Lyft quietly rolled out a so-called Women+ Connect option that explicitly matches women and nonbinary riders with women and nonbinary drivers — a policy framed as “safety and comfort” but that collapses basic biological categories into ideology. The company advertises the feature as a way to give women more control over who picks them up, yet it also opens the door for biological males who claim a gender identity to participate in spaces many women expect to be single-sex.
The rollout has not been small: Lyft expanded Women+ Connect from a handful of pilot cities in September 2023 to hundreds of markets by early 2024, and the company boasts millions of rides completed under the program and wide driver opt-in rates. That scale matters — when a major corporation rewires its matching algorithms to prioritize ideology over clear, practical safeguards, it affects ordinary Americans and the ability of women to feel safe in ordinary activities like getting home from work.
Lyft defends the move by pointing to a distressing record of assaults and harassment in rideshare history and argues the feature reduces barriers for women who want to drive. Those are legitimate concerns that deserve attention, but dressing controversial policy in the language of concern isn’t a blank check for experiments that undermine commonsense protections or sidestep the realities of biology.
Predictably, the rollout has sparked sharp pushback from women who worry a “women-only” preference that includes nonbinary riders and drivers will let men who choose to identify as something else enter those spaces. Conservative critics have also flagged promotional material and influencer tie-ins that featured transgender-identifying individuals as proof Lyft prioritized woke optics over the straightforward promise of single-sex choice, and those reactions deserve to be heard.
There are also real-world logistics and fairness problems that Lyft’s PR gloss cannot hide: only a small fraction of drivers are women, so guaranteeing matches is often impossible, and some drivers report the feature doesn’t even operate transparently in the app. Instead of posturing about inclusion, the company should fix underlying safety failures, improve vetting and enforce accountability for bad actors so passengers of any sex can trust the ride they order.
American families and hardworking women deserve private companies that protect them, not companies that force social experiments on the public because it wins headlines in liberal media circles. Lyft can and should offer genuine safety options that respect biological reality, improve background checks and make women’s safety a measurable result rather than a slogan. If big tech insists on marching left, voters and customers should march right with their wallets until safety and common sense are restored.
