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Governor Mills Stood up for Students and Survivors—Who Will Join Her?
Rather than descend into reactionary advocacy that centers an untrustworthy, increasingly fascist government, we must go above and beyond Title IX, standing up for actionable, lasting solutions to sex-based discrimination in schools.
Mar 27, 2025
“Are you going to comply with that?”
The question came at a bipartisan governors’ meeting, lobbed unceremoniously by U.S. President Donald Trump toward Gov. Janet Mills of Maine. Gov. Mills is one of the few representatives of any political party or institution to defy a recent executive order barring transgender students from women’s sports—and to stand firmly and vocally against the weaponization of Title IX to advance a bigoted, anti-trans agenda.
“I’m complying with the state and federal laws,” she replied. And then—“See you in court.”
Even as we identify and invest in alternate approaches to protecting students from gender-based discrimination, we cannot grant right-wing politicians leeway to weaponize Title IX for their own political gain.
The exchange, though brief, and the rushed and retaliatory federal investigation that followed, echoed far beyond the White House as a rare but critical example of how state, local, and school officials must stand up for students in the absence of adequate federal protections against sex discrimination. And those federal protections have never been adequate.
It is high time to recognize that in practice—and without states and schools moving beyond compliance to true advocacy for their students—Title IX has never offered comprehensive, accessible solutions to gender-based violence. I should know: I’ve experienced Title IX’s failings as a student, an organizer, and a policy advocate working to change how schools treat—and advocate for—survivors.
I was a college student in the Obama years, during what should have been a progressive “golden age” for Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in publicly funded schools. The reality on the ground was marked less by progress than by confusion and chaos. When my peers sought support from our Title IX office, administrators called their reasonable requests for support “too difficult” to address. Without on-campus advocates, nearly 40% of survivors who reported abuse during this period experienced a substantial disruption in their education due to retaliation, institutional betrayal, and being pushed out of schools. Many survivors stayed silent.
When Betsy DeVos gutted Title IX protections during the first Trump administration, I joined the survivor- and youth-led project Know Your IX, where I worked with student activists whose horror stories under the Trump administration’s Title IX rule sounded eerily familiar. Survivors experiencing traumatic investigations dropped out of school—paying off student loans for a degree they would never get. Medical school students chose not to report abuse for fear of losing professional opportunities. Young people who had experienced dating abuse developed new mental health challenges, and their schools refused to grant accommodations. And though Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, Trump-era guidance on how schools should enforce Title IX persisted throughout nearly the entirety of his presidency. President Trump moved to officially reinstate DeVos-era guidance, after appointing people who have caused sexual harm or been complicit in it (including Secretary of Education Linda McMahon) to the highest positions of power in our country. If it wasn’t already clear, it should be staggeringly so now: We cannot rely on the federal government to save us.
Rather than descend into reactionary advocacy that centers an untrustworthy, increasingly fascist government, we must go above and beyond Title IX, standing up for actionable, lasting solutions to sex-based discrimination in schools. Local organizing at K-12 schools and college campuses led by students and survivors offers one path forward. We can also fight for stronger state anti-discrimination policies that reflect the needs of marginalized students. And we can empower student groups with resources and training to support their peers in the absence of federal or administrative protections.
Most importantly, it is time for schools to take responsibility for protecting their students and act accordingly—regardless of state and federal policy, or how the president decides to interpret the 37 words that make up the statute of Title IX. While federally funded schools are required to comply with Trump’s Title IX rule, they can and should create separate anti-discrimination policies that fill in the gaps of the current Title IX rule. We should encourage schools to go above and beyond what federal law requires to protect students from sexual violence, and respond with care when it occurs.
Of course, in the absence of strong, federal legislation codifying students’ protections and schools’ responsibility to address gender-based discrimination, “sending education back to the states” creates an inequitable patchwork of civil rights protections, resulting in even more students experiencing traumatic disruptions to their education. While investing in school- and state-level organizing, we must build wide networks of support and mutual aid that persist no matter how hostile the environment. Groups like Know Your IX, now a project of the national youth activism organization Advocates for Youth, will continue to organize alongside brilliant and dedicated survivors and student activists holding their schools accountable and fighting for survivor-centered solutions.
Even as we identify and invest in alternate approaches to protecting students from gender-based discrimination, we cannot grant right-wing politicians leeway to weaponize Title IX for their own political gain. We must join Gov. Mills and shout from the rooftops that bigoted, transphobic attempts to attack marginalized young people through education policy will never be a solution to this country’s epidemic of sexual harassment and assault. We must hold strong in the face of increasingly brazen attempts from federal officials to curb students’ rights and retaliate against dissidence. If lawmakers actually cared about women and girls, they would bolster Title IX protections—not attempt to dismantle them.
Title IX was always the floor, not the ceiling. Now, it’s time to aim for the stars. Student survivors, LGBTQI+ youth, and pregnant and parenting people deserve nothing less.
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'Unite and Resist': Women's Day Rallies Against Trump Held From Coast to Coast
"This is our day to stand together, make our voices heard, and show the world that we are not backing down," said Women's March.
Mar 08, 2025
Women and their allies took to the streets of cities and towns from coast to coast Saturday for a "Unite and Resist" national day of action against the Trump administration coordinated by Women's March.
"Since taking office, the Trump administration has unleashed a war against women driven by the Project 2025 playbook, which is why, more than ever, we must continue to resist, persist, and demand change," Women's March said, referring to the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, "seeks to obliterate sexual and reproductive health and rights."
"This is our day to stand together, make our voices heard, and show the world that we are not backing down," Women's March added. "Women's rights are under attack, but we refuse to go backward."
Women's March executive director Rachel O'Leary Carmona asserted that "the broligarchy that owns Trump is working to 'flood the zone' with hateful executive actions and rhetoric, trying to overwhelm us into submission."
"But we refuse to lose focus," she vowed. "We refuse to stand by."
In San Francisco, where more than 500 people rallied, 17-year-old San Ramon, California high school student Saya Kubo gave the San Francisco Chronicle reasons why she was marching.
"Abortion, Elon Musk, educational rights and trans rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change—all of these things, I am standing up for what I believe in," she said.
Her mother, 51-year-old Aliso Kubo, said that "we came out here specifically to support my daughter and women's rights."
Thousands rallied down the coast in Los Angeles, where protester Pamela Baez toldFox 11 that she was there to "support equality."
"I think I mostly want people to be aware that women are people. They have rights," Baez said. "We just want to show everybody that we care about them. People deserve healthcare. Women deserve rights."
Thousands of people rallied on Boston Common on a chilly but sunny Saturday.
"We are the ones who are going to stand up," participant Ashley Barys toldWCVB. "There is a magic when women come together. We can really make change happen."
Boston protester Celeste Royce said that "it was really important for me to be here today, to stand up for human rights, for women's rights, to protect bodily autonomy, to just make myself and my presence known."
Sierra Night Tide toldWLOS that seeing as how Asheville, North Carolina had no event scheduled for Saturday, she "decided to step up and create one."
At least hundreds turned out near Pack Square Park for the rally:
Today at the Women's March in Asheville, NC pic.twitter.com/BPAIZORSUd
— Senior Fellow Antifa 101st Chairborne Division (@jrh0) March 9, 2025
"As a woman who has faced toxic corporate environments, living with a physical disability, experienced homelessness, and felt the impact of Hurricane Helene, I know firsthand the urgent need for collective action," Night Tide said. "This event is about standing up for all marginalized communities and ensuring our voices are heard."
Michelle Barth, a rally organizer in Eugene, Oregon, toldThe Register Guard that "we need to fight and stop the outlandish discrimination in all sectors of government and restore the rights of the people."
"We need to protect women's rights. It's our bodies and our choice," Barth added. "Our bodies should not be regulated because there are no regulations for men's bodies. Women are powerful, they are strong, they're intelligent, they're passionate, they are angry, and we're ready to stand up against injustice."
In Grand Junction, Colorado, co-organizer Mallory Martin hailed the diverse group of women and allies in attendance.
"In times when things are so divisive, it can feel very lonely and isolating, and so the community that builds around movements like this has been so welcoming and so beautiful that it's heartwarming to see," Martin toldKKCO.
In Portland, Oregon, protester Cait Lotspeich turned out in a "Bring On the Matriarchy" T-shirt.
"I'm here because I support women's rights," Lotspeich
said in an interview with KATU. "We have a right to speak our minds and we have a right to stand up for what is true and what is right, and you can see that women are powerful, and we are here to exert that power."
The United States was one of dozens of nations that saw International Women's Day protests on Saturday. In Germany, video footage emerged of police brutalizing women-led pro-Palestine protesters in Berlin.
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Trump’s Christian Nationalists Are Targeting Those the Bible Is Most Worried About
The battle of theologies taking place right now is anything but a new phenomenon, even if it’s at an inflection point, with life-and-death consequences for our democracy, Christianity itself, and those who are God’s greatest concern.
Mar 03, 2025
“There has almost always been an outright hostility that is shown towards people of the Christian faith,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on a podcast recently. He was talking with Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana lawmaker and president of the Family Research Council, about freedom of religion and the actions of the second Trump administration.
I have to admit that such a statement from this country’s third most powerful politician and an avowed Christian nationalist almost takes my breath away. Of all the people facing hostility, discrimination, and violence now and throughout history, Christians like Mike Johnson rank low on the list. Still, his comment is consistent with a disturbing religious trend in the country right now.
As an early act of his second administration, President Donald Trump has created an anti-Christian bias task force to be chaired by Attorney General Pam Bondi. At the same time, he’s slashing federal jobs and programs, threatening Medicaid, Head Start, the Department of Education, affordable housing programs, accommodations for the disabled, environmental protections, public health and safety, Social Security, and Medicare, while scapegoating immigrants and trans kids. It’s particularly ironic that Trump, Johnson, and the people with them in the top echelons of power are targeting those that the Bible is most concerned about—children, the poor, immigrants, the sick and disabled, women, the vulnerable, and the Earth itself. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the richest man ever to exist, who has built his wealth off exploiting the poor, goes so far as to call the impoverished “parasites.” After all, there are more than 2,000 biblical passages that speak about protecting the vulnerable, offering good news to the poor, stewarding God’s creation, and bringing judgment down upon those with wealth and power who make people suffer.
The Christian nationalism, exceptionalism, and white supremacy ascendant in Trump 2.0 has evolved from a long genealogy that has enabled an elite strata of mostly white Christian men to rule society and amass enormous wealth and power throughout American history.
Pope Francis himself has weighed in on the regressive policies and posture of the current administration. To America’s bishops he wrote, “The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all—as I have affirmed on numerous occasions—welcomes, protects, promotes, and integrates the most fragile, unprotected, and vulnerable.” Indeed, if any Christians are under attack right now, it’s those included in what liberation theologians have called “God’s preferential option for the poor” (the very creation for whom God has special love and care) and those standing up with and for them.
The Pope hasn’t been the only one to challenge the use of religion in the Trump administration. Since the inauguration, the actions of Johnson, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and others have been opposed and decried by people of faith of many persuasions. Remember Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde imploring President Trump to show mercy, especially to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, at the Inaugural Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral? Since her gentle reminder that the Bible teaches love, truth, and mercy, she has received regular and credible death threats on a daily basis, even as people have also flocked to the cathedral and other houses of worship in search of moral leaders willing to stand up to the bullying tactics of Donald Trump, the richest man on earth Elon Musk, and their cronies.
In response to Trump’s threats of mass detention and deportation, especially removing “sensitive sites” status from houses of worship, schools, and hospitals, while threatening “sanctuary cities” with a loss of federal funding, 27 religious groups have sued the Trump administration for infringement of their religious liberty to honor and worship God by loving their immigrant neighbors. Kelsi Corkran, a lawyer with the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and lead counsel in that lawsuit, said that plaintiffs joined the suit “because their scripture, teaching, and traditions offer irrefutable unanimity on their religious obligation to embrace and serve the refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants in their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.”
Faith leaders are coming together to support and protect transgender and nonbinary people now under attack by the Trump administration as well. My colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses Hernandez-McGavin recently penned an article for Religion News Service where they affirmed the dignity of LGBTQ+ people, even as Christian nationalists continue to build their influence and power by damning LGBTQ+ communities, all while claiming to protect children and traditional family values. “Gender diversity,” they wrote,
is a fact of human existence older than Scripture and is thoroughly attested to in the Bible. Jesus’ teaching about eunuchs in the Gospel of Matthew makes clear there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth, as well as those who live outside the gender binary “for the sake of the kingdom.” In the story of the Ethiopian eunuch’s baptism, the Book of Acts lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender nonconforming people of African descent. In the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people outside the gender binary, promising us “a name better than sons and daughters.”… The Talmud reflects this affirmation of gender diversity, recognizing no fewer than seven genders.
A Battle for the Bible in History
The battle of theologies taking place right now is anything but a new phenomenon, even if it’s at an inflection point, with life-and-death consequences for our democracy, Christianity itself, and those who are God’s greatest concern. The Christian nationalism, exceptionalism, and white supremacy ascendant in Trump 2.0 has evolved from a long genealogy that has enabled an elite strata of mostly white Christian men to rule society and amass enormous wealth and power throughout American history.
Such Christians have always anointed themselves with the lie of divine righteousness, while insisting that they are God’s chosen representatives on Earth. To maintain this charade, they have brandished the Bible like a cudgel, bludgeoning poor people, people of color, the Indigenous, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others with tales of their supposed sinfulness meant to distract, demean, divide, and dispossess. Therefore, if we are truly serious about confronting and countering the influence of such an authoritarian version of Christianity under Trump, Vance, Johnson, and their associates and followers, we must learn from how it’s been wielded (and challenged) in other times in history.
The roots of such idolatry reach back centuries, even before the founding of this nation, to the conquest of Indigenous lands by European invaders. In 1493, after Spain first sent its ships to islands in the Caribbean, Pope Alexander VI issued the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls granting all newly “discovered” lands to their Christian conquerors. Those church documents asserted the supposed “godlessness” of Indigenous peoples, smoothing over the ruthless colonial campaign of extermination being waged with a veneer of moral virtue. Centuries later, the idea of “manifest destiny” drew on the same religious underpinnings as the Doctrine of Discovery, popularizing the belief that white Christians were destined by God to control and therefore redeem the lands of the West. Manifest destiny not only valorized the violence of westward expansion but sanctified and made exceptional the emerging project of American imperialism. God, the argument went, had chosen this nation to be a beacon of hope, a city upon a hill for the whole world.
Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new attacks daily on what the Bible calls, “the least of these,” it’s important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the past as well as the heroic, if often unnoticed, moral organizing happening now.
Alongside the dispossession and attempted extermination of Indigenous peoples, invocations of God and the Bible were used to justify the enslavement of African peoples and their descendants. Slaveholders cherry-picked passages from the book of Ephesians—“slaves obey your earthly masters”—and lines from other epistles of the Apostle Paul to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They ripped out of the pages on the Exodus from Egypt, huge sections of the prophets, and even Jesus’ inaugural sermon praising the poor and dispossessed from the Bibles they gave to their enslaved workers. Those “Slave Bibles” would serve as evidence of just how dangerous the unadulterated gospel was to the legitimacy of the slaveholding planter class.
They also twisted theology to serve their political needs by obscuring the common interests of enslaved Black workers and poor Southern whites. Readings of the Bible that claimed God had singled out Black people for slave labor helped the Southern ruling class turn many of the region’s majority of poor whites into zealous defenders of a system that relegated them to marginal lands and poverty wages.
After the fall of the Confederacy, the Bible remained core to the new racialized divide-and-conquer system in the South. Pro-segregationist preachers, no longer able to use the Bible to defend slavery per se, turned to stories like the Tower of Babel to claim that God desired racial segregation and abhorred intermarriage across racial lines. In 1954, Baptist preacher Carey Daniel wrote a pamphlet entitled God the Original Segregationist in which he explained: “When first He separated the Black race from the white and lighter skinned races He did not simply put them in different parts of town. He did not even put them in different towns or states. Nay, He did not even put them in adjoining countries.” The pamphlet was distributed widely by White Citizens’ Councils and sold more than a million copies.
Parallel to the theological justifications for the system of segregation that came to be known as Jim Crow, a national theology of industrial capitalism emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the Gilded Age, a prosperity gospel and its theology of muscular Christianity flourished among the white upper class. Amid the excesses of the Second Industrial Revolution, they celebrated their own hard work and moral rectitude and bemoaned the personal failings of the poor. When the economic bubble finally burst in 1929 with the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in an unprecedented era of financial regulation and labor protection, the nation’s corporate class turned once again to the church to fight back and put a stamp of approval on its free-market aspirations.
As historian Kevin Kruse writes in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, in the 1930s and 1940s, “corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase ‘freedom under God.’ As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most—not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as ‘Christian libertarianism.’”
The phrase “freedom under God” captures the tension at the heart of the long battle over the Bible in this country in which there have always been two diametrically opposed visions of freedom: on one side, the freedom of the vast majority of the people to enjoy the fruits of their labor and live with dignity and self-determination; on the other side, the freedom of the wealthy to control society, sow division, and hoard the planet’s (and in Elon Musk’s case, the galaxy’s) abundance for themselves. Poor people, disproportionately poor people of color, have always been on the front lines of this battle, as both canaries in the coal mine and prophetic leaders. Think of it this way in the age of Trump: As their lives go, so goes the nation.
Ordo Amoris and Other Theologies of the Day
This age-old debate is playing out in JD Vance’s recent statement about “ordo amoris” (or “rightly-ordered love“). Weighing in on cutting both domestic and global aid as well as scapegoating immigrants, the vice president wrote on social media, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Pope Francis offered a fitting rebuttal to Vance’s statement and the actions of the second Trump administration by summing up its deeply heretical nature and echoing a historic prophetic tradition of increasing importance again today. In his letter to the American bishops, urging them to reject Vance’s theology of isolationism and egotism, Pope Francis wrote, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
As this statement from the Pope reminds us, history is replete with examples of people from many religions who have grounded their struggles for justice in the holy word and the spirit of God, not just extremists trying to claim and justify their lust for power and avarice for wealth. Abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, student protestors, civil rights leaders, and various representatives of poor and oppressed people have insisted that divinity cannot be reduced to private matters of the soul and salvation. They have affirmed that truth, love, and justice, starting with the most vulnerable and marginalized, are what matter the most to God. They have insisted that the worship of God must be concerned with the building of a society in which all life is cared for and treated with dignity. In every previous era, there were courageous people for whom protest and public action were a form of prayer, even as the religious leaders and institutions of their day hid behind sanctuary walls—walls currently being torn down again to release forces devastating to the most vulnerable among us and to the planet itself.
Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new attacks daily on what the Bible calls, “the least of these,” it’s important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the past as well as the heroic, if often unnoticed, moral organizing happening now. I return to my colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses Hernandez-McGavin who sum up the sentiment of many people of faith in our society today: “God’s love and truth are alive whether elected officials seek to legislate them out of existence or not. God’s Word continues to call for justice and mercy for all people regardless of the distortions of the Word by religious and political leaders obsessed with the worship of their own power. They are not God. And God will not, and cannot, be stopped.“
As they conclude, offering a message of hope and encouragement in these dark and dangerous days: “God’s liberating action will break through in this world through the steadfast work and witness of people of goodwill who are beholden to a higher law, who refuse to comply with unjust executive orders, who continue to defend the vulnerable against abuses of the powerful in courtrooms and school buildings and hospitals and in the streets across the country.”
The question then is: In the second age of Donald Trump, which side will you choose?
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