June 19, 2025
by Marybeth O’Mara
First, the good news:
The protests on No Kings Day last Saturday were the largest protests in US History, outstripping the Women’s March protests in the 1st Trump administration and the Civil Rights protests of the 60’s. One of the co-sponsors, the ACLU, estimated that over 5 million people participated. The organizers have already announced a follow-up on July 17, called “Good Trouble Lives On,” in memory of Rep. John Lewis, who died 5 years ago. Now, it is on a Thursday, not a weekend, so it is not likely to outstrip the No Kings marches, but I am happy to see organizers keeping up the pressure on the administration and offering an assortment of causes to rally around on a regular basis. While Indivisible and 50501 have not updated their sites to include the July 17 actions, keep an eye on them, as I am sure they will soon.
We attended a protest in Evanston and it was great! Peaceful, good speakers (whom I could hear but not see), crowded downtown, and I ran into lots of old friends (but could not connect with anyone I’d hoped to see—the crowds were too thick.)
So, back to Trump and gender. I woke up to news about and analysis of the Wednesday Supreme Court decision in US vs Skremetti, which in a 6-3 vote upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, opening the door to other states, nearly half of which have been waiting in the wings to enact their own bans. This is the latest institutional attack on transgender individuals, after others following the clear signals emanating from the White House since Trump’s first day in office (this time.) In one of his first executive orders, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” Trump declared that “my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” He goes on to require that all federal agencies, departments, and recipients of federal money adhere to that definition. The oral arguments in Skremetti that took place last October left little doubt that Wednesday’s decision would turn out as it did, but the invented and tortured justification for the decision, in both Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion and in a number of concurring opinions, defied logic, ignored precedents, and denied parents the recognition that they are the best ones to make decisions on behalf of their minor children (unless they are the ones deciding that their children should not be exposed to ANY LGBTQ-friendly literature in school.) The opinions did harken back to the chain of logic first articulated in the Dobbs decision 3 years ago, which stripped American women of the universal right to reproductive health care and granted decisions over abortion rights to the states. The majority and concurring opinions gave little weight to any arguments that trans children face discrimination and persecution and that their realities do not have any reasonable persuasive merit. This decision will force many families into making difficult choices, including moving to states that (at least for now) allow gender-affirming care.
Because of Dobbs, doctors in the state of Georgia did not feel as if they could legally allow the family of a pregnant, brain-dead woman, Adriana Smith, to decide to stop life support because they felt they needed to keep her body alive in order to gestate her 9-week old fetus until he could be viable upon delivery. This woman was kept alive on ventilators and intravenous nutrition from February until this week so that her son could be born. He was delivered by C-section this week, after 4 months inside his brain-dead mother. Her family’s wishes to discontinue life support have finally been honored. A wanted pregnancy, a tragic pregnancy side effect resulting in the brain death of the mother, and two motherless sons—is this what the justices wanted with Dobbs?
Pro-natalist columnist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote an article for the Atlantic this week about this case, and her point of view seems like another back-assed justification for promoting the “rights” of a fetus over its mother’s. She writes, “What is clear is that mapping abortion rights onto her case is difficult, because Smith herself is likely dead in the eyes of the law, a judgment that seems reasonable enough to me—but that means there can be no legal weighing of maternal interests against those of the fetus, because the mother no longer has any interests. Nor can there be a violation of Smith’s right to choose, because she is no longer making choices. This use of a human body to effectively treat another is certainly grisly and possibly morally questionable, but it isn’t a case of a woman being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, as much of the coverage of Smith’s situation has suggested.” If this is not treating a woman’s body like a vessel for growing babies, I don’t know what is!
The administration’s attack on voting rights in the SAVE Act will also affect women more than men, and conservative women more than liberal women. How? Increasing the difficulty of registering to vote with a name one was not assigned at birth hurts trans folks, of course (and maybe intentionally) but it also hurts women who have changed their names in marriage or divorce. The percentage of women who change their names at marriage is much higher among conservative couples than liberals, and liberals are more likely to have additional forms of required identification, including passports, than their conservative neighbors.
The Conversation, a liberal-leaning non-profit news organization, reported on how Trump’s policies in its first 100 days affected women, and showed that the policies have already had negative impact in reproductive rights, Democratic rights, and transgender rights, all elaborated above.
How are attacks on transgender rights attacks on women’s rights? Like so many of Trump’s policies and viewpoints, Hitler was there first. Identifying and demonizing subgroups of the population allows the administration to get followers to unify against shared “enemies,” and allows them to try out strategies on small groups before enacting them against the total population. The US Holocaust Museum maintains a collection called “Belonging and Exclusion: Reshaping Society Under Nazi Rule,” and in that collection is the sub-collection titled “Sexuality, gender, and Nazi Persecution.”
Shortly after Hitler’s election in 1933, the regime began to forcibly raid and close Berlin’s large circle of gay nightclubs because of “degeneracy.” Listen to Pete Hegseth testify about transgender service members and see if you can hear the echoes of German. I can.
And while Trump says he wants to protect women and encourage them/us to have more children, according to Ms. Magazine’s Sara Estep, the policies proposed by both a series of executive orders and the Big Beautiful(Budget) Bill would harm rather than hurt mothers in many ways, including family health care and food costs, undoing expanding childcare and early childhood education initiatives, and rising consumer costs through tariffs.
It is not an accident that women voted for Kamala Harris at much higher proportions than men did, but there is much work to be done to make sure that those that voted for Trump in any of the past 3 elections do not vote for him or his chosen successors again.
Have a good week!