Someone showed up in my comments yesterday to call me a mean girl for posting an unflattering photo of Karoline Leavitt alongside my piece about women carrying water for the patriarchy.
It’s such a perfect example of the way we’ve been trained to protect powerful women from accountability by using the language of girl solidarity against the women who dare to criticize them.
The mean girl label is a threat/leash, designed to make you second guess yourself, soften your voice, and redirect your energy away from the people doing actual harm and back toward policing your own tone. It takes everything we know about how women tear each other down, everything we’ve learned about Queen Bee female bullying and social exclusion and cruelty, and it weaponizes it against women who say, WTH? It turns analysis into cattiness and accountability into “jealousy.”
So let’s go.
Let’s name the ACTUAL mean girl behavior happening in this country right now. It doesn’t happen in high school hallways but in executive orders and budget proposals and Supreme Court decisions. It’s the kind that doesn’t leave girls crying on the school bus but leaves them without food, healthcare, legal protection and without a country that gives a damn whether they live or die.
You want to talk about mean girl behavior? Let’s actually talk about it.
Mean girl behavior is forcing a ten year old to carry her rapist’s baby.
In 2022, a nine year old girl in Ohio became pregnant by her rapist. Her body was not remotely developed enough to safely carry a pregnancy. The trauma she was already living inside was compounded by the state of Ohio forcing her to remain pregnant. The adults in power looked at a ten year old SA victim and said….not our problem.
She had to travel to Indiana to access medical care. A child who was a SA victim had to cross state lines because the state she lived in decided its ab xx tion ban mattered more than her life and her body and her survival.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade did not happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of fifty years of organized effort to strip women’s bodily autonomy from constitutional protection. And it didn’t end there. As of late 2025, the Trump administration had implemented roughly 40 percent of Project 2025’s policies aimed at restricting reproductive freedoms. Women are dying from entirely treatable complications because doctors in abxxtion ban states are terrified of prosecution. Amber Thurman in Georgia. Nevaeh Crain in Texas.
Forced motherhood, written into law, enforced by the government, and defended from a podium by women in blazers.
A mean girl makes your life miserable. A mean girl with a Supreme Court majority and a legislative agenda makes you bleed out in a hospital parking lot and calls it God’s plan.
Mean girl behavior is erasing trans and nonbinary people from existence.
On day one of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order declaring that the United States officially recognizes only two sexes, male and female, explicitly denying the legal existence of transgender and nonbinary people. Declaring that millions of Americans simply do not exist in the eyes of their own government.
Federal health agencies purged their websites of any data referencing LGBTQ+ people. The Census Bureau stopped collecting gender identity data across multiple major surveys, including the National Crime Victimization Survey. Do you understand what that means? When you stop counting a group of people, you make it nearly impossible to track hate crimes against them, to document discrimination against them, to make the legal case that they are being harmed. You
A mean girl makes you feel like you don’t belong. A mean girl with executive power makes you legally not exist.
Mean girl behavior is ICE raiding schools and churches and hospitals.
There are women in this country right now who are afraid to take their children to the doctor because they are terrified that going outside means not coming home. That dropping their kid off at school means never seeing them again. That an emergency room visit means an immigration officer waiting when they try to leave.
ICE has conducted raids at or near schools, churches, hospitals. Places that have historically been understood as sensitive locations, where vulnerable people go specifically because they need help and need to feel safe. This administration rolled back those protections and sent a clear message to millions of people that nowhere is safe for you.
And the women standing at podiums defending these raids, smiling through the press briefings, calling it border security and rule of law? They go home to their own children every night without fear. They schedule their doctor’s appointments without calculating the risk. They exist in a version of America that is safe and comfortable and theirs.
That is not sisterhood. That is a woman using her position to make other women’s lives smaller and more terrifying and more dangerous, and calling it patriotism.
All while wearing a little gold cross around their necks.
Mean girl behavior is cutting the school lunch program.
Thirty million children receive free or reduced price school meals in this country every single day. Thirty million kids who show up in the morning and need to eat in order to learn, in order to think, in order to grow. The research on school nutrition is not complicated or contested. Kids who eat learn better. Kids who don’t eat cannot focus, cannot retain information, cannot develop the way they’re supposed to develop.
The current administration has moved to gut federal funding for school meals. Not trim. Gut.
A mean girl excludes you from the lunch table. A mean girl with a federal budget cuts your lunch entirely and gives the money to billionaires.
Mean girl behavior is erasing Black history and dismantling civil rights.
This administration removed Black historical figures from national websites. It signed an executive order attacking the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It removed the Black Lives Matter Plaza. It terminated more than $600 million in grants to institutions training teachers on topics including anti-racism, critical race theory, and the history of white privilege in America.
And then, in one of the most breathtaking moves of all, the Department of Justice withdrew from a decades old desegregation consent decree in Louisiana, with the administration calling this decision “righting a historical wrong.” That is what they are calling the end of school desegregation enforcement… a historical wrong. Righted. By ending the legal requirement to desegregate schools.
DEI programs have been gutted across the federal government and in institutions that receive federal funding.
Mean girl behavior is protecting the men who trafficked and assaulted women.
The Epstein files. Hello!
Jeffrey Epstein ran a sex trafficking operation that implicated some of the most powerful men in the world, including our current President. Those files are being buried deliberately with the protection of people in power who have every incentive to make sure they stay buried.
A mean girl spreads rumors to protect her social standing. A mean girl with government access buries the files that would hold powerful men accountable for trafficking women.
Mean girl behavior is lying from a podium.
Karoline Leavitt stands in front of the American press corps every day and lies. Not stretches the truth or spins the truth. She LIES on behalf of the President about policy and what this administration has done and plans to do and said on the record. She does this with a smile and a confidence that is genuinely breathtaking in its audacity.
And when women like me point that out, we’re mean girls.
Leavitt a mean girl for standing at that podium defending policies that are forcing ten year old rape victims across state lines, erasing trans people from legal existence, raiding hospitals, burying trafficking files, and cutting lunch from thirty million children. Nobody calls her a mean girl for being part of an administration that voted against a United Nations document affirming the basic rights of women and girls, making the United States one of the only countries on earth to side with authoritarian regimes against its own female citizens.
When powerful women implement policies that harm women and girls and LGBTQ+ people and Black and brown communities, that betrayal at a scale that most of us are still struggling to fully comprehend. That is a woman climbing a ladder and pulling it up behind her, smiling for the camera the whole way.
What is really happening when they call us mean girls.
I have been doing this work long enough to know what is actually going on when someone calls feminist critique “mean girl” behavior. They are uncomfortable because the critique cuts through the story they have been telling themselves, the story that says a woman at a podium is automatically progress, that female success is inherently feminist, that we should celebrate women in power regardless of what they are doing with that power.
But a woman can carry water for a system that is crushing other women. A woman can smile while she dismantles the protections other women bled for. She can be charming and polished
When you call a woman a mean girl for demanding accountability you are doing the patriarchy’s housekeeping for it.
Sisterhood is fighting for the ten year old who had to cross state lines. Sisterhood is showing up for the immigrant mother who is afraid to take her kid to school. Sisterhood is demanding that women stop dying in emergency rooms because doctors are afraid to treat them. Sisterhood is refusing to stay quiet while Black history gets erased and trans people get legislated out of existence and sex trafficking files get buried and thirty million kids lose their lunch.
Sisterhood is naming the harm, clearly and loudly and without apology, even when the person enabling that harm is wearing lipstick and a blazer and calling herself a girl boss.
That is what I AM doing and that is what I will KEEP doing.
And if that makes me a mean girl, I will wear that label with my whole DD chest.