Years ago, my alma mater invited me to join an alumni committee made up exclusively of women to talk about women’s issues. When I asked what “women’s issues” meant, I got a jumbled serving of the usual fare: women’s health, child welfare, education. I declined right away: It isn’t that these topics aren’t important; it’s that I don’t see them as concerns specific to women, or issues that are best tackled by someone whose lead qualification to address them is that she is female. 

I guess I am meant to feel a certain sympatico when it’s women-only, but I don’t. I think I am supposed to be less inhibited speaking about politics or social policy in a room full of women, but I am not. I know I am supposed to care more about breast cancer than kidney cancer but, actually, the latter has affected my family more. I am sure I am supposed to delight in referring to myself as a “mama bear” or a “woman who supports women,” but I cringe when I hear those memes. Also, I absolutely don’t believe all women: I don’t believe most people most of the time. 

All of the lines people use to lure women into women’s groups are lost on me, and the politicians who traffic in them really lose me at hello. I will never forget meeting Amy Klobuchar when the Minnesota senator was running for the Democratic nomination in 2020. A friend was hosting her at his Manhattan offices one wintry morning and asked me to join for a breakfast. There were 12 people around the table, of which two were women, including me. It was a detail I hadn’t noticed until the senator drew attention to it. 

Entering the room a few minutes late and wet from the rain outside, she apologized for keeping us waiting and then nodded at me in some sort of sisterhood moment, laughing that “we” know what it’s like when the humidity does a number on “our” hair. 

In fairness, I do know what it’s like, but I marveled to myself that the politician in her really thought she had built a rapport with me in that little moment of girl bonding. I was never voting for Amy Klobuchar anyway, because I didn’t like her policies and I thought she and her party were poisoning the country with identity politics. The irony of her “women only” moment with me only reinforced my view. 

Of course, I understand that it wasn’t that long ago that the fight for women’s rights was on, and women had to band together. Yet can’t I be grateful for the past, and simultaneously choose not to live in it? I appreciate that someone named Amy can run for president in 21^st century America. But shouldn’t we all appreciate that as a woman I can be completely disinterested in her gender because while we may share struggles with bad hair days, I am looking for someone who shares my view on a nuclear Iran? Perhaps featuring her gender would have been less annoying if she could have explained in plain English how being a woman would have made her a better president.

In my experience, women’s groups are assembled for two main reasons: Either women are told they need special assistance, or women can be of special assistance to those organizing them into groups. The former seems outdated at best; at worst, it perpetuates a mindset of victimhood to which I don’t subscribe. The latter speaks to the agendas of organizations that like to demonstrate that they “care about women” so you will care about watching their films or buying their products. 

It may not sound like it, but I really like women — individual women. As a category, though, they are no more interesting to organize myself around than “parents” or “writers.” I don’t join those groups, either.