By Liz Fedak

If New Yorkers don’t act fast, New York City will go from the birthplace of the women’s and gay liberation movements to the place those movements went to die.

It started with a progressive sleight of hand to disappear anyone who went up against the mysterious Omnicause: define themselves as the heroes, the good, the endlessly virtuous; define everyone in the outgroup as the villains, the wicked, the hatefully ignorant; and re-define the word “woman” to center men, destroying any meaningful feminist progress by wordsmithing their advocacy group out of existence.

This rot has consequences that can’t be hidden away. What many women are learning, even former progressives, is that those abuses of power that “never happen” tend to keep happening. It only takes one boy playing on their daughter’s sports team, or one hulking 6’4” linebacker photographing himself and strangers in the women’s bathroom, or one straight man putting on lipstick and harassing a lesbian friend, for a well-meaning but captured person to reject sex denialism for good.

It persists, however, driven by an unhinged activist mob enforcing their harmful erasure of reality from the top down. Plurality of thought and freedom of speech cannot coexist with the notion that a man’s claim, “I am a woman,” must be adhered to above all else.

This has led to Democratic leaders abandoning the cause of women’s liberation entirely. As one of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s constituents, I tried to set up a meeting on behalf of two women’s groups, Women’s Liberation Front and ROAR Women NYC. When I received no response after a week, I opened the meeting form again, only to find she’d removed “Women’s Rights” as an approved meeting topic entirely.

Make no mistake, this is what establishment Democrats think of women. So-called “progressives” are even worse.

It’s not just that Mamdani wants to spend $65 million on “gender-affirming care” after multiple high-profile systematic reviews have come out showing there was never any evidence these procedures had any positive benefit at all, except as a cash cow for doctors who permanently harm the young and vulnerable. It’s not that he pays lip service to “queer liberation,” a fashion trend for straight kids, while lesbians have been pushed back into the closet due to a constitutional amendment last year that made it illegal for women’s spaces to exclude men. It’s not that his call to defund the police will leave rape kits untested and victims of domestic abuse and street violence with little recourse.

It’s that voters refusing to push back after misguided attempts to write women out of law and policy will sink the Party of Non-Men even further. New York’s leaders, in their cowardice, have already left the civil rights fight of a lifetime in the hands of individual women and grassroots groups.

What will it take to show female voters the Democratic Party has abused our loyalty and abandoned us to fend for ourselves? That they thought they could hold abortion access over our heads forever, like a dangling carrot, and we’d have no choice but to vote blue no matter who?

Women cannot afford to vote for Mamdani at this time, even if they like his other policies. We need to act as a unified voting block against complete political erasure. If another candidate wanted to show themselves worthy of winning half the vote on a pro-reality, human rights platform, the would at least be able to proudly and unambiguously state they know what a woman is.

Hint: they all came out of one.