Wishful thinking?

Beloved community, we gather in this future time not to resurrect what has passed, but to mark its end with clarity, relief, and a firm sense of purpose. Today we speak over the remains of patriarchy—a system that once ruled through fear, domination, and a narrow vision of power. It shaped laws, economies, intimacies, and bodies. It taught boys to be weapons and girls to be apologies. It left men starving for tenderness and everyone else starving for safety. We knew its voice for thousands of years, and now, finally, we speak aloud in its absence.

Patriarchy was never a single man. It was a system of breath, a structure built on violence, control, and the worship of emotional silence. Its greatest lie was that it protected us. It told us that order required hierarchy, that strength required domination, that security required obedience. It pretended cruelty was stability. It insisted that power was a zero-sum game, and that someone must always be beneath someone else.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde warned us—not to paralyze us, but to remind us to build new tools, new ways, new futures. She believed deeply that oppression could be undone through imagination and shared power. Today, that house is rubble, and in its place we are building gardens.

For a very long time, many believed in patriarchy. Some still mourn its passing—not because it was good, but because it was familiar. We honor the complexity of that grief. When a system is all you’ve known, even freedom can feel terrifying.

But we also remember. We remember the bruises hidden by clothing and shame. We remember the genius never nurtured because it was born into the “wrong” body. We remember the tenderness denied to boys, sliced off before they could speak its name. We remember how it taught us to survive instead of thrive. As bell hooks reminded us, “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” Love was always the cure—patriarchy simply feared it too much to allow it.

Yet if this were only an indictment, it would be incomplete. Even oppressive systems carry fragments of wounded humanity. Patriarchy was born from fear—fear of vulnerability, fear of loss, fear of our shared fragility. It clung to armor because it did not trust we could love each other without it. In a strange way, patriarchy wanted protection, too. It was simply incapable of imagining connection without domination.

Today we release that fear. We honor a new world that does not need to define strength as control or worth as dominance. We honor boys and men who were once confined to aggression and now may grow in wholeness. We honor the women, nonbinary people, and all who resisted—even quietly, even at great cost—so that this future might trust softness as fiercely as it once trusted force.

Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings.” Her reminder applies here as well. Patriarchy felt eternal until it wasn’t.

Let history record that patriarchy did not fall in one moment, but in a thousand acts of refusal and imagination. It fell when people stopped laughing at jokes that harmed. It fell when a generation of parents raised children to value consent and compassion. It fell when elders laid down roles they no longer wished to play. It fell when we remembered that power shared is not power lost, but power multiplied.

And, so, we lay this system to rest—not in reverence, but in responsibility. Let the memory of patriarchy be a caution, not a blueprint. Let our grief be brief and our commitment enduring. May the world that replaces it be rooted in mutual thriving, open tenderness, and the radical belief that everyone’s humanity expands our own.