Welcome to the weekly Fairer Disputations round-up: your one-stop shop for the best in sex-realist feminism. This week: Kaeley Triller Harms on Charlie Kirk and the cost of dissenting from gender ideology, Ann Ledbetter on the benefits of working in a female-dominated career, and B.D. McClay on Sydney Sweeney’s “fans.” Plus: a review of Angela Franks’ new book, the price of parenting, why trans retractions aren’t enough, the aunt life, a seminar on home-work integration—and more!
First, Kaeley Triller Harms discusses the Charlie Kirk assassination and his stand for free speech, often against the violent, totalizing voice of gender ideology.
Next, midwife Ann Ledbetter reflects on the importance—and the benefits—of working in a female-dominated career.
Finally, B.D. McClay discusses the uproar around Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaign–and takes on her “worst fans.”
More Great Reads:
- Whose Body? Whose Self?, Nadya Williams, Religion & Liberty Online
- What Is the Price of Parenting?, Ivana Greco, Commonplace
- Saving Sex: Love and Responsibility Revisited, and Saving Sex: Love and Responsibility Revisited, Part II, Nathan Schlueter, Public Discourse
- Why Malcolm Gladwell’s Trans Retraction Won’t Ever Be Enough, Victoria Smith, The Critic
- Eat, Pray, Leave, Kay Hymowitz, City Journal
- Living the Aunt-Life, Kari Barbic, Verily
Fairer Disputations Recommends:
The Duty of the Moment: Learning from Pre-Industrial Home-Work Integration
September 29, 2025
3:00 PM – 4:15 PM ET
Online, RSVP here
This virtual seminar, featuring Fairer Disputations Editor-in-Chief Erika Bachiochi, is part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program’s weekly fall series Exploring Work & Family, led by Co-Director Hannah Riley Bowles. Attendance is open to all.
In this seminar, Erika Bachiochi of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University will discuss how the conflict between responsibilities at home and at work are largely the result of economic transitions to which we still have not adequately responded, nearly a century after industrialization. We tend instead to leave each worker to resolve this disharmony on his or her own, or offer solutions that do not fit most parents’ circumstances or needs. While good scholarship in recent decades has analyzed the impact of industrialization on the decline of the patriarchal family, and Marxist analysis has emphasized the alienation of labor from capital, less attention has been paid to the reality that before industrialization, most work was a thoroughly family affair, conducted in the most important sphere of pre-modern society: the economically interdependent and solidaristic household. After offering gratitude for the many technological advances the industrial era wrought, not to mention the myriad gains for women, Bachiochi will draw out for our time principles and practices that Aristotle and others understood to have governed work-home integration for both men and women in the pre-modern era.
