Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, appearing for a social media award this year, said: “Wear pink, get shit done.”
But this November, American women showed the world what it looks like to get shit done when they showed up in record numbers to elect Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Republicans up and down the ballot.
Democrats claim the color is for “women’s rights,” and they wore it while they slowly erased us and began replacing us with men that “identify” as women.
Under this guise, they’ve made life harder for women. They closed our children’s schools and sent us home to teach our kids, while balancing full-time jobs. They told us we had to cover our faces in public. They told us we could lose our jobs if we didn’t take an experimental vaccine. Then they removed the word “woman” from every Michigan pregnancy, reproductive, lactation, harassment, and other protective law for women in our state. They also tried to rewrite Title IX to let men come into our bathrooms, locker rooms, and compete against our daughters in sports.
All while dressed pretty in pink.
On election day, American women took back pink. I celebrated with a new pair of hot pink rhinestone boots, and I’m still adding to the collection.
We took pink back from women who jeopardize our safety. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell wears pink, but in the last two weeks, she’s voted against women twice. First, she voted against the Laken Riley Act, which would protect women and girls from violence, and then against the Protection of Women and Girls’ in Sports Act, an act protecting our rights as women not to include men in Title IX Protections:
We took pink back from women like Debbie Dingell, with the help of NCAA Swimming Champion Riley Gaines. We took it back from transgender rights activists who told us that men can become women and that we should share our private, personal spaces with them.
We took pink back from abortion worshipers like Gretchen Whitmer, who have tokenized us and told us for decades that the only issue women should care about is abortion.
When we sent Second Lady Usha Vance to the West Wing this week, she wore pink. Usha Vance knows what it means to be a strong and capable wife, mother, and successful lawyer without trading in her femininity. A daughter of immigrants, she is the vision of the American dream—and she didn’t rely on victimhood to achieve it.
Like Usha Vance, we wear pink for our daughters. They won’t be replaced or erased. We know they are not defined by their reproductive choices. We know they are special, beautiful, smart, and deserving of their own teams, scholarships, and private spaces.
It’s time to take back pink for all women. It’s the color of femininity, not feminism, abortion, confused men, or social media influencers masquerading as governors or wannabe governors.
Pink belongs to all women. If you want to wear it, you have to know what a woman is. If you forget, we’ll remind you.
Anna Hoffman is a real woman and hockey mom of three in Ann Arbor. You can find her at @shoesonplease on X.
