The Girls Are Fighting… And Here Come The Gatekeepers

Why Policing Black Expression Isn’t Feminism—It’s Adaptive Oppression

When Congresswoman AOC was quoted saying, “the girls are fighting, aren’t they?”, in response to Elon Musk and Donald Trump going back and forth on Twitter (this is my blog, so it’s still twitter), a familiar wave of outrage followed, this time from white women claiming the phrase was “misogynistic.”

To them, the comment seemed reductive and offensive to women. But that reaction reveals something far deeper than just a misunderstanding of tone. It reveals how whiteness—especially in feminist spaces—polices language it doesn’t understand, centers itself as the default, and refuses to engage with the cultural and strategic nuance that underpins so much of how Black and queer people speak.

And that right there my friends? That’s not feminism. That’s oppression.
Specifically, adaptive oppression— a term I coined to describe how white women subtly oppress other women under the guise of protection, solidarity, or even fear. It’s feminism that shapeshifts to preserve comfort, not dismantle power.

✦ What They Don’t Know (Or Refuse to Acknowledge)

Let’s start with the obvious: “The girls are fighting” didn’t originate in white suburban living rooms or the pages of academic feminist theory. it also didn’t start with an azealia banks meme.

It’s ballroom language—rooted in Black and Brown queer spaces where language wasn’t just expression, it was armor. It was commentary, survival, and performance. It was shade and storytelling and theatre. It was camp, and it belonged to the people who needed it most.

Yes, queer men and trans femmes shaped much of the ballroom lexicon—but additional important context is that Black women have always been part of that cultural blueprint as well. Our tone, our flair, our audacity, our teeth sucking and one-liners, our ability to live out loud and turn critique into our lived choreography—that is part of the ecosystem.
It’s not imitation here. It’s collaboration. It’s a shared cultural rhythm we have that’s long been dismissed until it became profitable, or palatable for certain people.

So when phrases like “the girls are fighting” make their way to the mainstream, they come carrying all that history. They aren’t meant to be literal. they’re meant to be theatrical. Observational. Even tactical.

✦ Performative Feminism Is Not Solidarity

When white women label phrases like this “misogynistic,” what they’re really saying is:

“This doesn’t feel appropriate to me, and therefore, it must not be appropriate for any woman.”

That’s not allyship. That’s assimilation.
That’s white womanhood being centered as the default.
That’s feminism being used not as a liberating force, but as a gatekeeping tool.

It’s also incredibly selective. The outrage shows up when a woman of color, like AOC, uses a culturally expressive phrase. But where is this same level of outrage when these white men and women attack black communities, stoke fascism, or pass anti-queer legislation?

Why do you have more smoke for tone than tyranny, homophobia and racism?

✦ Correction Is Not the Only Tool

Part of what’s happening here is the limited range of how many white women have been taught to express dissent or pursue justice.

it’s Correction. pointing out a perceived misstep, demanding rewording, appealing to “respectability” is often seen as the most acceptable tool. But when that becomes the only tool, it creates a rigid, sanitized version of liberation that has no room for coded language, satire, wit, camp, or cultural reclamation.

Black and queer communities have always had to be strategic.
We’ve had to joke to keep from crying.
We’ve had to use double meanings.
We’ve had to outwit power in the spaces where we weren’t allowed to challenge it directly.

That’s what they’re missing.
This isn’t confusion. It’s coded.
This isn’t aggression. It’s our performance.
This isn’t misogyny. It’s mirroring.

We’re showing them themselves through language that has long been misunderstood or dismissed by those who never needed to use it to survive.

✦ A Question For Those Women: Have You Never Needed That?

Even if you don’t understand our culture, our history, or our context, surely you’ve felt what it means to be silenced or shamed. To be called “too much, too mouthy, too emotional”? To have your power or your pain reduced to a stereotype?

If so, have you never felt the need to flip it?

To call yourself the thing they tried to use against you?
To wear the word like armor?
To beat them to the punchline so they have nothing left to say?

Because that’s what we’re doing.
That’s what “the girls are fighting” is doing.
It’s not a dig against women, this is a declaration.

✦ What Real Allyship Looks Like

If you truly want to be in solidarity with marginalized communities, you have to let go of your grip on control. Not everything is yours to correct, especially when you haven’t taken the time to understand where it comes from.

Here are my personal suggestions on where you can start:

1. Check for context before critique.
Ask yourself: Do I actually know where this comes from? Or am I reacting based on assumptions? is this a reach?

2. you are not the moral authority on resistance.
Just because you don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Not everything needs your correction, sometimes it just needs your curiosity.

You don’t have to be the smartest girl in the room to be part of the movement. In fact, you’ll be a much better ally when you stop trying to lead every conversation and start listening to the ones already in motion.
Take a breath. Take a seat. Take notes.

3. Recognize that not all resistance looks like you.
Liberation doesn’t always sound polished. It doesn’t always stem from yOUR lived experience as a white woman. it may not be holding a “hands off my uterus” sign. It might be loud. Funny. Petty. Poetic. Sharp. That doesn’t make it less powerful.

4. Learn the culture before you police it.
Language like “the girls are fighting” didn’t come from nowhere. If you’re going to engage with culture, engage fully. Not just when it’s something you think is cute on tiktok.

✦ My Final Thoughts:

If your feminism requires everyone to speak like you, think like you, and protest like you, it’s not feminism. It’s actually colonialism in a costume.

we don’t want to assimilate.

We’re not here to be corrected.
We’re not here to be sanitized.
We’re here to speak our truth in the language that raised us.
And if you can’t understand it, the least you can do is stop standing in our way.

Because the girls that get it, aren’t fighting.
The girls are unifying and reclaiming, as we do.