Mamdani’s All-Female Fantasy | The American Spectator

Zohran Mamdani’s announcement of an all-female transition team was greeted with predictable applause. The message was clear: competence now comes with a gender. But behind the standing ovations lies a more insidious suggestion — that women, by virtue of being women, are not just equal to men, but better. More trustworthy. More capable. More moral. It’s the new secular gospel of politics: salvation through representation.

But is it true? Are women inherently wiser, kinder, or more competent than men? If so, history has a strange way of hiding it.

Take Jacinda Ardern, once the darling of global progressivism — feted as the empathetic antidote to “toxic masculinity.” Yet under her leadership, New Zealand’s economy floundered, its mental health crisis worsened, and its COVID policies resembled house arrest more than public health. She promised kindness; she delivered curfews. Ardern was not a tyrant, but she proved that empathy alone cannot run a nation — any more than testosterone alone can. Her resignation was billed as “graceful.” Others might call it “strategic retreat.”

Or Liz Truss, who managed to crash the British economy in less time than it takes to roast a Christmas turkey. Six weeks. That’s how long it took her to vaporize market confidence and resign in disgrace. The media called her “a symbol of systemic failure.” Feminists called her “a victim of sexism.” The rest of us simply called her a poor leader. Angela Merkel survived the euro crisis with Teutonic discipline, then threw open the doors and invited half the world to move in. What began as a humanitarian gesture became a housing crisis with subtitles. Overnight, Europe went from Mozart to muezzins, from beer gardens to border patrols. Cities that once fretted over carbon emissions now fret over knife attacks. Merkel called it compassion; history may call it continental self-harm. Then there’s Kamala Harris, a politician buoyed by firsts: first woman, first Black woman, first woman of color to hold the vice presidency. But history will remember her not for breaking ceilings, but for breaking sentences. Her tenure dissolved in a fog of platitudes and nervous laughter. To call her a model of competence was always to confuse volume with vision.

And she’s hardly alone. Argentina once pinned its hopes on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose populism left the economy gasping for air while corruption ran a marathon. Imelda Marcos turned the Philippine treasury into a shoe closet. Marie Antoinette mistook starvation for bad manners. Even Eva Perón — immortalized in song — left a legacy more theatrical than transformative.

None of this is to deny women’s achievements. Margaret Thatcher rebuilt Britain’s backbone when men around her folded. Golda Meir held Israel together under siege. These were not “female leaders” so much as formidable ones, whose competence owed nothing to chromosomes and everything to conviction.

But that’s precisely the point. Competence has never been gendered. The myth that women lead with “heart” while men lead with “ego” is as reductive as it is patronizing. It assumes that compassion and logic, empathy and authority, cannot coexist in one person — when, in truth, the best leaders embody both. Churchill could weep and roar. Thatcher could mother and maul. Power does not rewrite nature; it reveals it.

The modern fetish for “all-female” teams, panels, boards, and cabinets is less about equality than optics. It’s virtue-signaling in high heels — an aesthetic of morality rather than its substance. Diversity by subtraction: if men are the problem, just remove them. One can almost picture Mamdani’s advisors leaning in, whispering sweet nonsense into his ear — and he listened. After all, he understands the times: an age where virtue is a brand, politics is performance art, and governing is influencer culture with a taxpayer-funded ring light. Purity isn’t moral anymore; it’s merchandised. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Mamdani Matriarchy Sets Up Shop In NYC)

To suggest that an all-female team is inherently more capable is to wander perilously close to biological essentialism — the very sin feminism once opposed.  Women possess remarkable attributes — resilience, intuition, grace under pressure — qualities the world sorely needs. But they do not have a monopoly on them. Men possess courage, composure, and conviction — qualities shared, not owned. The point is not that men and women are the same, but that neither sex holds a moral monopoly on virtue or vice. Cleopatra and Catherine the Great were brilliant — and ruthless. Mother Teresa embodied mercy; Queen Mary burned heretics. Gender never guaranteed goodness, only complexity.

New York doesn’t need a sisterhood of salvation; it needs a functioning city hall. Government is not a therapy circle. It’s an arena of competing interests, where ideology must meet reality — and reality doesn’t tick boxes, it kicks them over.

If Mamdani truly believes that the best person for every job just happens to be a woman, then fine. But if his all-female team was assembled to prove a point rather than solve a problem, then New York is in for a rude awakening. Symbolism makes for stirring headlines, but it rarely fills potholes or fixes budgets. It’s easy to pick a team that looks virtuous; it’s harder to build one that actually works.

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