The Gender Traitor
I know I’m always late to trends, but this time I was glad.
The Handmaid’s Tale is one of those stories that stays inside you after you finish it. Not just because of the violence or the fear, or even because of the rage it pulls out of you as a spectator, but because of the way it forces you to look at women and womanhood itself differently.
I have a lot on my mind when I think about this series. I could talk about June, about Emily, about the constant unbearable tension of needing to see how it all ends. But strangely, the moment that broke something open for me wasn’t a grand speech or one of the brutal scenes everyone talks about.
It was one sentence.
Season 3, Episode 12. Moira to Serena:
“I am who I am, and I have sinned plenty. But you… you are the gender traitor.”
That line turned a few things inside me upside down, and I genuinely haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since finishing the show.
Because up until that moment, the series seemed to be asking one question over and over again: what happens when fear, religion and gender hierarchy become the architecture of a state? What happens to women inside systems built to control them?
And then suddenly, in one exchange, the show pivots toward something even harder:
What do women owe each other?
What do women do to each other in order to survive?
Serena is one of the most uncomfortable characters I’ve watched in a long time. Not because she’s a villain in the clean sense, but because she’s something more unsettling than that. She helped architect Gilead. She wrote the doctrine. She sat at the table where the decisions were made, and then she watched that same table slowly shrink until there was no longer a seat for her at it.
Her suffering is real. I don’t doubt that for a second.
But the show refuses to let her pain erase her complicity, and I think that refusal is one of the most honest things about it.
What makes the phrase “gender traitor” hit so hard is the inversion inside it. In Gilead, the term is used against women like Moira, queer women, women who refuse to perform womanhood the way the system demands. The system calls them the traitors.
And then Moira, who has survived unimaginable things, who has every reason to be broken, turns the word around and throws it back with precision.
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The real betrayal, she’s saying, isn’t refusing the system.
It’s helping build it. Sustaining it. Participating in it while other women are crushed underneath it.
That reframing wrecked me a little.
Because it forced me to think about what solidarity between women actually means. Not the easy version. Not the version where support exists only in soft moments or safe conversations. The harder version. The one that costs something.
The version where you refuse to participate in the harm of another woman even when participation would protect you, elevate you, or keep you comfortable.
The show made me think about empathy differently. Less as softness, and more as responsibility. It made me think about solidarity as something you choose when it’s inconvenient, not only when it’s safe.
And that’s why Serena keeps haunting me as a character.
Because the show never lets her forget the choices she made, even while allowing us to see pieces of her humanity. That’s the tension I keep turning over in my head: you can understand someone completely and still hold them accountable.
Pain and complicity can live in the same body.
Vulnerability is not automatically virtuous, and pretending otherwise can become its own kind of betrayal.
I still don’t know if Serena is redeemable. Part of me thinks redemption for someone like her can only exist in what she chooses moving forward, once she no longer benefits from the machine she helped build.
And even then, I don’t know.
Because one of the most uncomfortable things about Serena is that she only starts seeing the cruelty of the system clearly once it begins turning on her too. Once the protection she thought she had disappears. Once she experiences even a fraction of what she helped normalize for other women.
What the series left me with isn’t only the horror of Gilead.
It’s the quieter, more uncomfortable horror of realizing how systems like that survive in the first place.
Not only through force.
But through silence that feels safer than resistance. Through complicity disguised as survival. Through enough people deciding that other women are acceptable collateral damage as long as they themselves remain protected.
Moira named it.
And once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
