Gloria Steinem Changed My Life. I Won’t Pretend She Was Right About Everything.

For years, when interviewers asked for a favorite quote, I gave them Gloria Steinem’s: “We are linked, not ranked.” She used the line in 2013 as shorthand for her whole political vision. Women are not a tournament. We are not climbing over one another toward a single chair. We thrive when we treat our connection as a circle instead of a hierarchy.

I needed that line. In corporate life in the 1990s and early 2000s, the conventional wisdom held that there was room for only a few of us in executive team rooms and that the smart play was to swat the woman next to you out of the way. Steinem’s sentence rejected that scarcity story. The problem was the ranking, not the other woman.

I am a feminist. I adopted the word in college. Before that I was an athlete training eight hours a day, with no political opinions to speak of. What I had was a body that coaches treated as theirs to break and use to achieve their own goals.

My feminist awakening came after those years, when I understood that what happened to me was not a private misfortune. It was a pattern.

When I speak at conservative events — which I often do — I sometimes open with the same sentence: I am a feminist.

I did it at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Conference in 2024, even after I arrived and saw the theme on the conference t-shirts: “Feminine, not Feminist.” I thought about dropping my opener. Then I decided honesty and authenticity were the only useful things I had to offer these women.

I told the room I believe women should have the right to vote, to own property, to get credit in our own names without a husband’s signature, and to keep private spaces — including battered women’s shelters and locker rooms — private.

Young conservative women cheered. That is not a contradiction. It is the part of feminism that simply demands that women be treated as full human beings.

It is not an exaggeration to say that without the movement Steinem helped build, American women would still be fighting for credit in our own names, locked out of professions and college majors, and without real recourse when a husband turned the home into a crime scene by abusing his wife.

People can criticize feminism all they want — I have my own criticisms of third- and fourth-wave feminism, which often treat promiscuity as equality and the female sex as a costume to be donned by anyone, including men, who choose it — but her influence on those earlier, concrete freedoms cannot be overstated. She mattered to me as a young woman trying to make a life after years of physical and emotional abuse in sport by male coaches.

In college, I read “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” her 1983 essay collection. I read it once, then again. She wrote about pornography and female genital mutilation as illustrative of the ways women are treated as less than human.

In the most famous piece, she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and reported the cheap pay and sexual harassment that Hugh Hefner’s club imposed on women, while selling it as a glamorous career path.

It all added up to what I already knew in my bones: women’s personal experience is a political matter. And women, as a sex class, deserve protections under the law.

I met her in 2018, when I was chief marketing officer at Levi’s. We brought guests into company events, and I was the in-house interviewer — Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, and Jill Ellis (the winningest soccer coach in U.S. history). Steinem was the only one who made me nervous. Not a pop star. Not a coach. A woman who had changed the course of American women’s lives. A hero, for me anyway.

In 2020, when “Athlete A” — the documentary I produced and appeared in about Larry Nassar and the system that protected him — was released, she posted about it on X. She called it “the complicated story of one man in a position of power who sexually abuses women and the heroes — journalists, gymnasts, and police officers — who exposed the system which enabled him.”

She said she could not think of anything more important to see in terms of truth-telling. I was honored. A woman who had spent her life naming power systems that kept women as second-class citizens had recognized the same architecture in sport. And she lauded the film, which went on to win an Emmy.

It would not be an overstatement to say that her later views on transgender ideology were a huge disappointment. For all her work on the oppression of women, she failed to see that this new doctrine is a continuation of that oppression: men in dresses insisting they are women, taking privacy, rights, and opportunities from actual women. Steinem came to treat those men as a kind of woman — linked, not ranked, inside the community of women.

They are not. They are men. And they are ranked at the top of the hierarchy whenever their feelings are placed above women’s sex-based rights.

That conclusion was not inevitable. Feminist icon Germaine Greer does not share it. Greer has said that transgender women are not women, and that surgery does not change sex. “Being without a penis doesn’t make you a woman any more than being without a womb makes you a man.”

Steinem was wrong on this. Terribly wrong. The man in the dress fooled her.

Steinem once said a woman has two choices: “She is a feminist or a masochist.” It is hard not to hear that line now as an indictment of women who call themselves feminists while handing men our privacy, our categories, and our very real identity — not as in “gender identity” but in who we literally are. On this question, that would include Steinem herself, as a masochist.

But we can praise the good without incinerating the whole person. At her death, I choose the harder thing: keep what she built and refuse the error that would undo it. “We are linked, not ranked” is still a true sentence about women, and people more broadly. It becomes a lie the moment it is used to smuggle men into the circle and then rank their claims above ours.

The work Steinem did during the first half of my life made the second half possible. The work still left to do is to defend the category she spent decades insisting was real: woman.

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Jennifer Sey is the CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She is an author, filmmaker, and retired national champion gymnast.

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