“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.”

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.

At the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’s abortion pills hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri spent the whole of his allotted time reiterating disinformation about transgender people. And, this isn’t the first time he’s utilized a hearing about reproductive healthcare to do so.  During an interaction at the hearing, Sen. Hawley asked Dr. Nisha Verma, who provides reproductive care in Georgia and Massachusetts, “Can men get pregnant?” Hawley asked this question over 10 times, repeatedly cutting her off when she attempted to answer.  Verma, along with Dr. Monique Wubbenhorst and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, was called on by the committee for the hearing. Wubbenhorst previously testified in support of anti-abortion initiatives, and AG Murrill just indicted a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state.  Before Hawley had the chance to share his views on gender, Florida Sen. Ashley Moody kicked off the topic by asking, “Miss Verma, can men get pregnant?” “Dr. Verma,” she corrected. Moody repeated:“Dr. Verma, can men get pregnant?” Verma paused. Moody asked the other witnesses, who quickly replied “no.” Later in the hearing, before handing off the mic to Sen. Hawley, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the committee, said, “I think it’s science-based, by the way, that men can’t have babies.” Then, it was Hawley’s turn.  “Since you bring it up, why don’t we start there,” he began. “Dr. Verma, I wasn’t sure I understood your answer to Sen. Moody a moment ago. Do you think that men can get pregnant?”  “I hesitated there because I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going or what the goal was,” Dr. Verma responded, adding, “I mean I do take care of patients with different identities, I take care of many women, I take care of people with different identities.” “Well,” Hawley returned, “the goal is the truth, so can men get pregnant?” “Again,” Dr. Verma said, “the reason I pause there is I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is—” Hawley cut her off, in part saying, “the goal is just to establish a biological reality.”  “I take care of people with many identities—” Dr. Verma began, before being cut off by Hawley.  “Can men get pregnant?” “I take care of many women, I do take care of people that don’t identify as women—” “Can men get pregnant?” “Again, as I’m saying—” Hawley cut in. This tempo continued, with the senator at one point saying that he was “trying to test, frankly,” Dr. Verma’s “veracity as a medical professional and as a scientist” and “I thought we were passed all of this, frankly.” > Sen. Josh @HawleyMO: "Can men get pregnant?" > > Dr. Nisha Verma: "I'm not really sure what the goal of the question is." > > Hawley: "The goal is just to establish a biological reality…Can men get > pregnant?" pic.twitter.com/4egtfZrPgB > > — CSPAN (@cspan) January 14, 2026 Transgender men can and do get pregnant, as detailed in several different reports currently posted on The National Library of Medicine, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services. Scientific research on this community is still limited, in part due to transgender men being hesitant to seek medical care in hospitals. Research out of Rutgers University found that about 44 percent of pregnant transgender men seek medical care outside of traditional care with an obstetrician, like with a nurse-midwife.  During the hearing, Republican members described abortion medication as dangerous and in need of further restriction. Their Democrat colleagues said that the hearing, entitled “Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs,” was a way to discredit settled science.  Mifepristone, one of the pills used in abortions with medication, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for over 25 years and, just this past October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill. A New York Times review of more than 100 studies on abortion medication found that it is safe and effective. The current pushback against abortion medication, which accounted for 63 percent of all abortions in the US in 2023, is being spearheaded in part by Erin Hawley—the senator from Missouri’s wife. Erin Hawley works for the Alliance Defending Freedom and, in 2024, unsuccessfully argued for further restrictions on abortion medication in front of the Supreme Court. In December, the couple launched “The Love Life Initiative,” which aims to support anti-abortion ballot initiatives.  Back in 2022, at a different hearing on abortion access, Sen. Hawley focused on the same topic with another witness: law professor Khiara Bridges. Hawley began, as he did on Wednesday, by saying he “wants to understand.” “You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?” Hawley said. Bridges responded, explaining that some cis women can get pregnant while others can’t—and that people who don’t identify as women get pregnant, too. “So,” the senator returned, “this isn’t really a women’s rights issue.”  Bridges replied, smiling: “we can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.” 

Tributes poured in on Sunday following the news of the death of director and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, film producer and photographer Michele Reiner. If you take a look at them, you’ll notice that many go beyond his film work and speak glowingly about his progressive activism—except for one missive from President Donald Trump. The president lashed out earlier today, claiming the filmmaker had “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” and hated that his administration “surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.” > Remember when they tried to make criticizing Charlie Kirk after his murder > into a capital offense?(Yes, this is real.) > > — Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T14:59:18.290Z Reiner was a co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), a nonprofit organization established to sponsor a federal lawsuit to overturn California’s Proposition 8 in 2009.  The ballot proposition banned same-sex marriage and added language to the California Constitution, stating “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”  Religious organizations, including the Catholic Bishops of California and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, advocated for the proposition through in-person canvassing and millions of dollars in donations.  A report from The Hollywood Reporter stated that Reiner collaborated with political strategists to establish AFER and leveraged his entertainment industry connections to secure $3-5 million in financial backing from wealthy film producers to support its legal work. AFER supported two couples—Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo—and argued that Prop 8 discriminated on the basis of gender and sexual orientation. Chief US District Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Prop 8 in 2010, citing that it violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.   The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court due to appeals. The court decided in 2013 that the Prop 8 sponsors did not have legal standing to dispute the ruling because they could not demonstrate a “personal and tangible harm” that went beyond a “generalized grievance.” Prop 8 wasn’t just a one-off in Reiner’s progressive activism. In 1998, he led the campaign to pass Proposition 10 in California. It passed that November, authorizing a $0.50 tax on cigarettes and up to $1 on other tobacco products, such as cigars. The money generated went to First 5 California, which distributes funds to the state’s county branches in support of programs for young children, such as health care and school readiness. “I loved Rob,” Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for her starring role in Reiner’s film, “Misery,” said in a statement to Deadline. “He was brilliant and kind, a man who made films of every genre to challenge himself as an artist.” Despite these progressive policy wins for Reiner, he was still compassionate enough to mourn people whose politics he despised. After Charlie Kirk was murdered in September, Reiner appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored. “That should never happen to anybody,” he said of Kirk’s violent and public assassination. “I don’t care what your political beliefs…that’s not a solution to solving problems.” > Rob Reiner responded with grace and compassion to Charlie's assassination. > This video makes it all the more painful to hear of he and his wife's tragic > end. May God be close to the broken hearted in this terrible story. > pic.twitter.com/07g2EFu8Ha > > — Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) December 15, 2025 As of this writing, Reiner’s murder is still being investigated by Los Angeles police and Hollywood is left to mourn one of its most visionary activists.

On Sunday, US lawmakers released the annual defense policy bill authorizing a record $901 billion in national defense spending in 2026. The bill was somehow $8 billion more than President Trump requested, and bans transgender women from competing in sports at military universities.  The 3,086-page bill states that the Secretary of Defense will ensure military academies do not permit a person “whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.” The text codifies “sex” as “a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” The bill has already been negotiated between Republicans and Democrats and is set to go to a House vote this week, likely leaving little room for significant changes. But the new version does drop the ban on Defense Department funding on gender-affirming surgeries. Previous versions passed by both the House and the Senate incorporated the ban. The House bill approved in September also prohibited gender transition services for family members through the Exceptional Family Member Program: “No gender transition procedures, including surgery or medication, may be provided to a minor dependent child through an EFMP.”   Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act restricted TRICARE, the health care program that provides civilian health benefits for US military personnel, their dependents, and retirees, from covering “certain medical procedures for children that could result in sterilization.”  The NDAA is must-pass legislation as it sets the defense budget and determines the policies it will apply to each year. NDAA laws from previous fiscal years thus have a knock-on effect, opening the door for lawmakers to flood the new bill with anti-trans provisions that would likely not pass on their own and force Democrats to block them while on limited time.  The House bill that was passed in September contains several anti-LGBT amendments in addition to the ban on “gender transition procedures” for servicemembers’ children. Many of Rep. Nancy Mace‘s (R-SC) proposed additions were adopted—including prohibiting coverage for “gender-related medical treatment,” defined to include puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries, as well as mental health care for transgender young people and requiring the use of single-sex facilities such as restrooms and locker rooms according to their “reproductive system.” Every year’s NDAA will likely prompt discussions on what anti-transgender provisions could be forced through. As my colleagues Madison Pauly and Henry Carnell wrote in January, President Donald Trump is restricting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. This has led institutions like the NCAA and government departments such as the Department of Veterans Affairs to bow to his orders. The NDAA is just one piece of this coordinated effort. 

When President Donald Trump tries to defend his mass deportation agenda, he claims, without evidence, that immigrants are entering the United States from “mental institutions and insane asylums.”  When he wants to insult people—like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Mo.), or former Vice President Kamala Harris—he calls them “low IQ,” “deranged,” and “mentally disabled.”  And when he and Vice President JD Vance tried to justify the federal takeover of Washington, DC, they claimed it was necessary in order to get mentally ill people off the streets. “Why have we convinced ourselves that it’s compassionate to allow a person who’s obviously a schizophrenic, or suffering from some other mental illness, why is it compassionate to let that person fester in the streets?” Vance said—offering as evidence, CNN reported, an anecdote “about his family being yelled at during a trip to DC.” > Thousands of federal staffers working on mental health-related issues have > been purged by Trump’s government. This is what mental health and disability advocates people call “sanist” language—words used to stigmatize mental health conditions in a derogatory way. Trump routinely turns to it to degrade his enemies and justify his actions. A review of his speeches and interviews includes more than 200 uses of the word ‘crazy’ thus far in his second term, and ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’ more than 60 times each, according to a Roll Call database. While these words can be part of casual vernacular, Trump’s constant use of dismissive and stigmatizing rhetoric matches his actions. His officials have dismantled key parts of the federal workforce dedicated to treatment and prevention and cancelled millions of dollars in research grants focused on mental health. In doing so, experts say, Trump and his cronies are not only undermining support systems for people with mental illness but also worsening some of the same issues they claim to prioritize, including minimizing crime and reducing homelessness.  “When you cut those services, you have a lot of downstream impacts, and that’s going to include upticks in emergency department visits, hospitalization needs, incarceration and in homelessness,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. One of Trump’s most sweeping attacks on people with mental illness came in late July, when he signed an executive order pushing “long-term” involuntary institutionalization for people with mental illnesses experiencing homelessness, which the order argues the EO argues will “restore public order.” Trump was more blunt about his hopes for what the EO would actually do a few weeks later, when he announced the deployment of National Guard troops to DC: “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” he posted on Truth Social. The White House did not respond to a series of questions. Advocacy groups quickly pointed to a plethora of issues in Trump’s order, including that it criminalizes mental illness and tramples the civil rights of unhoused people, particularly those with mental health disabilities. “This executive order diverts resources away from the real solutions we know work and instead embraces coercion over care,” National Disability Rights Network executive director Marlene Sallo said in a press release. As the National Alliance to End Homelessness pointed out, the order does not address who will determine involuntary civil commitment, under what criteria, nor acknowledge the shortage of mental health beds nationwide—an issue the American Psychiatric Association asked Trump to tackle at the start of his second term.  Research indicates that involuntary commitment can be highly traumatic and lead to people cycling in and out of institutions without getting the support they need. More research is needed on how best to support unhoused people with mental health disabilities and substance abuse issues, but Wesolowski, of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said that Trump’s order is not the way forward. “If we want to both reduce the burden of chronic conditions in this country and reduce homelessness,” she said, “the solution to that is to help people sooner.”  Trump’s cabinet seems to share his disdain for people struggling with mental health. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy oversees the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, and the FDA, among other agencies—and since he was confirmed in February, has shuttered key offices and fired critical staffers throughout the department. As our colleague Kiera Butler previously reported, during his doomed presidential campaign, Kennedy floated sending people on antidepressants to “wellness farms…to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” He also baselessly implied, during a 2023 event with future DOGE head Elon Musk, that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings. Just last month, the FDA held a misinformation-fest about antidepressants in pregnancy during which panelists argued that perinatal depression does not actually exist and that antidepressants are overprescribed to pregnant women, despite research suggesting that only six to ten percent take them. A leaked strategy document, that Kennedy’s so-called Make America Healthy Again Commission reportedly submitted to the president, obtained by Politico, called for a working group on antidepressant “overprescription trends” among kids.  HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump at a White House health technology event, July 30, 2025.Jack Power/White House/Zuma Federal staffers working on mental health-related issues, meanwhile, have been purged by Trump’s government. NIH has lost 7,000 workers, roughly 16 percent of its workforce, through firings and resignations, according to a ProPublica analysis. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) lost an even higher proportion, at 22 percent. HHS also plans to cut more than $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which will be collapsed into a proposed “Administration for a Healthy America,” following cuts of $72 million from March’s continuing appropriations bill; dwarfing an additional $19 million the agency supposedly plans to earmark to support housing for people with severe mental illness. In a May letter to Kennedy, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and three Democratic senators said the plans to dissolve SAMHSA appear to violate the federal law that created it. A slew of advocacy organizations also condemned the proposed cuts, calling to preserve the agency and its funding. NIMH will also be swallowed up into the newly proposed National Institute of Behavioral Health, along with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. An HHS spokesperson told Mother Jones that “Secretary Kennedy remains deeply committed to the mental health of all Americans, including our nation’s children” and that “under the Secretary’s leadership, SAMHSA is sustaining and strengthening essential mental health and substance use programs so people can access timely, high-quality care.” Many NIMH research projects have also been decimated. In March, Michael Bronstein, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota (UMN), received news that he was dreading: He and his colleagues were losing what was left of their four-year, $187,000 research grant from the NIMH to study vaccine hesitancy in people with severe mental illness. (Bronstein spoke to Mother Jones in his personal capacity.)  The work was important. Research has shown that people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are vaccinated at lower rates. They are also more likely to die of illnesses for which we have vaccines. But under the leadership of RFK Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, the NIH deprioritized research on vaccine hesitancy, according to the grant termination notice Bronstein received—and a Washington Post report published the same day.  The news was particularly cruel for Bronstein, who with his colleagues had already spent time recruiting about 60 participants who were prepared to open up to researchers about their mental health conditions. “When things get cancelled like this,” Bronstein said, “it’s a betrayal of those individuals’ trust”—and of research that he believed was “going to have a real impact on public health.” Past NIMH research has, indeed, had major implications for treating mental illness. One 2008 study, for example, investigated treatments for psychosis in young people experiencing an initial schizophrenic episode, and led to the launch of hundreds of treatment programs for schizophrenia nationwide. The research found that wraparound treatment of psychosis after an initial episode led to less severe episodes later in life. That study was “a great example of research being put into practice and making a huge impact,” Wesolowski said. “But we need more of that.” But mental health research has been a particular focus on the chopping block of DOGE, which terminated hundreds of NIH grants—with NIMH grants accounting for the largest subset, according to a paper published in JAMA in May. Since then, dozens more NIMH grants have been cancelled, although some terminations have been reversed or are likely to be reversed following a slate of legal challenges, according to the database Grant Witness.   The majority of the cancelled NIMH grants featured in the JAMA study—nearly 75 percent, according to Mother Jones’ analysis—focused on research involving LGBTQ people, who are more than twice as likely as straight, cisgender people to report mental disorders. And with the Trump administration’s additional measures seeking to erase LGBTQ people from public life—by banning trans troops from the military, dismissing discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and purging LGBTQ history from public spaces—these rates could climb even higher.  > “When things get cancelled like this, it’s a betrayal of those individuals’ > trust.” Many of the NIMH-funded projects specifically aimed to better understand these disparities. One cancelled grant, for example, was intended to study how stigma, including state laws restricting trans health care, shapes the mental health of trans people living in rural areas. The project, part of Kirsten F. Siebach’s doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, will continue thanks to an alternative funding source. (Siebach also spoke to Mother Jones in their personal capacity, not on behalf of the university.)  But Siebach, who hopes to build their career as a public health researcher focusing on how structural stigma affects LGBTQ people, worries that “there’s just no funding to support such work” going forward. There is already evidence that Trump’s return to the White House has made things worse for LGBTQ kids’ mental health. The day after Trump’s re-election last November, the Trevor Project, an organization focused on preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth, reported a 700 percent increase in contacts to its crisis lines. On Inauguration Day, when Trump signed an executive order that essentially refused to acknowledge the existence of trans people—the organization saw a more than 30 percent increase in contacts compared to weeks prior. Casey Pick, the organization’s director of law and policy, said those spikes reflect the fact that “LGBTQ youth are well aware that the access to care, to support of adults, to welcoming and affirming schools and medical environments is very much at risk.” A protest in defense of LGBTQ suicide hotline services in New York City, July 12, 2025.Gina M Randazzo/Zuma One of the highest-profile blows for LGBTQ young people came last month, when SAMHSA officially shuttered the National Suicide Hotline’s specialized services for LGBTQ youth. Those services, received more than one million contacts since launching in 2022. In a statement, SAMHSA claimed that access to “culturally competent crisis counselors” would continue, adding, “Anyone who calls the Lifeline will continue to receive compassion and help.”  The administration has also undermined support for LGBTQ youth mental health in less public ways: Seven of the cancelled NIMH grants in the JAMA study, Mother Jones found, were explicitly focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth. (Two were since reinstated, but face cancellation again due to a recent Supreme Court ruling.) Two explicitly focused on suicide prevention among Black LGBTQ youth, who report disproportionate suicide risk; another aimed to implement and measure a pilot program for LGBTQ youth at risk of suicide in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Projects like these, Pick said, helped experts “to see trends, patterns, disparities in the mental health outcomes for our LGBTQ+ young people and to begin to identify solutions.”  Explicit attacks on LGBTQ young people in particular are coupled with indirect impacts on their mental health from other administration actions: Trump’s involuntary commitment order, for example, is likely to have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ young people, given that they experience homelessness at higher rates than their straight and cis peers. Trump’s executive order seeking to end federal funding for K-12 schools that promote so-called “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” could penalize teachers and school counselors who seek to support LGBTQ students, which would ultimately harm the students themselves, given that research has shown accepting adults can reduce their risk of suicide. And LGBTQ youth and their families who flee their home states, or even the country, to escape threats to gender-affirming care or outright bans may further struggle after being uprooted and losing support systems. “What is so important now is that we make sure that young people know that they are not alone, that they still have access to resources,” Pick said, “but the reality is, this is a very challenging time.”

The suspect in the mass shooting responsible for killing two school-aged children and wounding 17 others at a Catholic church in Minneapolis on Wednesday has been identified as having changed her legal name in 2020 to reflect her identity as female. “Minor child identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” a judge wrote in court records reported by the New York Times. Predictably, voices on the far right have immediately seized on that tidbit, blaming the suspect’s gender identity for the shooting. “Today’s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted on X. “Congress MUST PASS my bill Protecting Children’s Innocence Act to make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors!!!” “One thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder,” wrote conservative YouTube host Benny Johnson. “The pattern is undeniable.” Just one day after the horrific event, it isn’t yet possible to conclude why the suspected killer choose to do what she did. But what we can say is that, despite the probable identity of yesterday’s attacker, there is no evidence that transgender people are any more likely to commit mass shootings. Rather, multiple independent databases tracking mass shootings confirm the opposite: The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in which four or more people (not including the shooter) are shot or killed estimated last year that fewer than 1 percent of the shootings it reviewed in the last decade were carried out by trans individuals. Mother Jones has its own database tracking shootings in which “three or more victims were killed in an indiscriminate public rampage.” As I wrote in 2023, very, very few of those were carried out by individuals who were not cisgender men. > One hundred and thirty four of the 141 mass shootings tracked by Mother > Jones since 1982 were carried out by men with no known history of identifying > as trans or nonbinary. Two were carried out by women believed to be cisgender. > Two more were carried out by a man and a woman, also believed to be cisgender, > working together. “From a statistical basis,” I wrote, “transgender individuals are much more prone to being the victims of violence than they are likely to commit it.” That doesn’t mean transgender people are never responsible for these acts. There are, unfortunately, many preventable deaths caused by gun violence in the US; trans people make up a very small proportion of the US population, and they make up a similarly small proportion of gun-violence perpetrators. But to blame the unnerving prevalence of mass shootings in America on the existence of trans people here isn’t just a dangerously stigmatizing, politically motivated take. It’s also bad math.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to its newsletter. The email came last fall while James Harter was on vacation with his husband in Quebec City, Canada. He was checking his computer in their RV when he read the no-nonsense subject line: Certificate of Pardon. He had no idea just how uncommon that email was—but in the moment, none of that mattered.  “The feelings were basically overjoyed relief,” he told The War Horse. “Just the sense of, maybe I could put what happened to me in my past.”  Nearly 40 years ago, Harter was court-martialed for having consensual sex with another man in his unit. He was convicted under the former Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 125, which forbade sodomy, defined as “unnatural carnal copulation,” and sentenced to a bad conduct discharge from the Army plus six months in two military correctional facilities: one in Germany and one in Kansas. He spent most of his time in isolation, on suicide watch.  “I just couldn’t understand how I’d gotten to this point,” he said, “where I was in prison with murderers because I had sex with someone.”  Last year, however, he finally got a chance at redemption when then-President Joe Biden issued a proclamation to grant a full and unconditional pardon to veterans with court-martial convictions under former Article 125. Harter applied right away.  Receiving the pardon on that early fall day, Harter said, “restored a lot of pride.” Only now does he understand just how unique he is to have received an Article 125 pardon.  More people have walked on the moon.  Documents obtained by The War Horse through Freedom of Information Act requests show that of the tens of thousands of veterans who were separated from the military due to their sexuality over decades, only 21 ended up applying for a pardon—and only four, including Harter, have received one. The numbers sharply contrast with the White House’s estimate that “thousands” of veterans could be eligible when Biden announced a year ago that he was “righting a historic wrong.” So much has changed since then. Both Biden and President Donald Trump have faced intense criticism for handing out controversial pardons.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have been erased under the new administration’s zeal to refocus the military on lethality. Thousands of transgender service members are being discharged and banned from serving. And the Pentagon is considering renaming ships, including the USNS Harvey Milk, named for the slain gay rights activist and veteran who was discharged over his sexuality, that don’t fit a “warrior” ethos.  While The War Horse had previously reported on the low number of pardon applications for LGBTQ+ veterans, records disclosed last month by the Office of the US Pardon Attorney are the first to reveal just how few have been granted: two from the Navy, one from the Air Force, and one from the Army. The records provided no other details and don’t explain why other applicants were denied. Harter is the only one of the pardoned veterans who has come forward to share his story. “I never expected to be pardoned,” he said. “But I don’t think it [the court-martial] should have ever happened to start with, so I felt like there was some redemption there.”  Harter was an Army staff sergeant before he was court-martialed. Courtesy James Harter A PALTRY PROMISE?  After the initial excitement over Biden’s Article 125 pardon announcement, it soon became clear to LGBTQ+ veteran advocates that many waiting for relief would be left out.   The pardon’s wording meant that it applied only to veterans who were court-martialed for violations of Article 125, or consensual sodomy, said Dana Montalto, associate director of the Veterans Legal Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. “But there were so many other ways that [lesbian, gay, and bisexual] service members were separated or their behaviors criminalized when they were in service, and the pardon didn’t reach those,” Montalto said. “I think it is a step in the right direction for our federal government to be making amends, but it certainly was not a solution to the problem,” she said. LGBTQ+ veterans were often outed by fellow service members or caught up in military witch hunts.  “Additional charges were often weaponized against service members, whether they were true or not,” said Cathy Marcello, deputy director at the Modern Military Association of America, an organization of LGBTQ+ service members. “Circumstances might look very bad on paper, but might not reflect what actually is historically accurate to this person’s conviction.”  LGBTQ+ veterans were also regularly charged with Article 134 (indecent conduct or adultery), Article 92 (failure to obey a direct order), and other transgressions. Any of these additional offenses would make a veteran ineligible for Biden’s pardon.  Last year, The War Horse submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for Defense Department memos or reports to understand why the White House suggested thousands of veterans would benefit from Biden’s pardon. The agency denied the request, however, saying the documents were part of the decision-making process and therefore protected. In May, The War Horse once again tried to contact the Office of the Pardon Attorney and Department of Justice for comment on this issue and received no response.  Advocates say there is another major reason for the low numbers: The burden is entirely on the veteran to apply for clemency and prove that they qualify. Unlike some mass pardons, Biden’s action requires that each veteran fill out a form, which could be daunting or bring up painful emotions.  Peter Perkowski, legal director at Minority Veterans of America, said the administration could have made the process easier. “They could have put the onus on the Defense Department to review all the [Article] 125 convictions and change them if it’s appropriate,” he said, “or they could have sent letters out to people at their last known address.” Ultimately, he said, “there were a lot of things they could have done. They did none of it.” The White House hosted a Pride event on June 26, 2024, hours after Biden’s proclamation announcing pardons for many LGBTQ+ veterans.Abe McNatt DIFFERENT TREATMENT FOR COVID VACCINE REFUSERS  Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order granting reinstatement eligibility, plus back pay, for more than 8,700 service members discharged solely for refusing a Covid vaccine. In contrast with the LGBTQ+ veterans, the Department of Defense stipulated that all eligible former service members discharged over Covid vaccines should be contacted by mail, email (if possible), and phone and invited to apply for reinstatement. And in May, the president pardoned a former Army officer who was court-martialed for refusing to obey Covid safety rules.   A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from The War Horse.  Perkowski can’t help but feel there is some bigotry at play. “There has been such a swift restorative justice action from the government to purportedly fix the mistakes the Defense Department made with Covid-related discharges,” he said. “Even though ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed 15 years ago, that has never happened for this community.”  And pardons don’t automatically change a veteran’s discharge status, said Christie Bhageloe, director of the Statewide Veterans Project at Florida Legal Services. Even if a veteran gets pardoned, they still have to apply for a discharge upgrade to be eligible for VA and other benefits. The pardon—and a recent class-action lawsuit win—may help, but it isn’t a guarantee. And unlike with the Covid executive order, there are no retroactive benefits.  “Even if everything goes well and you get a pardon and a full discharge upgrade to honorable, it doesn’t bring back your military career,” Bhageloe said. “It doesn’t fix the fact that you were a volunteer for the military during an all-volunteer force and we essentially discarded them.”  The United Kingdom and Canada faced similar reckonings with the treatment of their gay and lesbian military members. But unlike the United States, both countries have made formal, public apologies and started funds for monetary reparations to pay LGBTQ+ service members who lost benefits after being kicked out of the military.   More than three decades after being court-martialed, Harter said he feels disconnected from other veterans because of his experience. Courtesy James Harter PARDONS AS A POLITICAL TOOL  Over the last year, both Biden and Trump were busy wielding their clemency powers, from Biden granting his son Hunter a pardon to Trump clearing political allies and contributors, including tax evaders and January 6 protesters.  “I think the difference is my pardon was done for a crime that no longer exists,” Harter said. “For crimes that still exist, there should be some other extenuating circumstance that justifies a pardon. Not just a political favor.” Eligible veterans are still able to apply for the Article 125 pardon on the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website. A Department of Justice spokesperson failed to provide The War Horse with an update on the pardon numbers since the office responded May 1 to our original request. Advocates say Trump’s decision to ban transgender troops from the military may make more LGBTQ+ veterans hesitant to apply for a pardon.   “Over time, more people might apply,” Montalto said, “but I would imagine some people who might have considered applying no longer wish to do so.” For others, it doesn’t matter who the president is, said Perkowski—the loss of trust is irreparable. “They do not trust the government, regardless of who is in charge, to do the right thing for them,” he said. Even after Harter left the military, his conviction followed him. He had to explain it during every employment background check, and he believes the experience escalated his downward spiral into drug and alcohol addiction. Plus, he lost access to all VA health care benefits and education benefits that he was getting through his service and had to finish working his way through college on his own. He feels disconnected from other veterans, despite having served for eight years in the late 1980s—two as a tank crewman and six as a field artillery repair specialist—and earning an Army Commendation Medal.  Although he’s now been sober for 35 years and recently retired from his job as a travel nurse, “these charges have haunted me,” he said.  His journey to clear his name is still not complete.  Even though Harter now has his pardon, he still had to separately apply to get his bad conduct discharge changed to an honorable discharge.  He was told the process could take up to 18 months. Five months after he sent his application, he’s still waiting. The pardon may help his cause, advocates said, but there is no guarantee that his discharge will be upgraded. Nearly four decades later, it’s one last hurdle. Getting his discharge record restored, he said, would “help me return to that sense of pride.” This War Horse investigation was reported by Leah Rosenbaum, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHERE TO FIND HELP FILING FOR A PARDON OR DISCHARGE UPGRADE Veterans who believe they might qualify to receive a pardon for Article 125 offenses can request a pardon on the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website at this link: justice.gov/pardon/apply-clemency.  If you’re not sure if you qualify, these legal clinics offer free help for LGBTQ+ veterans seeking pardons, discharge upgrades, and other services: * National Veterans Legal Services Program (National) * The Veterans Consortium (National) * Florida Veterans Justice Project (Florida only) * Swords to Plowshares (Northern California only) * Harvard Veterans Law Unit (Greater Boston area prioritized) * Yale Veterans Legal Services Clinic (Connecticut only) Or go to statesidelegal.org/stateside-map, enter your state, and click “Law School Programs” under “Organization Type” to find a free program near you.  Even veterans with a bad conduct or dishonorable discharge rating may still be eligible for VA benefits by filling out a Character of Discharge Determination form. Learn more here. 

In late March, the US Department of Education put state education officials on notice: No longer would the federal government tolerate what the agency described in a Dear Colleague Letter as the widespread infringement on parents’ rights to direct the schooling of their kids. “By natural right and moral authority, parents are the primary protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in a cover letter attached to the guidance. “Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that presume children need protection from their parents.” Like many of the executive orders and other directives coming out of the Trump administration since January, the guidance focused largely on trans and queer students—in this case, their right to privacy (or lack thereof). But McMahon’s sweeping rhetoric framed the issue as something much bigger. “Attempts by school officials to separate children from their parents, convince children to feel unsafe at home, or burden children with the weight of keeping secrets from their loved ones is a direct affront to the family unit,” she wrote. The US Supreme Court has long held that the parental right to direct the upbringing of one’s children is fundamental. But McMahon’s letter highlights how the Trump administration is weaponizing that idea to a degree that scholars and advocates say is unprecedented at the national level. The ideology of parental rights has emerged as a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda, repeatedly invoked by him and others to justify the rollback of a wide range of policies—involving civil rights, education, public health, and reproductive health—that conservatives have vociferously opposed.  Some of the biggest supporters of the Trump administration’s actions are Christian nationalists intent on imposing a near-limitless idea of parental rights on American society, legal scholars and children’s rights advocates say. In the view of religious ultraconservatives, any government infringement on the right of parents to control every aspect of their children’s upbringing violates both the laws of the land and the laws of God.  > “Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the > political and cultural momentum, and they’re pushing to make this happen right > now.” “Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the political and cultural momentum behind them, and they’re pushing to make this happen right now,” says Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma and a leading scholar of the religious right. “They feel like, OK, this is our chance, and we are not going to apologize about pushing our agenda.” The parental rights agenda has found eager supporters on Capitol Hill, in state legislatures, and with state and federal courts. Here are some examples: * In January, Republicans in both houses of Congress introduced the “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act,” which would empower parents to use parental rights as a defense for any behavior that falls short of “serious physical injury” to or death of their child. * At least 22 states have enshrined “parental bills of rights” into their laws, reports the ultra-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which was responsible for Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the Trump 2.0 era. One of those states, Texas, just passed another bill that prohibits the government from infringing on “the fundamental rights granted to parents by their Creator.” Among other things, it bans DEI hiring programs in K-12 schools and school-authorized LGBTQ clubs. * Lawmakers and courts have been using parental rights to roll back reproductive protections for minors. In May, a Florida appeals court ruled that the state’s “judicial bypass” law allowing teenagers to seek a judge’s sign-off for an abortion violated the rights of parents. Last year, the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially sided with a Texas father who sued to block Title X clinics in the state from offering birth control to minors without parental consent.  * Even child labor protections have been getting the “parental rights” treatment, with more than a dozen states weakening labor laws for children since 2021. An expansive idea of parental rights is also before the US Supreme Court this term. The case of Mahmoud v. Taylor was brought by a group of religious parents who opposed the required reading of LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks in public schools. A decision is expected by the end of June.  Legal scholars note that increasingly, conservatives are deploying “parental rights” as a way to advance regressive and unpopular social policies. Their strategy has been successful because “almost everybody can agree on the importance of parental rights,” says Naomi Cahn, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “It’s a good Trojan horse.” But for Christian nationalists, “parental rights” is much more than a buzz phrase—it is part of a deeply held belief system, rooted in religion and patriarchy. They’re not egalitarians, Perry says. “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes parents [having authority] over their children.” He points out that allowing “for the possibility that a child could kick against that [authority] to carve out their own space…is out of the question.” > “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes > parents [having authority] over their children.” Whatever adherents are motivated by—a sincerely held belief in the rights of parents, or something more cynical—the expansion of parental rights comes at a cost to the very children that conservatives vow to “protect,” child advocates warn. “They may want to cloak this in the words ‘parents’ rights,’ but it’s about authoritarianism,” says Rebecca Gudeman, who leads health policy initiatives at the National Center for Youth Law. “It’s not about one parent’s ability to create a safe space for their child, it’s about controlling society.” Parental rights are far from being a new rallying cry. They have been invoked to support or oppose a slew of policies for over a century—titans of industry in the 1920s, for example, warned that restricting child labor would threaten the “fundamental institution” of the family. Around the same time, the Supreme Court issued two seminal opinions establishing parental rights in education: Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which respectively struck down an English-only instruction law and a compulsory public education law. But the modern parental rights movement was born when the Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Fearmongering by white parents about the federal government’s infringement on their right to direct their children’s schooling led to the widespread establishment of segregation academies: whites-only private schools, some receiving government funding, many of them religiously based. “You had largely evangelical Christian conservative populations in the American South say, ‘This was about family values, this is about traditional families. It’s not about racism. It’s just about us wanting to control our own families and their education,’” Perry says. “But of course, it looks a lot like segregation, and it looks a lot like just retreating from mainstream culture and values.”   Over the years, many of the hardest-fought parental-rights battles have been waged over education and reproductive health. In the 1980s and ’90s, its rhetoric was used to challenge sex education in public schools and school curriculums more broadly and to push for the right of parents to withdraw their children from school and teach them at home. Parental rights arguments also led to the passage of dozens of state laws requiring parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973.  > In the past, parental rights laws were aimed at “giving parents an individual > decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something, or to make an > individualized decision for their child.” Now, many of these laws “create > mandates coming top down from the state.” Importantly, most parental-rights laws of this era were aimed at “giving parents an individual decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something or to make an individualized decision for their child,” says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But since 2020, that’s changed: Now many of these laws “create mandates coming top down from the state, imposing [ideas or actions] on all parents in the name of parents’ rights.” The pandemic was a turning point for the parental rights movement. With school closures in early 2020, parents became much more involved in their children’s education—and many were clamoring for school re-openings or appalled by what they saw. Add to this, the “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and conservatives became mobilized in opposing curriculum changes around the teaching of American history. “Covid-19 opened parents’ eyes to the pervasive indoctrination taking place in many classrooms,” McMahon wrote in her March letter to educators. “Families across the country saw gender ideology and critical race theory taught on-screen at their own kitchen tables.”  Beginning in earnest in 2021, issues like vaccine requirements and mask mandates were weaponized in the name of parental rights by fledgling rightwing groups like Moms for Liberty as well as conservative behemoths such as the Alliance Defending Freedom. But the parental rights movement’s biggest obsession was diversity and school curricula focused on America’s racial, and racist, history. The CRT Forward Tracking Project at the UCLA law school found that local, state, and federal government bodies introduced nearly 900 policy proposals targeting critical race theory and diversity initiatives from September 2020 through the end of 2024. “Parents’ rights cannot help but be racialized,” UCLA law professor LaToya Baldwin Clark wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 2023, calling the parental rights movement and the anti-CRT movement “twins.” “The movements work in tandem because they are born from the same parent: White supremacy.” The next wave of bills focused on queer and trans kids. Queer acceptance—particularly the notion that children can be trans—was a direct threat not only to the order of men and women in society but to the authority of parents over children, Perry says. Hundreds of anti-trans bills, pushed by religious right groups, flooded state legislatures in the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency. When Florida passed its then-groundbreaking Parental Rights in Education bill in 2022—banning, among other things, teaching about gender and sexuality from kindergarten through third grade—then-Republican House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the year “the session of Florida parents.” Meanwhile, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a new flurry of actions targeting minors seeking abortion and other forms of reproductive care—notably, “abortion trafficking bans” in Idaho and Tennessee that make it a crime to help teenagers cross state lines to get an abortion. Cases like these prompted Ziegler and her colleagues to take a broader look at how parental rights are being used by conservatives: not to protect individual parents’ rights but to bring about a sweeping policy realignment that rolls back progressive policies. They call this strategy “retrenchment by diversion.”  “The idea is that you have to invoke some other goal—[in this case,] parental rights—to advance your agenda when you know that voters would be much more likely to reject it if you named what it was you were prioritizing,” Ziegler says. “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”  > “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are > movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental > rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”  Conservatives stop short of promoting parental rights when to do so would conflict with their other beliefs—like banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, regardless of whether parents support such care for their own children. Maxine Eichner, a family law scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees this as evidence that the real goal of many parental rights bills is to turn back the clock on broad policies that conservatives abhor. “Recent uses of parental consent statutes seem like a subtle, or not so subtle, attempt by legislatures just to force minors to forgo some activity that the legislature simply doesn’t like,” Eichner says. Perry has seen what he describes as “a form of local resistance among red states to push parental rights” transformed, after Trump’s election, to become “mainstreamed at the national level.” It doesn’t matter to the religious right that Trump isn’t exactly a model Christian, Perry adds. The president is “Christian enough” since he represents a political vision that Christian nationalists want: A strong patriarch willing to break things in pursuit of what they see as righteous goals. “Whether they think Donald Trump should teach their Sunday school, I think they wouldn’t have that,” Perry says. But “he fights for their team. He is powerful. He doesn’t apologize, he’s not democratic, he’s not egalitarian. He’s an authority, and he issues executive orders, which they love. … So they do see him as a Christian leader in as much as he is leading our country back to ultimate authority: authority of the Bible, patriarchal authority, authority of God.”  This aggressive push for a no-guardrails version of parental rights has made children’s rights advocates deeply alarmed, because, put simply, parents don’t always act in the best interest of their children. Certainly, many well-meaning parents make decisions with good intentions that nonetheless end up having long-term negative consequences for their children. But as it expands its power, the parental rights movement is resisting efforts to impose minimal constraints in order to protect children from harm.  For example, this year’s battle over homeschooling regulation in Illinois. The state has among the loosest regulations on homeschooling in the United States, with no record-keeping mandates or requirements that a parent or other teacher has a high school diploma or a GED. When the legislature tried to pass a law addressing the lack of regulations—prompted by an investigation by ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois, which found that fatal child abuse went unaddressed due to the state’s homeschooling laws—homeschool advocates, supported by the Home School Legal Defense Association, launched a nationally-reaching opposition campaign. The bill’s sponsor, Democrat Rep. Terra Costa Howard, told multiple news outlets that she received a death threat in the mail. “God said ‘Do Not Kill,’ but also said ‘Smite thine enemy.’ We’re watching,” the anonymous letter read. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by HSLDA (@hslda) The anti-regulation campaign was effective: Despite passing out of committee, the bill never received a floor vote in the Democrat-controlled House and died when the legislative session ended on May 31. That disappointed a homeschool reform advocate I’ll call Elizabeth, who calls the legislation’s attempts at oversight “bare minimum.” Elizabeth was homeschooled in Illinois from third through eighth grade and says her later education and transition to the workforce suffered from a lack of structure, oversight, and accountability. “The sheer spectrum of what can go wrong is so wide,” she says, “from something this simple like, I just was not educated, to situations of deep and horrific abuse that can happen when there’s [no regulation] in place.” The parental rights movement thinks about issues in terms of what parents want, rather than what children need, says Anna, another woman whose childhood experiences being homeschooled in Illinois have made her an advocate for more regulation. “My parents are the consumers of homeschooling, they’re the consumers of the curriculum,” Anna says. “But once I turn 18, they are done.” And then it’s left to the now-adult homeschooled children to pick up the pieces.  > “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the > world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are > chattel.” Homeschooling is far from the only issue that worries children’s rights advocates contemplating the Trump 2.0 era. In opposing the proposed “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act” introduced by Republicans in Congress, the bipartisan advocacy organization First Focus Campaign for Children underscores the threats to children’s well-being. Child abuse that falls short of “serious injury or death” would be harder to prosecute, particularly with the built-in parental rights defense afforded by the bill. State-level vaccine mandates for education could be nullified (alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push for greater vaccine scrutiny at the federal level). Requirements that parents “make and consent to” all healthcare for children would prevent adolescents from accessing STI treatment, mental health care, and reproductive health services, while likely denying them the right to refuse medical treatment that has proven to be harmful, including anti-queer “conversion” therapy.  “Parents are the guardians and not the owners of children,” First Focus Campaign for Children President Bruce Lesley wrote in a February letter to lawmakers. “Policymakers should reject philosophies that treat children as the property of parents or that assume children lack independent reason, agency, or understanding of their own ‘best interests.’” It’s a battle that’s as old as this country. For much of our history, white women were considered the property of their husbands and children the property of their fathers (marriages between enslaved people weren’t legally recognized, and neither were their parental rights). The family patriarch could force his children to work, enlist his sons in the military, marry off his daughters, and otherwise harm his children under the guise of corrective punishment. “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are chattel,” says Kristen Weber, the National Center for Youth Law’s senior director of child welfare. The rise of the parental rights movement makes one thing clear, she adds: “We haven’t really fully gotten there.”

In early May, the small city of Banning, California, hosted the Palm Springs Hot Rodeo. The competition, which has occurred most years for the past 50, salutes the homoeroticism of rodeo culture. The four-day event—an official stop on the International Gay Rodeo Association circuit—features traditional rodeo events like steer wrestling and calf roping, along with more whimsical activities like a wild drag race, in which a person in drag rides a steer while their teammates guide it, and goat dressing, in which a pair attempts to put tighty-whities on a goat as quickly as possible. All events are open to any gender—men can barrel race and women can bull ride. “A lot of gay people can’t be incorporated into the other rodeo world,” contestant Savannah Smith told me. “You can do whatever you want here,” she added, “and everyone here is supportive.”  This year, the festive event took place against increasing attacks on queer rights. Two days after the rodeo ended, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration’s ban on transgender soldiers in the US military. It is unclear what will be targeted next; some fear the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision legalizing gay marriage. Against this backdrop, the Hot Rodeo serves as an important reminder of the resilience of queer culture in America, with its inclusive celebration of LGBTQ athleticism and joy.  Curt Black and Bob Bayne set up contestant registration at the Tool Shed, a gay bar in Palm Springs, 30 minutes away from Banning, where the Hot Rodeo takes place. Alexander Saites partners with Matthew Garcia during the rodeo’s dance contest. Curt Black shows off his Palm Springs Hot Rodeo Outstanding Volunteer buckle. Zac Rogen, a Hot Rodeo participant, says gay rodeos help keep queer representation in Western culture. Brian Helander warms up his horse before competing in the Hot Rodeo. Bob Bayne and Daniel Guevara participate in the rodeo’s “riderless horse” tradition. The riderless horse symbolizes those involved with the International Gay Rodeo Association who have since died, particularly those who died from complications with AIDS. Rodeo director Sylvia Mower takes off her hat during the riderless horse procession. David Lawson and Greg Begay compete in the steer decorating event. The goal is for a team of two to tie a ribbon on a steer’s tail as quickly as possible. Begay, who has been involved with gay rodeos for years, says, “It’s always been my goal in life to rodeo, and it just so happens that I’m gay.” Brian Contratto and Gunner Sizemore compete in the goat dressing event. The goal is to catch a goat and place a pair of underwear on it as quickly as possible. Brian Contratto shows off a tooth that broke in half during his steer riding event. Katie Shaw and Pepe Lozada compete in the team roping event. Love Bailey, the rodeo’s community grand marshal, performs during the grand entry. Chris Otten holds his cowbell, painted with a pride flag, after competing in the bull riding event. Rodeo contestants Steven Housley and Scott Reed pose for a portrait. The Palm Springs Hot Rodeo is the first gay rodeo Reed has participated in. “It’s the most welcoming group I’ve ever been around,” he says, adding, “Everyone here is equal.” Two men dance together at the Dancing Under the Stars party hosted by the Palm Springs Hot Rodeo at Oscar’s, a bar in downtown Palm Springs.