Is Anyone Not Ready?
On female friendship and the fast-talking world of policy debate
I latched the stall door behind me and pulled my hair back in a single, fluid movement, breathing shakily and willing myself to throw up and get back to the room. I thought about what I’d had for breakfast — a few bites of a granola bar, a cup of sugary coffee — and the day ahead of me — elimination rounds, a seven-hour drive back to Sacramento — and heaved into the toilet bowl. As usual, my efforts produced little, more a consequence of my empty stomach than a desire not to be vomiting at 7:30 on a Monday morning. I stayed in the stall for about 30 seconds more, hoping I’d satisfied the urge that sent me there. I flushed and composed myself, ever impressed by my own ability to look perfectly fine just moments after puking.
With no time to waste, I rushed back into the hall, straightening my skirt and running my fingers through my flat-ironed hair as I went, nodding and smiling at the friends and vague acquaintances I passed on my way back to the hotel ballroom I’d been assigned. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d gotten away with something: no one had come into the bathroom during the few minutes I’d been there, and I could probably put money on the fact that no one in the hallway had any idea what I’d just done. Perhaps overcoming this moment of self-imposed adversity would make victory this morning a bit sweeter.
I made it back to the room and slid into the seat I’d claimed earlier, slipping back into a conversation about the Supremacy Clause and federal sexual harassment policy that my debate partner, Elyse, had continued with our coach in my absence. I hopped between the overwhelming number of open tabs and documents on my laptop, sometimes piping up in the conversation but mostly compiling things to present in the round ahead. I drank nearly half my water bottle in an attempt to rinse the taste of vomit from my mouth and erase the smell of it from my breath.
8:00 came sooner than it felt like it should’ve, and the round began. Thus concluded the routine that preceded the first debate of the day for almost every debate tournament I attended.
If you’ve never watched a high school policy debate round, it can be jarring. Debaters speak at upwards of 300 words per minute in a style called “spreading.” The term is allegedly a hybrid of “speed” and “reading” but rhymes with “dreading,” and has come to define the performance of modern competitive debate. Pimply high schoolers seek to “outspread” one another — that is, overwhelm each other with a high volume of arguments — in an attempt to slip something by and win the debate. Of course, debates are rarely decided on something as simple as one team having more arguments than the other, but spreading is the most foreign feature of policy debate to most casual observers.
I’ve lost touch with how strange spreading is. I don’t notice people’s gasping breaths between 2-second sentences unless their technique is outstandingly bad; I don’t jump when someone starts a speech at full volume and full speed anymore. It’s easy to lose myself in the rhythm of a particularly good speaker’s speech, tapping my foot to the beat of their quickly punctuated sentences, absorbing the tidal wave of information being presented.
Opponents of spreading say that it defeats debate’s purpose as a communication activity, but I’d argue otherwise. Bad spreading still sounds bad, even to trained ears, and debates are rarely pure speed contests. There is, in fact, such a thing as going too fast. Spreading can be elegant in its own right, and efficiency and quality of argumentation, not the sheer quantity of arguments presented, are still emphasized above almost everything else. If someone speedily presents seventeen terrible arguments, there’s a good chance they’ll lose to someone who slowly presents seven good ones.
After the first two speeches and cross-examinations in which Elyse presented our affirmative case (our “aff”) and our opponents took their first shots at it, I stood up for my speech, feeling whatever the opposite of how I’d felt in the stall that morning was. I emailed the evidence for my speech to the other team, the judges, and the handful of spectators in the room, setting my timer for eight minutes as I waited for each of them to pull it up.
“Is anyone not ready?” I asked the room after a minute, using the ubiquitous debate expression that placed the burden of interfering with the round’s progression on everyone but myself. No one answered, which meant I was free to start. I beeped the start button on my timer and launched into a 400 word-per-minute opening statement I’d given so many times that I’d memorized it. My voice dropped an octave, my eyes darted between the judges, and my fingers fidgeted with the hem of my skirt as I tore through my impassioned tirade on the importance of federal Title IX reform at a blistering pace. The room felt smaller as my voice reached its corners.
Giving speeches in elimination rounds (rounds that, if lost, could end your run at a tournament) felt like traversing an obstacle course. I extrapolated sentences from two-word scribbles on my “flow” — the name given to notes taken in a debate — and verbally raced through my opponents’ arguments, indicting their authors and preempting pivots I knew they’d make in the next speech as I went. I spat out bits of information about the law that were questionably true but benefitted my argument, I blew through pieces of evidence carefully lifted from obscure law review articles to support my point, and I confidently asserted that what my opponent said was patently false, even though I wasn’t totally sure I was right. Honesty was of little importance — I knew what I had to say to win, and I said it.
I nervously twisted the hoop in my left ear as I pieced together an answer to an argument no one had made against our aff before. All debaters have tics that accompany their spreading; fidgeting with my earrings and touching my hair were mine. Elyse moved her arms like she was swimming breaststroke. It’s not uncommon for people to physically bounce up and down.
Eight minutes feels terribly short when you’re tasked with discussing about thirty-five different issues at once, but I managed to say everything I needed before the shrill beeps of my timer alerted everyone that it was time for cross-examination. I loved cross-ex, especially when I was the one answering questions. My opponent stood up, straightened his tie, and pushed his semi-kempt hair out of his eyes.
“Ready?” he asked. Of course I was. Our timers beeped in unison, and three minutes of one-on-one verbal cage fighting commenced.
I fudged my way through explanations of district court operations, using an assertive tone to undermine whatever research he’d done before the round. I scoffed when he asked questions that I wanted the judges to know I thought were dumb or irrelevant. I did my best to mimic his distinctly teen-boy confidence, standing at my tallest 5’10”, maintaining my artificially baritone voice, rolling my eyes when he didn’t get it.
Elyse and I jostled with each other to give answers, as was our bad habit. The closest we ever came to arguing with each other was during cross-ex, and even then, it was in pursuit of a shared goal — winning. Cross-ex is supposed to be one-on-one; we saw it as one-on-two. Judges reprimanded us for years, but we never changed. It wasn’t as if we didn’t trust the other to answer questions on her own (our debate expertise was nearly identical, and we knew it), but we both seemed to forget that although debate was a team sport, we were supposed to answer questions as individuals. We constantly tweaked each other’s answers and spoke over each other, definitely undermining our credibility, but always doing it even so. Just in case. In case of what, I’m not sure, but we always took the precaution.
The performative aspect of debating can often convince people you’re better than you actually are. The spreading, yes, but also everything else — the decision to sit down or stand up for cross-ex, the decision to read from your computer in a final rebuttal or give it just off of handwritten notes, the precise pitch and tone of your voice, the placement of breaths between words in a sentence. All of it works to create a competitive character that a judge has to evaluate in conjunction with the arguments presented, and regardless of whether it’s supposed to matter, it does.
Decisions made outside of the round, for that matter, are almost equally important, and that was arguably where Elyse and I were most successful. We had moderate competitive success, to be sure — we beat our fair share of top teams, were invited to the most prestigious round robins, and qualified to and did decently well at the top national championship — but our real success was in the semi-accidental creation of a personal brand, one that we used to garner social capital and capture everyone’s attention a bit more than we probably otherwise would have.
Debate has a bizarre culture of celebrity, one where 16-year-old boys are hailed as gods of ethos and argument because they can explain Chevron deference or Baudrillard, where “GDS” (“good debater syndrome”) means that an unattractive guy with a penchant for aggressive argumentation becomes a 10 to wide-eyed and ambitious sophomore girls, where everyone thinks they personally know the good debaters because they know how they debate. This fame is sometimes extended to non-men, but it’s rare. Our brand allowed us to tap into the reserves of debate pseudo-celebrity in a way our skills alone might not have.
It began when we registered to a tournament as a team from an institution called “Debater Girls” — obviously not a real high school — because we couldn’t get permission from our school to fly to New York to compete without a chaperone (unsurprising), and we decided we needed to go anyways. We thought it’d be funny to compete under a cutesy name, and the Debater Girls brand was born.
The name was inspired by the fact that we loved being a rare, successful two-girl partnership in a male-dominated activity, and were obsessed with beating obnoxious boys while wearing dresses from Urban Outfitters and matching silver hoops. Our senior year, we spent the season defending an aff about Title IX reform, and enjoyed nothing more than watching boys squirm as we grilled them on the nuances of sexual harassment policy. It felt indulgent and fun, and it helped that we never really lost those debates.
We claimed “debatergirls@gmail.com” and used it as a joint email instead of the customary practice of using our own personal emails to exchange evidence with other teams. We took a mirror selfie before the first round of the day at every tournament for three years, and found a pattern between ugly selfies and poor performance — surely a correlation that was more imagined than real, but one that motivated us to be extra-judicious in our outfit selection and mascara application each day. We sold Debater Girls-branded sweatshirts to debaters across the country to fund our travel to tournaments, and we wore them during our most important debates. We recorded vlog-style video clips throughout our senior year and published a half-hour long, self-edited “documentary” on YouTube after the season ended. We even made a Mean Girls-style “Burn Book” that included the names of teams and people we’d like to beat, and kept it hidden away on our shared Dropbox.
We were a unit, best friends, inseparable at tournaments, inconsiderately distant from the other members of our own team, and thought of as little else than “the girls who do debate” back at our high school. We told everyone that we were functionally the same person; we thought the same things, wore the same things, cared about the same things, both spent our afternoons researching Title IX policy and our weekends at debate tournaments. Sisters, we said. Her 5-year-old brother called me “Elyse 2.” Her mom bought us matching bracelets engraved with “Debater Girls” as a graduation gift. We’d obviously always been debater girls, but our senior year was different. That year, we claimed the label as more than a description: we claimed it as our brand.
I sat down after cross-ex, pleased with how I’d done. I could tell I’d made him sweat. It didn’t really matter that I’d just blatantly lied about what the Supremacy Clause was, or waffled on about what our proposed reform to Title IX’s institutional liability standard might actually entail — he hadn’t caught on, and even if he had, I’d just do it again, but better, in my final rebuttal. I knew these arguments better than he did; I knew I sounded more persuasive. I’d done the research. I knew everything he could possibly say. Even if he did have some tricks up his sleeve, I’d be fine — I knew I was better than him.
Elyse and I conferred as our opponents prepared for their next set of speeches, mulling over evidence they’d presented and making fun of arguments they’d made. Debaters have a tendency to call anything they slightly disagree with stupid, ridiculous, or irrelevant, regardless of whether the thing actually is. The activity incentivizes thinking in extremes; my argument was The Truth, and anything that contradicted it was automatically garbage, despite the fact that I might be forced to defend that position in the very next round.
The remaining hour of the round unfolded without incident. The other team responded to my eight-minute speech in the thirteen-minute, two-speech “neg block.” Elyse, the first affirmative speaker (the 1A, in technical terms), gave the first affirmative rebuttal (the 1AR), and effectively annihilated the preceding thirteen minutes in the five she was allotted. We were both unusually speedy, but she was always faster. The 1AR is considered to be the hardest speech in debate, and she handled it with ease, sprinting through arguments and setting me up for a strong conclusion.
As the second affirmative speaker (the 2A), I gave the eighth of eight speeches in the round. The second affirmative rebuttal (the 2AR), in my opinion, is the most elegant speech in debate, and was always my favorite to give. The 2A’s goal is to sort through the overwhelming number of arguments presented in the debate and tell the judge how to interpret them all. I loved the storytelling aspect of the 2AR, the fusion of technical analysis about the arguments remaining with emotional appeals for the judge’s ballot, the opportunity to look the judge in the eye and explain to them exactly what their decision must be. I loved being given permission to be manipulative, to force the judge’s hand in my favor.
“Zero risk of the disad, significant solvency deficits on the counterplan, and conceded arguments on framing mean it’s an easy aff ballot,” I’d often begin, using the clipped, jargon-heavy, assertive speech characteristic of policy debate, even if I knew I was losing. I told the judge what I’d have to do to win, and if I did my job well enough, they’d parrot those phrases back to me — zero risk, solvency deficits, conceded framing arguments, a win for the aff.
I stood up for the 2AR, and performed as I always did. I closed my laptop, a sign that the next five minutes would be purely off the top of my head and the notes I’d scribbled down in prep time, not reliant on arguments that coaches or anyone else had written for me before the debate. I straightened my skirt, straightened my papers, ran my fingers through my straightened hair — is anyone not ready? The room was silent, and I was off. Full speed ahead.
Every woman in debate has a “gross debate guy” story; many have worse. Elyse and I regularly had uncomfortable interactions with men who judged us, and we frequently debated budding sexists who seemed to enjoy nothing more than speaking over us. Two men who’d judged us in a debate (and decided different ways) once hashed out a disagreement about how to consider our arguments about gendered violence on a high school debate podcast. “The plot thickens,” the host of the podcast said upon realizing his guests had a bone to pick, “I didn’t realize this was personal for the two of you.” Personal for them. A podcast. Hilarious. Too perfect.
My primary “gross debate guy” story is relatively mild (assuming sexual harassment can ever be considered to be so). A year after I quit the Cal debate team, I received an unsolicited, multi-clip dick video from an older guy I debated as a high school sophomore and again as a college freshman. When I debated him in college, my partner was a guy, and after I delivered the final negative rebuttal and the other guy gave his 2AR, he confronted my partner in the men’s restroom, taken aback at the speech I’d given — what the fuck was that, he demanded, banging on the stall door, furious that he might have just lost to us, to me. He did lose to us, to me. We eliminated him from the tournament. But it didn’t stop him from sending me a video of him masturbating more than a year later. You can take the girl out of debate, but you can’t stop the creepy debate guys from bothering her, or something like that.
I struggle with the thought that some version of me probably existed somewhere in his brain, maybe since the first time I debated him when I was 15 and I lost to him and he told my older male teammate he thought I was cute. Who was that girl to him? What did she represent? Was the video he sent three years later supposed to scare her? Seduce her? Is there (can there ever be?) deeper meaning in a dick video? Whatever the answers, whoever she was to him, she was a placeholder for women in debate as a whole, I imagine: ripe and tempting when young and beatable, complicated and threatening when older and better. In any case, regardless of if meaning can or should be derived from a video of someone’s dick, she (I?) was apparently humiliating to lose to.
Sexism is embedded in every part of debate; not all of it comes in the form of graphic Snapchats or sleazy comments from coaches. The most everyday forms, which is to say the most acceptable forms, come in debate rounds themselves, in the assigning of speaker points based on how someone sounds, in telling a tenacious freshman that she’s too aggressive and should really be nicer in cross-ex, in judges rolling their eyes at emotional arguments about gendered violence. At one national tournament, Elyse and I were the only two girls in the top 20 speakers, clocking in at 18 and 20. At that same tournament, there were two guys named Nicholas in the top three speakers.
Debater Girls was primarily an out-of-round brand, and while we resisted some of these more insidious forms of sexism, we also fully conformed to sexist expectations in other regards. Perhaps most noticeably, I deliberately lowered my voice when I spread.
I’ll be the first to admit that I think spreading sounds better in a lower voice. It’s never something I was told; I was lucky to have coaches who were mindful of the potential long-term psychological effects of telling a 15-year-old girl that she’d be better and more people would like her if her voice was deeper, but it’s something that became obvious over time. A few weeks into the seven-week summer debate camp I attended before my senior year, my voice was hoarse from hours of drills and practice debates, and I had to lower it out of necessity. Despite the fact that I’d lost my voice and was pushing into a lower range than felt natural in order to be heard, instructors complimented me on how I sounded. The positive reinforcement convinced me to keep the baritone, and at the highly competitive season-opener in Dallas, I won the 7th place speaker award, beating over 220 competitors from across the country. Further validation.
When I watch recordings of myself from when I debated, it’s funny (if mildly embarrassing) how much I lowered my voice. I sounded — and with my flat-ironed blonde hair, unfortunately looked — like Elizabeth Holmes, the start-up scammer who wore black turtlenecks and adopted an unnaturally deep voice to gain credibility in male-dominated Silicon Valley. She was clearly emulating Steve Jobs, and it paid off: despite the fact that her product never worked, she won praise from across the globe, earning honorary doctorates and “Woman of the Year” awards and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Lowering my voice in order to make myself seem more competent in the eyes of greasy middle-aged debate coaches felt similarly scammy. I was also playing a part. And I was also getting away with it.
I sat down after the 2AR, exhilarated. I looked at Elyse, and we knew. We knew! I crushed it. Over the years, we’d grown so close that we could communicate through facial expressions alone. In rounds, this manifested in exaggerated smirks and arched eyebrows upon receiving the evidence the other team sent — our smiles said this was stupid, they were bad, we were going to win. We sometimes got in trouble for being too expressive in debates. We looked catty, we were told, our faces and whispers to each other just a little too mean. We relished the compliment.
After rounds, as we sat in limbo waiting for our fate to be handed down, we exchanged manic glances and scurried into the hallway to debrief. I never noticed it, but I’ve been told that when we spoke to each other, it was almost incomprehensibly fast, especially with the adrenaline of a debate round still coursing through us.
In the hallway, we gave each other a play-by-play of the round, despite the fact that we’d both been there the whole time. We mapped out the ways the judges could decide and felt confident they’d conclude in our favor. Perceptually, we thought we’d dominated. After we established that we both thought we won, we took a few selfies. For the archives, maybe for Instagram. We texted our friends and our mothers. I choked down bites of a chalky protein bar and we waited.
After 20 minutes or so, the decision was in. Holding the losers’ trophy in hand, one of the three (male) judges announced it: a 2-1 victory for us. We’d take the win, but who was the 1? What was he thinking? We asked these questions to ourselves and each other, but as the judge explained why he voted for the boys, we didn’t listen for the answers. This was perhaps disrespectful, probably a reflection of our inflated post-win egos, certainly a consequence of the fact that we’d be debating in the semi-finals in an hour and needed to prepare. We just didn’t care that much about what he had to say.
It’d be wrong to group Debater Girls with the Elizabeth Holmeses, Caroline Calloways, and Anna Delveys of the world. No one was cheated or lost any money because we created a calculated personal brand, and we never set out to scam anyone. We didn’t scam anyone, really. Debate is a game, and serious players will always look for ways to refine their techniques, to score a few extra points. By becoming Debater Girls but still playing the game by its rules, we struck a middle ground: by virtue of our very existence, judges were forced to confront the fact that being a debater girl was different from just being a debater, that some things were harder and worse, but by not straying too far from the expectations of us as players of the game, we made ourselves easier to like, more palatable. The apparent contradiction of our deep voices and miniskirts was really not a contradiction at all. They were two halves of a whole, two crucial elements of our collective competitive character: the fiercely competitive debaters and the feminine, agreeable girls.
Our carefully curated brand of feminism was clearly influenced and warped by the simultaneous prevalence of #GirlBoss feminism. To us, it was simple: women should win, women should get to be as successful as men, women should break every glass ceiling they encounter, etc. And on a surface level, those things are true. It’s certainly a good thing to have women (and debater girls) in high places, to redefine what traits are required for success. It’s important for success and notoriety to seem accessible to everyone, for there to be multiple models for what success looks like and who can achieve it. But it’s also true that we didn’t actually redefine what traits lead to success in debate; we just repackaged them. For old debate community stalwarts with liberal leanings, it probably felt better to vote for the Debater Girls in matching miniskirts and hoops than it did the thousandth reiteration of suburban Chicago white boys in loafers and slacks. They could be the change they wanted to see via playing a small role in our success. This isn’t to say that we achieved a level of success that we didn’t deserve, but it is to say that Debater Girls was as much a competitive strategy as it was a fun and meaningful thing for two best friends to do and be.
Our proximity to the types of people who were traditionally successful (read: wealthy white boys) afforded us an advantage, and performing as Debater Girls exploited it in the least threatening way — we became the cute, bubbly, white girl-Asian girl counterpart to the typical white boy partnership that ended up in the finals of tournaments. Not too scary to vote for. It felt different, perhaps, but in a way that scored judges feminist points instead of threatening the integrity of the activity they’d dedicated their lives to.
Nothing about the Debater Girls agenda was radical. We didn’t want to be. We generally enjoyed debate as we knew it. We met our best friends there, we had all our significant firsts there, we grew up there. We knew and saw and experienced many of its flaws, but we didn’t feel like the game as a whole had to go. Or at least, if it did, we weren’t going to be the ones to torch it. This could be criticized as cowardly or un-feminist — if we knew these inequities existed, why didn’t we do everything in our power to change them? If we knew debate was broken, why didn’t we fix it? I’d answer this by saying we were in high school, we enjoyed the game, and at the end of the day, it wasn’t really up to us. Adults still controlled the activity (as they probably should).
We didn’t do debate to change it, we did it because it was fun and we loved it and were good at it. We played the game that we loved, but we played it with few illusions about its goodness. We were players who knew what happened behind the curtain and cared, but not enough to pull it down completely.
It also wasn’t insignificant that we were conventionally successful. There was something special about our particular flavor of debate celebrity. I think it mattered that we forced people to engage with nuanced, policy-based arguments about gendered violence at the highest levels of competition, and I think it mattered that younger debaters could see us debate. We were snarky to our opponents like the boys were, and we tried to make our voices deep like the boys’ were, but we were still never the boys.
We ended up winning the semi-finals and advancing to the final round of the tournament, where we were promptly clobbered. I gave only my second losing 2AR of the season, which at that point had been going on for several months. The decision was a 3-0 against us, and we felt it. We knew they’d beaten us; we knew we’d lost. Good game, guys. And so ended our tournament. We debated 22 people, 19 of them men, and none of them women once we reached elimination rounds. We were judged by 14 people, 13 of them men, with not a single woman judging us in elimination rounds. I didn’t even realize how terrible those numbers were at the time. The tournament felt like any other.
We stood together in the hotel ballroom after taking a few photos with our trophy and the champions (our friends, boys we went to camp with and who purchased and wore Debater Girls sweatshirts). The room had mostly cleared out, and it felt strange. The anxiety and adrenaline of the tournament began to dissipate, and the exhaustion of a weekend of debate rounds and minimal sleep started to settle in. I became hungry for the first time in three days. The room was strewn with papers, people’s flows from rounds prior, and the tables were still arranged as if awaiting another debate. The room we’d filled with our voices felt large and empty. Like we were intruding. The tournament was over, and we had to go home.
We drove back to Sacramento through the night, alternating between shallow sleep and giddy recounting of the weekend’s highlights. We went to school the next morning and were just ourselves again. Not Debater Girls, just the girls who do debate. Which was just as well.
It’s customary to write a goodbye to debate and post it on Facebook after your final tournament. Usually, these posts include shoutouts to everyone you’ve ever cared about in the activity, unfunny inside jokes about rounds won and lost, and platitudes about how debate changed your life forever. When it came time to write ours, in an airport in Kentucky after the Tournament of Champions, Elyse and I didn’t feel like that kind of post was right for us. Our high school debate experience had been defined by our partnership. Everything we knew about debate we’d learned together; debate was meaningful because we had each other. Because we became Debater Girls. Our posts were love letters to that, to each other.
Both of our posts recounted the story of our partnership, expressed tentative excitement at the idea of debating in college, and mourned the end of the thing that gave us each other. We wrote about sobbing together in a high school classroom in New York, dancing to Top 40 pop songs in grungy Las Vegas hotel rooms before tournaments, our shared and uncanny ability to know what the other was thinking before she said it. I attached 30 of our tournament-day mirror selfies to mine; she attached parallel photos of us at debate camp as 14-year-olds and us crying after finishing our last debate together to hers. It felt impossible to convey everything we’d done and given each other over four years in a Facebook post.
I don’t fully know what the legacy of Debater Girls is. It certainly isn’t continued success in debate: I outlasted Elyse’s college debate career, and I only made it to November of our freshman year, competing at three tournaments and reaching elimination rounds only once. Part of it was that I was bored of the boys’ club, but most of it wasn’t. I was partners with my roommate and college best friend for two of the three tournaments I attended in a near replication of the Debater Girls experience, but college debate just didn’t do it for me.
I didn’t want to do debate if I wasn’t going to be one of the best. I knew what it required, and I discovered I didn’t care to do it anymore. I still loved the act of debating, the rush of creating the perfect argument, the satisfaction of victory, but I felt like I’d gotten everything out of debate that I was ever going to: success, a taste of celebrity, best friends and relationships, research and writing skills, the ability to pursue an auctioneering career, etc. I began to feel like I was doing something fake. This wasn’t a new feeling — I’d always known debate was a game — but suddenly, I wanted to be a real person doing real things. I’d spent four years perfecting and behaving as a character, arguing with other characters about bastardizations of public policy and critical theory. In college, I wanted something else.
College promised to be different, to be something real. Lying about Title IX policy in debate rounds was fun, but so was actually working on it, something I discovered after I quit debate and joined new clubs. Being a Debater Girl was fun, but so was being Annabelle, girl of many interests. Elyse discovered something similar. Our time as Debater Girls positioned us well for new ventures after. She writes about gender in magazines and studies sex work and power; I advise respondents in Title IX cases and work on campus sexual harassment/sexual violence policy. Our one-note, Catharine MacKinnon-inspired, carceral flavor of feminism gave way under the weight of the real world’s complexities — when people were attached to our ideas, not just wins and losses, it suddenly felt harder to defend our uncompromisingly punitive model of Title IX, harder to justify our myopic, victory-focused dismissals of valid objections to our views.
My Debater Girls sweatshirt is still in my closet, but I don’t really wear it anymore. The Debater Girls version of myself is in the equivalent position in my psyche. I draw from it when needed, but never all at once anymore. I see pieces of it in class discussions and in conversations with my friends; in my interactions with the Title IX respondents I work with; in my bad habit of picking stupid fights for the sport of it. Mostly, though, I see it in how I think of myself. Annabelle, the Debater Girl, created Annabelle, the person, whether she (I?) knew it or not.
