The point had a market. Cunningham — who gained more than 500,000 followers after a viral flagrant foul in 2025, and whose endorsement deals reportedly exceed $1 million a year — moved to sell merchandise of the meme until the players’ union barred it. “That moment last year, that was feisty,” she said on a podcast appearance this summer, of the foul that first made her famous. “It worked in my favor last year.” And: “I know that if you use this platform, you can, once the ball stops bouncing, you’re setting yourself up for success,” because “we don’t make enough money to retire and not do anything once we’re done.”

July

On July 21, ESPN published a profile of the newly famous Cunningham, in which she addressed the “MAGA Barbie” nickname: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The next day she stood by it: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.” The U.S. Department of Education posted her meme with a crown photoshopped on: “Common sense prevails 👑.” Three days after the profile, Adidas released her player-exclusive colorway; it sold out within hours.

Then the question started traveling. Over the next two weeks it was put, at podium after podium, to Fever coach Stephanie White, to Golden State’s Natalie Nakase, to Minnesota’s Cheryl Reeve — and, repeatedly, to Caitlin Clark, whose refusal to answer it became its own national story. That two weeks — the rallies trailing the Fever’s road trip, the fined owner, the pile-on against Clark for answering nothing — is documented in Thursday’s column. By Monday, the conservative Christian advocacy group Concerned Women for America was demanding the WNBA adopt a policy “that establishes only biological women can play basketball in the league.” No publicly known transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA.

Toronto

This week the question jumped leagues. At the National Bank Open, tennis reporters began asking players where they stood — and the tour they play on had, quietly, already answered. Since July 1, the Women’s Tennis Association has required every player to submit to a one-time genetic sex test — an SRY gene screen, by cheek swab or blood sample, with a positive result ending a player’s eligibility unless she documents Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or another qualifying difference of sexual development. The WTA posted the policy to its website only after reporters obtained it, without a press release. Nor was tennis the first quiet mover: the National Women’s Soccer League — which confirms it has no transgender players — dropped its own trans-participation policy in early 2022 without announcement, and weathered an op-ed fight over “gender standards” last fall; World Boxing made genetic testing mandatory in May 2025, with Imane Khelif’s name in the announcement — apologizing later for the name, not the test.

Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, backed the policy: “I think it’s really important to keep the fairness in our tour. It’s obvious that biologically the men are way stronger than women, so I feel like it would be not really fair for the woman to compete against biological men.” And: “If they want to test us all, I’m happy to do that, it’s pretty fair, and let’s keep it that way.” OutKick, the Fox-owned conservative sports site, posted the clip: “Thank you, Aryna Sabalenka, for standing up.”

Elena Rybakina, the world No. 2, said: “I don’t know what to comment. If we got to do it, we will do it. For me, I won’t say it’s unnecessary, but I think it was, without these tests, also fine.”

Coco Gauff answered at length: “I understand the reasoning behind it. I do think that this kind of conversation has created a lot of animosity towards the trans community, which I’m not really a big fan of. But I also understand the biological difference and the need to protect that and preserve that… I guess I kind of agree with trying to protect the fairness in women’s sports, but I also do not like the attack that it is creating. People who don’t really care but just want to use this as an excuse to attack the trans community — I’m not really a big fan of that either… I definitely support the trans community, but I also support the need of creating fairness in sport too.” Within hours, Jennifer Sey — founder of the anti-trans-inclusion apparel brand XX-XY Athletics — reposted the last sentence alone: “Translation: I don’t want men in women’s sports but I’m scared to say it outright… Pick a lane Coco.”

The mandatory test has an Olympic history. At the 1996 Atlanta Games, SRY screening of 3,387 women athletes flagged eight — all eight were cleared to compete. The International Olympic Committee abandoned universal sex testing in 1999, a step the American Medical Association and the IOC’s own Athletes’ Commission had urged. Jessica Pegula, the top-ranked American and a member of the WTA Players’ Council, said she thought the tour based its policy on what it had seen from other sporting organizations, and that testing is expected to begin at the Cincinnati Open.

August 5

Cunningham is now backpedalling — from the fight, if not the position. In late July, she told reporters the rallies and the argument did not concern her as a distraction. On August 5 she told USA Network: “It just makes me sad that all this kind of drama… is getting overshadowed, that the basketball is getting overshadowed.” And: “I think there’s room for absolutely everybody. We don’t always have to agree, but that respect and love definitely has to be there.” At practice the next day she said: “I know that people are not always going to align and agree … but I think the most important thing is having that respect, having that love, and pursuing peace in these conversations.” The WNBA’s press corps, she added the same week, should cover more basketball: “we got to keep the main thing the main thing.”

The question did not stop. On Thursday it reached Gabby Williams, the Golden State Valkyries forward and two-time Olympian. “I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a problem in the world.” Trans rights, she added, “right now, is our new battle.” By Thursday night, Jon Root, a sports commentator and contributor to the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, had called her answer “certifiably insane.”

Testing begins next week in Cincinnati.

Also This Week

Read more

April

In April, Liberati filed a complaint challenging Whaley’s place on the ballot, arguing her election paperwork was invalid because she had not filed under her former name. Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett rejected the challenge: Whaley had legally changed her name and met every requirement to appear on the ballot as Joanna Whaley. The Michigan Legislative LGBTQ+ Caucus and LGBTQ+ organizations called the complaint “a transphobic political tactic rather than a legitimate election concern.” Whaley spent the months that followed campaigning on utility bills, health care costs, and medical debt.

Fifteen years

Whaley spent years as a pastor at evangelical megachurches. When she brought questions about her gender to church leaders, they directed her into conversion practices that continued for 15 years. She lost her job when her plans to transition became known. She went back to school, graduated from seminary, and now works as a clinical chaplain in Detroit-area emergency rooms, intensive care units, and hospice care.

“I’ve experienced financial hardship firsthand,” she has said of those years. “Coming out as transgender meant rebuilding my life and career. My Christian faith, family, and community supported me as I went back to college and became a spiritual care provider.”

Her campaign platform lists affordable health care, medical debt relief, lower utility bills, civil liberties, and the district’s roads. Asked by the Free Press about the office she is now favored to hold, she said: “I’ve been professionally trained to be the calmest in the room.”

July 30

On July 30, U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering permanently blocked Michigan from enforcing its 2023 ban on conversion therapy for minors, ruling in a lawsuit brought by a Catholic Charities affiliate and a licensed counselor that the law violates the First Amendment as applied to therapy “that consists exclusively of talking.” The state agreed to stop enforcing the ban — the first state to drop its ban after the Supreme Court’s ruling in March, in Chiles v. Salazar, that talk-therapy bans regulate speech. The Daily Signal described the order as “a ruling that protects children.”

Five days after Beckering’s order, the Democrats of House District 2 nominated Whaley.

2017

In November 2017, Danica Roem of Virginia defeated Bob Marshall — a 26-year incumbent and the author of the state’s bathroom bill — to become the first openly transgender person elected to and seated in an American statehouse. In 2020, Delaware’s Sarah McBride became the country’s first openly transgender state senator; in November 2024, its first openly transgender member of Congress. In 2023, Montana’s Republican House leadership barred Rep. Zooey Zephyr from the House floor for the remainder of the session; in 2024, her district re-elected her.

This cycle, four transgender women ran for the Michigan House. The chamber already includes Rep. Emily Dievendorf, who is openly nonbinary. Whaley would be the Legislature’s first transgender member.

November

Kokinda awaits in a district that has not been competitive for Republicans. Whaley has said she hopes her campaign makes it easier for future LGBTQ+ candidates to run without the same scrutiny. “It hits me when I’m talking to trans folks across the state,” she told the Free Press. “I understand in this moment in politics what it would mean to elect a trans woman could be monumental.”

Her name appears on the November ballot as Joanna Whaley.

Also This Week

Read more

“Caitlin Clark might be the biggest coward in the history of sports,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh wrote on Monday afternoon. “She punts on the trans question, which is the easiest question you could ever be asked. No spine.” Breitbart had already run its headline Sunday night: “Caitlin Clark Dodges Question on Protecting Women’s Sports.” OutKick, the Fox-owned sports site, scored her performance like a routine she’d botched: she “carefully avoids taking a side.”

Clark did not defend transgender athletes. She did not criticize her teammate. She gave the same answer that commissioners, athletic directors, and Olympic committees have given for decades — eligibility belongs to the governing bodies — and then declined to give it twice.

No publicly known transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA. Not this season, not any season. The college pipeline runs the same way: NCAA president Charlie Baker testified to the Senate in 2024 that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of 510,000 across every college sport in America — and the NCAA barred trans women from women’s sports entirely last year.

1931

The loyalty test is new. The apparatus running it is not — and it has never confined itself to trans women.

In 1931, a teenage minor-league pitcher named Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in Chattanooga. Baseball’s commissioner responded by voiding her contract and declaring the game “too strenuous” for women. Historians still argue about whether the strikeouts were staged.

Caster Semenya — a cis woman and a two-time Olympic champion in the 800 meters — has spent seven years barred from her own event unless she medicates her natural testosterone down to a number World Athletics will accept. Europe’s top human-rights court has ruled in her favor twice, most recently in July 2025, finding Switzerland never gave her challenge a rigorous hearing. The regulations stand anyway.

And Imane Khelif — a cis woman — won Olympic welterweight gold in Paris while J.K. Rowling and half the English-speaking internet insisted she was secretly a man, on the strength of an unpublished test from a boxing federation the Olympics had already expelled. Her reward for the medal: the sport’s new governing body announced mandatory sex testing with her name in the announcement — it apologized later for the name, not the test — and the reigning Olympic champion sat out last September’s world championships while her appeal waited.

The profile

The campaign now aimed at Caitlin Clark began as a soft-focus feature about somebody else. On July 21, ESPN published a profile of Cunningham, the Fever’s enforcer and the league’s newest celebrity, in which she addressed the “MAGA Barbie” nickname her fans had given her: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The next day she stood by it: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

The machinery arrived within hours. The U.S. Department of Education — the federal agency that enforces Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in schools — posted a meme of Cunningham’s finger-point celebration with a crown photoshopped onto her head: “Common sense prevails 👑.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the president agreed with Cunningham and called the backlash “ludicrous.” Riley Gaines and Tomi Lahren praised her. Within a week, a veteran role player had become the White House’s favorite athlete.

The road trip

Then the Fever left home for three games — Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis — and the content machine traveled with them. At each stop, demonstrators rallied outside the arena to thank Cunningham; in Portland, the Women’s Liberation Front — a group that has spent a decade fighting trans recognition in the courts — organized a crowd of about 50. Crowds inside booed her. The Fever said in a statement that “neither our organization nor Sophie had any knowledge of this demonstration.”

In Seattle it curdled. Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton confronted two 16-year-old fans wearing shirts from XX-XY Athletics — the apparel brand former Levi’s executive Jennifer Sey founded to oppose trans inclusion in women’s sports — and the WNBA fined her and barred her from the Storm’s next five home games.

The coaches, meanwhile, did something almost old-fashioned: they answered the question. Cunningham’s own coach, Stephanie White, said “I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t.” Golden State’s Natalie Nakase said “Sports is about belonging. It’s about inclusivity. It’s about allowing everyone to be their authentic self.”

Minnesota’s Cheryl Reeve — a four-time champion as a head coach — spent the weekend reminding reporters what the panic keeps omitting: “It is not the case that we have ‘biological men’ in girls’ locker rooms.” On Sunday she coached the game in a shirt reading “Trans Kids Belong,” then declined to perform outrage about her pregame conversation with Cunningham: “Both of us understand that we have platforms and we both talked about wanting to, more than anything, educate.”

By Monday, Clay Travis, OutKick’s founder, was announcing that he stood ready to buy a WNBA expansion team in Nashville and stock it entirely with “men who identify as women,” a bit he spent the afternoon elaborating with a team name built on a genital joke — “the most inclusive team in history!” Walsh called the most bankable woman in American sports spineless. And Concerned Women for America, the conservative advocacy group, demanded the WNBA adopt a policy “that establishes only biological women can play basketball in the league.”

A movement that says it exists to protect women’s sports spent Monday mocking women’s sports as a punchline, attacking the sport’s biggest star, and demanding a league expel transgender women it does not have and has never had.

The escalation will not stop at Clark. Last month the offense was saying something objectionable about trans people. This week the offense is saying nothing at all — “no comment” now scores as opposition. Cheryl Reeve’s shirt left OutKick complaining publicly that the Lynx had denied its writer a credential to interrogate her about it. Nakase’s inclusion answer became a Fox News clip within hours. Coaches across the league now get the question at the podium, and every answer — including no answer — gets sorted into content. The machine Cunningham fed does not have an off switch, and it does not have a finish line.

Three weeks ago the Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 — published a report by senior fellow Scott Yenor titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment,” which calls the law’s equal-opportunity requirements for women’s athletics “part of a sustained social engineering effort” designed to produce women who are “more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational” — and recommends rolling the requirements back, steering women toward recreation instead of competition while preserving “major revenue producing male sports.” The report arrived the month after the Supreme Court let states ban trans athletes from school sports. The trans athletes went first. The plan for what’s left of women’s sports followed within weeks: less of it.

On Monday, Penny Nance, Concerned Women for America’s president, called on the league to “look in the mirror and do some soul-searching about what it stands for.” The number of transgender women her policy would remove from the WNBA is zero.

Also This Week

Read more

The Times has heard versions of this accusation for years, and it has always had the same defense: name the article. Any single story can be defended on its own terms, the paper’s editors defend each one, and the argument resets the next morning. A shift in framing doesn’t live in any single article. It lives in the pattern across thousands of them, in the one place no reader — and no editor, honestly — can see from a day’s paper. So Caraballo read the thousands.

The method is what the paper will attack, so the method is built to be attacked. Caraballo pulled the corpus from the Times’ own public data feeds, including every article the paper’s own editors tagged as trans coverage — 2,266 pieces carrying the Times’ own subject labels, 3,242 after de-duplication. Her rubric never asks whether a story is good for trans people, only how it is framed: who carries it, what it treats as settled, what it treats as doubtful. Three language models from three different companies scored every article against that rubric independently, a word-counting sentiment pass with no AI in it ran as a control, and one of the three models is open-weights and runs on a home computer, so anyone can rerun the whole thing without her cooperation, her servers, or her permission — and every one of those measures, run by different code on the same twelve years, landed on the same year. 2022. The data is going up on GitHub.

She is candid about where she stands — “I don’t think the existence of transgender people should be up for debate,” she writes — and candid that the findings can’t lean on it. A neutral report on a pro-trans court ruling scores neutral under her rubric, not positive. “If you think I got it wrong, the data is right there,” she writes. “I’d rather be corrected with it than agreed with on faith.”

Three years ago I measured one narrow slice of the same question. In 2024, with Media Matters and GLAAD, I counted how often the Times quoted an actual trans person in its stories about anti-trans legislation, in the year after hundreds of the paper’s own contributors had publicly criticized its coverage. About a third of the stories did. Two-thirds carried no trans voice at all. For one three-week stretch in the spring of 2023, the paper covered anti-trans bills nine times — Florida, Texas, Louisiana — and quoted no trans person in any of them.

That study measured who got quoted. Caraballo’s measures who carries the story, what gets treated as settled, and how the tone moves — across twelve years instead of one — and the two instruments, built by different people and run on different data, found the same thing. Her charts show the trans-voice and anti-trans-voice lines converging year over year until, early this year, they crossed: in the paper’s coverage of trans people, the people arguing against trans rights now carry more of the story than trans people do.

Her data can also date the turn, which is something mine couldn’t do. It concentrates in 2022, and she lays the paper’s own personnel record beside it without claiming more than the record shows. Joseph Kahn became executive editor in June 2022. Jennifer Finney Boylan — for years the paper’s most prominent trans voice — lost her contributing-writer contract early that same year, and Pamela Paul, who became the opinion pages’ most reliable skeptic of trans rights, was given her column that March. A new reporter took over the gender-medicine beat and became its most persistent critic. None of that proves why the coverage turned — Caraballo says so herself — but it puts names and dates on the season the numbers moved.

The Times has responded, through senior communications executive Danielle Rhoades Ha: “We reject any suggestion that our coverage is biased or anti-trans; we report on gender identity and related issues fully and fairly and approach our coverage with curiosity and sensitivity, as we do with every story.” The analysis, she said, “shows a fundamental misunderstanding of our journalism and how it works,” and she noted that the newsroom publishes more than 2,000 pieces of journalism each week. The defense is a claim about framing — fully and fairly — and framing is the exact thing that 3,242 scored articles, three models, and a no-AI baseline all measured moving in one direction. The statement never touches the measurement. It restates the claim the measurement contradicts, and offers the paper’s own volume as the rebuttal to a study built from the paper’s own volume.

“I don’t misunderstand anything,” Caraballo told me when I sent her the paper’s statement. “I analyzed what they wrote, every word of it. If there’s extra context they want people to know, they should write about it, not just mention it in a request for comment.” The context she left out of the study, she said, cuts the other way: “how they put their criticized coverage up for a Pulitzer or how they put star reporters to push critical trans narratives in major pieces. That’s the context I left out so their words can speak for themselves.”

The method deserves scrutiny, and Caraballo built it to take some: the rubric is published, one model is downloadable, the corpus comes from the Times’ own feeds, and the full dataset is being released for anyone to break. Skepticism that stops at “an AI said so” without opening the dashboard is the single-article defense wearing a new coat. The honest critique would rerun her numbers and show where they fail. Nobody has yet. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “no one else has contradicted my results.”

I asked her what the dashboard would show if the paper actually changed. The line on skeptical and restrictive coverage would turn back around, she said; more trans voices would be centered in the coverage; the hyper-focus on trans youth care through a critical lens would end. “They would need to stop treating trans existence as exceptional and instead ordinary.”

Any of this matters beyond media-criticism scorekeeping because the Times still sets the boundaries of respectable opinion in this country. What it frames as settled, courts and statehouses treat as settled; what it frames as an open question turns up in attorneys general’s legal filings, in school-board meetings, and in the minds of parents deciding whether to believe their own kids. The 2023 open letters — one signed by more than 100 organizations and public figures, one by hundreds of the paper’s own contributors — warned that the framing had already escaped the page. The paper dismissed them and said nothing had changed.

Three years later, the critics came back with an instrument.

Also This Week

Read more

The amendment, offered by Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert to the annual defense bill, would have codified Executive Order 14183 — the order the administration used to expel transgender service members — by requiring every member of the military to serve “in accordance with their biological sex.” It would have taken a policy that currently rests on an executive order and a Supreme Court stay and made it a statute, the kind of thing a future president can’t simply sign away. It failed, 212 to 217. Every Democrat present voted no. So did Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, James Moylan of Guam, and Kimberlyn King-Hinds of the Northern Mariana Islands — the only four Republicans to break with their party.

One thing keeps this from reading as a victory lap. The same night, in the same bill, the House passed two other anti-trans amendments. South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace got one through barring gender-affirming care under TRICARE, the military’s health program, 219 to 208, and another barring transgender girls from girls’ sports at schools the Defense Department runs for military families, 221 to 203. On the ledger for the evening, the House moved the defense bill in an anti-trans direction. One of three amendments failed. Two passed.

Which is exactly why the four “no” votes are worth naming. The measures that passed were narrow — a care restriction, a sports rule. The one that failed swept wide: a total, permanent, statutory ban on transgender people serving at all. Fitzpatrick and Lawler sit in the kind of suburban swing districts that decide House majorities. Moylan and King-Hinds are delegates from Guam and the Northern Marianas, who could vote on the amendment because it was considered in the Committee of the Whole. Four Republicans who will vote for plenty of things this administration wants would not put their names on writing an entire class of Americans out of the armed forces. That is a smaller finding than “the coalition is cracking” — and a truer one.

It is also, as far as the public record shows, a first. Anti-trans measures have reached the House floor repeatedly this Congress — a national sports ban, a bill to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors — and they have passed. Others were stripped in negotiation or never allowed a vote at all. This is the first standalone anti-trans amendment to be brought to the floor and voted down. (The distinction matters: in May, a bill to build a women’s history museum failed 204–216 while carrying an anti-trans amendment — but there the amendment was adopted and the whole bill collapsed around it. That was a bill dying. This was an amendment losing.)

None of which changes the situation for a transgender person currently in uniform, or trying to enlist. The ban Boebert wanted to codify is already in force. The executive order stands; the Supreme Court let it take effect last year; transgender service members have already been pushed out under it. July 21 killed the effort to make that ban permanent — to move it from an order a future administration could reverse into a law that would take an act of Congress to undo. Stopping that is not nothing. A statute is a lock; an executive order is a latch. Four Republicans declined to turn the lock.

So the honest version of the night is neither the celebration nor the shrug. The right did not have the votes to make the cruelest version of its policy permanent, even in a House it controls, even with the administration behind it — and it could not get there because four of its own members wouldn’t go. That is the line they found. It held on TRICARE and it held on school sports, and it broke on the total ban. Where a coalition breaks tells you where its floor is.

The people who lost this vote will be back — the NDAA still has a Senate to clear and a conference to survive, and the two Mace amendments are riding along with it. But for one night, on the one measure that would have made the ban forever, the answer was no — and Republicans made it no.

Also This Week

Read more

The same administration threw transgender people out of the armed forces and spent the last year and a half calling hormone therapy a dangerous ideology with no place in the ranks. In January 2025, one executive order — 14183 — barred people with a history of gender dysphoria from serving. A day later, a second order, 14187, labeled puberty blockers and sex hormones “chemical and surgical mutilation,” and named testosterone specifically as mutilation when it is used “to align an individual’s physical appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”

Eighteen months later, the Pentagon is building a program to find the men who don’t have enough of that same hormone and give them more of it.

The testosterone in a colonel’s prescription and the testosterone a transgender man takes are the same molecule. Not similar. Identical. The Endocrine Society — the professional body that writes the clinical guidelines — puts patients on the same drug, in the same forms, the injection and the gel and the patch, with the same yearly bloodwork, whether the person is a fifty-year-old with a documented deficiency or a trans man starting his transition. A pharmacist filling the two prescriptions could not tell them apart. The only thing that differs is whose name is on the bottle.

Which is the whole story, and everyone can see it. Hegseth’s own pitch for the program — restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities — is, almost word for word, the case that transgender people and their doctors have made for gender-affirming care for as long as the phrase has existed.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Washington Democrat and the mother of a transgender child, said it without decoration: “This is gender-affirming care, and it completely debunks all of Republicans’ attacks on trans people.” Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat and Army veteran who lost both legs when her Black Hawk was shot down over Iraq, was shorter about it: “Sounds like gender-affirming care to me.”

Transgender service members were forced out under the ban and cut off from the exact hormones their own military doctors had been prescribing them. Now those same doctors have been told to start writing that prescription for everybody else.

The response from the right has been to laugh at the Democrats pointing this out rather than answer them — Fox News ran a piece on Democrats getting “roasted” for the comparison. What no one on that side has done is explain why the same molecule is medicine in one body and ideology in another, because there is no way to say it out loud. The strongest version of their case is that testosterone for aging troops is optimization, not transition — a different medical context. But that doesn’t move the pharmacology, and it doesn’t move the executive order, which did not outlaw a context. It outlawed a drug, by name, for a particular kind of person.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, put it to the New York Times: the program “makes crystal clear that the policy banning transgender troops for taking the same medication is pure bias.”

The administration has spelled the double standard out itself, in court. For more than a year, the Justice Department defended the transgender military ban partly on money, telling federal judges that transition-related care was a needless expense and pegging it at roughly $52 million across the entire department over nine years. That was the figure it called waste. The new program will screen hundreds of thousands of troops and prescribe, indefinitely, to everyone who qualifies. No one has put a price tag on that one.

And the doctors the program leans on aren’t sold on the medicine. Urologists and men’s-health specialists told TIME and the Washington Post that screening men with no symptoms is a bad idea, and that dropping testosterone into a body that makes enough of its own can shut that production down and cause infertility. The same medical establishment invoked for “readiness” thinks the protocol is questionable. The science, it turns out, settles only when the patient is right.

On the same afternoon, at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, President Trump told an audience that grants under the CHIPS Act — the semiconductor subsidies — had required the companies receiving them to be run by transgender people. “If you weren’t transgender, as an example, you didn’t qualify,” he said. There is no such requirement anywhere in the statute, which conditions its money on building chips inside the United States and staying out of China. So in one day the administration conjured a country where the government forces firms to install transgender executives, and stood up a real program to screen soldiers for the hormone it calls mutilation the moment a transgender person takes it.

The executive order that names testosterone as mutilation still stands. So does the ban that discharged transgender troops for taking it. And now the Pentagon will screen the rest of the force and offer that same drug to anyone who needs it — everyone except the people it was taken from.

Also This Week

Read more

By the end, though, I knew that I would watch it again and again in all seasons of my life.

The acting performances are stunning, with notable turns by Anne Hathaway and Zendaya in particular. Matt Damon plays such a tortured, kinetic Odysseus that you forget, by the end, that he is Matt Damon. Tom Holland is well cast as Telemachus. Robert Pattinson, as one of Penelope’s many suitors, brings to mind a kind of serpentine Elon Musk.

The music, too, deserves notice. The composer working on the film recreated ancient instruments to build a soundscape both authentic to its era and that will, as many Nolan movie soundtracks have, redefine our own.

Like most Nolan films, the Odyssey explores themes of love and loyalty across distance and time, its structure is incomprehensible until it becomes inevitable, and it ends with the hero sailing into the proverbial sunset with Anne Hathaway. It feels like the perfected form of a story that Nolan first developed across Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, and its propulsive ending sounds uncannily similar to the latter of these projects. But most of the similarities end there.

Though Nolan’s Batman movies were beloved by a certain genre of punisher-tatted vigilante wannabe, his latest work has been subject to widespread calls for boycotts by right wing figures over its casting decisions, but its diversity feels more authentically Mediterranean than a cast made up of blonde men with blue eyes. Much has been made of Elliot Page’s role in the Odyssey, as has become traditional in some corners of our society whenever a trans person is involved with much of anything except pornography. In truth, his casting is both less pivotal than the fears of the trans-obsessed, and a masterclass in trans inclusion: Nolan needed an actor to play a character loyal to Odysseus, too young and small to have been dragged to war, and Page fit the bill. The bar in the age of political campaigns against they/them may be in the basement, but it’s refreshing to see it cleared either way. The world of the Ancient Greeks spanned continents and cultures - the poet Ovid described Scythian Priestesses who removed the male genitals they’d been born with, an invincible male hero who’d been born a woman, and a blind prophet whose lives as both made them uniquely equipped to serve as a judge of disputes about the sexes - and you feel that as you watch this film. Page, and Lupita Nyong’o’s chilling Helen, are simply part of the world. Their inclusion in the cast is both the modern right’s biggest fear, and a hopeful indicator of where our culture has already moved after the woke revolution and counterrevolution of the turbulent past decade.

While the story of Odysseus is now more than 3,000 years old, this is a movie with strong opinions about the state of the American Empire. It is one of the most visceral pieces of anti-war media I have ever seen, and it takes specific aim at the particular form of cultural rot best embodied by Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees. The antagonists in the film are gluttonous, undisciplined, delighted by the weakening of norms of courtesy, menacing towards women and comically cruel towards their lessers. Their comeuppance is as satisfying as their behavior is difficult to watch. When one particularly rancid specimen takes an arrow to the neck in a way that evokes modern parallels to one particularly high profile political assassination, the crowd in my screening applauded wildly. Sitting in a packed IMAX theater, I found myself yearning for a restoration of virtue as one of the cornerstones of a society that does not heap scorn on the poor, the frail, and the elderly - a society where even a newly-arrived beggar, made weak by time and fate but strong in will, could hope for an audience with the Queen.

All of this is to say that the Odyssey is, in a way I did not expect, a story about love. About how, having found the one person who can string your recurve bow, there is no second-best option, no going back, no moving on, nothing to do but to fill the yawning chasm of their absence as best you can, in a body with half of a heart. The romance between Odysseus and Penelope survives twenty years of longing because both of them know beyond a shadow of a doubt that their lover is the person who coaxes their best out of them. In the New Testament, written eight centuries after this story, the prodigal son returns home and is greeted with love without precondition on account of his blood. In the Odyssey, love is the role for which you continually audition (a thesis it happens to share with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders). Love is knowing that though your partner may weep with longing for the Sirens and spend seven years eating lotus flowers from the hand of Calypso, when they once again pass your threshold, wooden limbs and twine will yield to the strength of their hands alone, and the string will hum once more. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. Love always comes home.

But what the movie actually does resists a poster. Again Again is the best film about the pandemic I’ve seen, and it is the truest film about the first few years of transition I’ve seen. One film, doing both. I’m not going to spoil how it gets there — partly because the reveals deserve protecting, and mostly because the plot is the least of what you carry out of the theater.

What you carry out is a feeling, and the feeling stuns. The screening I went to sold out — SIFF ran three showings — and the cinematography earns it. Moore and co-director Heather Ballish light the film with a warmth that kept stopping me, a nostalgia for the era when studios still let movies look like places instead of plates. There is a church scene — red glass, the altar windows reflected — that did something to me I’m still thinking about.

A sequence called “Duet” is the high point of the film. The casting of the leads’ younger selves works without a visible seam. And the score — Moore co-composed it with Chloe Iris, with original music from Ekko Astral, the trans punk band fronted by Jael Holzman — is the rare indie score that stands out instead of washing past. The whole thing feels lived-in, set in an actual world, which counts for something: so much trans independent film is stuck in the claustrophobic register of people who couldn’t afford a second room. This one breathes.

And it breathes transition. Not the part the movies always choose — not the self-discovery, not the first hormones, not the reveal. Again Again lives in the mess that comes after the decision and before the peace: the difficulty of breaking an old habit, the vertigo of watching your own memories get rewritten while everyone around you keeps you filed under the previous version.

A time loop turns out to be the perfect machine for that feeling. You move back through your own life and it has changed, and the people in it haven’t updated, and the loneliness of that gap is the entire film. “Why do I have to be so fucking high all the time,” Aggie asks at one point. It lands less as a plot point about drugs than as the question anyone asks about whatever they’re still using to get through the day.

Moore has said the film grew out of her own agoraphobia during the COVID lockdowns, and you can feel that history in every frame without the film once announcing it.

Like Moore, I decided to transition immediately before COVID, and then the lockdown shoved me back inside — into many of the exact constraints I thought I had just walked out of. That timing carries a specific cruelty that is hard to explain to people who didn’t live it: you finally start, and the world makes you start over, alone, on a loop. Moore knows it because she lived it. That is what lets Again Again work as a pandemic movie that never needs the news footage. It has the feeling instead.

The emotional engine of the film is a resentment that shouldn’t make sense — a woman who bristles at the person who loves her most, in a movie otherwise full of tenderness and laughing and the easy chemistry of two people who plainly delight in each other. The film takes its time letting you understand it, and when it does, it hands you the best line in the picture. “You might be the kind of person who gets to have things,” Aggie tells Tess, “and I’m not.”

That line names the wound: the conviction that love and safety and a future are things other people get, and that loving someone who gets to have things only sharpens the sense that you don’t. The film tells the truth about how that curdles. It also tells the truth about the only way out, which turns out to be faith rather than understanding. We will never really know each other, the movie finally decides; we can only choose to believe each other anyway. Trust is a leap, not a conclusion.

It has flaws, and I don’t think Moore would want me to pretend otherwise. An early hostility between the leads asks you to hold a discordant note longer than feels comfortable, and trusts the payoff to justify it — which it mostly does. And I wanted more of what made Tess fall for Aggie in the first place. The movie treats that love as a given, maybe on purpose — from the inside, love does arrive unexplained — but it left me wanting the evidence.

Abigail Thorn, the actor behind Philosophy Tube, is a bright spot. Her Naomi is cheeky and quirked-up and pulls a lighter register out of Moore’s Aggie than anyone else in the film gets to, and the audience howled at her line readings. A movie this saturated in longing needs somebody who knows where the jokes are. Thorn keeps finding them.

Moore made this thing the way she makes everything — openhandedly, with an earnestness that reads almost defiant in a mean and cynical time. She wrote it, co-directed it with Ballish, stars in it, co-composed the score, and shot it in her hometown of Aberdeen with a crowdfunded budget and a producer roster that includes Lilly Wachowski, who also kicked $5,000 into the crowdfunding campaign herself. Moore is the person who popularized “if you want to be a girl you can just be a girl,” and the movie is made of the same stuff: no irony tax, no protective cool.

The comps are easy to reach for and none of them fit. Memento by way of I Saw the TV Glow by way of Bo Burnham’s Inside, with the DNA of ’90s cinema and anime and Life Is Strange — and somehow none of them, because all of them chase spectacle and this one chases a feeling.

There’s a moment late in the film — I won’t say which — where the laughing finally outlasts the dread, and the two women just get to crack each other up. “Have fun being straight or whatever,” one of them says, and the whole theater laughed the laugh of people who got to leave the worst of it behind them. That laugh is the gift of Again Again, rarer than another coming-out story: it films the long, ugly middle nobody films, and it promises — quietly, without insisting — a peace on the far side. You only have to decide to believe it. The movie has already decided for you.

Again Again premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in May.

Share

Subscribe now

Consider what the anti-trans movement won in the past thirty days. The Supreme Court blessed state bans on trans girls in school sports — the culmination of a five-year legal campaign. Children’s hospitals kept folding under federal pressure, with the Cleveland Clinic signing away pediatric care for decades. And then, on Monday, NPR revealed that HHS had quietly shelved the most aggressive health-care rule it ever drafted — a story about their own administration, on their signature issue.

By every theory of how movement media works, this should have been their victory month. The content wrote itself: we said we’d win, and we won.

Their audience yawned.

I watched it happen in the data, day after day. The Supreme Court ruling generated an enormous wave of right-wing posts — one of the highest-volume weeks I’ve recorded — and the wave landed with a thud. Post after post from accounts that reliably light up their followers came in at or below their ordinary performance. The engagement was there in raw numbers, spread across thousands of posts, but the heat wasn’t. Their audience treated the biggest anti-trans legal victory in American history the way you treat a rerun.

And the retreat? The rule their administration abandoned — the one that threatened every hospital in America over trans kids’ care? The accounts that spent December howling about “sex-rejecting procedures” have mentioned it barely at all. Not spun it. Not defended it. Just — nothing. Silence, from a movement that posts about us hundreds of times a day.

Then Elliot Page walked a red carpet in London, and the machine woke up.

You’ve probably seen some of it — the Odyssey press tour dogpile, a full week of misgendering headlines and gym-photo mockery from the same three dozen accounts. What you can’t see from the outside is the shape of it in the numbers: a fraction of the posting volume they spent on the Supreme Court, generating nearly identical total engagement, at per-post performance their policy content hasn’t touched in months. And as the Page cycle crested, a single post mocking a trans American detained in a Dutch asylum center spiked to eighteen times that account’s normal performance — the kind of number this machine only produces when it has found something new to feed on.

The anti-trans machine does not run on winning. It runs on people — and now that it is running out of policies to win, it will not wind down. It will need more people.

The numbers behind that sentence — how much more efficiently a pile-on performs than a policy victory, which stories the right is refusing to touch, and what’s about to replace the culture war they just won — are below, for paid subscribers.

Read more

But the rule was never in effect — and by the time it died, it had already accomplished most of what it was written to do. More than forty hospitals across the country stopped or paused care for trans youth while the threat hung over them. Nothing about this week’s news reopens a single one of those clinics.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — the federal agency that pays for the health coverage of roughly 150 million Americans — published the proposed rule on December 19 under the title “Prohibiting Sex-Rejecting Procedures for Children.” The mechanism was a “condition of participation”: the list of baseline requirements a hospital must meet to bill Medicare and Medicaid at all, which historically has governed things like nurse staffing ratios and whether the emergency generator works.

This rule would have added a new condition — no puberty blockers, no hormones, no surgery for any patient under eighteen, no matter who paid for the care. A children’s hospital that treated a single teenager on a family’s private insurance could have lost the federal money that runs its cancer floor and its emergency room.

Asked about the reversal, CMS told NPR that it “does not comment on future rulemaking or speculate on potential actions,” and then commented anyway: “The Trump Administration rejects ideologically driven surgical interventions on vulnerable children.” Surgery is vanishingly rare for transgender patients under eighteen. The rule the agency just shelved covered all gender-affirming care, which for minors mostly means counseling and, later, medication — a gap between the stated target and the actual text that ran through the entire December package.

Sam Bagenstos, who served as general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden and now teaches at Michigan Law, told NPR the decision amounts to “a victory for people who are defending the rights and interests of trans people.” He delivered the warning in the same breath: “But I don’t think it indicates a more general retreat from the aggressive posture of the Trump administration.” Both halves deserve attention, because the second half is where the story actually lives.

A rule, it turns out, accomplishes a great deal without ever becoming law.

Forty hospitals

The threat started emptying clinics almost immediately. Children’s Hospital Colorado suspended its gender-affirming care program in January, citing the mounting federal pressure. Rady Children’s in San Diego, the largest children’s health system in California, stopped prescribing hormone therapy to patients under nineteen. Children’s Minnesota halted treatment the same month.

By early February, STAT counted more than forty hospitals nationwide that had stopped or paused some form of gender-affirming care for young people, and HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart had referred six children’s hospitals — including Lurie Children’s in Chicago and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — for federal investigation. None of these hospitals was violating any law. The rule that threatened their funding never took effect. No court ever ordered a clinic closed. Their lawyers simply did the math on a nine-figure funding cliff and read the room.

Then the Justice Department started converting fear into signatures. In May, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston agreed to pay a $10 million penalty, permanently cease providing gender-affirming care to minors, and open the country’s first clinic dedicated to detransition.

A month later, the department announced a resolution with the Cleveland Clinic: a decades-long commitment to stop providing the care, $308,000 to resolve allegations that it had submitted false billing codes to Ohio Medicaid, and $2 million set aside for detransition care. The billing claims were allegations only — the department’s release acknowledges there was no determination of liability, and the Cleveland Clinic denied all of them. The clinic signed anyway.

In the press release announcing that settlement, the Justice Department described its own project with unusual candor: a national investigation into “sex-rejecting procedures on minors (often euphemistically referred to as ’gender-affirming care’)” — a federal press release informing the reader, in the government’s own voice, that the medical profession’s term for this care is a euphemism. Brett Shumate, the assistant attorney general who runs the department’s Civil Division, thanked the two hospital systems for choosing to be “part of the solution, not part of the problem,” and promised that the department’s work is “far from over.”

The rule that drove hospitals toward those settlements died on Monday. The Cleveland Clinic’s commitment runs into the 2040s.

Colorado

What happened in Colorado over the past two months is the cleanest demonstration anywhere in the country of why this week’s retreat gives back so little. On May 18, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5–2 that Children’s Hospital Colorado had likely violated the state’s antidiscrimination law when it suspended care for trans youth, and it ordered the hospital to resume.

The hospital resumed — on paper. In June, it reported that not one of its physicians was willing to provide the care, because a federal grand jury in Fort Worth, Texas, had begun issuing criminal subpoenas to doctors who do this work, and no doctor wanted to become the test case.

A state supreme court can order a hospital to open a clinic. It cannot order a physician to walk into it.

Fort Worth

That Fort Worth grand jury explains more than the empty clinic in Colorado. In May, the Justice Department used it to subpoena NYU Langone for the identities and complete medical records of every patient the health system had treated for gender dysphoria under the age of eighteen, reaching back to January 2020 — a demand that turned on no individual case and no named suspect, just a category of children the government wanted identified.

Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York blocked the subpoenas on June 24, in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Lambda Legal. The government, she found, had mounted “a concerted effort to obtain deeply private information about an entire class of individuals without their knowledge or consent.”

You do not need to hold any particular view of puberty blockers to find that chilling. Whatever the argument about the medicine, federal prosecutors assembling a named list of transgender teenagers out of hospital charts is a different kind of project — one that requires only the belief that the government has no business knowing which thirteen-year-olds went to which doctor’s appointments, a belief most Americans of every politics still hold.

December 2028

The shelved rule was shelved, not killed. Nobody withdrew it. The administration’s own regulatory agenda still lists a final action date for the rule: December 2028, which happens to be the month before President Trump leaves office.

And the companion rule that CMS published the same December day is very much alive. That one bars federal Medicaid dollars from covering gender-affirming care for patients under eighteen — and Children’s Health Insurance Program dollars for patients under nineteen — and it sits in final review right now, on track to take effect within weeks. It drew 34,960 public comments, more than the rule the administration dropped.

So the government has walked away from the version that would have reached every family and kept the version that reaches only families on public insurance. In the twenty-three states where this care remains legal, a kid on a parent’s private plan keeps her doctor, and a kid on Medicaid loses hers. Nobody in Washington had to say that part out loud. Nobody did.

The third piece of the December package fared worst of all. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s declaration rewriting the medical standard of care by personal decree was vacated as unlawful in April by Judge Mustafa Kasubhai in Oregon, who called it one more example of “how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.” As of this week the administration has not appealed. It has, however, deleted the December press release announcing all three actions from the HHS website, along with the Kennedy declaration itself — an agency quietly disposing of the evidence that it made a policy at all.

The playbook

Why did the administration fold on its most sweeping rule? Because the rule was illegal, loudly and obviously so. Bagenstos, who spent years administering these programs, laid the problem out for NPR: the Medicare Act forbids using Medicare and Medicaid to control how medicine is practiced within a state, because regulating the practice of medicine belongs to the states. Conditions of participation exist to keep the generators running and the wards staffed; by his account, no administration of either party had ever tried to use them to prohibit a treatment for a particular class of patients. Thirty thousand commenters and two of the largest medical organizations in the country said the same thing on the record, and the administration’s lawyers could count.

Which leaves the uncomfortable lesson of this week, and it is the opposite of the one in the headline: the pressure campaign worked and the law did not. Katie Keith, who directs the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at Georgetown Law, told NPR the retreat “should give hospitals more confidence to either resume or continue offering the care,” adding the sentence that ought to sting every hospital general counsel in the country: “I would argue that they should have been doing this all along anyway.”

She is right. The hospitals are unlikely to listen, because the hospitals were never afraid of the rule. They were afraid of the grand jury, the subpoena, the $10 million penalty, and the Justice Department press release with their name in the headline — and every one of those instruments survived this week intact. Kellan Baker, senior adviser for health policy at the Movement Advancement Project, put the administration’s posture to NPR in one line: it remains “prepared to use almost any means necessary.”

Run the dates forward and the machinery shows itself. CMS proposed the sweeping rule in December. Hospital lawyers did the math through the winter, and the clinics closed. The Justice Department signed its settlements in May and June, while the rule still hung over the table. And then the rule died quietly, on a Monday in July, in a document a reporter had to go get — having already banked nearly everything it was ever going to buy.

The retreat costs the administration nothing, and it will run the same play again, because the play does not require the rule to survive. It only requires the threat to be believed for a while.

Twenty-seven states. Forty hospitals. Twenty years.

Children’s Hospital Colorado has a clinic, a court order, and no doctors.

Subscribe now

Also This Week

A trans man played a Greek warrior, and the internet lost a week. Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Page appears in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as Sinon — the soldier who talks the Trojans into hauling the horse through the gate — and since the London premiere on July 6, a large slice of the right-wing internet has done nothing else. Oli London, The Post Millennial, and End Wokeness have been running the story on repeat, most of them misgendering Page in the headline while doing it. Strip away the noise and what remains is a director who has never needed anyone’s permission, casting the actor he wanted for the part. The film opens Friday.

A mainline Protestant denomination just called this care what it is. At its General Assembly in Milwaukee, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted 441–30 to declare its support for access to medically necessary, evidence-based gender-affirming health care, and separately added sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected categories in its constitution. The Daily Wire headlined the vote as an endorsement of “transgender mutilation of kids” — although the commissioners had in fact struck the phrase “including minors” from the text, reasoning that “all individuals” already covers everyone. Better than fourteen to one, a hall full of Presbyterians looked at the same treatments the Justice Department calls “sex-rejecting procedures” and called them health care.

The UK guidance is not the win the headline promised. England’s Department for Education issued new schools guidance saying staff need not automatically tell a parent when a child raises questions about gender, and much of the coverage framed it as the government declining to force schools to out their students. The document itself is narrower than that. Where a student asks to change a name or a pronoun, schools are still expected to bring parents in “in most cases,” and ministers strengthened the language so that parents’ views carry “great weight” in every decision. The confidentiality protects only the child who says something and asks for nothing — and that describes very few children.

The operative word: may. Kavanaugh wrote that states “may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.” The Court did not compel a single state to do anything; it only allowed it. That narrower holding — permission, not command — got lost in the headlines. The Court banned nothing. It removed a legal obstacle that lower courts had used to block some state bans, and left the bans where it found them: twenty-seven states have passed one over the past six years; twenty-three have not. A state that wants to keep letting a fifteen-year-old run cross-country can keep letting her. Nothing in seventy-seven pages forces its hand.

Which raises the question the celebrations skipped past: if the Court meant to take a side, why take it this way?

A Court that wanted to end this fight had two clean ways to do it. It could have read the Constitution to protect transgender students, as the Fourth Circuit did for B.P.J., and struck the bans down everywhere. Or it could have done what the right openly fantasizes about — a national ban in every state at once. It chose neither. It blessed the bans where they already stand — the states where Republicans already hold the legislature — and left everyone else to keep fighting about it.

The majority wrapped the punt in the language of restraint: drawing the line on who plays, Kavanaugh wrote, belongs to “the legislatures and the schools,” because “the Judiciary is not the proper institution” to decide it. Nobody should mistake that for modesty. Whatever the justices intended, the ruling hands candidates a gift. A ruling that settled the question would have taken the question away; this one keeps it alive in all fifty states. It lives in the twenty-three without bans, where a Republican running for governor or the legislature can now promise to pass one and point to the Supreme Court for cover. It lives in the twenty-seven that already have them, where the bans harden into permanent campaign trophies. It lives in every primary where a candidate needs a wedge. The Court did not retire trans kids as an electoral issue. It renewed the subscription.

The Court did not arrive here in a single step, either. Six years ago, in Bostock v. Clayton County, a differently composed bench ruled 6–3 — Justice Neil Gorsuch writing, the Court’s liberals in the majority — that firing a worker for living as transgender counted as sex discrimination. That coalition did not last. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat flipped months later, and the trans-rights majority went with it. Last June, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Court’s six conservatives upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors and set the rule that governs everything after: a law aimed at trans people barely has to justify itself in court. Judges give it the easy pass, not the hard look. Tuesday’s ruling picks that logic up and carries it onto the field: it leans on Skrmetti to wave the bans through, and it files Bostock under “not relevant here” — a precedent that, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in dissent, “plainly applies to Title IX.” The Court buried it anyway. The same six justices, two terms running — a Court that once read trans people into a civil right now hands the states tools to read trans kids back out, one arena at a time.

And the reach goes past sports. The Court has quietly let two more anti-trans policies take effect on the same theory that decided this case — one forcing trans adults to carry passports marked with the wrong sex, another pushing trans people out of the military after years of service. Line the rulings up and they say one plain thing: the courts will not save anyone here. Not a kid who wants to run cross-country, not an adult who needs an ID that matches her face, not a sailor with nearly twenty years in. For a decade, trans people could hope a judge would step in. This Court just shut that door.

“States’ rights” sounds neutral until you notice what got handed back to the states: a population too small to outvote anyone. We have watched this move before. Four years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade and handed abortion back, in its words, “to the people and their elected representatives” — and “the people” promptly drew a map where a woman’s rights end at a state line. The phrase sounds like democracy. It runs like a sorting mechanism. Federalism favors whoever already controls the statehouse, and when one side runs the states doing the banning, “let the people decide” hands down a very different verdict for the one percent who can never outvote the other ninety-nine. On Tuesday the Court ran the Dobbs playbook on trans kids.

Consider the size of the thing the Court spent a term on. Two plaintiffs brought these cases: Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high schooler who started puberty blockers and estrogen in elementary school and wanted to run cross-country, and Lindsay Hecox, a distance runner at Boise State. That makes the threat: two kids who wanted to join a team. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that across the five years West Virginia’s ban has stood, Pepper-Jackson stands as the only transgender girl in the entire state who has come forward to play girls’ sports. One child. Five years. An entire act of the legislature, a federal lawsuit, and a Supreme Court argument, aimed at one child who wanted to run.

The national numbers run no larger in spirit. In December 2024, under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Dick Durbin asked NCAA President Charlie Baker how many of the roughly 510,000 athletes in college sports identified as transgender. His answer: fewer than ten. The entire moral emergency, the thing worth a constitutional ruling, fits in a minivan.

This ruling did not make a single child safer. It did not protect anyone’s scholarship or anyone’s spot on a team. It handed state governments a power they lacked on Monday — the power to decide, by majority vote, which kids count as girls — and trusted that the people most eager to use it went looking for it in the first place.

A power like that never stays pointed where you first aim it. A government that can pull one student off a team because most people dislike her has established that a head count suffices — the same logic that decides which books stay on the library shelf and which families count as families. You do not have to care about transgender athletes to notice you have handed someone a loaded thing.

The right’s victory laps depend on the misreading. “The Supreme Court banned men from women’s sports” — that chyron gets it exactly backward: the Court permitted, it did not compel, and any politician who claims his hand got forced just told you he went looking for the fight. Strip the misreading away and the ruling stops reading as a referendum on transgender girls. It does not ask whether a transgender girl should make varsity. It asks whether a state legislature and a county school board belong in the business of inspecting fifteen-year-olds — and most parents answer that one the same way the moment the fifteen-year-old becomes their own daughter.

The fairness frame exists to keep that question from getting asked. The right wants the fight to turn on fairness, because the right wins that fight, even with people who would never vote Republican. But the frame falls apart the moment you look at who these laws actually catch. They draw their line around “biological sex” — less a coherent definition of “girl” than a machine for sorting transgender people out. I wrote earlier this year about a transgender man playing on a women’s team in a league that bars transgender women, because its rules classified him as a woman — on the condition that he skip the testosterone that would change the classification. A rule that ushers transgender men into women’s leagues while shutting transgender women out never aimed at protecting girls. It aimed at deciding who counts as one.

The executive branch has spent the year running the same play. In April I wrote about the Justice Department suing Minnesota to bar transgender girls from school sports and to reach back into the record books and change the results of games teenagers had already played. The line from a federal lawsuit over old box scores to a Supreme Court ruling over one cross-country roster runs straight. An apparatus this size goes looking for somewhere to point itself.

And the disproportion gives it away. Nobody trains this much firepower on a handful of kids because the threat looms large. They do it because the issue pays — and nothing measures the payoff better than how little anyone actually demands it. In an April Fox News poll, fewer than one percent of voters named “wokeness and transgender issues” the country’s most important problem, and voters trusted Democrats on the subject by thirteen points — even after Republicans poured something like $215 million into anti-trans television in 2024. The right kept losing the salience fight not because it argued badly but because no one ever asked for this fight — no one but the people who profit from having it to run on.

None of this wins the sports debate. I will say so plainly, because pretending otherwise marches advocates into the same wall every time. Most Americans — including plenty who would never vote Republican — back some version of birth-sex eligibility in girls’ sports, and the number has drifted the wrong way for years. On the bare question of who plays, our side keeps losing ground, and will keep losing it for a while. So forget winning that argument. Aim narrower and more achievable: deny the right the story it sells — that the fight has ended, that the outcome always loomed inevitable, that everyone should move on. The fight has not ended. Twenty-three states still haven’t passed a ban. Every legislature that passes one from here forward chooses to, with no one forcing its hand, on behalf of a danger that fits in a minivan.

The fear underneath the polling did not come from nowhere. Somewhere a mother genuinely dreads that a scholarship — the one that decides whether her daughter goes to college at all — could come down to a race against a transgender girl. That fear deserves a real answer, and the real answer points it the other way. A single athletic scholarship carries the weight of a whole future only because college now costs more than the families who need it most can pay — and the politicians waving this ruling have done precisely nothing about that. They have handed those parents a transgender teenager to blame instead. The nightmare they sell — your daughter, denied her shot — pins real anxiety on an imaginary culprit. In a country where a kid’s whole future did not hinge on one scholarship, no one would have a nightmare left to sell.

And for almost everyone these laws actually reach, a scholarship never entered into it. Sotomayor’s dissent paused to set down what sports give a kid: resilience and discipline, yes, but also “life-long friendships, community, and a sense of belonging.” Pepper-Jackson turned to a team at eleven — the age when a sport means just the thing your friends do after school, the Saturday game, the bus to the meet, the ordinary fact of belonging on a roster with the other kids. That marks the scope of the world these bans shrink. Not a podium. A place to belong, withheld from a child because a majority would prefer she go without.

She saw where that same reasoning leads. “To the Court,” she wrote, “the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” West Virginia wrote an absolute ban. It applies, she pointed out, even to a girl who would not take anyone’s roster spot, even on a team where everyone who tries out makes it, even when keeping her off does nothing for anyone and something cruel to her. The majority did not dispute any of that. It just handed the question back to the legislatures that wrote the bans in the first place.

We called this a pretext from the start. For three years, every time someone called it fairness, the people closest to it called it the next election — and every year since has proved us right. Knowing it has not made it hurt less, and it has not made it stop. What changes now happens in the states: in legislative sessions, in the twenty-three places where the question stays open. The Court left it on the table, and that cuts both ways. No one in a robe ended this fight with a phrase you can’t appeal. And the people who decide it next do not sit on a bench in Washington. They sit in a state house you can name, on a school board you can show up to, in a governor’s race you can work.

Becky Pepper-Jackson wanted to run cross-country. That made up the whole case. Five years and one Supreme Court later, it still amounts to exactly that — and in twenty-three states, a girl like her still can.

Also This Week

Read more

In the Republican primary for South Carolina governor, Mace — a third-term congresswoman who gave up a safe House seat to run — finished fifth. Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette, whom Donald Trump endorsed, and Attorney General Alan Wilson advanced to a June 23 runoff. Behind them came Representative Ralph Norman and businessman Rom Reddy, who had never held elected office. Then Mace, at 11.4 percent — about 37,000 votes. She had largely stopped campaigning in the final days and conceded early. Polls in the closing weeks had her stuck in the low-to-mid teens; she finished below even that.

This is a person who, for the better part of two years, was arguably the most recognizable anti-transgender politician in America who wasn’t named Trump.

It wasn’t always the plan. In 2021, Mace told CBS News she was “pro-transgender rights, pro-LGBTQ.” She’d built a brand as a post-January 6 Republican willing to cross her own party. Then she found a better one. By late 2024, after Delaware elected Sarah McBride — the first out transgender member of Congress — Mace introduced a resolution to bar McBride from the women’s restrooms in the Capitol, then expanded it into a proposed nationwide federal bathroom ban. She sold “come and take it” bathroom-sign merchandise off the fight. She traveled to Delaware, the state McBride represents, to headline a state Republican event, where she said campaigning in “Sarah McBride’s backyard” was “just icing on the cake” and added that she had “no interest” in ever meeting her. According to the Advocate’s reporting, she also used a slur through a megaphone outside the Capitol and once chased a cisgender woman out of a public restroom, wrongly believing she’d caught McBride.

When Mace launched her campaign for governor at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college, in August 2025, the trans issue wasn’t part of the pitch. It was the pitch. She promised to “ban pronouns in the classroom” — “I want kids coming home with A’s and B’s, not they and them” — to fight the “gender cult,” to veto funding for colleges promoting “gender ideology.” LGBTQ Nation’s headline on the announcement was not an exaggeration: it really was all about trans people. State issues — taxes, immigration, the things a governor actually runs — got a sentence each.

She was, in other words, the purest available test of a proposition the Republican Party has insisted on for five years: that being against trans people is a winning issue. Not a useful issue, not a base-pleaser — a winning one, worth more than your record, your seat, your relationships. Mace believed it enough to stake everything on it. And she ran the experiment in the cleanest possible lab: a Republican primary in South Carolina, an electorate that demographics and decades of state politics have built to reward exactly this. If the anti-trans playbook is a trump card anywhere on the electoral map, it is here.

It bought her fifth place. Behind a man who had never run for anything.

The people who built the bathroom fight have already told us, on the record, that they built it. Days after Mace’s 2024 resolution, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles took a bow: “We kind of brought this to the forefront.” Libs of TikTok called a trans woman using a restroom “a fetish.” Former conservative activist Charlie Kirk demanded McBride use the facilities matching her “chromosomes.” The controversy didn’t well up from voters demanding their representatives do something about congressional plumbing. The right manufactured it — they say so — and Mace volunteered to be its face.

Trump, for his part, declined to reward her. In a February Politico profile, Mace described sending him her polling numbers — “I didn’t send it to my dad. I sent it to the other fatherly figure” — and keeps a cardboard cutout of Trump, dressed in a “MACE” shirt and hat, in her office. Asked what she was looking for from him, she said: “What’s more important than an endorsement?” Then he endorsed Evette, who he said “never wavered, never let me down, and was the only South Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate to Endorse me as soon as I launched my 2024 Presidential Campaign.” The father figure picked someone else. Even the architect of the anti-trans agenda didn’t think the issue was load-bearing.

The canary

I wrote in April about Fox News’s own national poll, the one the network’s pollsters built to be as favorable to the right as a poll can be. It found Democrats leading on transgender issues by 13 points and less than 1 percent of voters naming the combined “wokeness / transgender issues” category as the country’s most important problem — a number that rounds to zero even after Fox bundled two of the right’s favorite topics into one answer. The party spent nearly $215 million on anti-trans network TV ads in 2024. The next year, in Virginia’s governor’s race, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears ran ads warning that Abigail Spanberger was “for they/them, not us” — roughly $30 million worth, by the Spanberger campaign’s count. A Republican strategist quoted in the coverage said the attacks hadn’t resonated “at all.” Spanberger won by 15 points.

Mace’s fifth-place finish is the same canary, in a different mineshaft. The Fox poll measured what general-election voters won’t buy. South Carolina measured what Republican primary voters won’t buy — and they wouldn’t buy it either, from the candidate selling it hardest, in the market most inclined to want it. The right has spent two cycles confusing fatigue with persuasion: reading “please stop talking about this” as “keep talking about this.” Last night added one more data point telling them the customer was never as interested as the salesman.

It would be easy to overread this, so I won’t. The bathroom fight didn’t sink Mace by itself. She carried plenty of her own baggage: she feuded with her party for years, ran a chaotic operation, lost Trump’s endorsement, and gave up a safe House seat for a race she was never going to win. A steadier politician holding her exact positions might have done better. Anyone who tells you the anti-trans brand alone destroyed her is selling the same overread from the other direction.

But that brand did exactly one thing for her: nothing. She staked her whole campaign on the issue her party swears is a winner, in the electorate most primed to reward it, and it gave her no floor — no base, no life raft, nothing to stand on when the rest collapsed. It didn’t cost Mace the race. It just sat there, worthless, while she lost it on her own.

Compare the trajectories. Mace made McBride the centerpiece of a national brand and finished fifth in a primary. McBride complied with the bathroom rule, kept her head down, and kept legislating — paid leave, healthcare access, the dull work of the job. She still sits in Congress. When YouGov measured the two of them last spring, McBride came out narrowly net-positive on favorability; Mace sat ten points underwater. The woman Mace cast as the villain is doing what we elect politicians to do. The woman who cast her is endorsing someone else for a job she won’t get.

None of this refunds the cost. Losing the bet did not make it harmless. Trans kids in South Carolina heard a candidate for governor turn them into a punchline at her campaign launch. McBride spent her first months in Congress as a prop in someone else’s merchandising. The cisgender woman Mace chased out of a restroom didn’t get those minutes back. And the people who manufactured the fight — Knowles, Libs of TikTok, the whole pipeline — still have their platforms and their reach. The machine doesn’t lose when its candidates do. That’s the part the canary can’t tell you.

But it can tell you the air is changing. Mace conceded last night and immediately endorsed Wilson: “I want a law and order governor, and that law and order governor is going to be Alan Wilson.” She was already chasing the next brand. In the whole concession, the issue she gave up her seat for never came up.

Sarah McBride had the last word. As the results came in, she reposted a split image of Mace beside anti-trans activist Riley Gaines — the former college swimmer — captioned “Conservative woman who placed 5th,” and added her own: “thoughts and prayers.” Then a statement: “I don’t like to punch down and I believe in the politics of grace, so I’ll just say, Happy Pride, Nancy.”

Also This Month

Read more

The suspect — described by UW police as a Black man between 25 and 30 years old, 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-8, with a slim build, black hair and a beard, wearing a dark blue vest over a button-up shirt and blue jeans — fled the building and was last seen heading toward University Village. UW police said the suspect is not affiliated with the university.

The victim was a University of Washington student; her name had not been publicly released as of Tuesday morning and no arrest had been made. Nordheim Court was operated by UW Housing & Food Services until May 2024, when the university sold the complex to Greystar and Provident; the property continues to house UW students and is listed as off-campus student housing affiliated with the university.

The UW Trans Collective released a statement on Instagram Monday afternoon. “Last night, a 19-year-old woman was killed in student housing,” the collective wrote. “Reports state that the victim was a trans woman. We at TCUW and in the rest of the UW community, as a collective and as individuals, are devastated that another one of our sisters was taken from us. Trans women, particularly trans women of color, are among the most vulnerable populations to violent crimes.”

The collective, posting in collaboration with the UW chapters of Students for a Democratic Society and ICA, called on the public to refuse any coverage that deadnames the victim or removes her transness from the narrative. “If this woman is deadnamed in the media, do not stand for it,” the collective wrote. “If details of her transness are removed from the narrative, do not stand for it.” The group said it would be scheduling a vigil and asked the community to stay posted for further announcements.

What happened in the Nordheim Court laundry room Sunday night was, by the documented public record, the seventh attack on a trans woman in the Seattle area in twenty months — and the first to be fatal. The Stranger’s September 23, 2025 piece by Vivian McCall assembled the prior six cases; KOMO News and other local outlets have reported on the resulting charges and trials.

In September 2024, a man named Andre Karlow attacked a transgender Sound Transit fare ambassador at the Chinatown-International District light rail station. The following February, a Seattle man named Michael Martindell followed a trans woman off a bus and assaulted her; two strangers joined the attack. In March 2025, four men beat a transgender Navy veteran outside her workplace in the U District; she sustained a brain bleed, fractured teeth, and required hospitalization. Karlow was convicted of hate crime and assault in February of this year for that March attack. The slurs he used, according to King County prosecutors at trial, included “drag queen,” “take your makeup off,” and “Trump got rid of people like you.” He has more than a dozen prior felony convictions.

In June 2025, a man named Onosai Popio Faumuina initiated an attack on two trans women at Lake Union Park; other men joined, the women were dragged toward the water, and a handgun was fired. On September 2, 2025, three trans women — Madison Carstens, Michelle Caywood, and Denise Throckmorton — were attacked at the corner of 12th and Union in Capitol Hill by six or seven men; Carstens sustained a concussion and a ruptured eardrum. In the week before McCall’s piece was published, three teenage boys and a 25-year-old man attacked a trans woman at the Renton Transit Center.

The King County Prosecutor’s Office filed charges in four of the six prior cases, according to Yessenia Manzo, the senior deputy prosecutor who handles hate crimes for the office. Manzo told The Stranger in September that trans women are the only group in King County experiencing this pattern of organized group violence. No other protected category, in her office’s case record, is being targeted by groups of cisgender men in the way trans women are.

Sunday night’s stabbing brings the documented total to seven attacks. It is the first to leave a victim dead. It is the second to take place in the University District in fourteen months.

UW spokesperson Victor Balta issued a statement Monday saying the university could not confirm the victim’s identity until her family had been notified. “Nordheim Court is operated by Greystar,” Balta said, “and the UW is working with Greystar to ensure residents there are receiving support and resources in light of this tragedy.” UW President Robert J. Jones, in a separate statement reported by The Daily, acknowledged that the killing has particular resonance for LGBTQIA+ students. “While investigators have not yet identified a suspect or a motive, I want to recognize that when violence affects a trans person it can be especially worrying to our LGBTQIA+ community members,” Jones said, adding that the Division of Student Life was reaching out to affected students with support and resources.

Neither statement addressed the documented pattern of attacks on trans women in Seattle, the prior 2025 attack on a transgender Navy veteran outside her workplace in the same University District neighborhood, or the university’s decision to allow a registered student organization to host a speaker arguing against gender-affirming care two days after the stabbing. The Seattle Police Department’s Bias Crimes Unit, which has investigated previous attacks in the pattern, has not publicly confirmed its involvement in the May 10 case.

The University of Washington’s chapter of Turning Point USA is scheduled to host the ex-trans activist Chloe Cole at Kane Hall, Room 210, on Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. — two days after the stabbing. Cole’s public work argues that gender-affirming care is medical harm and that access to such care should be restricted, particularly for adolescents. She is among the most prominent national voices in the political project that produced the executive orders the Trump administration signed on trans issues during its first hundred days in office. The Cole event was scheduled before the May 10 stabbing. As of Tuesday morning, the University of Washington had not announced any change to the booking or cancellation of the event.

The event is the second TPUSA UW has hosted this spring under the “Pick Up the Mic Initiative,” a campus-speaker program the organization launched after the September 10, 2025 assassination of its co-founder, Charlie Kirk, at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. TPUSA’s campus-speaker programming has continued under the initiative, with confirmed 2026 appearances by Vice President JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, the conservative commentator Matt Walsh, and others.

The first TPUSA UW event of the spring was a “Prove Me Wrong” debate at the Husky Union Building on April 29, featuring the former Virginia state delegate and TPUSA-affiliated commentator Nick Freitas. University of Washington police arrested a counter-protester at that event after he refused to stop drumming during the speaker’s remarks; according to FOX 13 Seattle’s coverage, the arresting officers had given the protester multiple warnings to stop. The university has not, in the two weeks since, issued public guidance regarding TPUSA’s campus programming or the safety of students from marginalized communities during such events.

UW Divestment Campaign and the UW chapter of Students for a Democratic Society have organized a counter-protest at Kane Hall for Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., the same time and place as the Cole event. The same SDS chapter co-signed the Trans Collective’s statement Monday afternoon.

Washington State has positioned itself, in policy and in public messaging, as one of the most protective states in the country for transgender people. In April 2023, Governor Jay Inslee signed the Shield Law (HB 1469) and a companion provider-protection bill (HB 1340), the first of which protects people in Washington from civil and criminal actions in other states that restrict or criminalize gender-affirming care. The shield law, the state attorney general’s enforcement posture under Bob Ferguson and now Nick Brown, and the legislative protections passed under Inslee and continued under Governor Ferguson have together been described — by advocacy organizations, by trans-rights commentators, and by the state’s own communications — as a national policy contrast against the states that have built the criminalization regime trans people have spent the past several years fleeing. The state’s communications have invited that comparison and have encouraged trans people to relocate to Washington.

People have. The trans women attacked at 12th and Union, at Lake Union Park, at the Renton Transit Center, outside their U District workplace, and now in the laundry room of an off-campus UW housing complex were each living the life Washington’s protective infrastructure was supposed to allow them to live. The infrastructure did not reach them.

The UW Trans Collective said Monday it would be scheduling a vigil and asked the community to stay posted on its channel for the details. As of Tuesday morning, the Seattle Police Department was continuing to search for the suspect. The victim’s name had not been released.

“Please hold your trans siblings tight today,” the collective wrote. “Together we are stronger.”

The USL W League’s eligibility rule, which the league says is in line with U.S. Soccer Federation policy, registers players “only with the gender team with which the player was assigned at birth, without regard to any other stated gender held or part of the player’s core identity.” Trans women are barred from women’s teams in the league. Trans men, by the same rule, can play women’s teams — under an anti-doping framework that operates within the same logic as the pre-2025 NCAA rule that allowed Ranson to play women’s college soccer at Cal State Fullerton. That rule required trans men on women’s college teams to refrain from testosterone-based hormone therapy. The USL W rule operates on the same principle.

A trans man signed to a women’s team because the league has classified him as a woman, on the condition that he forgo the medical care that would change that classification, is not a milestone for trans inclusion. It is the policy outcome the right has been engineering for nearly ten years.

Trans men are men

Trans men are men. This is the central claim of trans politics — the claim every executive order signed by the second Trump administration is designed to overturn, the claim every state-level athletic ban depends on rejecting, the claim every “biological sex is the only thing that matters in women’s sports” op-ed exists to undermine. “Chromosomes don’t lie,” former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines wrote in Fox News in 2026, in an op-ed celebrating the Olympics for “picking biology over ideology”; “No more gray areas. No more pretending biology is optional.” The right’s project is to write into law and culture a single proposition: that a person’s sex assigned at birth is the relevant fact about their athletic, medical, legal, and social identity, and that what they have done with their lives, their bodies, and their time is not.

The cleanest mechanism for enforcing that proposition is sports policy. When a league or a state requires athletes to compete in their birth-assigned-sex category, the rule produces, with industrial reliability, the visuals the right needs: trans men in girls’ brackets, trans women shut out of competition. The visual doesn’t require the right to win an argument about gender. It requires the right to control the rules of the institution making the placements. Every time a trans man ends up on a women’s roster — by force of state law, by accommodation under league policy, by his own choice within the framework — the rule has worked.

The cases the rule produces are not symmetric. A trans man, under birth-sex placement, is included in women’s competition. A trans woman, under the same rule, is excluded from competition entirely. This asymmetry is what the structural argument means when it says trans men, like other men, occupy a position of privilege relative to trans women — a claim that has become controversial but that the rule’s outputs make undeniable. Sociologist Armani Beck’s 2024 Rutgers dissertation, “And now I have male privilege”: transgender accounts of the precarity of privilege, traces how trans men experience access to male privilege contingent on being read as men in public — and the corollary, here visible in the soccer rule, is that the same trans man also retains access to women’s institutional categories on the basis of birth assignment. The trans woman has neither. She is barred from male spaces by the social fact of her transition and barred from female spaces by the rule’s birth-sex framing. Her exclusion is the rule’s intended product. The trans man’s inclusion is the rule’s permissible byproduct.

A version of trans politics that defines inclusion as the right of an individual trans person to be treated as a member of their birth-assigned-sex category — that does not insist on transition, and that does not require the structural changes real transition demands — is what historian Jules Gill-Peterson, in “Reject Transgender Liberalism,” calls transgender liberalism: “the rejection of transition as what distinguishes transgender people from the rest of the population.” The celebration of a trans man on a women’s roster, in a league that bars trans women, is what transgender liberalism looks like at its terminal point. It does not require the league to change. It does not require any of the harder material work of trans liberation. It requires only that the trans man take the placement the rule offers him.

Read more

Euphoria actress Hunter Schafer wore custom Prada built around Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Mäda Primavesi, the 1912 painting of a nine-year-old girl standing very still in a white dress with rosettes beneath the bust. The painting is one of Klimt’s portraits of his patrons’ daughters, and the girl in it has the upright, unsmiling presence of a child who has been told to hold still for the artist and is trying. Schafer wore the painting grown up. The empire waist and rosettes were preserved exactly. The dress itself was deliberately torn in long ragged cutouts that revealed floral silk chiffon underneath — a train of what was inside. W called the effect “Schafer as Primavesi all grown up.” The fashion reading is that the dress is aged, weathered, deteriorated by time. The other reading — the one I could not stop thinking about — is that the painting was made of a child, and the woman is what was underneath all along, and the cuts are how the underneath got out.

Model Alex Consani wore Gucci, by Demna, reportedly inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera — Spring, the painting where Venus stands in a meadow flanked by the goddess of flowering and the West Wind. Consani arrived in a long white faille cape and removed it on the carpet to reveal a sheer nude bustier and a black-feathered skirt and train. The cape was the move. She arrived covered in white and removed the cover and stood there in what was under it, by choice, in front of every camera in the city. She is the first trans woman on the Met Gala host committee. She said it was “a really special moment” and that she hoped to “set the conversation around expression and our bodies.”

Aariana Rose Philip wore custom Collina Strada by Hillary Taymour, a black gown built for her body and her chair. She is the first Black trans woman with quadriplegic cerebral palsy to attend the Met Gala, and the first wheelchair user — of any identity — to attend the Met Gala in its history. The second of those facts is the one most of the coverage led with, and it is the one that should be led with. The Met has been holding this event since 1948. It took until 2026 for the institution to figure out how to invite a person who uses a wheelchair to the steps. Philip told Vogue: “for so long, disabled people were not represented anywhere…To go from that to now, somehow finding myself there — I can’t say how blessed and honored I feel attending.” The honoring runs both ways. The institution that finally figured out how to open the door is also the one being honored, by a person who agreed to come through it on its terms.

The 2026 Met Gala theme was Costume Art. The premise of the show is that the dressed body is itself a medium — that fashion is a centuries-old art form whose canvas is a human being. That theme, in 2026, while the federal government is actively writing law about whose body counts as which kind of person, is not a neutral curatorial choice. It is one of those moments when the calendar produces a juxtaposition the institutions involved did not necessarily set out to make and then cannot un-make. Schafer’s body was offered as a reading of a Klimt painting; Consani’s body was offered as a reading of a Botticelli; Philip’s body was offered as the answer to a question about whose body the institution had managed not to invite for seventy-eight years.

I have spent my entire adult career arguing — sometimes for pay, sometimes in tweets, sometimes in research about the New York Times’s coverage of trans people — that visibility is not safety. That trans women being photogenic on a red carpet does not save trans kids in Tennessee whose families are losing them to forced outing laws. That representation is not policy. That what one trans woman in a designer gown does on the cover of Vogue does not, by itself, change the material conditions of any other trans woman’s life. I believe all of this. I will keep arguing it. The data on it has not moved.

And also, on Monday night, I was inspired.

The reason I was inspired is that I have never in my life seen three trans women arrive at a room like that one as if they belonged there. Not as the diversity hire on the host committee. Not as the brave breakthrough quoted in the soft-focus profile that the magazine ran to demonstrate its open-mindedness. Just there, dressed as art, taking the picture, being photographed by the same photographers and praised by the same critics and listed in the same best-dressed roundup that listed Beyoncé. The fashion press wrote about their dresses. The dresses were good. That was the entire story, on the surface.

If you have spent your life knowing that the room you are entering is going to do you damage on the way out, the experience of seeing other people who are like you enter the same kind of room and not get damaged is important.

I came up in a generation of trans women that learned to manage expectations. I learned, before I transitioned, the small daily practice of reading a room for hostility before entering it — the version of that practice available to a white, middle-class person who would eventually be able to pass, which is the gentlest version of it on offer. I learned, after I transitioned, that being recognizable as trans in public was — if I was not sufficiently careful about my voice or my walk or happened to cross paths with someone with a porn addiction and a guilt problem — a tax I could pay every time I left the house, and I learned the small daily craft of paying it without losing the entire day. The art of being in public as a trans woman, for most of us, has historically been the art of being in public less — of training the eye to not see you, of wearing the cut and color that doesn’t catch attention, of taking the seat at the back of the cafe.

What Hunter Schafer did on Monday night, and what Alex Consani did on Monday night, and what Aariana Rose Philip did on Monday night, was the inverse of that art. They moved toward the cameras. They wore the cuts that were designed to be looked at. They were art — they had volunteered, with the Met’s collaboration, to be art — and they collected the looking that art collects. There were no apologies in any of the three dresses. There was no managing. There was nothing said with any of the three bodies that meant please do not see what I am. There was a great deal said with all three bodies that meant look.

I am thirty-five years old. I have been a trans woman in public for something like eight years. The number of trans women in human history who have taken a room the way the three of them took those steps is vanishingly small. The political claim — that representation does not equal liberation, that one trans woman on a host committee does not undo the legislative damage being done to trans children by the same institutions that find trans women acceptable when they are dressed by Gucci — that claim is true, and I have written it many times, and I will write it again. But the cost of being a trans woman in public, paid daily by the trans women who do not get the Gucci cape, is not separately measurable from what the Gucci cape is for. The cape says the room can hold this. The cape says, to the next girl who is about to enter a worse room: there is a way of standing in public in which your existence does not require an apology.

I do not believe that way is universally available yet. I know it is not. But I have spent enough of my life apologizing for taking up space to recognize the difference when I see it.

The dressed body in public is always making a political statement. The question is whose body, and what room they are standing in. In January 2025, Lauren Sánchez stood next to her husband Jeff Bezos in the Capitol Rotunda at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, in a white Alexander McQueen pantsuit with a white lace bra showing through the open blazer. She later told The New York Times she was “super proud” of the look. The criticism she received was about taste. It was not about whether she belonged in the room. The room — the Rotunda, the inauguration, the front row of the new presidency — was hers, on her billionaire husband’s seat, behind the man whose first executive orders would target trans people for federal exclusion. She wore the kind of revealed body that no trans woman in this country could wear in that room, on that day, and survive professionally. She did not have to think about it.

Four months later, on the Met Gala steps, Alex Consani wore a sheer bustier under a cape she removed in front of the cameras. The visual move is similar. The political stakes are not. Consani was not standing behind power on the day power renewed its right to write trans women out of public life. She was standing on the cultural pinnacle in the year power was trying to do exactly that. The body in the dress was making a different argument because the room was different.

In the months since Trump’s second inauguration, the federal government has issued executive orders that govern whether a trans person can update a passport, board a plane, hold a federal job, or use a public restroom in a federal building. The conditions of trans life are not improving. The country we live in is not improving.

And on Monday night, three trans women arrived at the most photographed room on the continent and were beautiful in it, and the photographers took the picture, and the magazine wrote it up the way it would have written up anyone, and the dresses really were good, and Hunter Schafer was the painting all grown up, and Alex Consani took the cape off, and Aariana Rose Philip arrived at a building that had not, in seventy-eight years, figured out how to invite her.

I am allowed to want both of those things to be in the same sentence. I am not required to choose between them. The political analysis stands. The cape is also the cape.

Three years ago I wrote a report at Media Matters about Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and the wave of right-wing commentators who had begun, openly and on camera, calling for the elimination of transgender people from public life. Knowles told a CPAC audience in 2023 that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” This terrifying pronouncement was defended by Senator Mike Lee and other federal officials. At the time, I argued that there was no distinction between the concept of “transgenderism,” and that Knowles was making a genocidal statement.

I was partly right at the time, and partly wrong. I was right that the people running the rhetoric were after trans people, not an abstraction; the federal executive orders of the last four months prove it. They are not aimed at an idea of transgenderism. They are aimed at the passports and the bathrooms and the jobs of people I know.

But there was also an idea those men were after, and they have not been able to eradicate it. They will not be able to eradicate it. The idea is what Hunter Schafer was wearing on the steps of the Met. The idea is the cape Alex Consani took off in front of every camera in the city. The idea is the ramp Aariana Rose Philip got the institution to build for her. You can write executive orders against the bodies. You cannot write executive orders against the idea of Hunter Schafer in a Klimt dress — the painting all grown up, the cuts that let the underneath out.

I do not know what the Met Gala does for the seventeen-year-old in Tennessee whose parents are about to be informed by her school that she has asked her teacher to call her by a different name. The honest answer is probably nothing. The honest answer is probably that one beautiful image on a phone screen in a bathroom at school is a thin shield against a state.

But shields have been thinner. The girls who came before me did not have the Met Gala. They did not have the cover of Vogue. They did not have the chance to look at a photograph of a woman who was like them being praised in the same paragraph as Beyoncé. The thinness of a shield does not negate that it is one. The seventeen-year-old in Tennessee will, on Tuesday, see that picture. So will the eight-year-old in Mississippi. So will the disabled trans kid in any of the fifty states whose first thought on seeing Aariana Rose Philip on the steps was that is the first time I have seen what I will look like in my own life. So will the woman in her late forties who has not yet told anyone, who has been holding a feeling like a held breath for thirty years, who will scroll past Hunter Schafer in the Klimt dress and feel something she does not have a word for.

The political conditions do not change because of a dress. The interior conditions of the people the political conditions are aimed at sometimes do.

I did not meet an out trans woman until I was twenty-eight years old. By then I had already come out. The thing I had to figure out about my own life, I had to figure out without seeing it lived in front of me. There were trans women in the world — there had always been trans women in the world — but the part of the world I had access to, growing up where I grew up, with the people I grew up around, did not contain any of them. I assembled a future for myself out of books and the internet and the small flashes of recognition I got from rumors of other people’s lives. The work was uphill. It is hard to describe how uphill it was, because the difficulty was made of an absence, and absences are difficult to point at.

The kid in Tennessee on Tuesday morning will start the same imagination work in a room where it has been done first by people who are now on the steps of the Met. The work will still be uphill. The state she lives in will still be hostile. The federal government will still be writing executive orders aimed at her. But she will be doing the imagination work in a world that contains a photograph of Hunter Schafer in the Klimt dress, and a photograph of Alex Consani removing the cape, and a photograph of Aariana Rose Philip at the top of a ramp she got the institution to build for her. None of those photographs existed for me. All of them exist for her.

Three women on Monday night put a marker of public dignity for trans people on the steps of the Met. They did not put it everywhere. They put it there. It is a real place. A child who is currently at war with her own image will, eventually, see what they did, and the war will not end, but the terms of the war will have changed, because the kid will have seen a thing that previously did not exist for her to see.

In February, I wrote about a Fox poll released in late January. That poll reported Democrats leading Republicans on trans issues by 22 points — the largest partisan gap Fox measured on any topic — but marked questions 21 through 31 “held for future release.” Every other question in the release came out with full party, age, and education breakdowns. The ones Fox held were the ones that would have shown the demographic shape of the 22-point Democratic lead.

The April poll is different. Conducted April 17–20, 2026, under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R), with a sample of 1,001 registered voters and a margin of error of 3.0 percentage points. The trans crosstabs are in this release.

Democrats lead Republicans on transgender issues 56–43. The Democratic advantage is larger than on the economy (+4), larger than on inflation (+8), smaller than on healthcare (+21), smaller than on climate (+29), smaller than on abortion (+18). The trans-issues gap has moved from the largest partisan gap in Fox’s January poll to one of several Democratic-advantage issues in the April poll — not because Republicans are gaining ground on trans issues, but because they are now losing on nearly everything.

The real story is Trump’s collapse

Donald Trump’s personal standing has collapsed.

His approval is 42–58. Strong disapproval is 45 percent — nearly twice his strong approval of 23 percent. Asked whether the Trump administration has been “competent and effective in managing the federal government,” 56 percent say no. Asked whether Trump has the judgment to serve effectively as president, 57 percent say no. Temperament, 60 percent no. Mental soundness, 55 percent no. Whether Trump cares about people like them, 63 percent no.

The environment underneath him is worse. On the economy Trump is at 34–66. On inflation, 28–72. Government spending, 33–67. Foreign policy, 40–60. His only issue above water, among the eight handling questions measured, is border security, at 53–47. Seventy-three percent of voters say economic conditions are “only fair” or “poor.” Seventy percent say the economy is getting worse. Sixty-two percent say current grocery prices are a major problem for their family. Sixty percent say the same about gas prices. Fifty-five percent about healthcare costs. Fifty-two percent about housing.

And the generic congressional ballot, which in Fox’s January survey was already a Democratic +5, now has Democrats at 52, Republicans at 47. Five points again.

This is the environment in which Fox published the trans crosstabs.

The question the right has answered for everyone

The headline is question 25.

Fox asked a version of a question pollsters have been fielding for nearly a century: “What do you think is the most important issue facing the country today?” Voters named inflation (26%), the economy (17%), political leadership and corruption (13%), Iran and war (11%), political division and the preservation of democracy (9%), immigration and border security (8%), healthcare (3%), homelessness (3%), government spending (2%), and climate (1%).

Fox combined “wokeness” and “transgender issues” into a single response category. That combined category rounded to zero percent.

The rounding is doing real work. No demographic subgroup in Fox’s crosstabs exceeded 1 percent on the combined “wokeness / transgender issues” category. The 1-percent readings were scattered — women, Hispanic voters, suburban voters, voters under 45, a few Republican-leaning subgroups, and “very conservative” respondents. Among Democrats, independents, moderates, men, rural voters, Black voters, and voters over 65, the finding rounded to zero or registered as no respondents at all.

That is a striking result in its own right. Fox’s pollsters put their thumb on the scale by combining the right’s two favorite culture-war categories into a single response option, which should inflate the reading. It still rounds to zero.

This is the issue the Republican Party built its 2024 ad strategy around. Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads attacking trans rights in the 2024 cycle, per AdImpact data reported by the Washington Post’s Casey Parks — a figure that excludes cable and streaming. In the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial race, eight-figure anti-trans ad spending was deployed against Abigail Spanberger; she won by 15 points, the largest Democratic gubernatorial margin in Virginia since 1961.

Even with $215 million in network TV. Even with eight-figure state-race spending. Even with an administration that made it a signature. Even with the “wokeness” and “transgender” categories bundled in Fox’s own Q25 to inflate the result. Less than one (1) percent of voters tell Fox’s pollsters this is the top issue facing the country.

The honest part of the data

Fox asked voters what is the one issue Democrats should talk about less. The answers are worth looking at directly.

“Culture Issues,” at 19 percent, is the single biggest “talk about less” category for Democrats — a Fox-constructed bucket that includes transgender issues, LGBTQ, DEI, racism, gender, and wokeness. It is ahead of Donald Trump (16 percent), immigration and transgender issues individually (both 11 percent), abortion (5 percent), and inflation (2 percent). Trump is a person, not an issue; the comparison that matters is the 19 percent on culture as a bucket.

Within that bucket, transgender issues specifically came in at 11 percent — tied with immigration as the largest single-issue response. Eight percent of Democrats themselves — Fox’s own Democratic respondents — say their party should talk about transgender issues less. Nine percent of 2024 Harris voters say the same.

The honest read requires separating two findings in the same survey. Voters trust Democrats on trans issues by 13 points. Voters also want Democrats to talk about trans issues less. Both numbers are true and they do not contradict each other. Voters are telling the party they agree with to stop litigating a topic the other party has spent five years forcing into every news cycle. That is a fatigue signal. It is the measurement of a manufactured-discourse cycle reaching the point where the audience it was aimed at stops paying attention — including the audience that has always been on the trans-friendly side.

The right has spent two cycles confusing fatigue with persuasion. They see a poll that says “stop talking about trans issues” and read it as an instruction to keep talking about trans issues. The volume is self-reinforcing: the more the right pushes, the more the discourse fatigues, the more voters say stop, the more the right interprets the signal as proof the issue is working. The signal silence would produce is identical.

A Democratic party that reads the 11 percent correctly makes fewer speeches specifically framed around trans rights and more policy work that includes trans people inside larger questions of economic and healthcare access — without concessions on substance. The 13-point lead on trans issues holds only if the substance holds. A party that leads by 13 on trans issues does not need to keep litigating them on the stump. It needs to govern.

The part that is not in the poll

The Republican Party spent five years building an anti-trans narrative machine — more than $215 million in 2024 TV ads, more than 760 anti-trans state bills filed in 2025 alone, and a federal administration that has made trans-targeted executive orders and agency policies a signature of its second term. Measured by its most favorable indicator, Fox News’s own polling, the machine now delivers a 13-point deficit on the topic it built itself around, less than 1 percent share of voter concern, and a general-election environment in which the party is losing nearly every issue that isn’t border security.

The messaging strategy did not save them from the economy. The messaging strategy, measured by Fox’s own crosstabs, did not even do the thing it was built for. Fox published the numbers this week because the numbers are now indistinguishable from the rest of the collapse.

Less than one percent.

Also This Week

Read more

He also called out Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) by name for posing with him on Capitol Hill.

The trans internet split immediately. One camp: too little, too late. The other: see, even he gets it now. They’re both part right.

Chappelle isn’t sorry. He’s resentful, which is different. He doesn’t regret “The Closer.” He regrets the company it put him in.

Anti-trans bills were already escalating before Chappelle — 32 in 2019, 91 in 2020. But in 2021, the year “The Closer” premiered on Netflix, state legislatures introduced 153. By 2023, that number was 614. By 2025, it was 1,022. The content of those bills — banning healthcare, criminalizing doctors, forcing schools to out children to their parents, putting the government between families and their physicians — has nothing to do with comedy. But the political permission to pass them came from somewhere.

A comedian tells a joke that treats trans identity as inherently absurd. The audience laughs. The laughter establishes a social norm: this is acceptable to mock. A pundit picks it up and strips the nuance — no ambivalence, none of the self-awareness about punching down. A politician picks it up from the pundit and strips the humor. What remains is a policy position dressed in common sense: everyone knows this is ridiculous, so why not legislate?

Social psychologists have a name for this. Disparagement humor doesn’t create prejudice. It activates it. It releases pre-existing bias into acceptable social expression. The comedy didn’t make people transphobic. It made transphobia speakable. And once it was speakable, it became law.

Chappelle’s “The Closer” declared him “team TERF”, defended J.K. Rowling, and devoted a long section to Daphne Dorman — a trans woman and comedian who opened for him and who died by suicide in 2019. Netflix employees walked out. GLAAD condemned it. Then-co-CEO Ted Sarandos said content doesn’t translate to real-world harm, then said he “screwed up” the messaging but kept the special. Chappelle said he’d stop making trans jokes “until we are both sure that we are laughing together.” He continued to reference trans topics in subsequent tour dates and appearances.

Chappelle wanted to push boundaries. The Republican Party wanted to pass laws. He gave them the register — the eye-roll, the “everyone knows this,” the framing of concern for trans people as uptight overreaction — and they gave it a policy agenda. Ninety-one bills became a thousand.

What those bills do is not abstract. Families in states with healthcare bans are making choices no family should have to make — moving across state lines so their kid can see a doctor, pulling children out of schools that are legally required to out them, facing legal costs to keep their families together. Doctors are being criminalized for providing care that every major medical association — the AMA, the AAP, the Endocrine Society — says is medically appropriate. The government is telling parents they can’t make medical decisions for their own children while claiming to defend parental rights.

Gallup found in March 2025 that 51% of Americans consider changing gender “morally wrong” — and that 62% oppose banning gender-affirming care for minors, including a majority of independents. Americans can hold moral discomfort and oppose government bans at the same time. In other surveys, when the question is framed as a choice between parents and doctors or state legislators, the numbers are even more lopsided. The GOP’s anti-trans legislative agenda is out of step with what voters actually believe about the government’s role in these decisions.

I want to be clear about something. Trans people said this would happen. We said it when “The Closer” came out. We said it during the Netflix walkout. We said it when the bills started multiplying. We said “this is what a permission structure looks like” and we were told we were overreacting, that it was just comedy, that we couldn’t take a joke. Now the comedian himself is saying what we said in 2021, and everyone is nodding along like this is a revelation.

It is exhausting to be right about a threat for five years and then be expected to feel grateful when the person who helped build it finally notices the building is on fire. But grace is the only option that actually works here. If the goal is fewer bills and safer families, then the door has to stay open for people who are late — even people who are this late, even people who profited from being wrong. The alternative is a smaller coalition and a longer fight.

So: welcome, Dave. We told you so. And we need you anyway.

Also This Week

Read more

I say that because of Bryon Noem, and because of a person called John.

Share

On March 31, 2026, the Daily Mail published hundreds of messages between Bryon Noem — husband of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — and three women in the online bimbofication community. A 56-year-old insurance executive from South Dakota had been paying upwards of $25,000 to OnlyFans creators who specialize in extreme breast augmentation and doll-like transformation. He used the alias “Jason Jackson.” He sent photos of himself wearing fake breasts made from balloons. He told one model he wanted to marry her.

“I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart,” Bryon Noem told the New York Times — when asked if he had anything to say.

Kristi Noem’s spokesperson said the family had been “blindsided” and asked for “privacy and prayers.”

Trans people have a name for this: John 50.

In 2001, a psychologist named Anne Vitale published a paper called “Implications of Being Gender Dysphoric: A Developmental Review.” Vitale is a trans woman herself — she transitioned in 1980 and spent the next twenty-five years counseling over 500 gender-variant clients in private practice in California. She’s been a member of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, since 1979. She is not speculating about this from the outside.

The paper identified three groups of people experiencing what she called gender dysphoria.

Group One was people who present as their true gender early and transition with relatively little difficulty. Group Two was the equivalent pattern in trans men. Group Three was the one that mattered to me.

Group Three is the closeted ones — the ones who pass. Vitale described them as people who look and act exactly as society expects them to — who build conventional lives, hold advanced degrees, climb corporate ladders, marry, have children — while living with their dysphoria in secret. She traced what happens to them across a lifetime. In childhood, they know something is wrong but learn fast that saying so is dangerous. In adolescence, they double down: they date the right people, play the right sports, perform the gender that keeps them safe. In young adulthood, they build the structure — career, marriage, family — and wrap it around the secret like a cast around a broken bone. It works. For a while.

Then it stops working. Vitale documented what the middle-age crisis looks like for Group Three: panic attacks, insomnia, inability to concentrate, episodes of weeping. The dysphoria doesn’t fade with age. It worsens in direct proportion to how deeply entrenched the person becomes in the life they’ve built around it. The further they get from believing they can ever live as themselves, the more acute it gets. Some become suicidal.

Vitale described a patient she called John. John was 50, a research scientist, married 23 years, three kids. John showed up in her office after a panic attack at an airport so bad they called paramedics, disclosing having “episodes” at work — curling into the fetal position and sobbing at a desk. John had known since childhood.

John wasn’t faking a career or being a father. John was faking one thing, and the effort of faking that one thing colonized everything else until there was nothing left.

John transitioned. Three years of therapy and hormone treatment, and then came out and lived as a woman full-time. She returned to her career. The structure keeping her from being herself didn’t just fail — it was replaced by something real. But she lost decades.

In trans communities, “John 50” has become shorthand for or a pattern. Most of us know someone like this. Some of us almost became someone like this. Like a splinter in your mind, the feeling doesn’t die. It curdles, comes out sideways, spilling out in ways the person themselves might not fully recognize, decades later, in a DM to a stranger.

And now it’s time for all the disclaimers: Bryon Noem may not be trans at all though that’s certainly up for debate. There are cis men, cis women, trans men, trans women, and people who don’t map onto either category who enjoy bimbofication as a fantasy or a way of being. Cross-dressing is not the same thing as transitioning. A kink is not a gender identity. What Bryon Noem experiences internally is not mine to diagnose from a newspaper article. Et cetera, et cetera.

But I know what John 50 looks like — the secrecy, the outside life so solid that nobody suspected anything. The insurance business, the ranch, the marriage to one of the most powerful women in Republican politics. And then one day, the dam bursts.

I read Vitale’s paper in my mid-twenties. I remember the feeling of going through her life stages and checking them off. Childhood: knew something was wrong, learned not to say it. Check. Adolescence: performed harder, dated the right people, built the mask. Check. Young adulthood: started constructing the life — the career, the relationships, the structure designed to make the feeling irrelevant. Check. I was in stage three. I was building the cast.

And then I read stages four and five — the panic attacks, the insomnia, the crying at your desk, the decades of compounding distance between who you are and who you’ve built yourself to be, until one day you’re a 56-year-old insurance executive from South Dakota making balloon breasts in your bathroom.

I did not want stages four and five.

Repression does not resolve gender dysphoria. It defers it. And every system that tells a person the thing they know about themselves is unacceptable — their family, their community, their government — is not preventing transition. It is building more John and Jane and Zane 50s.

In 2022, Kristi Noem became the first governor in the United States to sign a ban on transgender girls playing school sports. In 2023, she signed a ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. As Secretary of Homeland Security, she removed LGBTQ+ protections from the department’s intelligence-gathering guidelines and oversaw a policy barring transgender TSA officers from performing pat-downs.

She signed the laws. She wrote the executive orders. She went on Fox News and made the case. And then Trump fired her.

I am not making fun of Bryon Noem.

The internet is having a great time with this, and I get it. The hypocrisy is a neon sign. But what I see when I look at those messages is a person who has been at war with himself for so long that his own desires have become unrecognizable to him. The secret payments, the alias, the fetish — these are not the behaviors of someone who is at peace. These are the behaviors of someone whose interior life has been sealed in a pressure cooker for decades, and what’s leaking out is not clarity.

Half a century of refusing to admit even to yourself who you even are will scramble your mind and your relationship to your own desires until they’re twisted into a funhouse mirror. Until your only knowledge of your own spark of life is of desperation.

I transitioned at 27. I had a therapist who didn’t make me prove I was suffering enough to deserve care. I had a doctor who prescribed hormones after an informed consent conversation, not a years-long diagnostic gauntlet. I had people in my life who told me the truth: this doesn’t go away, and trying to make it go away will cost you everything. So I stopped trying to make it go away.

It wasn’t willpower that kept me from becoming a John 50, and it wasn’t self-knowledge. It was access.

A 17-year-old in South Dakota can’t get that access today, because Kristi Noem signed it away. A teenager who knows exactly what I knew — who feels the same thing I felt, who would benefit from the same early intervention that let me have a life — is now required by state law to wait, to suppress, to build the structure and hope it holds.

Decades are not reversible. You can’t give someone back the years they spent at war with themselves. You can’t undo what thirty years of suppression does to a person’s relationship with their own desire. You can let someone transition with a doctor and a therapist and a supportive family. Or you can watch them detonate at 56 on the front page of the Daily Mail. Those are the options. Kristi Noem chose for her state. Her husband is simply collateral damage.

Share

Three weeks later, the full legislature passed it. All but three Republican lawmakers present voted yes.

The same week, Governor Brad Little signed HB 752, which makes it a crime for any person to use a bathroom that doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth in a government building or place of public accommodation. First offense: misdemeanor, up to one year in jail. Second offense within five years: felony, up to five years in prison.

Idaho now has two new laws: one that forces institutions to out trans kids to their parents, and one that can put trans adults in prison for using a restroom.

Michael Devitt is a physical therapist in Idaho. His wife Angie is a doctor. Their daughter Eve is transgender. When HB 752 takes effect on July 1, it will be illegal for Eve to use a women’s bathroom in a public building.

The Devitts announced they are closing Michael’s practice and leaving the state. His patients will need to find another physical therapist. In a state with among the fewest doctors per capita in the country, Idaho is also losing Angie.

“Anybody with transgender family members in Idaho,” Michael told the Idaho Statesman, “we’re basically in an abusive relationship with the state government.”

He’s not the only one responding. The day after Little signed the bathroom ban, nine protesters were arrested after refusing to leave the entryway to the governor’s office. Two days later, six more were arrested during a sit-in inside a Capitol bathroom, where they occupied the space for two hours. In Kansas, on the Transgender Day of Visibility, Samantha Boucher — the executive director of Trans Liberty — walked into the women’s restroom at the state Capitol in deliberate violation of that state’s bathroom ban. She told Capitol Police beforehand. They followed her in, filmed her, and interrogated her afterward. They did not arrest her.

“I’m more than happy to put myself at that risk,” she told the Topeka Capital-Journal, “if it means that somebody else doesn’t have to.”

Share

Here is the part of this piece where I have to be honest with you about the polling.

The public supports parental notification. A 2023 Parents Defending Education poll found 71% of registered voters support legislation requiring schools to tell parents if a child wants to change their gender identity at school. That includes 59% of Democrats. A separate Monmouth University poll in New Jersey found nearly 80% support, including 61% of Democrats.

Those numbers are not going to change because we want them to. If you argue this issue on the axis of “should parents know what’s happening with their kids at school,” you lose. Every time.

The reluctance to accept this is understandable. The impulse is to say: these are kids who might be unsafe at home. Forcing a counselor to betray a student’s trust could get someone hurt. Those things are true. They are also not persuasive to the 71%.

But there is a frame that survives.

The question is not “should parents know?” Most people — including most people on our side — believe parents should be involved. The question is whether the government should force a three-day disclosure deadline, with $100,000 penalties for schools and doctors, and give the attorney general enforcement power over what a child tells a counselor.

When you put it that way, the numbers shift. A family making medical decisions with their doctor is one thing. The state attorney general threatening a pediatrician with a six-figure fine for not reporting a conversation within 72 hours is another. One is parenting. The other is government overreach.

The Devitts are the argument. A physical therapist is closing his practice. A doctor is leaving the state. Their daughter is the reason — but the mechanism is the law. Idaho didn’t persuade a family to leave. It forced them out with the threat of criminal prosecution for using a bathroom.

That distinction — between the substance and the mechanism — is the only frame that works on this terrain. You don’t have to convince someone that trans kids should keep secrets from their parents. You have to convince them that a $100,000 fine, attorney general enforcement, and a five-year felony for using the wrong restroom is not a proportionate response. That the government is doing more here than “protecting parental rights.” That it is building a surveillance and punishment apparatus around children, families, and the professionals who care for them.

The ACLU of Idaho called HB 822 “extreme and unconstitutional.” Democratic lawmakers in the Idaho House concluded the bill is “constitutionally vulnerable, operationally unworkable, and harmful to the very children and professionals it purports to protect.” Those are the right arguments. They are also the arguments that lost 59-9.

What won the room is “parents have a right to know.” What can win the public — the narrower, harder argument — is “the government built a punishment machine to enforce it.”

A family closed their business and left the state. Fifteen people were arrested at the Capitol. A woman in Kansas told the police what she was about to do, walked into a bathroom, and they didn’t arrest her because they didn’t know what to do with someone who wasn’t afraid.

Idaho passed two laws. One of them forces schools to out trans kids within 72 hours or face a $100,000 fine. The other makes it a felony to use the wrong bathroom. The governor signed the bathroom ban. The outing bill was delivered to his desk on April 2.

Also This Week

Caitlyn Jenner went on Tomi Lahren’s show and called herself “a biological man.” In an interview with OutKick, Jenner said she felt like “a hypocrite” for accepting Glamour’s Woman of the Year award while fighting to keep “biological men out of women’s sports.” The most famous trans woman in America is now using the right’s language, on the right’s platforms, to describe herself. That language will be used against the rest of us. It already is.

Catholic nuns are suing New York over a law requiring nursing homes to use patients’ pronouns. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne filed suit against a 2024 law that covers room assignments, bathroom access, and pronoun use in long-term care facilities. The law exempts facilities run by the Church of Christ, Scientist — but not Catholic institutions. If you’re wondering why one denomination gets a carve-out and the others don’t, that’s the case. The right is framing this as nuns-vs-the-state. The actual legal question is why New York wrote a religious exemption that only covers one church.

The right’s detransition content machine had a big week. Jonni Skinner, 23, testified before the California state Senate that puberty blockers prescribed when he was a minor caused lasting harm. Wesley Yang amplified the clip to 1 million engagements; Andy Ngo added another 91K. Skinner’s experience is real and should be taken seriously. It is also being deployed by people who want to ban care for everyone — not improve it for anyone. The hearing was on SB 934, a bill by Scott Wiener that would extend the statute of limitations for suing providers who fail to affirm a patient’s identity — the opposite of what the viral framing implies.

Four days later, the Department of Justice sued the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League, alleging that the state’s policies allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports violate Title IX — the first time the federal government has used a statute designed to expand women’s athletic opportunity as a tool to restrict transgender participation. The DOJ is asking for a permanent injunction barring trans girls from girls’ sports, sex-separated locker rooms and bathrooms, and a process to “correct past athletic records” of student athletes.

One week. Two institutions. The IOC made a governance decision about the Olympics. The DOJ filed a federal lawsuit about high school sports in Minnesota.

The advocacy response has been consistent. Human rights groups called the IOC ban “an astounding rollback on gender equality” that would “set women’s sport back 30 years.” LGBTQ organizations called it discriminatory and scientifically unfounded. The ACLU and HRC have framed the DOJ lawsuit as a violation of civil rights. UN experts described the genetic testing as “intrusive” and “privacy-violating.”

A New York Times-Ipsos poll in January 2025 found 79 percent of Americans believe transgender women should not compete in women’s sports — including 67 percent of Democrats. Gallup put the number at 69 percent in May 2025. Support for trans athletes playing on teams matching their gender identity has fallen 10 points among both Democrats and independents since 2021.

On this terrain, arguing the biology does not work. The claim that medical transition significantly reduces physiological advantages is a factual argument that requires voters to update a settled belief — one of the hardest persuasion tasks available. Arguments that open with “trans women are women” or frame the ban as a civil rights violation land with people who already agree and no one else. Calling the science “unfounded” when 79 percent of Americans — including two-thirds of your own party — have already made up their minds does not function as a rebuttal. It functions as a base communication to an audience that does not need persuading.

There is one frame that survives on this issue, and it requires a shift that most advocacy organizations have been unwilling to make.

The question is not whether trans women should compete. The question is who decides: sports governing bodies with scientists, physicians, and athletes at the table — or a presidential executive order and a DOJ lawsuit?

This frame works because it does not require voters to change their mind about transgender athletes. It asks a different question entirely. Should a Trump executive order tell the Olympics how to run its competitions? Should the DOJ sue a state education department over how a high school sports league handles eligibility? For voters who are skeptical of both Republican overreach and Democratic identity politics — the voters who decide competitive districts — this resolves the tension without requiring them to take a position on transgender identity at all.

The IOC ban is painful. It is also the system working — even badly. The IOC had years of case-by-case eligibility review, conducted with individual federations and informed by evolving science. It scrapped that process for a blanket gene test — aligned with a Trump executive order — to ban a class of athletes that had zero participants in the last Olympics. Advocates can and should criticize the decision. But the IOC acted within its institutional domain. That is what governance looks like, even when the outcome is wrong.

The DOJ lawsuit is something else entirely. The federal government is suing a state education department over how a high school sports league sets eligibility rules. The complaint asks the court to impose sex-separated locker rooms and to “correct past athletic records.” The DOJ is not adjudicating a fairness question with the help of sports scientists. It is taking a statute written to get women into sports and using it to dictate who gets kept out — in a state that didn’t ask for federal involvement. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called it “a sad attempt to get attention over something that’s already been in litigation for months.”

That distinction — between a sports body making a governance decision and the federal government suing to impose one — is the only ground that holds. It is not a comfortable argument. It concedes the IOC’s authority to make a call you disagree with. It does not affirm anyone’s identity or name anyone’s rights. It asks people to care about process when the substance is what hurts.

But it is the only argument that reaches voters who are not already on your side. And right now, on this issue, that is nearly everyone.

Seventy-nine percent of Americans — including two-thirds of Democrats — oppose trans women competing in women’s sports. No frame reverses those numbers. The goal is narrower: give persuadable voters a reason to object to the mechanism — the executive orders, the DOJ lawsuits, the federal government reaching into state high school sports — without requiring them to change their position on the underlying question.

The 2024 election showed what happens when the other side overplays this issue. Republicans spent $215 million on anti-trans ads. Four percent of voters said trans issues motivated their vote. In 2025, Virginia and New Jersey held gubernatorial races saturated with anti-trans coverage from Fox News and The Daily Signal. Both Democratic nominees won. The overreach argument works — but only if advocates are willing to make it about the overreach rather than about the identity.

The DOJ’s complaint against Minnesota asks the court to retroactively correct the athletic records of high school students. The federal government is suing to reach into a state’s record books and change the results of games already played by teenagers.