Letters from a Feminist is an independent, reader-funded digital publication and community dedicated to reimagining social and political issues through a feminist lens. It serves as an educational hub and advocacy platform designed to de-stigmatize feminism and explore its application in modern life, both online and offline.
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Talking Points: Liberating from Tyranny
Tyranny is a word people save for history books. As though it only happened to other people, in other times, in other countries.
But tyranny is not historical. Tyranny is a method. It is the method of ruling people who never consented to be ruled. It does not require an emperor, a dictator, or a flag.
Tyranny happens in three places at once.
It happens in the country when a few decide for the many what their lives will be.
It happens in the workplace, when a leader uses position to silence what should be heard.
And it happens inside you, when the voice you inherited keeps making decisions on behalf of the person you have actually become.
These three are not separate. They feed each other. The political authorizes the institutional. The institutional disciplines the personal. The personal hands its compliance back to the political. The loop closes.
Liberation is the work of breaking the loop in all three places.
That is what we are here for tonight.
The Core Reframe
Tyranny only works if you agree to call it normal.
The Three Forms of Tyranny
Form #1: The Tyranny of the Room
The everyday tyranny most leaders never name. The boss who treats disagreement as disloyalty. The policy that punishes the people it claims to protect. The unwritten rule that says you can stay if you stay small.
This tyranny operates by exhaustion. It does not have to break you in one blow. It only has to wear you down until you start enforcing it on yourself.
You stopped speaking up. You started over-explaining. You learned to read the boss’s mood before your own. You called all of that professionalism.
“I have been complying with rules no one ever made me sign.”
What is one rule you have been living by at work that nobody wrote down and nobody can name?
Form #2: The Tyranny in Your Head
The inherited dictator. The voice that disciplines you ahead of the room. The internal authority you never elected that still gets the final say.
This tyranny is the most dangerous of the three because it follows you home. The boss cannot fire you on a Saturday. The policy cannot reach you in bed. But the voice in your head pays no overtime and takes no holidays.
You did not choose this ruler. You inherited it from people who were also being ruled. They handed it to you the way it had been handed to them — as protection. They were not wrong then. You are not wrong now to suspect it has overstayed its welcome.
“I have been governed by a voice that was never mine.”
Whose voice is it, actually? Trace the rule back. Who first told you that?
Form #3: The Tyranny of the Nation
The big one. The one happening right now, in real time, while we have been told to look away.
Rights being narrowed. Voices being silenced. Bodies being legislated. Histories being erased. Truth itself is being made optional.
This is not abstract. This is not history. This is the present.
And this present is asking marginalized leaders specifically, leaders who have already been reading the room, naming what is unsaid, holding the line in their own bodies for years, to bring those exact skills to the larger civic moment.
You did not pick this era. But everything you survived was training.
“I was not asked if I wanted this country. But I am being asked what I will do with it now.”
What truth about this current moment have you been holding inside the family, inside the team, inside yourself, because saying it out loud feels too costly?
The Loop: the thing that must be named
Tyranny in one place feeds tyranny in the others.
The leader who is being ruled at home arrives at work already prepared to be ruled.
The worker, ruled at work, returns home with less energy to question the country.
The citizen who has stopped questioning the country teaches her children to stay small.
The child taught to stay small grows into a leader who arrives at work prepared to be ruled.
The loop closes.
You do not have to free yourself in all three places at once.
But you cannot free yourself in only one and call it freedom.
The Four Liberation Moves (Taxonomy)
1. Naming — Call the tyranny what it is in your own thinking before you say it out loud. Stop calling it “the way it is.”
2. Withdrawing — Stop volunteering the consent that was never required of you. Quiet, internal, the first protective move.
3. Speaking — Say one true thing in one specific room. Public, dated, on the record.
4. Building — Make something the tyranny cannot reach: a relationship, a policy, a coalition, a vote, a record, an heir. Long arc work.
Most leaders skip 1 and 2 and try to start at 3 or 4 — and burn out. The internal work is the protection. Naming and withdrawing come first.
The Pivot Questions
5. What rule have you been living by that nobody ever wrote down and nobody can name?
6. Which of the three tyrannies, the room, the head, or the nation, has the most authority over your daily decisions right now?
7. Whose voice in your head are you still ruled by, and do you actually agree with them about you?
8. If you had been alive in another era of tyranny, what do you tell yourself you would have done? Now look at what you are doing.
9. What is one liberation move you can make this week in your room, your head, or your country?
Thank you Ms.Yuse, Papi Jack, NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, David A Henry, river, Natasha K.. A. Eevie Bateman Sturg Writes It Down and many others for tuning into my live video with Walter Rhein and Letters from a Feminist! Join me for my next live video in the app.
