The night of the verdict, I sat down with my husband to play chess.
I needed a distraction, something to pull me out of my head. I thought, this will help.
It didn’t.
I made a few bad moves late in the game, sacrificing pieces for nothing. I saw them too late—too late to take them back, too late to fix them. And I kept making the same mistake.
And it brought out the anger I had been trying to suppress all week.
I kicked over the table. Pieces scattered across the floor. And I felt stupid. I felt helpless. I felt like I had just lost a game I never even had a chance of winning.
And the thought that hit me hardest was this:
What else don’t I see?
What else am I sacrificing for nothing?
Because women sacrifice all the time.
We are told that sacrifice is noble, that it’s what makes us good mothers, good daughters, good partners, good women.
We give up our bodies, our choices, our time, our careers, our safety, our autonomy—for our children, for our families, for our country, for the greater good.
And we are expected to do it quietly, gratefully, obediently.
We are expected to play the game, even when the game is rigged against us.
We are expected to follow the rules, even when the rules are designed to keep us from winning.
And if we dare to question it, to rage against it, to demand better—we are labeled as bitter, difficult, irrational.
That chess game was just a moment, but it was a mirror of something bigger.
Because that’s what being a woman often feels like—making sacrifices you didn’t always agree to, and then being blamed when you lose.
And the hardest part?
Sometimes you don’t even realize what you’ve lost until it’s too late to get it back.
Because that’s the cost of silence.
If we don’t speak out, if we don’t push back, if we don’t demand better—by the time we see what’s been taken from us, it may already be too late.
Too late to reclaim the opportunities we let pass.
Too late to challenge the rules we never agreed to.
Too late to undo the damage of a system that was never built to serve us.
Chess is a game that men have dominated for centuries, not because they are innately better at it, but because they have been given the space, the training, and the opportunity to succeed. Women have been told that they simply aren’t as good, when in reality, they’ve just been shut out.
Just like in life, we are expected to compete in a game where the board has already been set against us. And when we don’t win, we blame ourselves—that we weren’t strong enough, smart enough, strategic enough.
I thought about the courtroom. About the verdict that was just, but the process that was not.
I thought about the white man who commented so aggressively that the female judge had to call him out, yet moments later, offered his seat to a black woman with a cane. What a perfect contradiction.
I thought about the people in that room who insisted that trans people are mentally ill, while also insisting that psychology itself is a scam a cycle of ignorance reinforcing itself.
And I thought about the personal stories the potential jurors shared of sexual victimization, most of which had never been brought to justice.
In most of those stories, women were the victim.
And the most perplexing part.
Most people said they were ok that the perpetrator in their story wasn’t brought to justice.
I thought about how many women had carried those stories, those traumas, without the support, protection, or justice they deserved. Maybe they didn’t even think they deserved justice. I thought about the silence they had endured, and how silence had cost them, too.
And I thought about how easy it is to accept the rules you are given when you don’t realize the game is broken.
But I see it now.
I see that women are always being asked to sacrifice something—our credibility, our autonomy, our ability to define our own lives.
I see that justice doesn’t mean fair protection for women.
I see that truth is often dictated by those who speak the loudest, not those who are most informed.
And I see that sacrifice is only noble if you choose it yourself.
I don’t know what the next move is.
But I do know this:
I refuse to sacrifice my rights.
I refuse to play by rules that were not made for me.
And I refuse to keep pretending this is a fair game.
So I’m flipping the board.
Because sometimes, the only way to win is to stop playing by their rules.
My next chess game, I’m replacing my knight with a rogue queen!