Topic to Debate
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April 8, 2025
The president and his cronies are dedicated to rolling progress again to the Stone Age. The consequences might outlast his second time period.
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This text seems within the Might 2025 situation, with the headline “Conflict on Girls.”
President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and senior adviser to the president, are seen within the Oval Workplace earlier than departing in Marine One from the South Garden of the White Home in Washington, DC, on March 14, 2025.(Samuel Corum / Sipa USA by way of AP Photographs)
For years, I’ve resisted the concept feminism was in retreat. Positive, there are all the time development tales to be written about backlash fads—“trad wives,” as an illustration, the most recent variation on girls who obtain fame and fortune by telling different girls to remain at dwelling. However I all the time thought girls’s liberation was unstoppable, nonetheless gradual the progress might sound at any given second. Girls are too important to the fashionable economic system to park them again within the kitchen. Have a look at how far girls have are available training, political illustration, the mainstreaming of as soon as marginal and radical feminist views. Have a look at what number of girls can help themselves and the impact of that on marriage. Have a look at #MeToo. Proper. Have a look at #MeToo. Oh, brother.
We now have an adjudicated sexual abuser, self-professed pussy grabber, and misogynist in chief as president, elected by the votes of males, together with supposedly extra liberal younger males. Amongst his many unqualified cupboard appointments are Pete Hegseth as secretary of protection and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of well being and human companies—every of them accused of sexual assault. (Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first decide for lawyer basic regardless of being investigated for sexual misconduct and drug use, stepped apart.)
Admittedly, their private misdeeds are dwarfed by their horrible stands on the problems earlier than them: Hegseth has blamed “woke” insurance policies for making the army “effeminate” and opposes many army roles for ladies. In February, he fired the one feminine and Black members of the joint chiefs of employees. Trans individuals, whom Biden permitted again within the army after they have been banned by Trump throughout his first presidency, are on unsure grounds, with federal judges staying an govt order to bar them once more. Following Hegseth’s DEI order, Arlington Nationwide Cemetery eliminated from its web site pages about girls, African American, and Puerto Rican troopers. Different army web sites eliminated details about Navajo Code Talkers.
As for RFK Jr., in his congressional listening to, this supposedly pro-choice candidate for the nation’s highest healthcare put up deplored abortion (“Each abortion is a tragedy”) and refused to say he would defend emergency abortions and the legality of mifepristone, the abortion capsule. (And, in truth, his appointment means that he can try and revoke FDA approval of abortion capsules.) He refused to say that the HPV vaccine was protected, though it has drastically lowered the speed of cervical most cancers, as an alternative claiming that it was “harmful and faulty” and has really raised the speed of the illness. If mother and father comply with his recommendation (“No loving mother and father would enable their daughter to obtain this vaccine”), this lethal most cancers will finally kill many ladies—perhaps much more than the unvaccinated kids who will die from measles.
In the course of the marketing campaign, Trump mentioned that he would defend girls, “whether or not the ladies prefer it or not.” What does that surprisingly double-edged stance imply in observe? Tens of millions of {dollars} in funding for home violence applications have been frozen. Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk is slashing employees at Head Begin and the Workplace of Little one Care. That doesn’t sound like safety to me. Trump’s govt orders in opposition to “DEI” have straight harmed the rights of hundreds of thousands of girls and non-white individuals—mainly everybody however white males—all over the place from federal companies to school campuses. With a stroke of his pen, guidelines and rules meant to advertise equity for long-disadvantaged teams are gone, and the federal employees charged with overseeing DEI insurance policies are gone as properly.
But it surely’s not simply insurance policies meant to learn girls which can be being abolished. Even these which can be impartial on their face can have an effect on girls extra. The Supplemental Vitamin Help Program, aka meals stamps, is on the chopping block—the majority of grownup recipients are feminine, whereas 40 % of all of the beneficiaries are kids. And Trump’s try to restrict or abolish the Inexpensive Care Act and Medicaid will straight hurt girls, who’re once more the majority of recipients. The ACA additionally covers contraception, no-copay gynecological and preventive careand preexisting circumstances like, um, being pregnant.
Present Difficulty
Internationally, issues are much more dire. USAID applications that save hundreds of thousands of lives, principally girls and youngsters in poor nations, have been ended with no warning. The worldwide gag rule, which banned teams that obtain US funds from a lot as mentioning abortion, is again.
Nicely, you may see why: equality, gender, and ladies are actually on a authorities blacklist of some 250 phrases that can get your grants canceled and your scientific analysis defunded—together with racism, Black, LGBT, and disabled. (Males is OK.)
These developments are only a pattern of the threats to the large progress girls have made up to now 60 years. It’s as if because the day Trump took workplace, all of the completely different troops of misogyny have come collectively in a single Monstrous Regiment of Males. There’s the pronatalist Christian conservatism of JD Vance and Russell Vought, creator of Challenge 2025 and now head of the Workplace of Administration and Price range. There’s Christopher Rufo, who’s waging warfare on universitieswith their gender research applications and ladies presidents. There’s the manosphere, the place younger males on the Web flock to listen to that girls have all the ability, and which incorporates Trump’s new finest palAndrew Tate, who tells them that girls are senseless intercourse dolls to be overwhelmed and prostituted. There’s Musk, the eugenicist with 14 kids and who is aware of what number of child mamas and nannies.
And presiding over all of it is Trump himself, who manages to maintain all these contradictory forces pleased. Give it some thought: You by no means hear the Christian right-wingers assault the manospherians as would-be libertines who want to search out Jesus and a spouse. You by no means hear JD Vance specific doubts about Musk’s household values. They’ll struggle about that later. Proper now, they’ve acquired larger fish to fry: Making America Guyland Once more.
Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.
