Just about all women sell each other out. Women have to do better, and men even more.

I know, I know, controversial title. White women have definitely sold the rest of us out, there is no doubt in my mind about that. Black women overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton. If it was up to the popular vote Hillary Clinton would have won, and that popular vote came overwhelmingly from black women.

Women for Trump? Absolutely mind boggling! But just about as mind boggling as LGBTQ people for Trump, Latin people for Trump and Black people for Trump. WTF is really going on? A lot of fear, hate, self-loathing and identity denial for sure.

White feminism is also truly a real thing, and backed up by systematic racism, there is no doubt in my mind about that neither. (Not that these white women who voted for Trump are feminists of course.)

It’s just that as a bi-racial (white and Asian) woman myself, or at least a female-bodied individual, (I identify as gender non-binary,) and victim of over 20 years of domestic abuse I have never really had the support of women in general in my struggle against abusive men. Women have downplayed the abuse I suffer at the hands of men, and in some cases even frowned on me for not leaving my husband, as if I have free will in an abusive relationship.

Never mind that I am an out and proud lesbian and have absolutely no need for men, at all. Never mind I am almost a heterosexual trans-man on the inside myself and have no need for men, at all. I need a man in my love life about as much as I need a white supremacist for a president as a bi-racial person, zero need at all.

(It’s actually been a delicate balance between my male gender and my female body to come to terms with feminism to the fullest myself but that will probably be the subject of another rant, also covering that not all trans-people have dysphoria and that non-binary does not mean I have no gender at all but rather feel I almost have two genders in various degrees at once. This my personal experience only anyway, and I’m certainly not judging dysphoria. Bi-gender might almost be a better term for me but even there both sides would be negated, just like people negate bi-sexuality, and even bi-racial people, somehow assuming they have no race at all instead of two at once, but not always as a 50/50 deal neither.)

But would a woman ask another woman, ‘why do you let yourself be raped?’ Rape is involuntary! What makes any woman think abuse is not involuntary?!

In reality, no matter how hard I fight, he is physically stronger. No matter how fast I run, he is physically faster. No matter how much I intellectually out-reason him, his brute force usually still wins. And as if his physical strength alone is not enough, he has the patriarch system on his side. Just like white women have a white system on “their side,” (or so they think. In the end the white system is still a patriarchy and they are sacrificed to it as well, just not nearly as badly as women of color.)

White women have sold out women of color, no question about it. But it goes down the line from there. Well-off women have sold out poor women, oftentimes for “having too many children,” not even questioning if these children are created entirely voluntarily or if poor women even have access to birth control and abortions.

Heterosexual women have sold out lesbians as well, even though homophobia seems to mainly be a heterosexual male problem.

And lesbians in turn have even sold out trans-men, as “traitors of their own sex,” as if trans-people choose their gender identity any more than lesbians choose their sexual orientation.

In a lot of cases our own mothers sold us out, in order not to lose our fathers, or often worse with stepfathers, but in order not to lose men, in order not to lose face in society, the approval and security of society, etc.

How many mothers have genuinely and readily accepted their daughters’ lesbianism? Many more than men at least. But how many have thrown their own LGBTQ children out of the house, or rather, stood by when their husband’s did the actual throwing out?

(In my own case my father was more readily accepting of my LGBTQ status than my mother though, not completely without resistance, but I’ve always a pretty solid relationship with him. Ultimately neither my mother nor father abandoned me for who I am but they’ve never completely understood it neither. I inadvertently abandoned them by becoming undocumented in the US, due to DOMA.)

This is my thought on this. I personally think that a lot of women sell each other out in order not to lose favor and protection from men, romantic and sexual favor and mostly a false sense of protection that is. It is survivor instinct, not long term, intelligent survivor instinct but short term, immediate survivor instinct. And it exists mostly in heterosexual women, since lesbians don’t need men’s romantic favor nor really trust men’s protection, knowing a lot of men mostly “protect” or do anything for women at all for sexual or romantic favor themselves.

We live in a rape culture, that is a reality and was one long before the electoral Trump win at the elections. In fact, if it wasn’t for rape we would probably not even be around on such a large scale, not just in the US but the world over. We’d probably have less than half the world’s population if women were allowed free will over their own bodies and minds. Yes, I really believe this. Whether or not the world is actually overpopulated or not, it is an unwanted population, half of us born because no full consent was ever respected, and no access to birth control or abortions was allowed.

If there was ever a conversation that needs precedence over all conversations at all, over the state of the economy, climate change and healthcare even, it is the subject of consent.

This is the singular most important topic that would need to be discussed by both women and especially men. Consent. Free will. This is the conversation I should have been seeing over and over, everywhere, on TV every day, on the radio every day, even in my own newsfeed on Facebook, and I picked my Facebook friends very carefully, and still I have not.

This is the conversation I have often tried to start by posting a lot of feminist articles on Facebook, regarding rape culture, regarding abortions, regarding gas lighting, a term for intimidation a lot of people aren’t even familiar with, and I myself even started to de-prioritize in order to highlight my immigration situation instead, for the moment I came out publicly as both “queer and undocumented” I had to fight for my life to defend my position. I know what people in this country think about women, about LGBTQ people, about people of color and about undocumented people, so mentally I’ve been having to fight like hell.

How many times in the 24 years I have lived in the US have I missed my home country, the Netherlands, where women have access to healthcare, birth control, legal abortions, where LGBTQ people enjoyed same-sex marriages since 2001, where sex work is legal, where recreational marijuana is legal, where we have a third party and more system? (15 Parties I believe, and a democracy and a monarchy at once.) How long did I have to wait in agony for California to turn little by little into my own home country? How strange does that last sentence even sound?

I can hear you think out loud, why on earth didn’t you just leave? Well, besides the fact that the Patriot Act put a no-exit visa system in place, and my trying to sneak out of the country would have resulted in my detention, without due process, I believe that women cannot keep running away from countries for their safety. Not on principle anyway. Out of safety yes, sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

But how many of you are going to actually run off to Canada now that we’ll have a fascist in the White House? And what will you claim at the border? Refugee status?

And how many of you are sorting out your emotions and your safety measures right now but will stay and fight on for your equal rights in the US?

I already ran once, not from my Dutch government, but from my small town existence as a gender-nonconforming lesbian in the 80s, during the international AIDS crisis which turned the heterosexual world even more against LGBTQ people than they already were. I “ran” to the US, legally on a 5-year student visa, to live out my dream of becoming a filmmaker.

I moved to Los Angeles by myself in 1992, at age 19, to study film. I came here with money, with the “right papers” initially, with health insurance even, and mostly out of my own free will. I worked manual labor minimum wage jobs for 3 years back in the Netherlands to save up for the full-time, out-of-state tuition required for a student visa. (You don’t get the actual student visa until after you got accepted by a college in the US and paid your fees.)

I was able to do these things not because I am better than my fellow undocumented people but because I was privileged as a citizen of the Netherlands. I was not brought here as a child by my family and therefore did not qualify for the DREAM Act in 2012 nor DACA in 2014, simply because my family didn’t need to flee poverty and violence caused by US foreign policy.

(By the way, Donald Trump stands nothing to win by deporting all 11 million but he stands something to win by incarcerating us indefinitely. Just like he wouldn’t win anything by freeing black people from jail. This country wants slave labor. If this country deported all of its’ brown kitchen workers it will be white women who’d be pushed back into the kitchens instead, not white men. Before Mexicans were accused of stealing Americans jobs, US citizen women were accused of stealing men’s jobs.

If this country killed all its black people and deported all its brown people, white people would be doing the hard labor again, or ramp up foreign policy. This country is hooked on keeping certain people in captivity to feed others abundantly. This country didn’t invent slavery from scratch but took after the European colonialists who are their ancestors and who provided captured people for them. This country just put the already existing slave system in full force.)

So yes, white women sold all of us out. Black women voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, that is a fact, and if Hillary Clinton won the popular vote she did so because black women did right. They voted for a white women who doesn’t even have their own best interest, but they sure as hell weren’t going to sell out to a white supremacist man, which is what Donald Trump simply is, a white supremacist just like his cronies who are now getting tapped one by one for top positions. Black women chose some security as well, the little bit of security a white woman can hopefully offer them over the tyranny of a white man instead. If it was ever a matter of choosing “the lesser of two evils,” black women still chose right.

White women, those white women who chose Trump, chose their own protection over the humanity and equality of all others, simply blinding themselves to the fact that these white men are not their protectors but their intimidators.

I mean, this largely female population, who is also white, chose a false protector. But who did their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, uncles, and brothers vote for? Obviously the same guy.

How safe is it in a marriage even when a husband choses a misogynist pig for a President and his wife chooses a feminist, or semi-feminist, or white feminist, but someone who might have their interest? What is that going to do to their marriages? And to the relationships to their fathers and brothers, etc.?

They’d have to not only divorce their husbands, break up with their boyfriends, but also break ties with all their male family members. And go where for safety? California?

White women chose to align themselves with a false narrative that black and brown people are criminals, rapists and job thieves, and chose their nasty Trump voting white male relatives instead.

White women sold us out. Black women saved us, or almost did, and we owe the popular vote to them and for that I am deeply appreciative. And yet the deep-rooted problem is male in my opinion. It is a complex problem, an inter-sectioning problem of racism and sexism. It might be a controversial stance to take but I believe that if we truly worked on solving female oppression, we’d solve racism in the process as well. (Even in pre-colonial times women were not treated equally by a lot of indigenous tribes worldwide, as well as in most other cultures worldwide, all throughout history, and if they were revered it was primarily for their baby making abilities, for being “life givers,” not for the contents of their minds.)

And it does not work by prioritizing white women over women of color but by understanding the meaning of full consent, of implementing free will for those who are not physically stronger but who are mentally equal. If might made right we would all lose out to the animal world instead because they could eat us whole.

We, as a human race, are all going to have to learn to respect full consent. And it won’t start with men teaching women. Women should not have to be the educators of men any more than black people should be the educators of white people but if we want our full equality and bodily autonomy we are going to have to educate, them and ourselves. We have a lot of work to do.

As a victim/survivor of physical, sexual, emotional and financial abuse this has been extremely frustrating to me for quite some time now and I just needed to get this off my chest. I’m not here to create any more division than there already is, just share my honest observations in an effort to unite us more.

Women in general have to do better, and white women more than anyone else. And men are going to have to shut up and listen.

Lastly, regarding the elections, on some level the Hillary supporters and the Bernie supporters both sold each other out, for we could have had both a true progressive and a woman rolled up in one for a President in Jill Stein. I’ve seen the division play out on my own Facebook newsfeed, my US citizen LGBTQ and women in the film industry acquaintances overwhelmingly preferring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and my POC and undocumented acquaintances mostly preferring Bernie over Hillary.

Of course I did not vote, not third-party, nor for “the lesser of two evils,” or an experienced woman, because as an undocumented person I am not allowed to vote. Of course I’ve had my own preferences and ideally would have liked to have seen a woman of color, instead of a white man or a man of color, in the White House, an LGBTQ person even instead of a heterosexual person, a bi-racial non-binary female bodied individual like myself, any damn combination of severe minority statuses, for the more minority identities in one person the better. And the more mixed up bi-anything even better, for the more bi-anything you are the harder it is to truly hate one group of people over the other, unless you let your fear get the best of you of course.

(I personally try to prioritize my “underdog” identities by highlighting them but I also cannot deny my other identities, and so I have to always explain all sides of things. I guess that’s why my articles run so long. As a gender nonconforming, trans-masculine individual with a female body, I am making a conscious choice not to transition, yet no amount of femaleness nor feminism will take away the fact that I have a primarily male gender, and even appearance, and have to deal with that. I’m probably closer to being a quarter Asian than truly half but that still means I am bi-racial, and that I am “read” as brown, by society and the authorities alike.)

My all-time favorite filmmaker John Cassavetes summed up politics this way, ‘There are no politics, there are only men and women.’ Ultimately I still agree with that.

Understanding, respect and implementation of full consent is my own personal solution to it all and I’ll leave it at that.

(PS: I have out-reasoned my husband’s misogyny by now, and have basically won, as he considers himself an ally in my causes now. In my own opinion, he can still do a lot better. The reason I cannot simply walk away now has more to do with my immigration situation than his abuse directly, and we are both dealing with resistance from others and the system now.)