I just had a stunning realization. I am the first generation of women who got to live her life with some semblance of equality, and I didn’t even get to live my whole life before those rights started being taken away. We never enjoyed full equality, but it was more than any generation before us had the privilege to experience.

I got to vote, make my own reproductive choices, have a legal right to equal education, schools had to legally spend as much on female sports as males. My 8^th grade softball team was the first in the school’s history. Workplaces couldn’t discriminate against me because of my gender. Domestic violence and spousal rape became criminal acts, and not just ‘family matters’ or ‘a woman fulfilling her wifely duties.’ Sexual harassment became illegal, as opposed to just being called ‘boys will be boys.’ I could open a bank account, take out a loan, rent an apartment, own my own home. All or some of these rights were denied to the women who came before me. Those women fought long and hard for the rights I so freely enjoyed.

And now, slowly but surely, we’re losing them all. First, we lost autonomy over our bodies, then we lost DEI, which gave us equal opportunity to work. Now they’ve begun the process of taking away our right to vote. If you think it will stop there, you’re not paying attention. Every right we have came after we had the right to vote. Once we lose that, we lose everything. People who can’t vote don’t exist to those who make the laws.

South Carolina lawmakers just introduced advocating for the death penalty for women who have abortions. Keep in mind that this is the same party that has turned into a hero a white boy who murdered two actual living people.

The confounding thing is that nobody was tricked. They spoke openly about their desire to bring women back to a place when men could control them. They even wrote it all down in a book. Despite the warnings, millions of white women still voted their freedoms away. Historians will be studying this for centuries to come.

To me the most tragic thing is the realization of just how much self-hate so many women have. It’s hard to comprehend millions of women thinking so little of themselves that they would vote for a man and party who have such open contempt for women. Racism is a part of it, no question. But racism is simply self-hate projected outward. As within, so without. People who love themselves don’t hate other people because of the color of their skin.

I may be naïve, but I still have hope. I have hope that as these women realize exactly what they’ve done, they’ll change course. That their spirits will rise up within them and they’ll refuse to participate in their own discrimination any longer.

I pray it happens sooner rather than later. I pray it happens before women are once again the legal property of the men in their lives, and their fourteen-year-old daughters and granddaughters are sold off in marriage to the highest bidder.