Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale is on its way to a series adaptation – Hulu in charge, Atwood consulting, and Elisabeth Moss starring as the titular handmaid Offred.

This is exciting news: with women’s rights crises all over the world, there has never been a better time to dig into one of the 20th century’s defining criticisms of misogyny, inequality, and the denial of female agency, with a 31-year-old story that holds up painfully well.

There’s just one problem: this promising feminist vehicle will be helmed by a white man.

No offense to Bruce Miller, the announced showrunner, writer and executive producer. His resume includes a number of excellent and underrated science fiction shows, and he seems to have done a swell job with them. Plenty of white male showrunners have done right by non-white, non-male narratives in the past: Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek), Chris Carter (The X-Files), and Glen Larson and Ronald Moore (the Battlestar Galactica reboot) have all contributed enormously to the portrayal of complex female and minority protagonists on television. The effects those characters have had on millions of lives, mine included, cannot be understated.

But The Handmaid’s Tale is no space western. It’s not a government conspiracy thriller with a supernatural tinge. It is an extremely specific critique of white, heterosexual society dominated by men, and the ways that that system objectifies and disenfranchises women and nonbinary people.

In the Republic of Gilead, a United States transformed overnight by a religious military coup, that patriarchy takes the form of a totalitarian government that determines the value and role of every woman according to fertility and class: all non-male bodies are sorted according to their use to rich white men. Not unlike slaveowners, these men vary in degrees of magnanimity. But at the end of the day, these women are still property – “two-legged wombs”, as Offred puts it. They are still things to be used. And the fact that Hulu has put a white man in charge of telling this story, for the benefit of a corporation, is so deeply ironic it would be hilarious if it weren’t so disturbing.

It won’t matter if Miller hires only women to work on the series; that would be great, but it doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, all of them would answer to a white man, however benevolent. And isn’t that the exact problem The Handmaid’s Tale seeks to address? Why tell dystopian stories if not to learn something from them? If we can’t learn from them, don’t they become just another vehicle with which to say, “At least things aren’t as bad as that in real life”?

No spoilers here, but they are.

Atwood herself has explained many times that the novel is not a prediction for the future at all – the circumstances she describes have all actually happened, and continue to this day. Women are reminded every time a new law is passed making it impossible for us to access abortion clinics, obtain contraceptives, fight domestic abuse or support our children. We’re reminded of it when we’re paid less than our male peers, when bosses say we should be more “helpful”, and when complete strangers insist that harassment is flattery. Yet this fact seems to have been overlooked, in the most basic and symbolic sense, in the decision to retell this story.

Times have changed since men created Dana Scully and Lieutenant Nyota Uhura. The public is screaming for more diversity in Hollywood, on both sides of the camera, and white men are no longer the only people making movies and television. It is no longer thought progressive for men to portray experiences that are explicitly not their own onscreen; sometimes, it’s even a liability not to entrust those people to tell their own stories. Half of all film school graduates are women, and at the premier program of the University of Southern California, more than half of its film program’s students are not white. This has already been explained countless times, in extremely specific detail, with appalling amounts of hard data. Representation is a huge issue in Hollywood as it is outside it – if you want to tell stories that criticize inequality, you ought to start by putting your own backyard in order.