The Word They Use

Sandra DeZen left a powerful family, raised three kids, and built a real estate career  from nothing. People call her a bitch. She’s not. She’s just not sorry. 

The first time someone told me Sandra DeZen was a bitch, I’d already known her long enough to  understand what they actually meant. They meant she had an opinion. They meant she didn’t  soften it. They meant she walked into a room and said what she thought without first running it  through the filter that women are supposed to use—the one that turns conviction into suggestion,  authority into apology, and certainty into well, I just feel like maybe… 

Sandra doesn’t use that filter. She never has. And in an industry—in a world—that rewards women  for being palatable, that makes her dangerous. Not dangerous like reckless. Dangerous like honest. 

A man who speaks his mind is direct. A woman who speaks her mind is  difficult. A woman who speaks her mind and doesn’t apologize for it?  That’s the word they use. 

Before she was a real estate broker, before she built her own name in an industry that runs on  reputation and relationships, Sandra was married into one of the most prominent development  families in the GTA—a family whose name is on buildings, on communities, on hospital wings. That  marriage gave her three children—Brittany, Colby, and Sydney—and for a time, it gave her the kind  of infrastructure that comes with belonging to a powerful family in Vaughan’s Italian-Canadian  world. The connections. The doors that open before you knock. The unspoken assumption that you  are someone because of who you’re attached to. 

Then the marriage ended. And the infrastructure went with it. 

What followed isn’t a comeback story, because that implies she lost. What followed is a rebuilding— from the inside out. Sandra got her licence, entered real estate, and started doing the work. Not  with the family name clearing the path. Not with a network that owed her favours. With the thing  that nobody can marry into and nobody can divorce away from you: the ability to show up, assess a  situation, and say exactly what needs to be said, even when the room doesn’t want to hear it. 

Today she’s a broker with Royal LePage Signature Realty, working across Toronto, Simcoe County,  Innisfil, and Tottenham. She speaks three languages—English, French, Italian—and she operates  with the kind of directness that makes clients feel either immediately safe or immediately 

uncomfortable, depending on whether they came looking for honesty or hand-holding. Sandra does  not do hand-holding. 

I know Sandra because we’re friends. Good friends. The kind of friendship that happens fast when  two people recognize the same thing in each other: an allergy to performance. She doesn’t code switch. She doesn’t manage her personality for the room. She is exactly the same woman at dinner  as she is in a negotiation as she is with her kids. That consistency—the refusal to edit herself for  comfort—is precisely what makes people reach for that word. Because when a woman is the same  person in every room, it unsettles people who’ve built entire lives on being different ones. 

The self Sandra buried wasn’t softness. It was the willingness to be liked  at the cost of being honest. She buried that woman a long time ago. She  doesn’t miss her. 

Here’s what I’ve learned watching her: Sandra didn’t leave a powerful family to become powerful.  She left to become hers. There’s a difference. Power borrowed from a name is a lease. What Sandra  built—the career, the clients, the reputation that follows her into every room whether people like it  or not—that’s ownership. You can’t take it back. You can’t renegotiate the terms. You can’t hand her  a document after the fact and expect her to sign away what she’s already earned. 

People will keep calling her a bitch. She knows that. I know that. The word doesn’t land on her the  way they want it to—because it was never really about her. It’s about the discomfort of watching a  woman refuse to perform gratitude for the space she’s earned. It’s about the fact that Sandra DeZen  doesn’t owe anyone a softer version of herself. 

And she’s not going to give them one.