Dear Democrats,

I would send you a letter signed with my name but such is the climate of fear that I do not trust that letter to not come back to me and bite me in some way. You have created such an atmosphere of Soviet-like punishment that I do not even dare write the elected officials who supposedly work for the public, for fear that some transactivist will submit my information to some website, and that there could be consequences for my family and career. So I write you this letter here on a website designed for likeminded women in the hopes that my voice might somehow get through to some of you.

Today for the first time in my life I voted in the US midterms for candidates who I do not believe in, people who I would never, ever vote for under different circumstances had your party not gone off the deep end with their blind support of gender ideology. Last night I was unable to sleep about it, I was so tormented by my decision, and so angry that it has come to this. It does not matter who I voted for, be it Libertarian, Republican, write-in, it did not matter: I voted for anyone who was not a member of your party.

A registered Democrat since I first turned eighteen, I have voted straight Democrat in every election up until now. I volunteered for more than one presidential campaign. I donated money to your party. In the fight of good versus evil, I sincerely believed that you were on the side of the good. You have betrayed women across the nation. You have broken my heart. Today I voted for people who I do not agree with almost anything on, most of whom I truly dislike. I held my breath and voted for these people I have almost nothing in common with ideologically except for one thing: they know the difference between a man and a woman, and they will not force me to speak those things that I know to believe untrue.

It is hard for me to believe that is where we are now, that this is where the bar is set. I find comfort in knowing that I am, in fact, not alone, but part of a trend greater than myself. I am surrounded by people in my life who know that what is happening is wrong, that what started out as good intentions, a desire to be tolerant, has become a destructive force that now actively harms girls and women every day. In the years to come, when you wonder why women have left you, let me solve this mystery for you now: you need to end this gender madness while you still can.

Even so, you will continue to play dumb. As women continue to leave your party, to vote for others, whomever they might be, many in your upper ranks will scratch their heads. Why on Earth are so many women voting for those nasty Republicans? Especially when the rights of “pregnant people” are at stake? What are we doing to lose all our voters with uteruses? We get to be women now only occasionally, when it serves you, and a collection of disparate body parts when it does not.

Listen to yourselves. Turn on NPR and listen to the way those voices tap dance around the word “woman,” the great lengths they will go to, to avoid even saying this terrible word. There is no mystery here. We are telling you in the clearest terms we know how, but it is your responsibility now to listen. Listen to the women--WOMEN, WOMEN, WOMEN--who are being raped in your prisons by biological males and then tell me once again that my reservations against gender ideology come from a place of hatred. Listen to the college athlete who spent her life working towards a dream that was ripped from her by another entitled male. Call me a bigot. Do it again, if that is all you’ve got. It’s just going to make me vote against you that much harder.

You can make me jump through hoops a little while longer, in public, in those places where you still hold power. You can force me to state my pronouns or call a man a woman or risk getting fired from my job. You can force me to pretend that some human beings are magically somehow neither male nor female but “non-binary,” and that this, somehow, is an issue just as important as important as any other, a hill your party is willing to die on, “the civil rights issue of our time,” as Joe Biden said, somehow equivalent to the plight of the homeless, the refugees, those afflicted by genocide, war, famine, and climate change. Continue to feed us lies and then be confused when we vomit in response. Tell us it is normal and good to offer confused and unhappy children synthetic cross-sex hormones and surgeries, that teachers should be fired from our public schools for refusing to play along. You have no good arguments, no logic on your side, only threats of punishment. Take a good look at what your party has become.

One day, hopefully soon, all of this will pass. We will awake from all this as if from bad dream. What was that? I was just trying to be a good person. I was trying to speak out for the oppressed! How did we get so far off track? There will be a long period of embarrassment, and a lesson to learn. Apologies and real repairs will need to be made. It is then, and only then, that I will consider voting for your politicians again.

In response to this letter, should any of you read it, I expect there will be attempts to shame and blame, or strike fear into those of us who care, who care so much about the issues, who care about women. I expect your party will dangle the abortion carrot-stick in front of us yet again, while threatening to take away our rights if we don’t comply. Go ahead and blame us for all your party’s problems, for all the world’s problems--women always take the blame anyway. Mumble your mantras; you no longer have my trust.

Nor will you have my vote.

Sincerely,

A Woman; A Feminist; an Ex-Democrat