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feminism
Trump Is Making the Women Disappear
This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge.
May 13, 2026
It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington—or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both—no surprise—were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, President Donald Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.
Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”
Equal Opportunity Failure
Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as The Guardian reported, “the US would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The US operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm.
Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a US missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.
Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.
So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)
Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order—namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.
And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).
Female Purges
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now—no surprise—been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.
Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the deputy attorney general and the deputy secretary of defense were both women.
Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of 8 women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions—admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)
Project 2025
It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.
Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”
The fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.
MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and “Velshi” Segment Producer Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “The freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”
Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.
A Future Government Without Women?
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.
When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the US Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”
Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.
The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.
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The Fertility Panic Is a Racist, Sexist Tool to Push More Austerity
Reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms, and economic inequality masks the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.
May 05, 2026
If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.
“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced The Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR‘s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”
It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.
Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”
It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.
The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as The Atlantic piece put it—”higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”
But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals, and economic inequality driving the narrative.
Hidden Xenophobia
The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.
In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.
But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023-24 than it did in 2003-04.
Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:
A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.
It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost, and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.
On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:
We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.
They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.
When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”
‘To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism’
And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”
A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family, and children while also valuing independence, career, and financial stability”:
“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.
That’s a very sad development.
Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”
Joecks further opined:
Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.
‘National Motherhood Medal’
Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.
The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.
The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.
It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.
While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”
‘Collapse of our civilization’
The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s
warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.
By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.
Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”
That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.
It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.
Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.
‘The Problem Is Teens’
Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that
30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.
It is indeed whiplash-inducing to hear today’s right-wing mouthpieces, like Fox News‘ senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26; Media Matters, 4/10/26), saying:
The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.
In any case, despite its better gender framing, the Times still pushed the “not enough workers” economic narrative—and downplayed the administration’s xenophobia with euphemism:
If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.
Vanishing Productivity
The economic doomsday argument being spread applies both in the US and globally. Declining fertility isn’t just happening in the US—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the US’ “demographic cliff” is much less dramatic than in many countries. China, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and that nation’s population is already beginning to shrink.
While some might think this slowdown (and even potential reversal, many decades from now) in global human population growth could be a positive development, there are plenty of media outlets looking to fearmonger about it. “The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly,” declared Forbes‘ Alexander Puutio (6/9/25).
The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff (6/30/25) presaged that within a few decades “rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging.” After arguing that United Nations population growth projections are overly optimistic, he addressed those who remain skeptical of doomsday warnings:
If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18% of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4% of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.
Who cares what percentage of world GDP a country produces? If you’re a resident of Japan, what you care about is your quality of life. As Novicoff acknowledges, Japan’s productivity hasn’t weakened. And if you look at the human development index, which measures gross national income per capita, years of schooling, and life expectancy, Japan continues to improve over time. So it’s entirely unclear on what basis he makes his claim that Japan doesn’t “have enough workers.”
But it is clear what readers are being primed for: Governments and companies cutting retirement benefits. As The Atlantic piece concludes:
If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.
Productivity Swamps Demographics
That neoliberal push for austerity is the third ideological agenda that lurks behind many of these population crisis stories. Even those news outlets that acknowledged the role of immigration in a country’s economy often took it as further evidence that the economic outlook is bleak. NPR (4/9/26), for instance, told its audience that
many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force, especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.
What such economic warnings hide is that, just as population size isn’t solely dependent on the native fertility rate, economic growth isn’t solely dependent on the working-age population.
It’s true that increasing life expectancies mean that the ratio of the US working-age population to the retired population is slowly decreasing, even with a growing population. That can put pressure on things like Social Security, which operates like a social insurance program in which taxes from current workers go into a fund for current retirees. A shrinking, aging population does require some policy adjustments. But it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/11/19) explains:
Even pulling out the impact of immigrants, the reality is that we have been seeing a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees pretty much forever. Life expectancies have been rising as people have better living standards and better healthcare. (Recent years have been an exception, where life expectancies have stagnated.) In 1950 there were 7.2 people between the ages of 20 and 65 for every person over the age of 65. This ratio now stands at just 3.6 to 1.
Over this 70-year period, we have seen huge increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. The key has been the growth in productivity, which allows workers to produce much more in each hour of work. (We also have a much higher rate of employment among workers between the ages of 20 and 65, as tens of millions of women have entered the labor force.) The impact of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics.
Not enough babies? Too many billionaires
The US has experienced an average of over 2% annual productivity growth in the nonfarm business sector since World War II, and there’s no reason to expect that to end. The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.
Look at Social Security, which is frequently pointed to as being in peril because of the aging population and decreasing birth rate. An op-ed in USA Today (8/21/25), advocating for “killing” Social Security, claimed that, “due to a collapse of the American birth rate, the program is expected to be unable to pay the full promised benefits to retirees within the decade.”
There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have.
An CNBC article (5/30/25) told readers that “fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare, which rely on a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio.” (That idea was supported with a quote from the director of the “Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies”—a right-wing think tank that recently launched a “Pronatalism Initiative.”)
But none other than the Chief Actuary at the Social Security Administration, Karen Glenn, testified to Congress (3/25/26) that birth rate has nothing to do with impending shortfalls in the program. Instead, one of the biggest factors imperiling Social Security is the problem of greater-than-expected income inequality.
Since 1980, when income inequality began to increase sharply, the amount of wage income that exceeds the cap for Social Security tax has doubled. The vast majority of us—those who make up to $184,500 a year—pay Social Security tax on all of our income; those who make more pay nothing above that cap. Simply removing the cap would eliminate three-quarters of the Social Security fund’s long-term projected shortfall.
Economic Value Judgments
And, of course, there are all the other ways the rich avoid paying their fair share in our economy, whether it’s through low capital gains rates, or simply through the fancy accounting that lets the super rich—including those who own the news outlets reporting on such things—pay next to nothing in federal taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, owner of The Washington Post, paid an effective income tax rate of under 1% on the over $4 billion he amassed from 2014-18 (ProPublica, 6/8/21).
So when The New York Times (3/26/26) tells you in its reporting on US population change that “the country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and healthcare for older residents,” understand that they’re making a value judgement about taxation. The more objective statement would be that the country needs an economic output large enough to finance these things, which is certainly true.
There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have. Many Americans have fewer children than they want because of financial limitations—like lack of affordable childcare or housing—or concerns about the state of the world or the environment. News outlets can and should be addressing these issues.
But reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms, and economic inequality masks the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.
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Why a Feminist and Just Energy Transition Is the Only Way Out of the Climate Crisis
As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it.
Apr 21, 2026
Wars, invasions, blockades, and genocide from Venezuela and Iran to Palestine have ripped the curtain off the inherent volatility and violence of the fossil energy system. We need a rapid and just scale-up of socially controlled renewables to end the era of fossil fuels. But ensuring a just transition requires deeper conversation. Who benefits from the energy transition? Who bears the cost? Who gets a say in how energy is produced? These are also feminist questions about power, labor, care, and whose lives are valued.
To answer them, grassroots leaders, Indigenous communities, trade unions, and environmental justice activists will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia for the Peoples’ Summit and First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this week. For many of us in environmental and social justice movements, this gathering represents both urgency and possibility. This will be a critical space because, without justice, the energy transition will reproduce the same systems of extraction, control, and violence.
So We Must Ask: an Energy Transition for Whom?
The transition narrative sold by corporations and rich countries today tells us we can scale up corporate, market-led renewable energy technologies without questioning who controls them, who benefits, and who bears the cost. This risks the transition becoming nothing more than the old model in greener packaging. In Malaysia, for example, the energy transition policy largely rebrands the old growth-and-extraction model. It uses green rhetoric, prioritizing corporate-led false solutions like carbon capture and storage and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Copying Western-style developments through corporate-driven trade and investment patterns sustains fossil fuel dependence and continues to entrench structural inequalities both nationally and internationally. Without systemic change, the transition becomes another chapter in a long history of resource plunder, particularly in the Global South.
Consider the surge in demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. These are essential components of batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. Governments and corporations in the Global North are racing to secure these materials, often greenwashing extraction as necessary for climate action, while diverting these minerals into military, aerospace, AI, and data centers. For communities across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this rush is already translating into land grabs, water depletion, labor exploitation, and violence. Lithium extraction threatens fragile ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods; cobalt mining has been linked to dangerous working conditions and child labor. As with oil before them, critical minerals are becoming objects of geopolitical competition—backed by military power and strategic control.
If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.
The military is among the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels, yet its emissions are routinely excluded from national reporting. At the same time, states and corporations work together to secure control over oil, gas, and critical minerals—profiting from war and devastation from Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba.
These are the very predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes profit over energy as a right for people. A just transition must go far beyond emissions reductions. It must actively confront inequality, redistribute power, and wealth, and repair historical and ongoing harms. It must center those who have been marginalized and exploited—not as victims but as leaders.
A Just Transition Must Be Based on Peoples’ Sovereignty and Energy Sovereignty
At the heart of this vision are peoples’ sovereignty and energy sovereignty: the right of communities to control their lands, resources, and energy systems, and to shape the decisions that affect their lives. This means treating energy as a common good that is managed for collective well-being rather than private profit, while building energy democracy, where communities have real decision-making power over how energy is produced and used. It also requires energy sufficiency, prioritizing meeting people’s needs over excessive and wasteful energy use. Together, these principles challenge the concentration of power in corporations and wealthy countries, and point toward energy systems that are locally rooted, democratic, and aligned with social and ecological needs.
Achieving this also requires that we confront imperialism. The current global order allows wealthy countries to externalize the social and environmental costs of their consumption to the Global South, while maintaining control over finance, technology, and trade. This imbalance shapes the terms of the energy transition, devastating communities and often locking countries in the Global South into roles as raw material suppliers rather than equal partners.
Policies that ignore power dynamics may deliver short-term emissions reductions, but they will ultimately fail as communities resist exploitation and inequity deepens. A transition rooted in justice, however, can build the broad-based support needed for transformative change.
Around the world, communities are already practicing energy sovereignty, from managing decentralized renewable systems in Palestine to asserting their rights against extractive projects in Mozambique. Alternatives are not only possible, but underway.
A feminist and just energy transition must challenge the structures that perpetuate dependency and inequality, including unfair trade agreements, debt regimes, and corporate impunity. It must also recognize and address the intersecting forms of oppression based on gender, race, class, and colonial history that shape how the climate crisis is experienced and resisted.
As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it. If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.
The path forward will require confronting entrenched interests and reimagining our economies and societies. From Santa Marta and beyond, communities are showing us the way. The task now is to listen, to act, and to ensure that the transition ahead is truly just—for people, for the planet, and for future generations.
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Raising Misbehavin' Girls
I’m sending my daughter into the world armed with a legacy of misbehaving. I hope she meets your girls on the way. Because the more misbehaving girls we raise, the closer we get to a world where women get what we deserve.
Mar 31, 2026
Fifty years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich popularized the phrase, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” It became a feminist call to action. Even women who didn’t claim feminism invoked it before challenging a rule, a system, or a societal norm—a permission slip to be loud, difficult, and disruptive.
But lately, I wonder if something has shifted—if girls are not just discouraged from making history, but conditioned against it. What happens to the women and girls who still live the phrase?
Look around.
Jasmine Crockett faces backlash for refusing to shrink herself. Female athletes at Howard University were criticized for protesting. Joy Ann Reid, once a prominent voice on MSNBC, was pushed out of the very spaces that benefited from her boldness. Leqaa Kordia became a flash point, punished for her pro-Palestine speech at Columbia. Renee Nicole Good murdered for talking back to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The women in my life taught me that there are repercussions to being “misbehaving”—but that the courage to continue is worth it.
Different circumstances. Different stakes. But a similar message: Misbehave, and there will be consequences.
I come from a lineage of women who refused to be well-behaved.
Long before it was popular to challenge Confederate symbols, my grandmother protested John McDonogh Day in New Orleans public schools. While others celebrated a man tied to oppression, my granny and her friends resisted—even when it meant detention. She modeled that courage for my mother.
As a school board member, my mother openly challenged the charter takeover after Hurricane Katrina. It cost her reelection. Well-funded lobbying groups backed her opponents, and she lost. But she did not bend.
Later, in my own career, I spoke out against unfair disciplinary policies—three-strikes rules and bans on hooded sweatshirts that disproportionately targeted Black students. I did so publicly. I was not promoted. Instead, my mental and emotional health were questioned.
The women in my life taught me that there are repercussions to being “misbehaving”—but that the courage to continue is worth it.
That is why the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) collective bargaining fight meant so much to me. The players weren’t asking for excess—just the standard their male counterparts had long received. Even so, they were met with resistance; fans and commentators questioned their gratitude.
For months, the women of the league misbehaved. They rejected lowball offers. They challenged the status quo. They held the line—and even threatened to strike—because they refused to be mistreated.
And it worked. A historic agreement will bring higher salaries, revenue recognition, and support for injured and pregnant players.
Central to that fight were WNBA Players Association leaders Nneka Ogwumike and Napheesa Collier—women who understood that progress requires pressure. Ogwumike has credited her family for instilling discipline and purpose. Collier’s parents modeled misbehavior early, creating opportunities when she was shut out. Years later, she took it further—co-founding Unrivaled, a rival league that pressured the WNBA.
Those foundations don’t just produce great athletes; they produce fighters. And when misbehaving women connect, things change.
During those negotiations, I found myself explaining courage to my 3-year-old daughter. She is too young to understand contracts or labor rights—but not that her voice matters. And I will continue to nurture that—even when it’s inconvenient. When she says, “Mom, stop, you’re hurting me” while I’m combing her hair. When she insists, “I can do it myself,” even if it means wasted strawberries and a mess I’ll have to clean up. Because the alternative is a girl who does not believe in her own agency, her own power.
In my work with girls, I’ve learned that many of us are not raised this way. Caregivers—often out of love, fear, or inherited trauma—teach girls that silence and compliance will lead to an easier life. And that belief is understandable. Who doesn’t want ease and safety for their children?
But as Viola Davis shared in a recent conversation with Amy Poehler, being a “good girl” didn’t protect her. It taught her to shrink, to tolerate hurt. That’s the lie we don’t talk about enough: that if girls (and women) are agreeable enough, soft enough, accommodating enough—they will be safe.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that progress has never come from compliance. It has always come from those willing to disrupt, to demand, and to refuse. To misbehave.
So, to the adults raising and influencing young girls, here’s what I’ve learned as an educator, advocate, and mother:
- Let them say no (within reason). They don’t have to hug anyone. They don’t have to stay friends with people who mistreat them.
- Give specific compliments. Replace “good girl” with “That was brave,” “That was thoughtful,” “You worked hard on that.”
- Respect their opinions. Let them explain why they’re upset, what they prefer, what they think.
- Let them experiment—with their style and their interests. It helps them find their voice.
- And model it. Praise yourself. Name the women—past and present—who you admire for their refusal to conform.
This isn’t just for parents. Anyone who has girls in their lives has the power to shape their beliefs.
I’m sending my daughter into the world armed with a legacy of misbehaving. I hope she meets your girls on the way. Because the more misbehaving girls we raise, the closer we get to a world where women get what we deserve.
Well-behaved women rarely make history. And they damn sure don’t get things done.
I’m raising the next generation of misbehaving girls. Who’s with me? Whose #RaisinMisbehavinGirls
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Eulogy for My Friend and Freedom Fighter, Yanar Mohammed
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently. She was one of them.
Mar 29, 2026
The first time someone threatened to kill Yanar was in 2003.
That was the year she returned to Baghdad, after having fled with her infant son during the first US war seven years earlier.
With Iraq now under US occupation, Yanar noticed something that the media did not: The US had unleashed and empowered Iraq’s most reactionary political forces, and like fundamentalists everywhere, their first priority was to subjugate Iraqi women and girls.
Yanar wasn’t having it.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed.
She saw what was happening and launched the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) to fight against the dismantlement of women’s rights and the terrible rise in violence against women. The organization’s first office was a bombed-out bank in central Baghdad.
From that moment, Yanar became a lightning rod for anti-feminist attacks, and very soon after, the threats began.
In 2004, I published an open letter to the chief of the US administration in Baghdad, reminding him that the United States was legally obligated to protect Yanar’s life and the lives of all Iraqi civilians under occupation. I didn’t know Yanar yet, but she wrote to thank me, and we arranged to meet in New York.
We sat on a lumpy couch in MADRE’s old office and talked about building a network of safe houses, where women fleeing violence could find safety and solidarity. Then we went to Macy’s, and Yanar tried on every single lipstick at the makeup counter.
Over the next 22 years, Yanar became one of MADRE’s closest partners, and to me, she became family.
MADRE accompanied Yanar as she brought her visions for revolutionary feminism to life again and again, founding a network of shelters for women and keeping them operational through attacks by clans, militias, and the State.
She launched a feminist newspaper and radio station and staffed them with women who rebuilt their shattered lives through the care, feminist education, and job training that OWFI provided.
She created safe spaces for young people to come together across sectarian lines to defy the logic of the US-caused civil war and create art, music, and poetry.
She co-founded the first organization of Afro-Iraqis, understanding that there is no feminism without racial justice.
She built an underground railroad to free women who were enslaved by ISIS.
She fought like hell to defend women’s legal rights, understanding that the more we lost, the more critical every victory became.
She led protests, campaigns, and coalitions that brought down a corrupt government and forced its successor to answer to demands for accountability from Iraq’s most marginalized people.
Yet, as extraordinary as Yanar’s legacy is, she was so much more than the sum of her accomplishments.
Yanar loved jazz, sushi, and beer. She also worried about her son and spent years hoping to find love. She loved her husband, who made her so happy these last few years.
Yanar was also despondent at times. More focused on all that was left to do than on what she had achieved. Her moments of exhaustion and frustration always reminded me that we don’t have to be infallible heroes in this work; we just have to keep doing our part and take care of each other along the way.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed. The Iranian-backed militias that had threatened Yanar for years have been galvanized like never before by this war.
In January, when Yanar and I spoke about the killing of Renee Goode in Minneapolis, we were both struck by the parallels between those militias in Iraq and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States.
“Now you have what the US brought to Iraq,” Yanar said, “A paramilitary force working for the worst reactionaries in government, terrorizing communities and committing extrajudicial executions.”
We talked about the beauty and the power of the organizing to protect immigrants, and the militant joy of people coming together to remake the world: in Minneapolis, in Baghdad, in Gaza, in Darfur, and in Haiti.
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently:
Heating soup and handing out blankets,
Offering sanctuary to those who are under attack,
Spinning the ideas that will move everything forward,
And putting their bodies on the line again and again.
Yanar did all of these things. And she did them with joy in her heart and fire in her belly. I loved her for that.
Two years ago, when I was in Jerusalem, where I lived as a child, Yanar wrote to me about her hopes for the future:
My plan for the coming decade is to have a small house with a big garden in a Baghdad suburb, where I will get a dog, and plant all the flowering trees and vegetables. And I hope the day will come when we can both visit each other in our home cities without any fear.
This is the legacy Yanar leaves us to enact—to fight for each other and spend time together in the flowering gardens we’ve planted.
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Beware Men Who Wage War to Prove They Are Men
The rabid hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the White House can be no surprise.
Mar 21, 2026
Seemingly endless recitations throughout history of what constitutes virtuous citizenship emphasize military life. A specifically masculine heritage of violence in the service of the nation oversees and delimits democracy and authority—a privileged area of social welfare in contrast to health, education, the environment, or poverty.
Much classical and modern political theory assumes and even endorses domestic violence, bellicose masculinity, and the notion that “real” politics is generated, discussed, and concluded between men. The idea that male virtue is tied to violence, whether in defense of faith, family, or the border, is immensely strong.
From individual duels to national campaigns, the “right” way to engage in violence has given rise to ideas of nobility. Masculine worth is supposedly incarnate in bloodshed and authoritarian leadership, embodied in the military as a righteous national embodiment of power, spirit, religiosity, and victory.
Raewyn Connell articulates the history of North Atlantic countries that conquered much of the world with contemporary ethnographic study of gender politics. She finds white male sexuality in Western Europe and North America is isomorphic with power: Men seek global dominance and desire, orchestrated to oppress women through hegemonic masculinity.
US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.
This encompasses overt sexism—rape, domestic violence, and obstacles to female career advancement—and more subtle domination, such as excluding women from social settings and sports teams, or the bourgeois media’s fascination with men. Ironically, women’s rights are often invoked to justify invasions that injure them. For example, the British used traditional limitations on women’s freedom and education to legitimize the colonization of India.
Everywhere you look, from diplomats to bombers to correspondents, war is an implicitly and explicitly masculine activity. This is rarely, if ever, recognized in mainstream media coverage and academic knowledge, or problematized as such.
That said, reactionary commentators, male and female alike, have gone out of their way to valorize the hypermasculinity that has been unleashed, beyond even normal limits, in the United States since 2001, laying claim to chivalry, dominance, and certainty.
Reactionary public commentators churn out press columns and viral videos, seizing the opportunities afforded by war to push a domestic agenda for male power, using international relations to denounce queerness and feminism.
Camille Paglia, Peggy Noonan and Ann Coulter endorse compulsory heterosexuality. Coulter called one deceased soldier “an American original—virtuous, pure, and masculine as only an American man can be” who “died bringing freedom and democracy to 28 million Afghans.” She insisted that “there is no other country in the world—certainly not in continental Europe—that could have produced such a man.”
In 2025, US Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley stated that “we are in an era of true masculinity thanks to the bold and muscular leadership of President Trump and our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.” And Hegseth dutifully promises “maximum lethality, not lukewarm legality” in the assault on Iran.
But behind those loud voices lurks a figure long plagued by doubts, failures, and weaknesses—actually existing masculinity. Hence Niccolo Machiavelli in the 16th century proposing that men dressed in uniform and trained to fight lose any “habits they consider effeminate.”
Such anxiety has been common among imperial powers across history and geography, with numerous institutions dedicated to carrying forward errant masculine impulses or channeling them into military readiness: physical culture, “strenuous living,” social Darwinism, rational recreation, and French neoclassical romanticism among them.
Matthew Arnold famously wrote, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”; but a deep concern for military preparedness led him to warn that “disasters have been prepared on those playing fields as well as victories.” Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient Olympics in 1896 as an international festival of male athletes and diplomats that could cultivate “man’s moral musculature,” redeeming French masculinity after the shocks of the Franco-Prussian conflict a quarter of a century earlier.
By the end of the 19th century, the United States had been at peace for three decades, ever since its bloody Civil War. As most veterans of that conflict passed away, there was public debate about whether American men were still capable of martial masculinity.
Wars in Cuba and the Philippines followed in quick succession. Hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded to expand US imperialism—part of a desperate, felt need to “build masterful male citizens.”
That has its modern corollaries. In 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy alerted Sports Illustrated readers to a “growing softness, our increasing lack of fitness.” Such trends supposedly constituted “a threat to our security” that must be addressed, per Ancient Greece’s Olympian quest to forge and maintain “a vigorous state.” After all, “struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.”
Concerns about masculinity and domination of territory routinely underpin the allocation of government resources. Donald J. Trump’s National Youth Sports Strategy feared that “most young people are not moving enough,” detailing “surveillance systems” to monitor children. His 2025 “Presidential Fitness Test” for school pupils aimed to improve “our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale” and “emphasize the importance” of “military readiness.”
The hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the current White House can come as no surprise. The fact that it is reinforced by a video of Hollywood explosions and outbursts makes this horror simultaneously banal and fatal, as propaganda and movies meet in male bodies: “machismo from film and television, crassly interspersed with real infrared kill-shot footage.”
US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.
It’s what those men do.
Not all men—the ones who need war to ensure that they are, in fact, men. To them, Hegseth and his cadre represent “less a symbol of toxic masculinity than a masculine tonic.”
Shall we join in? Thanks, but no thanks.
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Cilia Flores: A First Lady in a New York Cell
Cilia Flores is one of the most prominent political prisoners in the world, yet most women’s rights organizations have not said a word in her defense.
Mar 04, 2026
On International Working Women’s Day in 2025, Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, read a poem she wrote highlighting the historic role played by Latin American women in the fight against imperialism:
We’re not flowers the wind can pluck,
we’re roots of rebel and loyal land,
we’re grandmothers, mothers, daughters, granddaughters;
we are woman.
Our blood pulses with the Manuelas,
Luisas, Josefas, Juanas, Cecilias,
Apacuanas, Bartolinas, Eulalias,
Martas, Anas Marías, Barbaritas
and so many others who legacy inspires,
commits, and strengthens us
to continue walking and traveling our path.
And in our hands and chests
a light is on that nobody will ever turn off:
love, peace and liberty.
—Cilia Flores, International Working Women’s Day 2025
One year later, she languishes in a cell in New York City, having been dragged out of her room and kidnapped by US forces on the January 3 attack on Venezuela. The first images after her abduction showed her face bruised. We later learned she had broken ribs, 23 stitches in her forehead, and deteriorating health inside US custody.
Flores is no ordinary first lady. She first rose to prominence in 1992 as a defense lawyer for a group of Venezuelan military officers who rose up against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, which had massacred thousands of people in the Caracazo of 1989–nationwide riots following the imposition of neoliberal austerity measures. Key among those officers was Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.
In 1993, Cilia founded the Bolivarian Circle of Human Rights and aligned herself with Chávez’s revolutionary movement. In 2000, having helped Chávez win consecutive presidential elections, she was elected to the legislature. By 2006, she became the president of the National Assembly, the first woman in Venezuela’s history to occupy the post. Flores held important positions in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and became the country’s solicitor general in 2012, a post she left to run Nicolás Maduro’s presidential campaign after President Chávez’s passing.
Cilia married Nicolás, her longtime partner, following the election. Feeling that the title of “first lady” could not capture her importance to the Bolivarian Revolution, her husband dubbed her the primera combatiente, or first combatant.
After working behind the scenes as a key adviser to President Maduro, she ran for election to the National Assembly and won in 2015, 2020, and 2025.
Today, she faces charges of conspiracy to import cocaine, along with possession of machine guns and destructive devices. The charges are absurd.
In the early 1990s, back when Venezuela was a key ally of the United States, over 50% of the world’s cocaine was trafficked through the country. By 2025, as Venezuela was considered an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, that number was down to 5%. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric of Venezuela flooding the US with cocaine, and his constant conflation of cocaine with fentanyl (which is neither trafficked through nor produced in Venezuela), has no basis in reality.
Now that the Trump administration controls Venezuela’s oil trade, the rhetoric on drugs has flipped. Following a visit to Venezuela, the head of US Southern Command touted a new counternarcotics cooperation agreement. Was the abduction of Nicolás and Cilia sufficient to end whatever alleged narcotics operation the Venezuelan government was accused of running? It’s more likely that such operations never existed in the first place. The allegations of drug trafficking served not only to discredit the Venezuelan government and its leaders but also paved the way for the January 3 attack.
Cilia Flores is one of the most prominent political prisoners in the world, yet most women’s rights organizations have not said a word in her defense. She is a sitting member of Venezuela’s National Assembly and played an instrumental role in the movement that greatly expanded democratic, economic, and social rights in the country.
Cilia stands with Palestine. In a November 2023 conference in Turkey, she said: “We are witnessing a genocide… We see the victims in Gaza. We see the death of children, women, the elderly, and civilians. We see civilian victims coming out of their destroyed homes, but unable to leave the city because they are in an open-air prison.”
Cilia brought feminism to the Bolivarian Revolution. On International Working Women’s Day in 2023, she helped launch a social mission aimed at protecting women from the worst of the economic war. At the time, she said: “Venezuelan women have shown they are the vanguard. Women make up more than half the population, but we are also mothers of the other half, so we form a whole. And in this war that Venezuela has endured, we achieved victory and are standing firm thanks to the participation of Venezuelan women, who did not just stay home taking care of children, building their families, but also took to the streets to defend the nation. Our women are patriots... and in the next scenario, whatever it may be, we will be victorious because women will be at the forefront of any battle."
Little did she know that the next scenario would be a prison cell in the United States. Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.
Recalling her beautiful poem above, today our blood pulses with Cilia.
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This New Dawn for Korean Democracy Must Center Feminist Peace
As the rising far-right threatens peace, stability, and democracy around the world, Lee Jae-myung and South Korea’s leadership must prioritize and support women’s leadership and peace building.
Jun 04, 2025
This week marks a new dawn for democracy in South Korea. South Koreans have successfully held a snap election, electing Lee Jae-myung as their new president.
The Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung represents a marked shift from former President Yoon Suk Yeol whose surprise martial law declaration last December beset the country with weeks of “insurrection insomnia.” Yoon’s actions upended politics in South Korea with multiple leaders cycled through office in the span of a few weeks. Yoon also fanned the flames of a far right surge in South Korea and exacerbated tensions with North Korea.
In contrast, Lee Jae-myung has pushed for a new approach to North Korea, calling for pragmatic diplomacy and a gradual shift toward peace. Lee’s election offers an opening not only for peace but also for restoring democracy and advancing women’s rights in the country.
As feminist peace activists working in international solidarity, we know that all Korean people deserve to reunite with their family members and live in lands free from landmines and pollution and violence from military bases.
While we celebrate this new dawn for South Korea’s democracy and successful election of a progressive president, feminists recognize that, for the first time in 18 years, none of South Korea’s presidential candidates in this snap election were women, and none—including Lee—placed gender equality at the forefront of their campaigns. Indeed, Lee largely avoided any explicit discussion of gender equality, despite the leadership of young women in ousting Yoon.
If Lee is really to mark a new start to South Korea’s democracy, he must uplift women’s leadership and peace building. No democracy can thrive under toxic patriarchy and militarism. Policies rooted in militarism often shift resources away from policy areas that are critical to the advancement of women and girls. Attacks on democracy and the expansion of militarism threaten women’s rights, and women are more likely to be exposed to gender-based violence during wartime.
That is why, in the week leading up to the snap election, and on the 10-year anniversary of Women Cross DMZ’s founding crossing, I brought a delegation of feminist delegates to march with hundreds of Korean and international women outside the largest overseas U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea to call for an end to the 75-year-old Korean War.
Our international delegation included diasporic peace leaders, including Afghan American, Indigenous, Korean American, and South Asian feminists—a powerful act of solidarity recognizing that the ongoing Korean War is a global war. (The U.S.-led United Nations command in Korea is a multinational force with combat forces and contributions from over 20 countries worldwide.)
Our solidarity trek was more timely than ever—and showed how war, militarism, democracy, and women’s rights are deeply intertwined.
Many people don’t know that the Korean War never technically ended but was only halted by the signing of an armistice in 1953. This unresolved state of war has not only kept Korean families separated but has resulted in the buildup of troops and weaponry on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea, ready to reengage in conflict at a moment’s notice. Militarism, war, and division of the peninsula have especially impacted women, who have been leading calls for peace.
The state of war has also shaped South Korean politics throughout history, threatening democracy. Politicians—often backed by the United States—have used the Korean War as justification to maintain power and squash dissent, labeling those who call for peace and democracy “communists” and threats to national security. In December, former President Yoon, who rose to power by courting men who are anti-feminist, declared martial law, accusing the Democratic Party of conducting “anti-state activities” and collaborating with “North Korean communists” to destroy the country. Later, it was revealed that Yoon attempted to bait North Korea into conflict as a pretext for his martial law declaration.
Yoon’s actions were exceptionally brazen, but he was also part of a long line of South Korean authoritarian militaristic leaders. Our international delegation bore witness to this legacy, visiting major sites of South Korean and U.S. militarism: the DMZ, the Civilian Control Zone, Pyeongtaek, Dongducheon, Jeju.
In each place, we learned about the deep scars stemming from decades of war and militarism—including the struggles of Daechuri farmers horrifically brutalized and displaced by state authorities during the expansion of U.S. military base Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek. We also met with Gangjeong villagers protesting the South Korean naval base destroying their ways of life, Dongducheon organizers preventing the destruction of “Monkey House,” and sex worker organizers in Yongjugol fighting for their livelihoods and homes.
While each struggle differed, what was striking was how at each place, people described that state authorities spent millions policing them, surveilling them, wiping out histories, and destroying their homes. They remarked that instead, government officials could have just as easily spent those resources and time on providing social services, healthcare, recognition of history—all the things that actually keep us all safe and secure.
As feminist peace activists working in international solidarity, we know that all Korean people deserve to reunite with their family members and live in lands free from landmines and pollution and violence from military bases.
Given the current attacks on democracy in the United States and across the globe, transnational acts of solidarity are more important than ever. The next generation of South Korean feminist activists say that political leaders must recognize and honor the diversity of the population—including across gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, and racial backgrounds. It is time to imagine a “new democracy”—“not going back to the democracy we used to have.”
Women play crucial roles in changing society from one rooted in militarism to one rooted in peace. Research shows that when women are involved in peace processes, outcomes are more likely to be reached and to last. As the rising far-right threatens peace, stability, and democracy around the world, Lee Jae-myung and South Korea’s leadership must prioritize and support women’s leadership in building sustainable peace.
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Your Designated Sports Break From Trumpalooza
Here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Then it’s time to get back in the game and face down the bullies.
May 10, 2025
If the overwhelming deluge from the Trumpian firehose of lies, threats, incompetency, illegal actions, and surreality is sweeping you off your feet, driving you to bedridden depression, leaving you passive and breathlessly unable to mount a response, much less resistance, please get into the huddle, take a time-out, and listen up to your Jock Culture coach. (That’s me, of course!)
You need some distraction.
Have you noticed lately how few sports stories are making their way to the top of the news beams? That’s because sports—once upon a time our most reliable source of outrage; speculation; cultish behavior; and lessons in domination, smackdown intimidation, and faux masculinity—has been replaced by a remarkable series of presidential half-time horror shows. It’s now all Trumpiana all the time.
Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
We need to get back to sports. So here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Of course, since only he truly sells in this numbed media moment of ours, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we’ll need sports stories with Trumpian subtexts.
Number One: How did some high school athletes suddenly get so rich? There are million-dollar quarterbacks lining up at the NIL pay window waiting to start their freshman year in college. In case you don’t already know it, NIL stands for name, image, and likeness—from which sports gear companies, universities, and the college sports ruling body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), have traditionally profited enormously, even though those athletes were prohibited from benefiting commercially. But in 2021, a series of state court judgements led to a unanimous Supreme Court decision that lifted the ban and it was suddenly pay-off time for “student-athletes.”
It all seems fair enough, although the new system is evolving with shady deals in which colleges and their boosters help organize “collectives” to recruit teenage high school athletes with the promise of booty that ranges from extra shoes to millions of dollars.
The top 20 money-making college athletes are bona fide millionaires, while the average starting pay-off for the top 100 is $583,000. University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, son of the former National Football League star Deion Sanders, leads the list with an estimated $4.7 million.
The Transfer Portal
Boosting the growing transactional nature of “amateur” sports is the newly installed “transfer portal,” a computerized system that makes it easier for college athletes to switch schools without having to sit out a season. Money may well change hands there, too.
So far, the Trumpsters have seemed more than okay with all this, but there could be a future glitch. While the current major beneficiaries are the expectables—football and basketball players—let’s welcome crowd-pleasing gymnast Sam Phillips, the first University of Nebraska athlete to come out as gay, now performing at the University of Illinois. Could this turn out to be a rainbow flag for the homophobic Trumpniks? Will they say nil to NIL (at least if it goes to the “wrong” people)? Stay tuned.
Number Two: Even though they’re a microscopic percentage of the varsity athletic population, transgender jocks have been getting an inordinate amount of attention lately, most of it grimly malevolent.
President Donald Trump’s order barring transgender girls and women from playing on women’s teams at federally funded educational institutions, even if followed, will have little effect on overall sports participation. Symbolically, of course, as The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin points out,
Diverse teams can help communities and families stop seeing marginalized people as an “other” and start seeing them as part of the same whole. Sports at its best can challenge the hate constantly generated by the right-wing media machine.
There are certainly reasonable arguments against situations in which trans athletes might physically overwhelm cis-athletes, but the climate is simply too charged right now for a reasonable discussion. This may just have to wait for Trump to be cut from the team.
Number Three: When I started writing about sports in the late 1950s, two of the premier American ones were boxing (the sweet science) and thoroughbred horse racing (the sport of kings). Both were romanticized, distinctly corrupt enterprises run by oligarchs and gangsters on the backs of poor boys and animals. They did well when they produced superstars (Muhammad Ali or Secretariat) but faded in the 21st century. Since then, football and mixed martial arts have provided more reliably entertaining violence, while state lotteries supplanted parimutuel betting as a way to tantalize the desperate with pie-in-the-sky jackpots. Pro wrestling (if you consider it a sport at all) is the only athletic entertainment that comes to mind as more truly Trumpish.
Horse racing is barely hanging on, mostly thanks to influential rich folks (including Arab oligarchs) who own and breed the best horses and the rentable state governments that provide subsidies for the sport. Boxing and horse racing seem to exist mostly to offer some of the saddest sights in sports: punch-drunk former prizefighters without pensions or health coverage and drug-abused horses killed on the track after breaking down in a race. Putting down both sports would be merciful.
The Spread
Number Four: Sixty-odd years ago, at Madison Square Garden, covering my first pro basketball game, I was mystified when the crowd began cheering for the visiting team. At least theoretically, these were, after all, rabid New York Knicks fans.
“Don’t they want their team to win?” I asked the seasoned reporter sitting next to me in the press box.
“It’s the spread,” he replied all too casually.
That was the beginning of the end of whatever innocence I had when it came to big-time commercial sports.
As that seasoned reporter, visibly amused by my naiveté, then explained, the point spread is the predicted margin of victory by the favored team in any given game. If the bookies have established that the favorite is expected to win by, say, 10 points, you could bet on the underdog to lose by less than 10, and be a winner. On the night of my tutorial, those in the audience who bet against the spread could have had a double victory, since the Knicks actually won the game, while their opponents lost by fewer points than predicted and so won the spread.
In those days, except in Las Vegas, sports betting was illegal and considered a threat to the game. Most legitimate newspapers avoided any mention of odds, and the professional leagues they covered inveighed against gambling as an existential danger. In highly publicized examples, they punished players caught betting, even stars, not to mention retired superstars working as greeters for gambling casinos.
At the same time, the sports world constantly flirted with gambling, offering odds disguised as informed predictions and, for a dozen years, a gambler, Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder, was featured on a TV football show until he was fired for claiming that Black athletes excelled because of how they had been bred during slavery (and that the only jobs left for whites in sports were as coaches).
All such hypocritical righteousness seems quaint in these Trumpalooza days as professional leagues, including the National Football League, promote their “official” gambling sites, while betting on games is acknowledged as an intrinsic element of fandom (as, in truth, it always has been). No gambling, no sports. Bet on it!
The Summer Games
Number Five: In March, President Trump established the 2026 FIFA World Cup Task Force, made up of the usual suspects (Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Marco Rubio), perhaps to reassure his followers that the gang will indeed all be there when soccer’s major event is held in the United States, especially should the Trumpunks decide to use a classic soccer match to lure immigrants to an abduction party.
Meanwhile, this country seems like an ever less welcoming place for the rest of the world’s favorite sport. As Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has pointed out, the United States may be anything but a safe haven for international athletes (not to speak of so many Americans). After all, should some foreigner get a little too fast or strong, maybe he or she could be checked for drugs, chromosomes, or challenging thoughts, and sent to a maximum security locker room.
And while we’re worrying (all too justifiably) about the World Cup next year, don’t forget that the U.S. will be hosting the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Number Six: The New York Yankees are growing hair. When the team played for owner George Steinbrenner, self-ordained as “The Boss,” a blustering, narcissistic bully and liar who was considered a mentor to the young Donald Trump, no moustaches, beards, or hair below the collar were allowed. The son of a shipping magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner postured as a standard-bearer for masculine American values. Why did working-class guys buy that?
As a New York Times sportswriter covering Steinbrenner, I was bewildered walking on the street with him when construction workers and cabbies hailed him warmly as a man of the people. They loved the way he bossed those jocks around. In retrospect, it was a portent of the authoritarian cultism around Trump—the urge for people who feel weak or marginalized to embrace a tyrant.
George’s son, Hank, a milder man who avoids the spotlight, runs the team now. His decision this year to allow Yankee players to grow hair where they pleased was generally applauded. Still, maybe George wasn’t as bad as I once imagined. After all, he had only one felony conviction compared to his mentoree’s 34. Steinbrenner’s involved illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential election campaign and, yes, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him.
The Draft
Number Seven: The opening of the NFL season is months away, but the recent draft of rookie players cracked through Trump’s curtain of sound for a day or so, reinforcing pro football as America’s 21st-century pastime. The biggest newsflash was that Shadeur Sanders, the $4-million-dollar NIL player, wasn’t taken in the first round. Football executives evidently found him too brash and self-promoting, possibly overrated, and too… dare I say it?… Trumpish.
I’ve never forgotten that the first time I met Donald Trump, as a CBS “Sunday Morning” correspondent in the 1980s, he lied to me about pro football. He owned a pro team back then, the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), which played during the NFL’s offseason. Many people thought the USFL was a conspiracy to force the NFL into a merger or to get several of its teams into the league. That would have been important to Trump, then still a minor-league real-estate magnate from Queens, pushing his dream of making it into the major leagues, the New York City market.
When I interviewed him about that, he swore such a merger wasn’t on his mind. Later that week, he emerged as the principal plaintiff in an antitrust suit against the NFL. It was the kind of early lesson that people like me didn’t learn. We were too smart for that buffoon, right?
Number Eight: Maybe the best that can be said about the “manosphere,” that trendy Trumpian hodge-podge of websites, podcasts, online forums, and blogs promoting misogyny and the false masculinity of “bro culture,” is the relatively small role sports seems to play in it. Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
Early on, the president touted himself as a good high school baseball player, but when his further posturing as a championship superstar was mostly ignored, he seemed to lose interest in promoting his athleticism, except in bed.
The anti-feminism of Trump’s base has always been predicated on the understanding that once women achieved equality, much less equity with men, the game would be over for the mediocre male. And yet current laments about boys and men losing out to women in educational and employment competition obscure the fact that men, particularly white men, still rule the roost. Trumpy attacks on liberals often emphasize their womanly “weakness.” The tough-talking handmaids in the president’s cabinet are borderline cartoonish.
As it turns out, one of the most consistent opponents of Trumpian anti-feminism is 60-year-old former football player and long-time activist Jackson Katz. He’s sounded his particular call to action in a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue.
He recently told Ammar Kalia of The Guardian: “We can’t tell boys that bullying is bad and then equally reward bullies like Trump in power. There’s a lot of fear in the face of a right-wing populist government, but we need men to loudly oppose him, otherwise real people will be harmed. We’re living in a different world now, and it’s urgent.”
It’s urgent indeed, and this has been enough of a distraction. So, suit up and get your game face on. Do something. Donald Trump is beatable if you keep your eye on the ball and don’t pull your punches.
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Fighting for All Our Lives: How Queer Resistance Protects Everyone’s Freedom
Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place.
Apr 24, 2025
On April 16, the U.K. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that the legal definition of a “woman” must refer solely to biological sex. The implications of this decision were immediate and severe—trans women may now be strip-searched by male officers and excluded from spaces where their safety and dignity depend on recognition. At first glance, the decision may seem like a dry point of legal semantics. But in reality, it reflects a far deeper and more dangerous shift: the consolidation of an authoritarian political logic that treats trans lives as expendable in the pursuit of social order and hierarchical control.
This is not a policy based on scientific evidence or democratic deliberation. It is part of a wider cultural strategy designed to fracture public solidarity, weaponize identity, and enforce a hierarchy of who deserves protection. These strategies rely on well-worn tools: the stoking of moral panic, the resurrection of essentialist binaries, and the reduction of rights to a zero-sum contest. At the centre of it all is a necropolitical logic—one that governs through the threat of exclusion and disposability, using the unequal and conditional distribution of life, rights, and freedom as a tool to maintain dominance, privilege, and control.
Yet these politics do not operate only on a material level. They work most powerfully through identity—through constructing certain groups as more or less deserving of life. This is where queer necropolitics becomes a vital framework for understanding the terrain we are on. In this logic, queerness itself becomes a site of state violence, not because it poses a real threat, but because it disrupts the neat social categories authoritarian capitalism needs in order to manage, discipline, and divide us.
Transphobia as a Form of Moral Panic
The U.K. Supreme Court’s decision is only the latest episode in an escalating series of culture war skirmishes that target trans people under the banner of protecting women. These moral panics, like those which target and continue to target migrants, queers, and sex workers, rely on sensationalism and fear rather than evidence. They mobilize deep-seated anxieties about gender, identity, and social change into a reactionary demand for order and exclusion.
Proponents of these anti-trans positions often frame themselves as defenders of feminism. They argue that allowing trans women into women’s spaces compromises safety or dilutes hard-won rights. But these arguments closely mirror the language and tactics of far-right populist movements. They draw on a worldview in which society is fractured into antagonistic identity blocs, and in which any gain by one group must come at the cost of another. This zero-sum logic reinforces the idea that rights are scarce—and that groups must compete for recognition, safety, and survival.
The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded?
Critically, these arguments lack grounding in either biology or social science. Claims about fixed “biological sex” ignore the robust and growing scientific consensus that sex is not binary and that human sexual traits exist along intersecting spectrums. From chromosomal variation to endocrine diversity, biological reality defies the simplistic male-female binary that the court ruling seeks to enshrine. Social science, too, has long shown that gender is a social construct with material effects, shaped by context, power, and historical processes.
Yet despite this, trans women continue to be painted as dangerous intruders, especially in spaces like sports or prisons. In sport, arguments against inclusion often rely on misinformation and biologically essentialist (and deeply racist) assumptions. However, both scientific research and legal analysis show that trans athletes face no inherent advantages—and are often at a disadvantage due to systemic barriers and social exclusion.
Through casting trans inclusion as a threat to cis women’s rights, this rhetoric not only distorts the goals of feminism but plays directly into the authoritarian politics it claims to resist. Instead of building coalitions among those historically marginalised, it encourages rivalry and suspicion. The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded? In this framework, protection is no longer a right—it is a prize to be fought over.
The Necropolitical Logic of Authoritarian Capitalism
These attacks reveal a profound transformation in how power is exercised. It is no longer enough to control access to resources, wealth, or institutions. Authoritarian capitalism now governs at the level of life itself—who is deemed socially legitimate, who is recognized by the law, and who is left to navigate violence and precarity without protection. This form of rule is what theorists have identified as necropolitics: the power to determine who lives and who dies, not only physically, but socially, economically, and symbolically.
A queer necropolitical perspective deepens this understanding. It shows how queerness—particularly trans identities—are positioned as excessive, abject, or threatening within systems that demand legibility and conformity. Queer bodies do not just live precariously under this regime; they are actively made precarious. Their visibility becomes grounds for surveillance; their autonomy becomes justification for abandonment. Crucially, queer life—and by extension, any life that resists being neatly classified and controlled—is often only tolerated when it serves a political purpose or stays out of sight.
This logic did not emerge in isolation. It evolved from the earlier structures of neoliberalism, which systematically turned basic goods—such as housing, education, and healthcare—into commodities to be fought over. Under neoliberalism, survival became a matter of individual competition. But as the failures of that model have become increasingly visible, its competitive logic has migrated: Now it is identity itself that is rendered scarce. Rights are no longer distributed through citizenship or universal protections, but through contest between demographic groups.
This shift has produced a kind of demographic austerity. If trans people gain access to gender-affirming care, it is framed as coming at the expense of cis women’s services. If migrants seek asylum, it is painted as a drain on national resources. If Black communities organize for safety and justice, it is seen as threatening the status of white working-class voters. These dynamics reflect a necropolitical state that no longer promises inclusion through shared humanity, but only conditional recognition based on identity, utility, and submission.
In this way, trans people—and queer people more broadly—are turned into political symbols whose lives can be bartered, debated, or denied. Recent legal commentary has detailed how trans voices were excluded from the court’s reasoning. Policy analyses show how access to gender-affirming services is increasingly restricted. Meanwhile, broader populist movements are reinforcing essentialist identities globally—such as the Trump administration’s recent effort to promote racial essentialism and reject race as a social construct.
These are not isolated developments. They are the global grammar of a resurgent necropolitical order.
The Necessity of Queer Resistance to Necrophobic Politics
Faced with these conditions, the most urgent political task is to reject the premise that life must be earned through conformity. Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place. It refuses the logic of scarcity, of competition, of “deservingness,” and insists instead on a politics rooted in abundance, solidarity, and mutual care.
This form of resistance is especially vital in confronting necrophobic politics—the cultural and institutional tendency to reject or erase those who live outside normative scripts of gender, sexuality, race, or ability. Queer resistance confronts this head-on, not by asking for tolerance, but by building new ways of relating, surviving, and resisting violent normative logics. It appears in grassroots movements for the collective ownership of our spaces, mutual aid networks, in trans-led care collectives and cooperatives, and in artistic and theoretical projects that imagine life beyond legibility.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in.
The point is not simply to expand the margins of acceptability. It is to dismantle the very system that produces social death in the first place. As recent academic research and political analysis show, authoritarian capitalism survives by creating artificial crises of identity, which can then be managed, exploited, or repressed. Queer resistance makes those crises unmanageable. It refuses to play the game of identity competition. It recognizes that our survival depends not on winning favor from the state, but on transforming the conditions that make such favor necessary.
This resistance is already under way. Across courts, classrooms, and communities, people are challenging the reduction of identity to threat and fighting to build alliances across difference. Even as the far-right attempts to recapture the public imagination with a nostalgic vision of fixed categories and rigid roles, queer communities continue to model what it means to live otherwise—to live together and otherwise—outside the confines of binary thinking and zero-sum fear.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in. Will we be divided into discrete groups, each vying for conditional safety under an authoritarian state? Or can we build a world where life is not reduced to a bargaining chip, but recognized as fundamentally shared, entangled, and worth protecting—simply because it exists?
Queer politics answers this question with a resounding refusal to accept the terms as they have been offered. It defines freedom not as something won by denying others their rights or survival, but as the shared pursuit of joy, dignity, and possibility through the creation and exploration of diverse ways of living. And in doing so it provides the radical blueprint for a different and better future.
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