When I think back on my childhood in “the 1900s,” as our girls often say, my memories usually include the early comforts: hours with my grandparents on the wrap-around porch, frolicking outside with my play cousins, Saturday morning cartoons, Soul Train and my parents’ love of music. And it didn’t take me long to learn that in our home, Stax, Motown and Atlantic artists reigned supreme, especially the undisputed Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
I was unaware of the turbulent social changes the era was fraught with, and didn’t yet realize that my existence as a dark-skinned Black girl would often intersect in both personal and political aspects of life. But what I did come to realize was that Franklin’s musical catalog often coincided with those milestones, especially her signature hit, “(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” What used to come across as a simple ballad over time became a meaningful mantra that reinforces how safe spaces and loving partners remained essential, even as women worked in and away from home or for equal rights.
So imagine my shock when Nia recently asked me what the song was about. I explained it to her, and then she said, “People online are calling it ‘transphobic,’ Mom. Is that true?”
“Are you serious?” I asked her. “How is that even possible? It came out in the 1960s!” And since my lifelong love of anything Aretha is well-documented, I did some investigating. I found the links and the story, and ultimately, I found it to be a satirical post from a tweet citing a nonexistent “Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance.”
“Aretha Franklin’s 1968 song ‘Natural Woman’ perpetuates multiple harmful anti-trans stereotypes,” according to the tweet. An Instagram post parroting the claim elaborated that the “TCMA is requesting it is removed from Spotify & Apple Music” after deeming the classic “offensive.” I don’t know which scenario is worse: The fact that no reputable journalists deemed it important enough to investigate before spreading the falsehood, or that today’s uber-sensitive political climate made it a possibility in the first place.
After we learned the story was untrue, we played the song, and while Aretha crooned, I explained what “Natural Woman” meant to me: a surrender to our softer sides, and desiring acknowledgment that can especially elude women of color, since stereotypes often, and erroneously, deem us to be less ladylike than our white counterparts.
In an 1851 speech at a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth pointed out that she was worked, beaten and mistreated just as hard as her male counterparts before finding her way to freedom and deserved to revel in that femininity:
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? ... I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
In our daily lives, women of color reside simultaneously at the intersectionality of gender and race: when tragic inequities occur, such as in the brutal killing of unarmed Black motorist Tyre Nichols by Memphis Police officers, many only see common skin tones. But what Aretha Franklin taught me, with this anthem and her own activism, is that both our gender and race matter equally, and we also deserve gentleness.
Lorrie Irby Jackson is a Briefing columnist. Email her at motherofcolor@gmail.com.