As someone forced into a life I never chose, I am appalled that women, who are more empowered than ever, are choosing a life without choice—putting themselves in a prison of their own making.
Brides shouldn’t be thinking about homework just before their wedding day. But when I entered into an arranged marriage with a 28-year-old stranger, I was still just a 17-year-old girl who loved her private British school and her books and cricket. As such, I found myself thinking about a recent creative writing assignment: I’d written a story about a young woman who wore jewelry in the shapes of snakes. I wrote that they suddenly came to life and they slithered up to her throat, strangling her.
That story would be a grim foreshadowing for the next 12 years of my life.
Shortly after our ceremony in the Middle East, my new husband and I moved to a suburb in Canada. I was excited about the North American education that he had promised me—maybe, I thought, I could even become a doctor. But everything changed when I became unexpectedly pregnant. I couldn’t go to school anymore, and over time, in nefarious and subtle ways, I lost more and more of my freedoms: I couldn’t leave the house, have my own money or own a cellphone. When I voiced concerns about my marriage, I was told it was a woman’s destiny, the will of our god. Slowly, my dreams were poisoned, and I was consumed by the belief that if I didn’t serve my husband—ironing his shirts, making his lunch, doing the dishes—I would be a failure as a wife and mother.
It didn’t take long for his browbeating to become physical beatings. He would grab my wrist and shove me; he’d slap me; he’d pull me by my hair and spit in my face. Once, he punched a hole in the wall next to my head and told me, “Next time, it’s going to be you.” On another occasion, he picked up a knife and vowed to kill me, then himself. At one point, I took a razor blade into the shower and thought about cutting myself, stopping only when I heard my baby cry. And through all this, I became certain that somehow, my unhappiness was my fault.
So trust me when I say that I know what it’s like to live as if women don’t have rights. In my marriage—my “family”—I was effectively stripped of my freedoms.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned about the social media phenomenon of “tradwives”: influencers in pretty dresses, cheerfully handing over their rights to serve their husbands. These women romanticize a golden era of America’s past that never even really existed: an imaginary time where the husband was the breadwinner and provider, and the wife was the obedient homemaker and childbearer … as is natural, as God apparently intended.
As someone who was forced into a life I never chose, I am appalled that women, who are more empowered than ever, are effectively choosing a life without choice—putting themselves in a prison of their own making.
Their support—as well as the support of men who fetishize the so-called “traditions” that promise to make America “great” “again”—also helped return Donald Trump to the White House. Both the president-elect and his VP JD Vance have branded themselves as champions of “family values”—a catch-all justification based on the toxic premise that a woman’s place is in the house.
In my marriage—my ‘family’—I was effectively stripped of my freedoms. … The last thing we want is to be dragged back to the past and relitigate the battles we’ve already fought and won.
“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at The New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” Vance said in 2022. Tying “family values” to nationalism is also at the heart of Project 2025, the conservative playbook that sets out that “families comprised of a married mother, father and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”
I’ve seen the world these people want, where the man is the provider, masculinity is muscular, and power lies in control. It’s a world where women are submissive and in need of protection—in Trump’s words, “whether the women like it or not”—and where feminism is a threat to the family unit. It’s a world that drags women slowly backward.
I know firsthand what it’s like when power curdles into violence. I know what it’s like to be surveilled, and to have to walk on eggshells so I don’t hurt a man’s feelings. I live in Canada, where abortion is fully legal and publicly funded, but I also know what it’s like to feel like you can’t get one. My daughters are the best things that have ever happened to me, but having them as young as I did could have threatened my health; still, abortion never felt like an option to me because of the shame of religion and the pressures of community. But I want my girls to have the freedom to decide, if they ever find themselves in a similar situation.
I live in Canada, where abortion is fully legal and publicly funded, but I also know what it’s like to feel like you can’t get one.
The votes hadn’t even been fully counted in Pennsylvania when Nick Fuentes, a cartoon-villain white supremacist with a long history of spewing hate speech, celebrated Trump’s win on X by perverting an iconic feminist mantra. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” he posted. Perhaps worse, tens of thousands of people quickly reshared or liked his post, quick to laugh off any criticism: Relax, can’t you take a joke? But it’s no joke.
Among the people happy about Trump’s win was a high-ranking member of the Taliban —the terror group that has basically erased the voices and rights of Afghanistan’s women—crowing that “Americans are not ready to hand over the leadership of their great country to a woman.”
I’ve lived in the world these people want. You don’t want it.
But I can also tell you that Fuentes is wrong when he says it’s forever. When you’re trapped in that world, stripped of your rights, it can feel like you’re being swallowed whole by despair. But you find a way.
I studied in my room every night to complete my high school education. After I had my second daughter, I got an undergraduate degree, then a master’s degree in economics, graduating at the top of my class, and worked at one of Canada’s biggest banks for years. Then, inspired to help others on their own healing journeys and informed through my own experiences, I switched tracks completely to pursue my childhood dream of being a doctor at one of the world’s best medical schools.
Today, through my psychiatry work, I know we don’t truly move on from trauma, we move with it—and that our capacity to heal is even greater and more powerful than the worst things that happen to us. Women understand this better than most, because we are always moving forward. The last thing we want is to be dragged back to the past and relitigate the battles we’ve already fought and won.
I’ve fought hard in my own life to make sure I could make my own choices, and so my daughters could do the same. The point is choosing—it is like breathing. We must not let that be choked out by those who would take us back.
