As our tech overlords continue pumping more resources into AI development and innovation—responsibly, of course—they’re facing a massive trust gap: the people they want to use the tech keep asking who the technology is actually for. Is it for those who clamor for a surveillance state? Is it meant to help us compete with other nations? Or is it for replacing employees—and deciding which ones should lose their job? A vast majority of these decisions are made by wealthy men in government and industry.  According to a study released Wednesday by Harvard University researchers, which included a survey of more than 5,000 US adults, women reported that they are habitually excluded from those conversations—let alone the decision-making—compared to men. Women are disproportionately concentrated in jobs most vulnerable to automation by AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini—more than 80 percent of women face such risks, according to the National Partnership of Women and Families—and were more likely to say they didn’t have sufficient access to information and training about how the tools are used in their workplaces. It’s therefore no surprise that the study found women less likely to trust AI tools, and the information they did get about them, than men. (The researchers note that most respondents identified as men or women, and that the analysis therefore “centers on these two groups, though we recognize that not everyone identifies within a gender binary.”) “Independent researchers rank among our respondents’ most trusted sources on AI, and caution is part of what they offer,” Laura Manley, the executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center told me. The US employment landscape offers little government or industry regulation on how employers incorporate AI technology into the workplace, or what specific products are promoted to the public. But women are “rarely quoted as experts,” Manley continued—according to data the researchers collected from July 2025 to June 2026, among the well over 100,000 experts cited in domestic news coverage of AI, men appeared 4.3 times more often than women. AI tools, the study found, were disproportionately seen as by and for men—women weren’t seen to have the same level of authority or perceived expertise on the technology, and male and female respondents in the study agreed that “men’s needs and perspectives are better represented in AI development and AI-generated content.” Women, meanwhile, were more likely to report concern and skepticism around AI: a sentiment many leading figures at the world’s largest AI firms do not want to hear, and an especially unwelcome perspective in a sector where a leading AI CEO—and the world’s richest man—already loves to complain about feminism. > Feminism and lack of children has killed the happiness of so many women > > — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2026 AI, in other words, is a boys’ club—and some of its leading figures like it that way.

“Big moves on Day 1,” White House senior policy strategist May Mailman crowed on X the morning of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, linking to a news article about a forthcoming executive order. Even amid the barrage of actions during the first hours of the Trump 2.0 presidency, the order—“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—was a bombshell. It directed federal agencies to eradicate every trace of what it called “gender ideology” and established new government-wide definitions of the sexes. “Woman” meant adult human female. “Female” was “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Men made “the small reproductive cell.” “Sex,” it decreed, was an “immutable biological reality.” For at least two years, Trump had been promising to “get transgender out” of schools, women’s sports, and the military. “It will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” he would tell his cheering crowds. > Riley Gaines, the swimmer–turned–anti-trans activist, fangirled, “May Mailman > is my Taylor Swift.” But the order’s sweep and audacity seemed to surprise even Trump’s admirers. “It’s perfection,” Megyn Kelly gushed on her SiriusXM show. “In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have drafted something this beautiful.” On X, the kudos flowed in from people in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil. Many of the posts singled out Mailman, a Harvard-educated lawyer quickly identified as the order’s chief author. Riley Gaines, the swimmer–turned–anti-trans activist, fangirled, “May Mailman is my Taylor Swift.” Mailman had spent four years working in the first Trump administration, becoming an immigration hawk and close ally and friend of senior adviser Stephen Miller. During the Biden era, she landed at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Washington power player that rose to prominence by pink-washing conservative economic policies—claiming to champion women’s freedom and equality while actually working to undermine them. There, she threw herself into the anti-trans cause, going from state to state to promote model legislation, known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, that enshrined narrow definitions of “male” and “female” into law. May Mailman, director of the Independent Women’s Forum’s law center, speaks at a 2024 press conference about suing a sorority that allowed transgender women to join.David ZalubowskiAP Now, at the start of Trump’s second term, Mailman was stepping into the spotlight as a White House surrogate and speaking to conservative outlets about the need to “protect” cisgender women. “If men can just assert that they are women and take women’s privacy away, take their opportunity away, take their safety away,” she told a St. Louis radio host, “then there is no such thing as women’s rights anymore.” But there were intimations that the crusade against trans people encompassed something broader. Mailman wasn’t just anti-trans; she was profoundly dismissive of feminism. “There’s something about, you know, swiping right and left in your apartment by yourself at 11 p.m. after working a hard day that, like, doesn’t feel like feminism is the answer to all your problems,” she mocked on one podcast. She was worried about how “gender ideology” would affect men, too. “Who’s going to be our firefighters? Who are going to be our policemen?” she fretted on another. At a Federalist Society webinar last March, she urged listeners not to even use the word “transgender,” so as not to give “credence” to the idea of “this being a category of people.” She also raised an essential question: After defining sex in the law and kicking trans women out of sports and sororities, what comes next? The answer, she suggested, had something to do with sorting out social roles for men and women. “Trying to figure out how much do we care about gender roles, how much should gender roles infect the idea of womanhood, will, I think, ultimately affect our thinking about gender roles absent transgenderism,” she mused. Then she stopped, as if realizing she was treading into dangerous territory, and smiled. “That conversation is maybe for another day.” This is the story of an extraordinary effort by the second Trump administration to shape our ideas about who and what men and women are—a campaign that began with the targeting of trans people but has vast implications for the rights of cisgender people as well. At the center is Mailman, who describes herself as “one of the most effective and connected veterans of the Trump West Wing,” the get-it-done woman for Trump’s get-it-done man. “Stephen [Miller]’s the ideas guy,” she told Blaze News in April. “And then I’m trying to be the one who makes it happen.” In her whirlwind tour through the White House last year, Mailman made quite a few things happen very quickly—including a high-profile pressure campaign against her alma mater Harvard University to adopt Trumpian priorities in hiring and admissions or lose federal funding. Then, after six months, she left the administration, returning to IWF—now rebranded as just Independent Women—to direct its law center. There, she co-authored amicus briefs in two of the biggest Supreme Court cases of the year, both involving transgender students trying to overturn laws that forbid them from playing girls’ sports. The day after oral arguments, Mailman was on Fox News complaining that some of the justices had dared to call the students “transgender girls.”   > “The executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender > women. Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.” Her Defending Women executive order—and the other anti-trans federal decrees that followed—had an immediate, sweeping impact on the estimated 2.8 million trans Americans over age 13. On the phone several days after January’s Supreme Court hearing, Mailman tells me the push to enshrine definitions of sex had two goals: to prevent courts and administrators from interpreting existing laws in ways that are inclusive of trans people and to make voters feel alienated from Democrats. She frames the idea that transgender women are women as an “elite” concept. “If the left can’t agree that ‘woman’ means ‘female,’” she says, “there is something very othering about that to most Americans.” Now feminist scholars are also starting to raise alarms about the order’s implications for non-trans women. They warn it could be used to undo 50 years of legal and economic progress in the workplace, health care, education, and much more. “At the moment, the most painful, prejudicial consequences are for trans people,” says Kathryn Abrams, a University of California, Berkeley law professor studying sex discrimination. But “the executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women,” she says. “Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.” For decades, much of the conservative movement has been fighting to undermine anti-discrimination protections based on sex, explains legal historian Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis. These include landmark laws like Title IX, which applies in education, and court decisions like United States v. Virginia, which said the government must have a strong reason, based on more than just stereotypes about physical capabilities, to treat men and women differently. Those protections profoundly reshaped American society, giving women more freedom to pursue the lives of their choosing. But they imposed new requirements on powerful institutions that balked at being regulated, and, Ziegler says, they outraged Christian conservatives who believe that “God has a plan for marriage and sexuality and the family” and “God’s plan should be written into the law.” The right slowed the momentum for women’s equality when it killed the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s and turned abortion into a wedge issue. Decades later, the anti-trans movement’s emphasis on strictly defining sex as “biological” has given conservatives a new weapon to claw back the feminist movement’s earlier gains, Ziegler says. The term “biological sex,” she says, has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law.” Related HOW RIGHT-WING SUPERSTAR RILEY GAINES BUILT AN ANTI-TRANS EMPIRE Mailman, not surprisingly, disputes that the sex definitions are part of a wider effort to weaken sex discrimination law. “Simply cementing the case that sex is real doesn’t change anything,” she tells me. “It is the status quo.” Nor does she think enshrining sex definitions based on eggs and sperm will lead to women being treated differently from men in, say, classrooms and workplaces. “There’s nothing about that that forces a woman into a separate calculus class.” But Mailman’s allies in the conservative movement—groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious right legal organization that has led many of the biggest attacks on abortion and LGBTQ rights—have their own agendas. “What they’re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,” Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, “they’re going to say, ‘American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.’” If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women’s lives—laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools—by arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.   > “The administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat > women’s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these > commodities.” Other Trump 2.0 priorities, like its fixation with increasing birth rates, add to this growing sense of feminist dread. “They’re so open about the fact that they want women to leave the workforce and have babies—the earlier, the better—and fulfill the role of motherhood,” says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at the NYU School of Law. “The administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat women’s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these commodities.” “The foundational piece,” Cheng adds, “is defining people by their biology—to essentially see women as people who have one manifest destiny to fulfill.” Last spring, to mark Trump’s 100th day in office, Mailman spoke with Debbie Kraulidis, vice president of Moms for America and host of its podcast. Inevitably, the conversation turned to trans kids in schools. Mailman recalled her own childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s: “When I was growing up,” she declared, “it was okay to be a feminine guy. It was okay to be a masculine girl.” Nowadays, she lamented, “you can’t be a tomboy anymore, because you’ll get your body parts chopped off.” The first child of a surgeon and his Korean-born wife, Mailman (née Davis) remembers her upbringing in “middle-of-nowhere” Kansas with great fondness: “For kids who are from small towns,” she told another podcaster, “you really get to build up your self-esteem and try a lot of things.” At Clay Center Community High School (class of 2006), she was a student council officer, drill team member, and athlete (lettering in cheerleading, tennis, and track), as well as the star at the top of the “Singing Christmas Tree.” By college, she was also a committed conservative, serving as treasurer for the University of Kansas College Republicans and interning for US Sen. Sam Brownback, a GOP stalwart who later became governor. But she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously, entering Spike TV’s “sexiest co-ed” competition in 2007 and earning a write-up in the college paper. “If somebody was doing it who wasn’t me, I’d probably be judgmental,” she told the reporter. Then again, “Why not, for $5,000?”   Graduating into the Great Recession with a journalism degree, she joined Teach for America, landing at Pathway Academy, a majority-Black charter school in Kansas City, Missouri. The school’s executive director, Jennifer Fleming, recalls her as “extremely intelligent, very self-motivated, goal-oriented,” building relationships with students and their families. Mailman would later describe implementing strict discipline, like “standing silent lunch,” in her classroom. Her sixth-grade class scored so high on state tests that the school got its accreditation back, Fleming says. The experience seemed to reinforce Mailman’s conservative beliefs. “I had always thought that Teach for America would help me equip people to be responsible for themselves,” Mailman later recalled for a profile on IWF’s website. “But my kids didn’t have the home environment necessary to do school…I became much more focused on what we can do to build families.” After two years and a master’s degree in education, Mailman headed to Harvard Law, where she chafed at automatically being made a member of the Women’s Law Association, she told me in an email after we spoke in January. “They gave us ladies a little pep speech, saying that women should support each other in class by applauding other women’s contributions,” she wrote. Men had no equivalent. “I hated this. It felt so infantilizing.” Mailman wanted me to know that as a conservative, she’s in favor of treating women equally; it’s left wingers who seek, through such “race and sex based identity groups,” to treat women as “weak or ill equipped” in her view. (Equal doesn’t mean identical, however: “At the same time, sex exists,” she wrote, citing differences between men’s and women’s LSAT scores.) May Mailman (née Davis, standing on left) poses with the girls’ tennis team in her 2006 high school yearbook.Clay Center Community High School From her 2006 yearbook, Mailman was the star at the top of her high school’s “Singing Christmas Tree.”Clay Center Community High School Mailman’s aversion to groups like the Women’s Law Association would echo, years later, in her Trump 2.0 campaign to eliminate diversity and inclusion measures at Harvard and other higher education institutions. The problem with universities, she told the New York Times last fall, is their “culture of victimhood—a glorification of victimhood—that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.” During her Harvard years, she’d felt very much outside the Obama-era political mainstream. “Conservatism was a lonely place,” especially for women, she told a podcaster last year. But that isolation was also empowering: “You end up being very comfortable with yourself, comfortable with your arguments, comfortable not having a lot of friends.” She became president of the ultra-elite Harvard chapter of the ultra-connected Federalist Society. Post-Harvard, she landed a prestigious clerkship with a federal appellate judge in Denver, then moved on to a private law firm. When a Harvard friend reached out with an offer to work at the “center of the universe”—the first Trump White House—she accepted immediately. Mailman started on day one of Trump 1.0 and stayed until the bitter end. According to emails reported by the New York Times, as deputy White House policy coordinator in 2018, she floated a proposal to send detained migrants to sanctuary cities. She describes herself as part of the “cleanup crew” for the administration’s family separation policy at the border. Later, she was promoted to the powerful White House counsel’s office, where her portfolio included social issues and the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trans issues were also on the White House’s radar, including a military ban. In 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services even considered an order that would have narrowly defined sex as “immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” But the conservative base reacted with crickets to proposed anti-trans policies, Mailman recounted on a podcast. “Nobody seemed to care, except for people who didn’t like it.” Indeed, public support for trans rights was at an all-time high. When North Carolina passed a law in 2016 restricting trans students’ bathroom access in schools, Fortune 500 companies boycotted the state. Then in June 2020, the Supreme Court stunned conservatives by ruling 6–3 that firing someone for being gay or transgender violated the federal law banning sex discrimination in the workplace. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointee to the high court, reasoned in Bostock v. Clayton County. Mailman hated the decision: “I would argue there’s no logic to Bostock,” she told me. Mailman was still working for Trump when his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That very day, she accepted a job offer from the Ohio attorney general, anticipating that her colleagues were about to become “unhirable for a very long time,” she later admitted. One month after Trump left office, Mailman also began a fellowship with the Independent Women’s Forum. Like many conservative organizations, IWF was starting to invest in anti-trans politics—putting Mailman at the center of the next big culture war. The organization Mailman joined had its roots in the 1991 Supreme Court nomination that was itself a turning point for the role of women in American politics. President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the nation’s highest court was greeted with howls of liberal outrage. Even before Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations threatened to tank his nomination, Thomas’ close friend Rosalie Silberman organized “Women for Judge Thomas” to vouch for his character. Thomas’ confirmation activated a generation of left-leaning women around the issue of sexual harassment. Silberman and her comrades created the Independent Women’s Forum to counter them. “We listened to the spin of those days—the litany that women are victims and men just don’t get it—and decided that those woebegone women did not speak for us,” Silberman said in 1998. “Nor did we think that they spoke for the vast majority of American women.” IWF’s policy agenda was defined by being anti-regulation and anti–“female victimhood.” At various points over its 35-year history, the organization has opposed the Violence Against Women Act, women’s admission to the Virginia Military Institute, the Affordable Care Act, and paid family and sick leave. It claimed Title IX was being used to defund men’s sports, that sexual violence rates were overblown, and that the gender pay gap was the result of women’s choices. For a time, it was run in tandem with the Koch brothers–affiliated interest group Americans for Prosperity. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas appears at his Senate confirmation hearing in 1991.Lee Corkran/Sygma/Getty Members of the Independent Women’s Forum gather in a Northern Virginia conference room in 1995.Mary Lou Foy/Washington Post/Getty From the beginning, much of IWF’s influence was derived from its messaging, starting with its claim to be “independent”—seeming to stand apart not just from feminists, but from ultra-right groups, in part because it didn’t take a public stance on abortion. “Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know-know that you’re actually conservative, puts us in a unique position,” IWF Board Chair Heather Higgins, a pharmaceutical heiress, explained at an event for potential 2016 donors. “Our value…is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable.” IWF’s first public, tentative forays into anti-trans politics seem to have started around 2017, with news releases ridiculing colleges for putting free tampons in men’s restrooms and for recommending that professors ask students their pronouns. Then in 2019, the conservative anti-trans movement suddenly got serious. That’s when the far-right American Principles Project turned a Kentucky gubernatorial election into a petri dish for anti-trans messaging—and found that a video about a boy in girls’ wrestling struck a nerve. > It didn’t matter that trans athletes were—and continue to be—vanishingly rare, > or that lawmakers in some states were unable to identify a single player who > would be affected by their bans. The Democrat won anyway. But conservatives had identified a compelling narrative: Trans people were victimizing female athletes. Within months, Republicans in 17 states introduced a new type of bill, banning trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. It didn’t matter that trans athletes were—and continue to be—vanishingly rare, or that lawmakers in states like Tennessee and South Carolina were unable to identify a single player who would be affected by their bans. The sports issue became the turning point for an anti-trans coalition that included juggernauts of the religious right like the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom. IWF stepped up to provide a female face and voice for the message. Never mind that the “women are victims” narrative contradicted so much of its past work. By 2022, threat of trans athletes had become a central theme of IWF’s messaging. It snapped up aggrieved athletes like college swimmer Riley Gaines, training her to communicate her story of tying for fifth place with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and eventually hiring her as a spokeswoman. Payton McNabb, a high school volleyball player injured from a spike by a transgender girl, became another “ambassador.”    Mailman embraced the message too, testifying on behalf of IWF against trans athletes in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee. IWF’s media training was a big part of why she joined the group. “I wanted to be on liberal media as a conservative person,” she says, “trying to talk to people,” the way pundits of old used television to shape public opinion when she was a kid. As Mailman sees it, female messengers have been critical to shifting the narrative around trans issues because—stereotype alert!—they are better at conveying empathy than men. For a long time, she tells me, progressive messages of acceptance and affirmation held sway, and “women do want to be kind, and we do want to be empathetic.” So conservatives needed women to challenge “the empathy play,” she went on. For men, it’s “not their natural language.” Differentiating the sexes based on such stereotypes is exactly the type of thing that causes left-leaning women to shudder. But one of the most confounding aspects of the Defending Women executive order is its connection to a group of activists who define themselves as radical feminists. In 2022, IWF announced an ambitious new project that would serve as a prototype for the Defending Women order: a model bill, then known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, that defined male and female in law according to a narrow view of biology. At a press conference, IWF and other social conservatives spoke alongside current and former members of Women’s Liberation Front, a small left-wing group vehemently opposed to the very idea of transgender identity. IWF leaders described their legislation as merely ensuring that policymakers were all on the same page about the meanings of “female” and “male.” But former WoLF board member Kara Dansky, speaking on the call, made it clear that the bill’s goal was to end legal recognition of transgender people. “Everyone is either female or male,” she declared on the call. “Everything else is a lie.” Sometimes known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, activists like Dansky believe that women’s rights will be lost if the category of “women” includes people assigned male at birth. They’ve pushed for decades to exclude trans women from women’s spaces. (Some who adhere to these views—including, famously, Harry Potter author JK Rowling—consider the TERF acronym a slur and describe themselves as “gender critical”; others embrace it.) Mailman tells me that TERF activists, particularly Dansky, were the intellectual force behind the effort to enshrine sex definitions. “The ones that were really driving the charge and had just a lot more knowledge and background, and had been thinking about these issues, writing about these issues, for such a long time, tended to be people on the left,” she says. (Dansky, in an email, says she did not contribute directly to the model bill’s language or strategy, though she does call Mailman an “extremely intelligent lawyer.” Like Mailman, she doesn’t believe that enshrining sex definitions could turn back the clock on women’s equality under the Constitution. “Radical feminists are gender abolitionists who fully support women who do not conform to sex stereotypes,” she writes.) Former Women’s Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky speaks at a 2020 event at the Seattle Public Library.Lindsey Wasson for the Washington Post/Getty The Women’s Bill of Rights wasn’t the first time radical feminists had teamed up with social conservatives on transgender issues. In 2016, WoLF received a $15,000 grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom to fund a lawsuit over trans students’ access to bathrooms and locker rooms. In 2021, WoLF took another $50,000 from ADF to sue California over a law that allows transgender women to be housed in women’s prisons. “It would be foolish to let performative virtue-signaling prevent us from using available resources,” WoLF legal director Lauren Bone emailed when I asked about the group’s work with the far right. Both sides have benefited from the strange alliance, Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, points out. Right-wing money and connections allow fringe TERF groups to “punch above their weight,” she says. And conservative Christian groups get “a lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation of sex as gender identity.”  > Conservative Christian groups get “a lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying > [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation > of sex as gender identity.”  Soon after the Women’s Bill of Rights was unveiled, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) introduced a version of it in Congress. With the midterms approaching, IWF targeted hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in swing states with ads touting the model bill as part of its supposed crusade for women’s empowerment, boosted by a $100,000 “Innovation Prize” from Heritage. In 2023, versions of the legislation began popping up in statehouses around the country. To promote it, IWF sent Riley Gaines and Mailman—a trip Mailman would later describe as her “first foray into TERFdom.” Mailman, by then married to former professional baseball player David Mailman, leaned on her own experiences as a woman to advocate for the bills. “‘Identification’ replaced the biological reality that we have been living our entire lives—that I am particularly 32 weeks into living right now,” she said on a stage in West Virginia, visibly pregnant with her second child. Her blitz through the state “was terrifying to watch,” says Khadijah Silver, director of gender justice and health equity at Lawyers for Good Government. “She did an incredible job of flooding legal and political environments, partnering with the right groups, to normalize a regressive and anti-scientific and extremely unfeminist analysis of gender—and make it pretty hard to break through that messaging.” The Kansas legislature became the first state to pass the bill in the spring of 2023, and when Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed it, the Republican supermajority overrode her. (“Victory!” WoLF declared in a press release.) Today, 16 states have similar laws, and two more have issued executive orders likewise defining sex. Logan Casey of the Movement Advancement Project describes the Women’s Bill of Rights as “more existential” than other anti-trans bills. “They’re not targeting just one policy area,” he says. “They’re zooming up and saying across the entire government, here’s how we define the word ‘sex’ so that we can basically apply it everywhere that we want, until somebody stops us.” Mailman drew on the state sex-definition bills as she drafted the Defending Women executive order. But the ink on Trump’s signature was barely dry before scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order’s claim to “biological truth,” a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs and sperm.  Today, many biologists view sex as measured by multiple indicators—hormones, chromosomes, genitalia, brain physiology—that typically but don’t always align. > Scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order’s claim to > “biological truth,” a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs > and sperm. More outcry came from reproductive-rights advocates, because the order defined sex as existing “at conception”—language that nods to anti-abortion religious activists who argue that fetal rights begin at fertilization. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for one, was elated about that phrasing, vaunting it during the 2025 March for Life in Washington. Mailman tells me the “at conception” language was added not for abortion policy purposes, but to make the point that sex is determined by DNA prior to birth. Still, “there’s a nice flavor to respecting fetal personhood,” she says. “That’s an added benefit.” So far, the Trump administration has not used the Defending Women order to pursue anti-abortion policies. Instead, it has zeroed in on attacks on the transgender community. The order had an immediate impact on passports, federal funding for gender-related health research, and transgender prisoners. Soon came more executive orders targeting teachers who supported trans students, schools that let them play girls’ sports, and doctors who provided them gender-affirming health care. Another order stated that being trans “conflicts” with a soldier’s “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” The Departments of Justice and Education formed a special team to investigate schools for promoting “gender ideology”—and some universities, in this new climate, fired instructors and censored Plato. The changes have been so drastic that federal judges have put many of the federal government’s anti-trans policies on temporary hold. But the ultimate decider will be the Supreme Court, which already has signaled its willingness to interpret sex discrimination law in ways that exclude trans people. Last June, conservative justices ruled 6–3 that states can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. In November, the Supreme Court allowed the State Department to stop changing trans people’s gender markers on their passports. Mailman appears on Fox News on January 14, 2026, to discuss the transgender sports cases before the Supreme Court.Fox News The court is currently considering a pair of cases that directly ask how much different treatment for the sexes based on “biology” is allowable. The cases involve two states, Idaho and West Virginia, which have both passed laws banning trans girls and women from playing on women’s school sports teams. During oral arguments in January, ultra-conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed to view the cases as an opportunity to enshrine a constitutional definition of sex: How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex, he asked, “without knowing what sex means?” But Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to understand that there would be greater consequences to a decision that gave states more leeway to treat men and women differently, so long as the state claimed the reason was biological. “Your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences, right?” Barrett asked the lawyer for West Virginia. But, she hypothesized, what if a state could produce studies showing that women’s presence in calculus classes held back men’s learning? Could women be excluded from calculus? “Seems to me like there would be some risk on your understanding that that would be okay,” she said. The exchange showed that even the Supreme Court justices are thinking about how an anti-trans ruling could have wider consequences for sex equality, says Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. “They’re opening up the possibility of much broader potential exclusions,” she says. Such a decision could call into question decades of progress fighting sex discrimination. After all, differences between men’s and women’s bodies have been used for much of human history to justify treating women as inferior to men. The Trump administration has been open about its desire to return to those old days—from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat to the White House’s reported consideration of proposals for “baby bonuses” to incentivize women to have more children. Even the title of the Defending Women executive order reflects early-1900s logic that the government needs to protect women due to their inherent fragility—an idea the Supreme Court rejected during the sex equality revolution of the 1970s, Shaw argues in a recent law journal article. And at a December press conference announcing a rule targeting trans teenagers’ medical care, Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill described gender roles as divinely ordained. “Men are men. Men can never become women,” he paraphrased Mailman. “Women are women. Women can never become men.” Then he went a step further: “At the root of the evils we face—such as the blurring of lines between sexes and radical social agendas—is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived.” It’s the focus on transgender people that gives the administration “cover” to pursue this broader regressive agenda, Ziegler argues. For that strategy, she credits Mailman and her allies. The Defending Women order “is about to matter in a big way,” she says. “It created political cover for all of these changes that are going to affect trans people, queer people, along with cis, straight men and women.” Mailman left the White House in early August, pregnant with her third child. But she’s found it hard to step away entirely. In addition to rejoining Independent Women, she has launched her own consulting firm and is representing Netflix as it attempts to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery (reportedly alongside Kellyanne Conway, a Trump 1.0 loyalist who used to be on IWF’s board). She also continued to work for the administration in its negotiations with Harvard. At the time we spoke, she hadn’t turned in her government laptop. On her last official day in the White House, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, “The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All,’” with Mailman prominently featured. She’d been flying on weekends from DC to Texas, where her husband, who owns a tree-transplanting company, took care of their children with a nanny’s help, the Journal reported. “In theory, I would love to be a trad wife,” Mailman confided. She’d intentionally picked a husband who made more money so she “wouldn’t feel trapped” in the workplace, she said. But she didn’t feel guilty about missing time with her kids: “I don’t have a victimhood mentality.” For all the praise that conservatives heaped on Mailman for her work in the White House, these details about her home life rubbed some the wrong way. A few weeks later, the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank, started publishing rebuttals to the Journal article—and to the lifestyles of the conservative women it featured. “There is no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation who needs a woman more than her children need her,” one writer, Maria Baer, reprimanded. Baer was calling out Mailman for defying the gender ideals that social conservatives were working so hard to promote. And then Baer stuck in the knife: It was a matter of biology for women to devote themselves to mothering. “We pursue high-powered careers because we want to make an impact, to leave a legacy, to be remembered, or to change the world,” Baer wrote. “There is no surer way to accomplish each of these than by mothering our own children—a job which, by definition, no one else in human history can do.” Mailman probably shouldn’t have been surprised. But the criticism from an organization she respects came as a blindside. “It was frustrating,” she tells me on the phone, her baby fussing in the background. “I felt like I was getting critiqued on something that I literally was actually doing the opposite on.” She’d joined the Trump transition team thinking her tenure would be brief, she says, then accepted a job in the administration to “help my friends,” but only for six months. She’d repeatedly said no to working in the White House “because I wanted to be around my young kids and my husband, not for any cultural pressure reason, but that’s what’s best for me and for what I wanted.” It was yet another reminder that, despite Mailman’s insistence that defining sex narrowly wouldn’t affect women’s equality, right-wing groups can’t be counted on to go along with that rosy thinking. Nor did it seem to strike her as contradictory that being able to pursue “what’s best for me and for what I wanted” depends on the very feminist gains that those groups—now armed with the Defending Women order—are working to undermine. But Mailman was too busy to be upset at her allies-turned-critics. “Everybody is going to have their own opinion about everybody else,” she says. “You just move on.”

From financial scandals to transgender rights, DEI, and Bad Bunny performing in this weekend’s Super Bowl, there’s no shortage of sports stories to tell. However, investigative sports journalism is a shell of its former self. That’s where Pablo Torre comes in. A longtime sports journalist and now host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre prides himself on digging into the important stories that affect not only sports, but American culture and politics. And that often means investigating the intersection of money and sports. “In sports, unlike in business, you can even argue, there is something resembling a meritocracy that is enforced and cared about by fans, let alone the officials that are meant to tend the store of what it is to have integrity in professional sports,” he says. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Torre’s reporting has shined a light on many stories that have gone unnoticed or  underreported, like his investigation into LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer potentially violating the NBA salary cap. He also recently collaborated with Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly on a story about former college swimmer Riley Gaines’ rise to MAGA prominence through anti-trans activism. Gaines, Torre says, turned her grievance against one trans athlete into a career and political platform, “such that she is in real intimate connection with not just the White House, but the superstructure of political organizations that crop up to turn her cause as this supposed victim into a way to truly victimize trans people in America.”  On this week’s More To The Story, Torre sits down with host Al Letson to discuss what it’s like investigating the complicated world of sports. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

During an NCAA women’s swimming championship in March 2022, two seniors tied for fifth place. The race was unremarkable except for one fact: One of the swimmers, Lia Thomas, was a transgender woman. The swimmer she tied with, Riley Gaines, believed the NCAA never should have allowed her to participate. The matchup, and Gaines’ subsequent transformation into a leading anti-trans activist, has fueled a growing movement to “save women’s sports” from trans women—and a conservative crusade against trans rights more broadly.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we examine Gaines’ rise and radicalization, as her rhetoric shifts from calling out NCAA policy to calling trans women sexual predators. Over the last year, the anti-trans movement has reached a tipping point. Trans girls are banned from girls’ school sports in the majority of states. The NCAA and US Olympic and Paralympic committees have banned trans women from women’s competitions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue, too. Then we dive into the science to understand how gender-affirming hormone therapy affects trans women’s performance—and what questions science still has not answered around fairness in women’s sports. Finally, we return to the swimming pool, as reporter Imogen Sayers speaks with Meghan Cortez-Fields, one of the last transgender swimmers to compete as a woman in the NCAA.

New dietary guidelines announced Wednesday by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. crank up the dials on red meat and full-fat dairy. The now-inverted food pyramid prominently features a steak, an entire chicken, and whole milk up top, relegating carbs to the bottom point—minor real estate compared to the portion they occupied before. Untethered from scientific research, the new recommendations seem more aligned with a burgeoning source of dietary advice: hypermasculine influencers. The fairly recent obsession with protein isn’t limited to men. “Protein has sort of become like a default or de facto good food, because it hasn’t been vilified in the same way that these other nutrients have,” says Charlotte Biltekoff, a professor at UC Davis who studies food and culture. It’s a buzzword in wellness corners around the internet. Yet the new guidelines basically ignore menopause influencers discussing the benefits of cottage cheese in favor of the red-meat-forward “manosphere.” Protein-maxxing obsessives can be found throughout MAGAville, ranging from Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—with his “all beef” diet—to the so-called Liver King. Alongside fitness shakes and supplement powders, these kinds of dudes are often peddling the notion that a high-protein diet is essential for masculinity. > “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein. I do worry about the longer > term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” The association of gender with certain foods isn’t new, but the wholehearted embrace of these perceptions is a more recent phenomenon, says Elaine Power, a dietician and professor at Queen’s University who studies food, gender, and health. In studies about a decade ago, when people were asked if they thought foods were gendered, they’d say no, “but then you show them a salad, and they say, of course that’s women’s food. You show them a steak, and that’s men’s food.” Her subjects, in other words, would initially deny that such perceptions existed. However, Power says she’s not sure she’d get that result if she repeated the experiment today. And these perceptions affect what men eat. A 2023 study titled “Healthful Eating as a Manhood Threat” found that men often avoid foods viewed as feminine, often favoring meat. This seems to have particularly affected young men, a greater proportion of whom—recent research suggests—have been eating meat daily and taking protein supplements. When asked why, many cited their desire for a more muscular physique, the baseline of the aesthetics advertised by macho influencers—some of the most notable of whom have been embroiled in steroid controversies. The ripped physiques influencers use to hawk carnivorous diets are hard to come by, of course, and consuming extra protein is often completely unnecessary. “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein,” Power says. “I do worry about the longer term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” Besides being terrible for the climate, excessive meat consumption has negative health effects, including an increased risk of cancer and heart disease, even in young people. While the American Heart Association praised the new pyramid’s suggestions to limit highly processed foods, the group stated its disagreement with the emphasis on meat and RFK’s aim of “ending the war on saturated fats.” The contents of the pyramid are simply recommendations, with little to no direct policy influence. They may eventually be used to redesign school and other institutional lunches, but right now, “there’s no little to no infrastructure to act on this kind of dietary advice,” Biltekoff says. What’s more, the admonition to avoid processed foods and eat home-cooked meals are inaccessible to many. “This is just another set of ideals that become moralized,” Biltekoff says. “Eating real food becomes a part of identity and status, and it becomes a way of signaling or symbolizing certain kinds of class-based and race-based identities and reinforcing social hierarchies rather than addressing them.” And to the boys and men in the thrall of protein-maxxing, these new guidelines are just an affirmation that they’re headed in the right direction.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmentalist, arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with $1 million more than when she set out on her journey last week. The diversity and inclusion advocate completed the 100-mile trek from Point Reyes national seashore to San Francisco in full drag with her voluminous red wig and smokey eye. The effort was part of a campaign she launched to raise $1 million for eight nonprofits that aim to expand access and make the outdoors a more “equitable place.” > View this post on Instagram “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference,” she wrote on social media after completing the journey. “When I started being Pattie, everyone told me I was crazy. When I told people I wanted to do this fundraiser, [they] laughed in my face. “Seven years later and I hope I can be a little bit of proof to you that combining who you are and what you’re good at to fight for the change you want to see in the world works.” Pattie Gonia has become one of the most visible drag queens in the US in recent years. In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign used footage of her with Kamala Harris as part of an attack ad against the then vice-president. Earlier this year she helped organize a demonstration at Yosemite, where LGBTQ+ climbers hung a trans pride flag on El Capitan. > View this post on Instagram “We flew the Trans pride flag in Yosemite to make a statement: Trans people are natural and Trans people are loved,” she said in a statement at the time. “We are done being polite about Trans people’s existence. Call it a protest, call it a celebration—either way, it’s giving elevation to liberation.” Recently, she playfully challenged the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to a pull-up competition in a video that contrasted footage of her lifting herself with ease with video of Hegseth appearing to struggle through the exercise. > View this post on Instagram For the last week, she was on a solo trek on the California coast, getting in drag daily and setting up camp each night, while filming videos documenting the journey. She is set to perform her final show of the year in San Francisco on Saturday, “That is, if I can make it in time,” she said. Video posted to social media on Friday evening showed her strutting across the Golden Gate Bridge and ending her journey with cake. By Friday, a GoFundMe for the project had raised more than $1 million from almost 35,000 individual donations.

Women are the fast-growing population of incarcerated people. And if Republicans get their way, more pregnant women will be joining their ranks. That’s because conservatives are behind a growing push to criminalize pregnancy outcomes nationwide, in part by giving full rights to fetuses. And while abortion opponents have long claimed they do not want to criminalize abortion-seekers themselves, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, a growing number of conservative lawmakers have begun introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide and criminalize abortion-seekers. These laws will likely put more Black and Latina women behind bars, who are already imprisoned at higher rates than white women.  President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is also ensnaring pregnant immigrant women: A report issued last month by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) alleged that officials identified more than a dozen credible reports of the mistreatment of pregnant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which included not receiving adequate, or even urgent, medical care and being denied food. The Department of Homeland Security has disputed those allegations, saying in part, “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review.” These recent events make Rebecca Rodriguez Carey’s new book, Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prisons, incredibly timely. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly three dozen women who were incarcerated in prisons throughout the Midwest while pregnant, the book provides rare insight into the experiences of pregnant women behind bars—an issue that lacked federal data until the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) issued its first report on the state of pregnant women in prisons earlier this year. But even the exact number of pregnant women in prisons remains unclear, in part because incarcerated women do not always have access to pregnancy tests: The BJS report, for example, cites more than 320 in state and federal custody in 2023, but past research from scholars and advocates has estimated about 3,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. prisons annually. “This invisibility,” Rodrigeuz Carey told me, “really contributes to systemic neglect.” In her book, Rodriguez Carey, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Emporia State University in Kansas, counters this historic invisibility by relaying women’s experiences being pregnant, laboring, and giving birth while in prison. Some stories convey the despair and desperation you may expect: Some women recounted purposefully committing crimes in order to be pregnant in prison rather than on the streets; others recalled falling into postpartum depression after being separated from their babies after giving birth while incarcerated. But the book also spotlights the surprising ways women managed to cultivate hope, by hosting makeshift baby showers and making plans for how they would make their children proud once released. I spoke with Rodriguez Carey via Zoom last month about the state of abortion access in prisons post-Roe, the persistent problem of shackling incarcerated people during childbirth, and what most surprised her during the course of her research. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.  I was struck by the fact that some of the women you interviewed deliberately committed crimes in order to have their basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care met in prison during their pregnancies. What do these women’s experiences indicate about the state of pregnancy care in the US more broadly? Well it’s really, really bad care when you have women who are seeking refuge in a carceral system. And that’s not to say that that the care in prison is optimal care by any means, but for those who are living at the margins of society, who are in extreme poverty and don’t know where their next meal is coming from, don’t know where they are staying each night, for them the mark of being a good mother is to ensure that those basic needs are met. And so that means turning to our criminal legal system. It’s really interesting to me that the incarcerated population are the only group of people in the US that are constitutionally guaranteed health care—that really says something.  > “There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the > criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. “ You have some prisons being more progressive with their efforts to provide wraparound services, but then you have other prisons where there’s not a lot of prenatal and postpartum care, and so there’s really just a wide variation of care there from state to state, and even from facility to facility. I think that speaks to the larger picture of inequalities in the US. There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. Even before the Dobbs decision that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, accessing it in prison was difficult. Only two percent of participants in the BJS report had abortions; other research has found an even lower rate. What sort of barriers did incarcerated people face when Roe was still the law of the land? Many states have laws that prohibit any sort of state funding to go toward abortion. That includes travel—so if an incarcerated woman is looking to access an abortion out of state, typically you have to have a correctional officer accompany that woman. That would require state funding, to be in a correctional van for transportation and to provide the salary for the accompanying correctional officer. Many women who are incarcerated may not know that they are even pregnant until they come to prison, if they are living on the streets, for example, and haven’t had access to routine health care in some time. And so by the time they learn of their pregnancy, it’s often too late, because many states have laws that regulate the number of weeks that an abortion can be performed. Many pregnant women in custody remain shackled while laboring and giving birth despite the fact that leading medical groups have denounced this practice. What did your interviewees say this experience was like for them?  They felt like they were caged animals. When you are in the state of giving birth, you are extremely vulnerable. You’re not necessarily at a risk of fleeing; there have been no documented cases to date of a woman trying to escape while in labor. Many of the women that I interviewed had cesarean sections, so they were on the operating table, numb from the waist down—you are not going anywhere at that moment. Most women who are incarcerated are there on non-violent crimes, and even if a woman is pregnant who committed a violent crime, she’s not necessarily posing a risk to society while you’re in that vulnerable state of childbirth, where your legs are in stirrups and you have a correctional officer often in the room. Many of these correctional officers are men, and a lot of the women I interviewed talked about how they had experienced sexual abuse growing up, so that adds just another layer of harm when you’re in this very vulnerable state, often in layers of undress or completely naked. Most states have laws on the books now restricting shackling during delivery. But how widespread of a problem does this remain?  It’s really hard to say. A state may have a policy, but then we know that the policy is often different from the reality of what takes place. Many states that have issued restrictions on shackling still leave it up to correctional officers if there is a point of threat or perceived harm. And I think when we look at the different layers here, of who is more likely to be considered harmful or posing a risk to society, that’s women of color. So you still have these tropes that are persisting behind bars. What about prison nursery programs that allow mothers to parent their newborns in prison—what benefits do they offer and why aren’t they more common? [Editor’s note: There are currently eleven state-run prison nursery programs, plus two more operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons.] The first prison nursery program has actually been in place since 1901, so this is not necessarily new. Women who go through a prison nursery program and have access to that oftentimes there are reduced recidivism rates, there’s improved maternal mental health and fetal health outcomes. Otherwise they’re meeting their children, and they’re saying goodbye all in a span of 24 hours, and so that’s going to have negative health implications for years to come.  There are no national mandates or standardized policies governing the incarceration of pregnant women. As a result, it’s up to individual states—and even specific correctional facilities—to decide whether to invest in such programs. Unfortunately, awareness among policymakers remains limited. Prior to the 1900s, reformatories often emphasized family bonds, allowing incarcerated women to live with their newborns—much like today’s prison nursery programs. But by the 1970s, most states moved toward a more punitive approach, passing legislation that effectively eliminated many of these programs. Some of your interviewees used their incarcerations during pregnancy as a “transformative period” and sought to “optimize pregnancy and birth outcomes” despite their circumstances. Can you say more about how they did so?  Many of the women that I interviewed had been pregnant before. Some of them had also been incarcerated before, but this was the first time they were both pregnant and incarcerated. Many of them talked about how being pregnant and incarcerated was rock bottom, and that this was very much a wake up call to do right by their unborn child. Many of the women interviewed talked about how during previous pregnancies they were out on the streets, doing drugs, getting into trouble left and right. And so when they were in prison, it was really this time where they could focus on their pregnancy. So that was really special for them, and it was a time where they were doing their best to take advantage of different programs and initiatives that they maybe had access to in their prisons, like pregnancy support groups, for example, reading all the books and trying their best to implement that advice. The women talked about how when you’re incarcerated, all you have is time to think and make the best choices for your unborn child. Is there anything that surprised you in doing this research? I think one of the biggest takeaways from me was how much hope is found inside prisons, where you have women coming together, given the absence of maternal healthcare, given the absence of institutional resources and support, creating their own networks of community and care. Food was a huge topic; pregnant women in prison don’t have access all the time to regular and nutritious foods. So you have other women who are incarcerated helping them out and coming together and saying, “Hey, I don’t want my baked potato, you can have it because I know you’re pregnant and you need these calories.” Women are also taking pregnant women, especially the younger ones, under their wings, and saying, “be sure to get a job in the kitchen while you’re incarcerated, because that way you have regular access to food.” So you see these informal networks of support. After a woman gives birth, she’s sent back to prison, often within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth and asked to fall back in line as if nothing has happened, even though her world has just been rocked. So you have women who are incarcerated really coming together and rallying around the pregnant women to provide that support and care. What gives you hope for pregnant people in prisons and their newborns?  The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka has a program called Play Free, which allows incarcerated mothers and grandmothers to spend a day at the children’s museum playing with their kiddo, free of these cages and environments that are not child- and family-friendly at all. It’s been really great to see the transformation, where it started just as a partnership with the Topeka Correctional Facility, and has since expanded to the men’s facilities in Kansas. You have incarcerated fathers as well, and centering the children in all of this is important.

Speaking at the Museum of the Bible on Monday, President Donald Trump repeated one of his favorite falsehoods as of late: That his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC has virtually eliminated crime in the nation’s capital. That is, of course, not true. But if that outright falsehood was not egregious enough, consider that Trump also complained that reports of domestic violence are inflating crime statistics and implied they should not be considered “crimes” at all. “Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump said. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent.” > Trump minimizes domestic abuse during a talk at the Museum of the Bible: > "Things that take place in the home, they call crime … If a man has a little > fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?" > > — Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T15:44:26.977Z Dawn Dalton, executive director of the DC Coalition of Domestic Violence, told me on Monday: “We don’t agree with what the president is saying.” Nearly half of women in DC, and more than 40 percent of men, have experienced intimate partner violence or stalking in their lifetimes, according to statistics the coalition compiled last year. Nationwide, an average of two dozen people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “There have been federal and local statutes in place for decades that does name domestic violence as a crime,” Dalton added, “and we know that domestic violence is often a precursor to other crimes, including domestic violence homicides as well as mass shootings.” Indeed, research has found that in nearly 70 percent of mass shootings, perpetrators had a history of domestic violence or had killed at least one partner or family member. “The frequency and the harm [of domestic violence] is not paid enough attention to, and remarks such as the president’s certainly underscore that truth,” Dalton added. Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “Of course the President wasn’t talking about or downplaying domestic violence—and any Fake News hacks trying to use this as a political cudgel against the President are doing a great service to actual domestic abusers and criminals around the country.” In fact, Trump has not only downplayed domestic violence through his speech, but also through his actions: His administration has cut millions of dollars in grants earmarked for victims of crime, including domestic violence, and has tried to force domestic violence service providers to agree to hand crime victims over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to receive federal dollars. A statement like the one Trump made is also not surprising when you consider the man that uttered it has himself been accused of rape by his ex-wife, Ivana Trump. She later claimed she did not mean it “in a literal or criminal sense,” adding that she “felt violated.” (Trump denied the allegation.) Trump has also stacked his cabinet and surrounded himself with men who have faced similar accusations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women,” in a 2018 email, though she told the New York Times last year that she subsequently recanted and apologized for it. Hegseth has also been accused of rape and sexually inappropriate behavior, charges which he denies. (Hegseth paid the woman who made the rape accusation, the Washington Post reported, but he alleges the interaction was consensual.) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was accused of groping a babysitter in the late 1990s. While running for president last year, he texted her to apologize and said he had no memory of the incident. Ex-Department of Government Efficiency head and Trump frenemy Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016, but he denied the claim—after Business Insider reported that the company paid her $250,000 in 2018 to keep her from filing a lawsuit. And Rob Porter, a top White House aide, abruptly resigned during Trump’s first term after two of his ex-wives came forward with domestic abuse allegations, which Trump himself cast doubt on. While there is ample evidence that the police do not always protect domestic violence victims or respond adequately to domestic abuse, it seems very unlikely that this is what Trump was referring to. The man is, after all, about the furthest thing from an abolitionist: His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill allocated more than $100 billion to ICE—the same agency that has created a chilling effect for immigrant survivors of domestic violence seeking help, as I previously reported. And the president has repeatedly threatened to send the National Guard to take over other cities after doing so in DC and Los Angeles. Instead, his latest comments are a throwback to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Trump seems to believe that, if you’re a man, “you can do anything” to women—and that you deserve to get away with it.

You could say that Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce’s engagement, announced Tuesday in an Instagram post that has 17 million likes and counting, broke the internet. And right-wingers immediately started talking rings and talking cradles. News outlets sent push alerts. Celebrities and politicians sent their congratulations. “Taylor Swift engaged” was the number one trending search topic on Google, with more than two million searches by early afternoon. The news also ricocheted around right-wing corners of the internet, where leading conservatives said they hoped Swift’s engagement would help achieve some of their top goals, now backed by the Trump-administration: Inspire a nationwide boost in (heterosexual) marriage and birth rates. Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the right-wing Daily Wire news site, called Swift and Kelce’s engagement “unironically an excellent thing” in post on X to his nearly eight million followers. “I hope many other single people follow their example,” he added. Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, said he hopes Swift and Kelce “have lots of kids and end up very happy!” in a post to his five million followers. On his podcast Tuesday, Kirk said he hoped that marriage might make Swift more conservative: “Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and we should celebrate that…she should have more children than she has houses.” > Congratulations @taylorswift13 > > I can't wait to go see a Taylor Kelce Concert! > > To listen to the full podcast — and for daily drops, subscribe to The Charlie > Kirk Podcast on Apple or Spotify! > > LINK https://t.co/Xi9hTbH4hv pic.twitter.com/Do8zmyIV0Q > > — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 26, 2025 Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, wrote to her more than 92,000 X followers that she hopes Swift’s engagement “inspires young women to see the joy and purpose in getting married, starting a family, and committing to one person for the rest of their lives.” A bit later, Hawkins followed up with another take, claiming, “America is heading into its “get married & have babies” era.” Lila Rose, a fellow leading anti-abortion activist and founder of the group Live Action, told her more than 394,000 X followers: “Marriage is the best and tons of women look up to Taylor. So happy to see her embracing it.” Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, said to “expect a spike in marriage” following the news. That MAGA would rush to claim this news as a win is not surprising when you consider how hard they have been pushing for more marriage and babies in the second Trump…era (see what I did there?). The Trump administration—and particularly Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk—are obsessed with boosting the declining birth rate, as my colleague Kiera Butler has chronicled. (The president’s promise to make IVF more widely available as part of this, on the other hand, has pretty much gone nowhere.) In the Christian nationalist worldview that shapes many of these right-wing thought leaders, marriage is, of course, a necessary precursor to procreation. A new generation of so-called trad (short for “traditional”) wives are thriving online, extolling the virtues of marriage and motherhood and calling for a return to more traditional gender roles. And federal officials have also signaled their desires to boost marriage rates: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is married with nine kids of his own, signed a memo in February recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Vance has also decried the decline in marriage among young people in a May interview with the New York Times. But, seriously, do the right-wingers who hope Swift will inspire a new army of trad wives know anything about the pop superstar? Even I, an avowed non-Swiftie, know all too well that Swift does not aspire to the MAGA model of marriage and motherhood that they’re hoping for. First, Swift endorsed then-Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump in the election, in an Instagram post featuring a photo of her with a cat—an obvious dig at Vice President JD Vance’s derision of so-called “childless cat ladies.” Secondly, while Swift has talked about wanting marriage and children, she has also spoken out against the pressure for women to think about having children once they turn 30. And perhaps most significantly, Swift has sung at length about resisting the double standards and traditional pressures women face. I mean…have they ever listened to “Lavender Haze“? > All they keep askin’ me (all they keep askin’ me) > Is if I’m gonna be your bride > The only kind of girl they see (only kind of girl they see) > Is a one-night or a wife > > […] > > Surreal, I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say > No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me Or “Bejeweled“? > They ask, “Do you have a man?” > I can still say, “I don’t remember” As Sam Van Pykeren, one of Mother Jones‘ resident Swifties, pointed out, the right-wing discourse around this proves that even Swift—one of the most famous and wealthy women in the world—can’t escape MAGA logic: Women only achieve their full value when they’re wifed up. Ruth Murai, Anna Yeo, and Sam Van Pykeren contributed reporting.

On Wednesday morning, the Labor Department quietly reposted grants aimed at getting women workers into fields like construction and manufacturing, tow months after DOGE sanctimoniously canceled the program. The move came as a shock to employees. DOGE previously eliminated dozens of the congressionally-mandated Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries in fields like construction, manufacturing, and information technology. As Mother Jones previously reported, DOGE cancelled the funds, which it dismissed as “wasteful DEI grants,” back in May. The Labor Department is trying to spin the renewed availability of the $5 million grants as proof of the Trump administration’s support for women in the workforce, even though the administration is also trying to eliminate the congressionally-mandated, 105-year-old Women’s Bureau that administers them. Instead, employees at the department say the agency’s attempted spin is laughable and yet another example of the administration backtracking on cutting support for marginalized populations after public outcry. “The press release makes it sound like it’s something they came up with,” said Gayle Goldin, former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under the Biden administration. “This is a multi-decade grant program that has had bipartisan support for years.” A DOL employee familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau agreed, adding, “This seems to be on trend for them, taking credit for revamping programs when they are largely the same.” (The DOL employees who spoke to Mother Jones for this story were granted anonymity for fear of retribution, given that a department official previously threatened staff who spoke to journalists with “serious legal consequences,” including criminal charges, ProPublica reported.) In fact, experts say the extent to which the program has been altered merely dilutes its goals. Compared to last year’s detailed guidelines for the grant, this year’s eliminate prior references to prioritizing “historically underrepresented communities,” such as women of color, women with disabilities, and women at or below the federal poverty line, and transgender and nonbinary people. Another DOL employee called those changes “unfortunate,” pointing to recent federal data showing a rise in Black women’s unemployment. “To remove this focus on underrepresented communities, it just makes it less likely that the organizations that ultimately get awarded will intentionally make sure that they are reaching all women, including and especially the ones who frankly need it the most,” that employee said. Another major change in this year’s grants: It reduces the amount of funds that can be used for supportive services like child care for participants’ kids or transportation to help them get to training programs. “We know how critical supportive services are to recruiting and retaining women in these programs,” the DOL employee added. The previously cancelled WANTO grants, which will not be restored despite the new funding announcement, were used to support programs for getting women and nonbinary into construction in places like North Carolina and Mississippi. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, cited some of these details included in my previous reporting when she questioned Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer about the status of WANTO grants at a House Appropriations Committee hearing. (Chavez-DeRemer declined to comment on the specific WANTO cuts at that hearing.) Prior grantees and experts have mixed feelings about the latest development. Goldin, the former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under Biden, said that on the one hand, “it is surprising, in a good way, to see the grant announcement back up.” “At the same time,” she added, “I feel like this administration is all over the place. Do they actually want women in the workforce? If so, I really hope organizations apply for this grant funding and that they go ahead and fund them.” Nora Spencer’s North Carolina nonprofit, Hope Renovations, which supports and trains women and nonbinary people to work in construction, lost about $300,000 of its $700,000 WANTO grant in May. “We have gone through all of this frustration and heartache from the grants being taken away,” she told me on Wednesday, “and now they’re back again with no notice to us.” Spencer is unsure if she will reapply, citing ethical concerns about seeking the funding when this administration does not want to support historically marginalized populations. Those requirements, she said, would “limit the people that we can serve.” Rhoni Basden, executive director of Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, also does not know if she will reapply. She had the remainder of her organization’s $400,000 WANTO grant cancelled back in May, and she did not know that the grants had been reopened for applications until I contacted her on Wednesday morning. The application deadline is in less than a month, and her organization’s prior WANTO-funded work was focused on serving marginalized populations, which seem to conflict with this administration’s priorities. Using funds for support services to help participants in rural Vermont attend their programming or pay for childcare was also critical, she said. “For us specifically,” she said, “it feels dismantling and backwards.” Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.