In his book “The War on Warriors,” Mr. Hegseth maintained that so-called D.E.I. hires have made the military weak and “effeminate.” The “standard,” though, has nothing to do with military effectiveness. Were Admirals Franchetti and Chatfield, General Crosland and company fired for not being good enough? Or for being too good, with skills and experience that threatened the restoration of a masculinist culture? Small wonder the photos of Mr. Trump’s cabinet meetings — especially after the departures of Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Tulsi Gabbard — have begun to resemble the shipboard scenes in “The Odyssey”: men seated around the edge of a long wooden ellipse, with a board table standing in for a galley deck. Pull, boys, pull!
Mr. Trump’s return to power resembled a sack of Troy — with women getting the sack. A National Women’s Law Center report found that DOGE’s mass layoffs targeted departments with a “substantial majority” of female employees, though the civil service overall leans male. Hardest hit were Black women, especially with college and advanced degrees, whose overall employment rate last year suffered one of the sharpest one-year declines in a quarter century. After Mr. Trump fired the two Democratic female commissioners and the female general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, its new leadership urged white men to file discrimination suits, and the agency sued a Coca-Cola distributor for excluding men from a women’s forum. Information on reproductive health, maternal mortality, employment equity and sexual violence began disappearing from government websites, along with women’s historical contributions and the words “women,” “female” and, of course, “feminism.” NASA employees reportedly received a “drop everything and reprioritize your day” advisory instructing them to delete by 5 p.m. “anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.).” The administration that insists “there are only two genders” seems determined to make it only one.
Also gone: data collection on women’s advancement, or the lack thereof. The E.E.O.C. voted to toss out the agency’s 60-year-old requirement that companies file annual work force demographic reports, claiming it burdened corporations. Is it any mystery that women have lost ground in corporate leadership two years running and their representation on corporate boards declined in the first quarter of 2026? Or that women constituted 100 percent of the decline in the labor force in December 2025, then again last month, bringing the total net job loss for women this year to 845,000? None of these women got their jobs, or lost them, because they were seen as heroes. Nevertheless, they were collateral damage in the custody fight over the hero’s journey.
That fight has filtered down to saturate workaday lives. Starting in the post-9/11 hero frenzy and accelerating in the “peak woke” era of the early 2020s, more and more ordinary struggles have been deemed heroic. For a while, thanks to feminism, women enjoyed an advantage in garnering those commendations. They didn’t just become firefighters or telephone linemen. They’d slain the Cyclops of sexism. Not to gainsay their grit, but their lionization came with a cost. The kudos over every valiant ascent excited the anger and envy of some men who, if they became telephone linemen, became … telephone linemen. In “Barbie” terms: just Ken. The backlash isn’t simply about who gets to do the job — it’s about who gets glorified for doing the job. Witness Mr. Hegseth’s book with its repeated fulminations about servicewomen showcased as heroes by a “military P.R. machine, looking for a ‘first.’”
Diversity measures were created to open up pragmatic, incremental opportunities for people long deprived. But there is nothing pragmatic or incremental about being a hero. The right sees D.E.I. as a plot to dethrone the men who once stood on Mount Olympus. For its part, the left employs the hero mythology to validate its causes, and uses journeys out of persecution, abuse, every misfortune from A.D.H.D. to PTSD, to place its contentions beyond debate and stamp even well-meaning dissenters as intolerant. The right has its own hero-martyrs. It’s a strategy to be wary of. When Purple Hearts become Medals of Honor, when suffering is conflated with valor, critique is relabeled as heresy. Surely not every victimhood drama has engendered a fascism, but every fascism has used a core myth of injustice and injury to justify its absolutism and brutality.
