To be clear from the start:

This post is only about gender issues, not about politics in general.

There are plenty of areas where progressive people still have very real reasons to fight. Economic policy, climate change, democratic norms, authoritarian tendencies, etc.

Gender is different.

On gender equality, progressive positions have overwhelmingly become the cultural and institutional mainstream.

Outside of a few fringe extremists, there is no serious political movement in the West advocating for the rollback of core feminist achievements:

• Women’s right to vote  • Legal equality  • Access to education and employment  • Financial and legal independence  • Protection against discrimination

Even among highly conservative groups, including mainstream Republicans in the US, these achievements are largely taken as a given.

Aside from abortion, there is no broad-based push to undo feminism’s core victories.

That matters, because political strategy should change once a movement is no longer opposition, but status quo. As long as a group is systematically oppressed, a combative, partisan approach is justified and necessary. That’s how change happens. But once that oppression has been largely dismantled, staying in permanent fight mode becomes harmful to the progress already made. And this is where I see a problem specifically in progressive gender discourse, particularly in feminist spaces.

Gender relations are still framed as an ongoing war. As a result:

• Criticism of women’s behavior is often interpreted as an attack on women as a class  • Defensive solidarity replaces individual moral accountability  • Even non-participants reflexively defend clearly problematic behavior

This dynamic makes sense only in a war mindset.

In a fight, any internal criticism looks like betrayal. Outside of it, it’s just responsibility.

For comparison:

Yes, there are men stuck in fight mode as well. Red Pill communities being the obvious example. That’s expected. Red Pill is reactionary and conservative, built around the belief that men lost a cultural battle.

What’s far more concerning is seeing the same fight mentality persist among progressives who have objectively won the gender debate.

When you are the new mainstream, your job is no longer to attack. It’s to hold ground, normalise standards, absorb criticism calmly and avoid amplifying fringe opposition by constantly “shooting back”. If you’ve already won, continued escalation isn’t strength. It’s insecurity, and it risks destabilizing the very status quo that feminism worked so hard to build.

Confidence is not the absence of criticism, but the ability to face it without fear.

And it’s not just about tolerating critique, it’s about being willing to re-engage with perspectives you no longer need to fight.Leaving fight mode allows a movement to do two things it cannot do in war: hold itself accountable and take the other side’s concerns seriously. You don’t get there by constant counterattacks. You get there by knowing you no longer have to.

Progressive gender politics doesn’t need more battles.

It needs the maturity to govern the ground it already holds.