The whipped-up fearmongering has been good for conservative media and politicians. But it has been terrifying for trans and gender diverse people and has kept eyes off the very real ways that actual gender oppression persists.

When China’s qualification campaign for the men’s World Cup ended in February with a humiliating loss to Vietnam, coach Li Xiaopeng apologized to angry fans and promised that “Chinese soccer will definitely revive in the future, but it needs hard work, generation by generation.” The revival is being led by the country’s women, who are very much the short and medium-term focus of the Chinese Football Association.

Eating disorders know no gender lines. When most people think “eating disorder,” they think of a severely underweight female. The truth is that men are just as likely as women to be genetically predisposed to eating disorders, and neither gender is immune to societal and media pressures to conform to an unrealistic body type.

In every presidential election since 1980, more male voters have backed the Republican, while women have broken for the Democrat. But the gap now in some polls is among the widest ever recorded.

When screenwriter and film producer Mallory O'Meara began researching Millicent Patrick’s life, many film historians brushed her off, saying that Patrick must have been somebody’s girlfriend. “They would dismiss me, like they had dismissed her. That was the moment that I realized I might have something here — maybe there are things out there that are just lying around, that male historians haven’t noticed because they’ve dismissed her.”

Women in technical roles reported 108 incidents of alleged sexual harassment and assault to the company between 2010 and 2016, court documents say. Three women alleged they were sexually assaulted or raped by male colleagues during that time. Newly unredacted sections of the plaintiffs’ court filings also show the frustration of some women, citing emails they wrote over the years to managers and executives. “Our organization is actually empowering a culture of exclusion,” one wrote.

Durkan mentioned Bertha Knight Landes, who won the city’s highest office in 1926 and served until 1928. And she noted that a tunnel-boring machine that famously broke down for about two years had been named after the leader. “Ninety-two years later, Seattle is about to have a new woman mayor,” Durkan said, joking, “Just imagine what they’re going to blame on me.”