulness are not mutually exclusive. A corporation can genuinely embrace an ideology that also happens to serve its financial interests.
And that, to me, is the part of this story that deserves far more attention.
A movement seemingly concerned with dismantling systems of oppression helped produce an ideological framework that could be comfortably adopted by the very institutions concentrating wealth and power. The wealthy didn’t have to fight the revolution. They could fund it, manage it, market it, and make themselves its benefactors.
Meanwhile, the upward concentration of capital continued, largely undisturbed by the endless competition over who was most oppressed. Perhaps that is the greatest sleight of hand of all. The oppression Olympics keep everyone fighting over their place at the bottom of the hierarchy, while the people holding the purse strings remain comfortably at the top.
Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist who has tracked the funding of the gender industry for over a decade. She is author of the The 11th Hour, a platform highlighting the connections between technology, transsexualism, and transhumanism. Her research into the philanthropic backers of the gender industry has been utilized for legal briefs, and platformed in myriad publications, films, and other media in the US and internationally.
She has appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show, Steven Bannon’s War Room, and James Patrick’s Big Picture, and on various other platforms and podcasts. She has been featured in films such as No Way Back (2023), Gender Transformation (2023), and The Gender Delusion (2023). Her work has been published in numerous books and magazines, among which: First Things, Tablet, Human Events, The Spectator World, The Federalist, The American Mind, and in the anthology Female Erasure. She is the author of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches From the 11th Hour. Now, also available in Portuguese
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