Feminism beyond Feminism: a Bridge to Broader Activism in my Life

I don’t write about feminism very often.

That may seem odd for someone whose work so often centers on equity, identity, autonomy, and belonging, but most of my advocacy today isn’t focused on binary gender, and often moves against the narrow understanding that binary gender gives us. But the reality is that feminism was the first framework that helped me understand that what felt personal was often built into expectations, institutions, traditions, and systems.

The death of Gloria Steinem this past week made me stop and reflect on how much feminism has informed all of my advocacy work. It was also a reminder that gender intersects with nearly every other identity. Being a female Atheist, for example. 🙂

Feminism is more than a political label or a list of women’s issues. It’s a way of seeing power, assumptions, and inequality. Of noticing who gets treated as the “default”, who is expected to adapt, whose experiences are taken seriously, and whose differences require an explanation. Feminism became foundational to my understanding of equity, equality, and belonging.

I don’t think i understood that when i was young, even as the experiences were shaping my future.

Some of my earliest memories are of wanting to be a boy. Not because of gender dysphoria or because i experienced myself internally as male. I wanted to be a boy because boys got to do the fun things. They could explore, get dirty, take risks, be physical, and be adventurous.

There were much more serious lessons, too. A childhood that had many good moments, but also domestic violence and sexual assault. An adult life that included opportunities and accomplishments, but also workplace inequity and barriers that male colleagues didn’t face. I have watched expectations about relationships, appearance, family, independence, and behavior follow women in ways that often go unnoticed by the people imposing them. It’s like speaking a language you’re fluent in … you don’t think about the rules, you just talk.

And clothes. I can’t write this without a brief rant about clothing. Men’s clothes are designed for comfort and practicality. Women’s clothes are designed to entertain men and to make them more vulnerable (to men). Sometimes people ask what you would do if you won the lottery….. oh, i’d have practical women’s clothing made so i can wear a suit with real pockets. Sheesh.

My experiences matter to my story, but they aren’t really what i want to write about today. I want to talk about what they made me notice as i move through the world every day.

Years ago, i was leading a kayak tour. Something happened that i handled. What happened is irrelevant and boring; here’s the focal point: one of the people on the tour said “Wow, you could be a guide!”

I was confused. I was the guide. So i said so. They clarified – i’d misheard “You could be a guy.”

It was a joke & i let it be just that in the moment.

What exactly had i done that was “male”? I was prepared. I knew what i was doing. I handled a situation competently. Why did that register as masculine?

That tiny exchange stayed with me because it illustrated something much larger. Inequality isn’t just laws, policies, or people openly declaring that one group is inferior to another. It is also the little assumptions about who we expect to be competent, nurturing, strong, emotional, rational, adventurous, authoritative, dependent, married, and even moral & good.

We absorb those expectations long before we examine them, which is what feminism helped teach me to do even though i didn’t always realise it.

None of us can be liberated alone

One thing Steinem said that struck me most as i reflected on her life this week is that “None of us can be liberated if other groups are not.”

I hear an echo in that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s familiar motivational words – “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Different people, different movements, different histories, with a fundamental connection.

No durable form of equality has some who are “less than” or beneath us. This is how i understand advocacy.

If what i oppose is a hierarchy that determines someone’s opportunity, credibility, safety, or humanity based upon a category imposed on them, then i have to care when that same mechanism is applied to somebody else. We have to care about all of it – every person – not just the people with whom we share an identity. Otherwise, it’s not an objection to the hierarchy, but to our own place in it – with the subtle undertone that we’d be willing to step on others to climb higher.

That realization became particularly important in my advocacy around Atheism, Humanism, and secular identity. The patterns of exclusion experiences of secular people were very similar to those experienced by religious minorities and LGBTQ+ people. While recognizing that every identity, and every person’s experience of that identity, has its own unique experiences, the understanding of intersectionality and shared pattern of experience was extremely important in my work.

I was an out, loud, advocacy-focused Atheist, and much of my work was about something our culture still struggles to understand: Atheistic, Humanist, and other secular identities can be foundational inner-life perspectives. They inform values, ethics, relationships, community, purpose, meaning, grief, mortality, wonder, and our understanding of what it means to live a good life.

A person does not need a specific, mainstream religion, or any religion at all to have deeply considered values. That shouldn’t be difficult to understand, but culturally, it often is. And religious ideologies are often the foundation of marginalization and othering of many identities – including women, LGBTQ+ people, and minority religious and secular people.

Religion is so frequently the default language for meaning that people often don’t recognize when they’re defining others by it. They see people who vary from their own interpretation of their dogma “lacking” something rather than seeing what is there and what we have in common.

My work as an Atheist advocate taught me something important about belonging: being allowed into a room is not the same as being included in it. The same is true about being a woman in a room – or any other identity.

A person can be “welcomed” into a space where everything about the space still communicates that someone else is the norm.

I see that clearly in my current work in deathcare. Imagine walking into a funeral home at one of the most vulnerable moments of your life and finding “bless and prey” language normalized, Bibles and religious quotes or items displayed, rooms called “chapels,” and assumptions about prayer or clergy woven naturally into the experience. None of those things may be intended to exclude anyone. But where mainstream religion has been a source of othering, rejection, or harm, a hollow philosophy of “we serve everyone” (or the offensive, “we take anyone’s money”) without consideration for who “everyone” is and what matters to them won’t create the compassionate experience needed in that moment.

Saying everyone is welcome is not the same as creating a space where everyone truly is welcome. This is precisely why liberation has to be viewed through a lens of fundamental connection. A room that merely permits outsiders to enter hasn’t challenged the ranking system.

Learning across identities

Feminism became both a lens for recognizing hierarchy and a bridge to recognizing inequities beyond gender.

My activism in its various forms – developing Religious, Secular, and Spiritual Identity workshops; creating a Secular SafeZone program; collaborating with LGBTQ+ inclusion professionals; changing language; creating resources; challenging assumptions in professional spaces; advocating for more identity-affirming deathcare – brought me into close collaboration with LGBTQ+ inclusion professionals, expanding my understanding of equity considerably. Experiential similarities came into focus.

It’s important not to flatten different people’s experiences into one generic story about discrimination. The identities, histories, and risks have overlapping similarities, but they are not the same.

But there are common mechanisms of exclusion, and similar ways diverse people experience the assumptions and expectations of a system that evolved in benefit to some more than others.

What happens to us internally and in very practical ways when

• someone assumes our identity … and assumes nuances, beliefs, behaviors, or characteristics they associate with it?
• we have to decide whether disclosing an important part of yourself is safe?
• our identity is treated as controversial, unusual, or inferior while someone else’s is considered “normal” or “better”?
• the language, rituals, forms, policies, or traditions of an organization reveal that it was never imagined someone like us would occupy that space?
• you are technically welcome, but constantly required to translate yourself or to be less visible?

Those questions aren’t unique to secular inclusion. I see them everywhere, related to lived experiences across many dimensions: race, ethnicity, ability, economics, citizenship & immigration status, age, education, body size or appearance, language & accent, neurodiversity, relationship status or family structure, as well as sexual, gender, & romantic identity, expression, and physicality, and Religious, Secular, & Spiritual Identity.

Advocacy became less about asking people to memorize the correct way to interact with a particular minority group and more about helping people recognize how assumptions work in the first place. Why language matters. Why representation matters. How something that seems completely neutral to one person can communicate exclusion to another. What compassion for all can actually look like in practice.

A checklist can tell you not to assume an LGBTQ+ person’s spouse is a different gender. Another can tell you not to presume an Atheist wants prayer. Others can remind us of important considerations about disability, culture, aging, or religion. That knowledge matters, but it can’t give you what you need to honor an individual.

And it is important to note that recognizing intersectionality means not isolating one part of a human being and assuming it explains the whole person. When we have multiple diverse identities and lived experiences they don’t politely take turns. A person navigates them at once, but can experience them individually. As an Atheist, i experience a room in a certain way. As a woman, another. They compound rather than meld. The same is true for my privileges – white, cisgender, housed, etc – and how those each create assumptions and experiences i need to question.

We need to think more in questions and come from a perspective of curiosity. Knowledge is a basis for better understanding and what we might need to ask, but it should make us better at asking the questions, not more confident that we already know the answers.

Carrying that back to deathcare work, you’ll often hear me say that we might hear a person share a religious, secular, or spiritual identity with us, and we might have a set of understandings about what that label could mean, but the experience of that identity is unique to that person, and how that identity will inform their deathcare choices, and experience of deathcare, is very personal.

This is one of the places where feminism, secular advocacy, LGBTQ+ inclusion work, and deathcare practice have converged for me. It’s not that our differences don’t matter – it’s that they matter so much that we must resist assuming that we understand them.

Walking a mile in someone’s shoes isn’t enough. Because it’s still our feet and our perspective experiencing those shoes. We will never know what it is like to the person who wears them. And we shouldn’t assume that we do.

Empathy as an advocacy tool

Another piece of Steinem wisdom i reflected on this week: “Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”

I think empathy is sometimes misunderstood as softness. Or conflated with sympathy, which is feeling for rather than with.

Empathy can be profoundly disruptive because it asks us to temporarily suspend experiencing the world as if we were at the center, as if our experience of it is the norm, and as if the world is actually as we see it.

If prayer comforts us, empathy asks us to understand that prayer might make someone else feel alienated. If prayer has never been part of our experience or holds no meaning for us, empathy asks us to create space for those who value it.

If marriage has been central to our happiness, empathy asks us to understand that someone else’s fulfillment may not involve a spouse.

If our gender or expression of gender has never caused our competence to be questioned, empathy asks us to believe someone who tells us that theirs has.

Empathy asks us to think about how a natural action may change the way someone treats us and to imagine performing that calculation and take (or avoid) risks knowing there can be consequences. Think of simply walking into a room when a diverse identity is visible and not knowing how it will be received, or exposing invisible identities such as holding a partner’s hand or stating your Religious, Secular, or Spiritual Identity.

Our own experiences are unique and valuable, but not to be presumed ubiquitous.

And that’s why i have come to see that the most consequential work in diversity and inclusion begins when we help people understand that another person’s experience can be real even when it is completely foreign to our own.

Empathy can be a tool to change behavior, policy, language, and systems. It can help us create choices and spaces in our professions and industries that honor differences. It’s how we can move beyond knowledge to wisdom as a catalyst to meaningful change. That’s how empathy can be radical.

Linked, not ranked

Steinem often returned to another beautifully simple idea: “We are linked, not ranked.”

Of everything i have read from her and reflected on this week, those words may resonate with me most. When i reflect deeply, ranking is at the core of what i have challenged throughout my adult life.

Male over female. Straight over LGBTQ+. Religious over secular. One religion over another. Young over old. Able-bodied over disabled. Married over unmarried. Parent over non-parent. Majority privilege over minority struggle.

We may seem almost drawn toward building pyramids of hierarchy as our social structure, but Steinem preferred the image of a circle of interconnection.

I don’t know if i’ve thought through enough to claim the same vision for us, but i do know that the concept of being connected to others and empowering people rather than exerting power over them … that resonates.

Our differences and unique value that we bring into a space matter. The historical, lived, and current reality of how those differences are experienced also matters.

I find the distinction of treating people holistically rather than by where they fall on a hierarchy is increasingly important in conversations about equality. I sometimes hear people talk as though the highest form of inclusion is becoming “colorblind,” gender-blind, RSSI-blind or otherwise blind to – or erasing – identity. De-ranking differences isn’t the same as pretending they don’t exist: we don’t solve these issues through erasure, but through radical recognition.

What we should strive to do is to see people more clearly. To know what matters to them without deciding in advance what should matter to them. That’s linked, not ranked.

This All Informs my Practice of Deathcare.

Of all the places my advocacy journey could have taken me, i doubt my younger self would have predicted the funeral industry. In fact, my 10-years-ago self wouldn’t have thought of it.

Yet deathcare has become one of the places where everything i have learned about identity, assumptions, autonomy, and empathy converges -in a way that is viscerally important yet rarely considered. It impacts people at their most vulnerable moments of dying, death, and grief.

Deathcare, like many professions centered on compassion, has traditionally been deeply intertwined with religion. There are understandable historical reasons for that. Religious communities have accompanied people through death and grief for thousands of years, and religious rituals continue to provide profound comfort to many people.

I don’t want less of that in religious spaces, but i want room beside it where spaces that are intended for all people can genuinely reflect that. No one should have to pray to or defer to someone else’s religion or beliefs in order to serve in the deathcare space as a professional nor to receive care at a time of loss.

Creating welcoming spaces for all requires those spaces to be secular. A secular common space isn’t anti-religion – it’s religiously neutral. Words, symbols, books, and language that affirm one perspective can inhibit or negate others. Deathcare can be so faith-biased that religious assumptions are simply invisible to the people making or implementing them.

I know, some people hear “secular space” and may think it means that religion is not welcomed there – it means the opposite; that while the physical space and employees don’t impose or presume a worldview, those we are there to serve are free to bring their own beliefs and experiences.

It’s not hostility. Well, not often hostility. It’s just people existing as they always have and speaking from their own hearts, rather than speaking to the hearts of those they serve. Exclusion happens among kind people and in institutions that genuinely want to welcome everyone. That is precisely why this kind of inclusion work can be difficult.

This is where empathy becomes practical and where feminism, for me, connects directly to deathcare. Who controls the body? Who gets to decide what happens to it? Who determines what a “proper” death, funeral, burial, or grief experience looks like? At the end of life, people shouldn’t have to defer to someone else’s idea of who they are, or should be.

Feminism is what taught me to ask hard questions about power and vulnerability – even at a very young age, before those questions could be put into words.

Secular advocacy taught me to recognize that assumptions are often invisible to the majority and that understanding requires curiosity.

LGBTQ+ inclusion work helped me understand identity through the lenses of visibility, safety, and creating community.

And deathcare has shown me just how important all of that becomes when someone is facing death or is trying to honor a loved one’s life authentically.

Authenticity shouldn’t be radical. But it still is.

Feminism gave me a bridge

Steinem described women’s liberation as a bridge to other movements for justice.

Feminism taught me that characteristics assigned to women—empathy, tenderness, cooperation, caregiving—should not make women less powerful, nor should men be diminished for possessing those characteristics.

It helped me recognize that autonomy is not selfishness and that independence shouldn’t require an apology – or even an explanation. In fact, independence and autonomy are required components of meaningful interdependence because genuine connection among equals requires people who retain agency and choose to participate in relationship and community.

Equality can’t mean simply allowing a few people from marginalized groups to climb higher in the same old pyramid. It has to mean a new understanding of the whole model, whatever that might look like, where we move forward together.

Those ideas are not just about gender, but about the ranking of identity and the use of power. Who holds power, and who doesn’t. Who is heard and who is punished for raising their voice in an attempt to be heard. Who is allowed to be who they naturally are and who is expected to adapt.

It is important, for those safe or brazen enough to do so, to advocate for our own identity. Self protection and protecting others like us is important work in and of itself. But there’s a deeper test of our equality ethic. We must ask ourselves: What responsibility do i have when the person being diminished isn’t me?

That may be the question that connects Steinem’s statement to King’s.

“None of us can be liberated if other groups are not.”

“An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Neither leaves much room for selective equality, and neither allows advocacy to end at the border of our own identity.

Human first

There is another part of Steinem’s philosophy that resonates deeply with me. She emphasized that both our shared humanity and individual uniqueness are greater than the categories we’re sorted into by others.

Labels can be helpful. Sometimes discovering the right word for ourselves and understanding its relevance both to us and the greater world around us is liberating. Some of mine: Activist. Ally. Atheist. Humanist. Older adult. Single. Survivor. Woman.

Words can help us find ourselves, explain experiences, and create community. They can give us language to understand and communicate who we are. They should help us understand a person, not convince us that we already do.

The problem begins when the label becomes more real than the human being wearing it, or when it is imposed by an external force.

Maybe this is why we are increasingly describing inclusion efforts as being about belonging rather than simply diversity.

It’s not just about who is in the room, but how those people each experience being authentic in the room.

That is a much higher standard.

What feminism means to me now

In reflecting on Gloria Steinem, i realized that feminism taught me to recognize the machinery of inequality and to understand that liberation isn’t really liberation if we simply rearrange the rankings.

To listen for the person whose experience isn’t represented in the room.

To recognize empathy as an instrument of change.

To keep questioning, and to believe that we can make a difference.

We don’t need everyone to believe the same things, build the same families, inhabit the same kinds of bodies, love the same people, observe the same traditions, or understand life and death in the same way. What a boring world would that be?

We need to learn how to make room for one another.

All of us.

Because none of us can be liberated if other groups are not.

We are human first.

We are different.

We are connected.

Activism … that’s what we do with that knowledge.