Former professional wrestling exec and billionaire GOP donor Linda McMahon faced tough questioning—and scattered protests—on Thursday during her confirmation hearing to head an Education Department that President Donald Trump is keen on abolishing.
During two-and-a-half hours of questioning (and opining) by senators, McMahon attempted to thread the needle between Trump’s plans to gut the 45-year-old US Department of Educationand federal laws and constitutional guardrails that stand in his (and Elon Musk’s) way.Even as she expressed support for key Trump policies—includingprivate-school voucher programs and bans on trans girls and women from sports—McMahon’s scant experience in education was on display as she misstated, or failed to answer key questions about, federal education law.
McMahon, who was head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, is best known for her role at World Wrestling Entertainment, which she co-founded and ran with her now-estranged husband, Vince. Her experience in education is limited: She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester. She served for a year on the Connecticut Board of Education, resigning in 2010 after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. She has spent more than a decade as a trustee of a private Catholic university. She also ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2010 and 2012.
As board chair of theultra-conservative American First Policy Institute, McMahon now oversees a think tank that supports education-related policies including universal school-choice programs, parental review of all school curriculum, and removal of so-called “gender ideology” and “political activism” from coursework. If confirmed, she says she will boost support for technical schools and vocational programs and ban the teaching of critical race theory—all while emphasizing that education policy is best left to states and local school districts.
The Department of Education, which began operating in 1980, now ranks sixth among federal agencies in total spending, accounting for 4 percent of all federal spending in fiscal year 2024. As secretary, McMahon would oversee the distribution of tens of billions of dollars every year to a vast array of federal and state programs, including funding for early childhood education, kids with disabilities, low-income schools, and federal Pell Grants for college students. She would also be tasked with enforcing anti-discrimination laws and investigating schools and universities for alleged civil rights violations, including sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
The department has been one of the early targets of the Trump administration, with the new president calling for its immediate elimination, even as he has acknowledged that only Congress can actually dismantle it. Trump’s executive order on trans-inclusive sports and bathroom policies effectively rewrites Title IX policy. Meanwhile, Musk’s DOGE team has cut nearly $900 million for education research and policy evaluation, and staff in the civil rights and financial aid divisions have been fired en masse.
Between outbursts from protesters at the Senate hearing—most of whom identified themselves as teachers—McMahon did not say whether she supports Trump’s plan to get rid of the department. She vowed that important programs protected by statute, such as the Title I program for high-poverty schools, Pell Grants, and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, would continue.
McMahon suggested that other federal departments and agencies might be able to oversee key education-related programs.
But she also expressed support for downsizing the department and suggested that other federal departments and agencies might be able to oversee key education-related programs. For example, she said the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces federal anti-discrimination laws including Title VI and Title IX, might be better managed by the Department of Justice. Disabled students might have their funding and protections overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, she suggested.
When pressed on her understanding of federal education law, McMahon came up short. Under questioning by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), she stated that schools are obligated to investigate sexual assaults that occur off campus. In fact, under Title IX rules promulgated during Trump’s first term and still in effect, schools are prohibited from investigating off-campus assaults. (It’s worth noting that McMahon, as WWE’s former CEO, is being sued for allegedly tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, a charge she has denied.)
McMahon also floundered when asked about the Obama-era Every Student Succeeds Act, one of the main laws governing K-12 education in the nation’s public schools. She didn’t know the specifics of funding required by another major statute, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. She falsely stated that “private schools aren’t taking federal dollars” (in fact, while private schools don’t directly receive federal funding, most do receive funds through grants).
When asked about choosing between upholding the law—for example, administering education funds already appropriated by Congress—and carrying out Trump’s directives, McMahon said that “the president will not ask me to do anything that is against the law.” She repeatedly asserted that defunding federal educational programs is not the Trump administration’s goal—ignoring Musk’s directive to slash funding, cancel grants, and end contracts.
“I believe the American people spoke loudly in the election last November to say they do want to look at waste, fraud and abuse in our government,” McMahon told the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, suggesting Musk’s budget cuts amount to an “audit.”
The committee will vote on whether to advance McMahon’s nomination after another hearing on February 20.
Former professional wrestling exec and billionaire GOP donor Linda McMahon faced tough questioning—and scattered protests—on Thursday during her confirmation hearing to head an Education Department that President Donald Trump is keen on abolishing.
During two-and-a-half hours of questioning (and opining) by senators, McMahon attempted to thread the needle between Trump’s plans to gut the 45-year-old US Department of Educationand federal laws and constitutional guardrails that stand in his (and Elon Musk’s) way.Even as she expressed support for key Trump policies—includingprivate-school voucher programs and bans on trans girls and women from sports—McMahon’s scant experience in education was on display as she misstated, or failed to answer key questions about, federal education law.
McMahon, who was head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, is best known for her role at World Wrestling Entertainment, which she co-founded and ran with her now-estranged husband, Vince. Her experience in education is limited: She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester. She served for a year on the Connecticut Board of Education, resigning in 2010 after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. She has spent more than a decade as a trustee of a private Catholic university. She also ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2010 and 2012.
As board chair of theultra-conservative American First Policy Institute, McMahon now oversees a think tank that supports education-related policies including universal school-choice programs, parental review of all school curriculum, and removal of so-called “gender ideology” and “political activism” from coursework. If confirmed, she says she will boost support for technical schools and vocational programs and ban the teaching of critical race theory—all while emphasizing that education policy is best left to states and local school districts.
The Department of Education, which began operating in 1980, now ranks sixth among federal agencies in total spending, accounting for 4 percent of all federal spending in fiscal year 2024. As secretary, McMahon would oversee the distribution of tens of billions of dollars every year to a vast array of federal and state programs, including funding for early childhood education, kids with disabilities, low-income schools, and federal Pell Grants for college students. She would also be tasked with enforcing anti-discrimination laws and investigating schools and universities for alleged civil rights violations, including sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
The department has been one of the early targets of the Trump administration, with the new president calling for its immediate elimination, even as he has acknowledged that only Congress can actually dismantle it. Trump’s executive order on trans-inclusive sports and bathroom policies effectively rewrites Title IX policy. Meanwhile, Musk’s DOGE team has cut nearly $900 million for education research and policy evaluation, and staff in the civil rights and financial aid divisions have been fired en masse.
Between outbursts from protesters at the Senate hearing—most of whom identified themselves as teachers—McMahon did not say whether she supports Trump’s plan to get rid of the department. She vowed that important programs protected by statute, such as the Title I program for high-poverty schools, Pell Grants, and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, would continue.
McMahon suggested that other federal departments and agencies might be able to oversee key education-related programs.
But she also expressed support for downsizing the department and suggested that other federal departments and agencies might be able to oversee key education-related programs. For example, she said the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces federal anti-discrimination laws including Title VI and Title IX, might be better managed by the Department of Justice. Disabled students might have their funding and protections overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, she suggested.
When pressed on her understanding of federal education law, McMahon came up short. Under questioning by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), she stated that schools are obligated to investigate sexual assaults that occur off campus. In fact, under Title IX rules promulgated during Trump’s first term and still in effect, schools are prohibited from investigating off-campus assaults. (It’s worth noting that McMahon, as WWE’s former CEO, is being sued for allegedly tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, a charge she has denied.)
McMahon also floundered when asked about the Obama-era Every Student Succeeds Act, one of the main laws governing K-12 education in the nation’s public schools. She didn’t know the specifics of funding required by another major statute, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. She falsely stated that “private schools aren’t taking federal dollars” (in fact, while private schools don’t directly receive federal funding, most do receive funds through grants).
When asked about choosing between upholding the law—for example, administering education funds already appropriated by Congress—and carrying out Trump’s directives, McMahon said that “the president will not ask me to do anything that is against the law.” She repeatedly asserted that defunding federal educational programs is not the Trump administration’s goal—ignoring Musk’s directive to slash funding, cancel grants, and end contracts.
“I believe the American people spoke loudly in the election last November to say they do want to look at waste, fraud and abuse in our government,” McMahon told the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, suggesting Musk’s budget cuts amount to an “audit.”
The committee will vote on whether to advance McMahon’s nomination after another hearing on February 20.
President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders targeting transgender people has resulted in an immediate catastrophe for trans people, their families, and those who seek to work with them. Federal agencies have scrambled to scrub so-called “gender ideology” from websites and agency guidance, removing valuable information about HIV prevention, research into health disparities, and webpages about sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Meanwhile, federal employees are orderedto remove pronouns in their email signatures, and agencies have banned Pride events.
Trump signed his first anti-trans executive order within hours of taking office and has only continued the onslaught. The speed and scope of the orders are “all- encompassing and terrifyingly breathtaking,” as Lambda Legal senior attorney Carl Charles tells me—which is the point. The orders will run up against significant constraints, like established legal precedent and administrative procedures, but by instilling fear in trans people and the institutions that support them, the Trump administration is banking on preemptive obedience.
“They’re hoping that they can scare people into compliance and therefore not have to actually account for—and do the things—that potentially require compliance,” Charles says.
“They’re hoping that they can scare people into compliance and therefore not have to actually account for—and do the things—that potentially require compliance.”
“This is an administration whose principal priority is driving transgender people from public life,” Branstetter says, “and doing everything in its power to try and control our bodies and our lives.”
Nonetheless, trans people and their allies are fighting back. Trans federal prisoners are challenging expected transfers and the end of their gender-affirming care. On Tuesday, parents of trans youthsued the Trump administration, arguing that his effort to ban gender-affirming care by executive fiat encroaches on Congress’ spending power, infringes on parental rights, and violates the First Amendment. A group of 15 attorneys general, representing states with some of the strongest protections for trans people, has declared their intent to ignore Trump’s gender-affirming care executive order and have promised to take the federal government to court should it attempt enforcement. New York and other states have their own anti-discrimination laws protecting access to such care.
“They are wielding trans people against these hospital systems as a weapon, as a cudgel to say, ‘Don’t do this, or you won’t be able to serve anybody,’” Charles says. “That is so incredibly shameful. It is shameful and it’s disgusting.”
Whether Trump’s executive orders have any teeth—the ACLU and Lambda Legal, among other civil rights organizations, argue they don’t—the mere threat of enforcing those orders has been enough to overturn what havebecome norms. Instead of waiting for agencies to go through formal rulemaking, a process that requires public input and takes years, or for courts to weigh in on whether the executive orders are legal, major institutions are capitulating.
“They are wielding trans people against these hospital systems as a weapon, as a cudgel to say, ‘Don’t do this, or you won’t be able to serve anybody.’”
Consider Trump’s trans sports ban that completely rewrites Title IX policy, even though the Department of Education is responsible for such regulation changes. Some institutions have already responded as though the order were an enforceable legal mandate. Harvard University’s athletics department removed its transgender inclusion policy from its website hours after Trump signed the order. On Thursday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned trans women from women’s sports competitions across its 1,100 member colleges and universities, with its president saying Trump’s order “provides a clear, national standard.” The same day, the federal Department of Education (the agency created by Congress that Trump suggests he would eliminate via executive order) announced it was investigating San Jose State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for their trans athlete policies.
Schools receive a significant amount of money from the federal government; the Department of Education disbursed more than $73 billion across K-12 schools and higher education in fiscal year 2021 (the most recent data available). Institutions of higher education rely far more on federal funds than K-12 schools; public two-year colleges, for example, have received more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government, while 18 percent of public four-year colleges’ revenue comes from federal sources. Institutions found in violation of Title IX risk losing all their federal funds. Since the law was passed in 1972, the federal government has never delivered on that threat, but the Trump administration’s unprecedented moves thus far don’t inspire confidence in norms to continue. “I don’t think anyone in the education world wants the administration using them as an example of something that is wrong,” Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, told Chalkbeat.
Similarly, major hospital systems, including Children’s Hospital LA in California and NYU Langone Health in New York, have stopped providing gender-affirming medications and surgery to trans youth under 19—much to the glee of the White House. In this case, the threat was explicit, so hospitals and medical schools that offer gender-affirming medical care to minors would lose federal funding.The order also mischaracterized puberty blockers and hormone treatments as “chemical mutilation.” Federal agencies were directed to begin a review process of research grants offered to medical institutions, and the Department of Justice was instructedto pursue civil and criminal prosecutions against providers under consumer fraud and female genital mutilation laws.
The 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County recognized that workplace discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation is, inherently, sex discrimination. Despite the actions of the Trump administration, this is still the law of the land. But the Trump administration has made efforts to simply erase the ruling. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that reviews workplace discrimination complaints, has removed its webpage on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination—a webpage that, until late January, outlined the Bostock ruling.
On January 28, EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas—a Republican holdover from Trump’s first term and one of two remaining commissioners after he fired two Democrats—announced that one of her top priorities is to “defend the biological and binary reality of sex.” As part of that, she directed the EEOC to remove the “X” gender marker and “Mx.” honorific on complaint intake forms and mentioned her disdain for prior EEOC guidance suggesting that the repeated misgendering of an employee could amount to discrimination. Former and current EEOC employees confirmed to Mother Jonesthat the commission has temporarily halted all investigations into complaints of discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
The EEOC’s move to foreclose queer people from raising sex discrimination claims upends its own longstanding practice and puts LGBTQ workers at risk, Charles says. “We’re talking half a century, nearly, of anti-discrimination systems that exist to protect people in the workplace, to ensure their complaints are heard,” he tells me. “There’s a lot of mischief and mayhem that can be caused just by delaying people the opportunity to be heard and delaying their day in court.”
The Supreme Court has not extended its ruling in Bostock to otherfederal anti-discrimination laws—like Title IX, which applies to education, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the Biden administration and federal courtsdidexpand myriad protections for trans people, from prohibiting anti-trans discrimination in schools to allowing intersex and nonbinary people to select the gender marker “X” on their passports.
“This is an administration whose principal priority is driving transgender people from public life .”
Now, in the aftermath of Trump’s executive orders, the State Department has stopped processing all requests to update passport gender markers. Branstetter says the ACLU has heard from trans and nonbinary people across the US whose identification documents—including former passports, photo IDs, and court orders for name changes—are being held by the State Department, with no timeline given for their return.
In his order seeking the elimination of “gender ideology” from the federal government, Trump also directed federal prisons to rehouse trans women in men’s facilities and forcibly detransition incarcerated people. That order, which incarcerated trans women have already challenged, flies in the face of federal court decisions that classify the blanket denial of gender-affirming care as cruel and unusual punishment, Charles says.
The Biden administration further protected trans people by applying Bostock to other anti-discrimination laws through administrative rulemaking. Last May, for example,the Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule specifying that gender dysphoria could be considered a disability. And under President Joe Biden, the Department of Education’s Title IX regulations affirmed that the education law protected trans and nonbinary students from gender identity discrimination. As I previously reported, this was one of Biden’s rules that was vacated by a judge shortly before Trump took office.
None of the Trump administration’s moves come as a surprise, Branstetter says. Trump’s directives are the culmination of a yearslong, coordinated conservative movement to restrict trans rights, elevating what had been a mostly state-level effort to cover every aspect of the federal government and fulfilling Trump’s anti-trans campaign promises. Nonetheless, what she finds most startling is the rhetoric contained in the mandate to eradicate trans people from the military—likely the largest single employer of trans people in the United States. The order says identifying as trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
“That order basically suggests that, by virtue of being trans, we are inherently less trustworthy and deceitful by nature,” Branstetter says, “basically echoing the way that the government used to describe homosexuals in the 1940s and ’50s and before purging thousands of them from the federal government.”
During a campaign stop filmed by Fox News at a Bronx, New York, barbershop, Trump answered a voter’s question about failing school systems by saying, “No transgender, no operations—you know, they take your kid—there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”
Obviously, this is untrue, but now, he’s trying to solve the problem he invented as part of his anti-trans campaign strategy—by going much, much further than the earlier lies, and threatening to prosecute teachers who take steps to acknowledge or support the identities of trans or nonbinary students.
In the executive order issued Wednesday evening, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump directs the attorney general to work with local and state officials to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” The order defines “social transitioning” to include using a trans student’s name and pronouns, recognizing a student as nonbinary, or allowing them to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.
The same section of the order suggests that K-12 teachers and school officials who take action to support trans students’ identities be prosecuted under laws banning sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The threats don’t stop there. Federal funding for schools and programs that teach lessons about gender or race is also in jeopardy. Trump’s order instructs the Departments of Education, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to come up with an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within the next 90 days, identifying federal funding streams that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in classrooms and teacher training.
But what does “discriminatory equity ideology” actually mean? The order defines it as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” In context, this seems to be Trump’s new phrase for what conservative activists used to call “critical race theory”—a term that itself mischaracterizes academic concepts around systemic and institutional racism as being anti-white.
Theorder is a transparent attempt to inject schools with whitewashed American history. It directs federal agencies to promote “patriotic education,” which it defines as teaching an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” To achieve that goal, it reestablishes the 1776 Commission, which Trump created during his first term to cultivate “patriotic citizens ready for the workforce, not political activists.” The original 1776 Commission’s report on US history identifies progressivism asone of the foremost threats to American principles and derides social justice policies as antithetical to the “color-blind civil rights” movement.
Wednesday’s order is the latest in a string of executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and trans rights that Trump has signed since taking office just over a week ago. These orders include redefining sex, banning trans people from the military, curtailing access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and ending DEI initiatives in the federal workforce.
Trump provided the blueprint in his first term to target antiracism and LGBTQ inclusion. His 2020 executive order to abolish DEI initiatives from the federal government armed conservative organizations and politicians with the language to target government entities, particularly schools, at the local and state levels. While former President Joe Biden quickly undid that order, it became the catalyst for the introduction of nearly 900 similar anti-DEI policies across the United States.
During a campaign stop filmed by Fox News at a Bronx, New York, barbershop, Trump answered a voter’s question about failing school systems by saying, “No transgender, no operations—you know, they take your kid—there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”
Obviously, this is untrue, but now, he’s trying to solve the problem he invented as part of his anti-trans campaign strategy—by going much, much further than the earlier lies, and threatening to prosecute teachers who take steps to acknowledge or support the identities of trans or nonbinary students.
In the executive order issued Wednesday evening, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump directs the attorney general to work with local and state officials to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” The order defines “social transitioning” to include using a trans student’s name and pronouns, recognizing a student as nonbinary, or allowing them to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.
The same section of the order suggests that K-12 teachers and school officials who take action to support trans students’ identities be prosecuted under laws banning sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The threats don’t stop there. Federal funding for schools and programs that teach lessons about gender or race is also in jeopardy. Trump’s order instructs the Departments of Education, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to come up with an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within the next 90 days, identifying federal funding streams that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in classrooms and teacher training.
But what does “discriminatory equity ideology” actually mean? The order defines it as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” In context, this seems to be Trump’s new phrase for what conservative activists used to call “critical race theory”—a term that itself mischaracterizes academic concepts around systemic and institutional racism as being anti-white.
Theorder is a transparent attempt to inject schools with whitewashed American history. It directs federal agencies to promote “patriotic education,” which it defines as teaching an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” To achieve that goal, it reestablishes the 1776 Commission, which Trump created during his first term to cultivate “patriotic citizens ready for the workforce, not political activists.” The original 1776 Commission’s report on US history identifies progressivism asone of the foremost threats to American principles and derides social justice policies as antithetical to the “color-blind civil rights” movement.
Wednesday’s order is the latest in a string of executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and trans rights that Trump has signed since taking office just over a week ago. These orders include redefining sex, banning trans people from the military, curtailing access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and ending DEI initiatives in the federal workforce.
Trump provided the blueprint in his first term to target antiracism and LGBTQ inclusion. His 2020 executive order to abolish DEI initiatives from the federal government armed conservative organizations and politicians with the language to target government entities, particularly schools, at the local and state levels. While former President Joe Biden quickly undid that order, it became the catalyst for the introduction of nearly 900 similar anti-DEI policies across the United States.
When Donald Trump was president the first time, his Department of Education promulgated a set of rules under Title IX that made it harder for sexual assault survivors on school campuses to seek justice—limiting the definition of sexual harassment, for example, and forcing victims into complaint processes that magnified their trauma. Then the Biden Administration set about undoing the Trump-era regulations—part of a broader rewrite of Title IX rules that also added protections for transgender and pregnant students.
Incoming Trump officials—led by his nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon—were expected to revert to the old Title IX rules soon after the inauguration. Instead, a federal judge has done their work for them.
Just days before Biden is set to leave office, Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the US District Court of Eastern Kentucky rejected the administration’s Title IX protections for trans students, siding with a handful of Republican state attorneys general who argued thatharassment on the basis of gender identity doesn’t constitute sex discrimination. But Reeves didn’t stop there. In refusing to uphold protections for queer and trans students, he vacated the Biden administration’s entire Title IX rewrite, including provisions aimed at making it easier for sexual assault survivors to hold their assailants accountable and for pregnant students to stay in school.
Passed in 1972 , Title IX—which applies to schools and colleges that receive federal funds—asserted that no person shall be denied access to any educational program or activity “on the basis of sex.” Reeves said the Biden administration’s inclusion of gender identity in definitions of sex-based discrimination exceeded the Department of Education’s authority and Title IX’s original text.
According to Reeves, the expanded definition of sex discrimination permeated the Biden rule to such an extent that the entire rewrite ought to be scrapped—even the parts that have nothing to do with trans students or gender identity.
“This court ruling turns longstanding legal precedent on its head in a direct, disproportionate attack on trans students.”
“When Title IX is viewed in its entirety, it is abundantly clear that discrimination on the basis of sex means discrimination on the basis of being a male or female,” Reeves wrote, siding with attorneys general from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Virginia. “Expanding the meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ turns Title IX on its head.”
The Biden rule’s gender-identity language relied on reasoning laid out in Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 US Supreme Court decision that expanded protections against sex discrimination in employment to cover gay and transgender workers. But the new Biden rules were “life-changing” for non-LGBTQ students as well, Brandon Wolf, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, said last April, when the rules were finalized. For example, the updated regulations explicitly stated that pregnant and postpartum students were protected under Title IX, meaning they were entitled to lactation rooms on university campuses and academic accommodations throughout pregnancy. And the Biden rules undid many of the Trump provisions that had weakened protections for victims of sexual misconduct.
“For more than 50 years, Title IX has promised an equal opportunity to learn and thrive in our nation’s schools free from sex discrimination,” Biden’s secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, said last April.“These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming, and respect their rights.” The rules were supposed to take effect nationwide last August.
At universities, the Trump rules required live hearings for sexual misconduct cases and allowed the admission of evidence about victims’ prior sexual history with the accused to “prove consent.”
But the Biden regulations were quickly challenged in court by multiple states and the Christian Educators Association International, represented by ultra-conservative legal firm the Alliance Defending Freedom, and never went into effect in more than half of the states. The plaintiffs argued that the rule was unconstitutionally vague, overly broad, and violated teachers’ freedom of speech by requiring them to use transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns. Reeves sided with the states. “The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” he wrote, referring to sections of the new rule that define misgendering of students as harassment.
“We are thrilled that the judge saw these rules exactly for what they are: a contradiction of Title IX’s text and purpose,” David Schmus, executive director of Christian Educators, said in a news release. “Our members and other educators are free from any attempt by the federal government to use Title IX to force them to say things about sex and gender identity that aren’t true and that violate their deeply held convictions.”
In vacating the Biden regulations, Reeves reverted Title IX policy back to the rule promulgated in 2020 by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary during his first term.
Those Trump-era rules were sweeping. Most significantly, they changed the way schools handled sexual misconduct claims at every stage of an investigation, putting in place some rules that protected the rights of alleged attackers but numerous other rules that discouraged victims from coming forward. For example, the Trump regulations raised the evidentiary standard needed to prove sexual misconduct; they precluded schools from investigating incidents that occurred off campus or on study-abroad trips, even if the perpetrator was a school employee; and they narrowed the definition of sexual harassment. At universities, the Trump rules required live hearings for sexual misconduct cases—forcing victims to undergo cross-examination by the accused’s adviser—and allowed the admission of evidence about victims’ prior sexual history with the accused to “prove consent.”
Biden’s rules returned theevidentiary standard to prove misconduct to the pre-Trump threshold, required schools to investigate harassment that occurred off campus or online, and no longer required live hearings or live cross-examination.
Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at the student- and survivor-led Know Your IX, called the Reeves ruling disappointing—and dangerous—for marginalized students, particularly survivors of sexual violence. “President Biden’s Title IX guidance defends survivors against retaliation,” Levinesaid in a news release. “With this ruling, the District Court imperils countless young people’s right to a safe, inclusive education.”
Protesters took to the US Capitol bathrooms across from House Speaker MikeJohnson’s office on Thursday to protest the recently enacted policy banning trans people from accessing bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Just a day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that may upend gender-affirming care for children and adults across the United States, dozens of trans people and their allies raised banners demanding Congress “stop pissing on our rights” and urging supportersto “flush bathroom bigotry.”
“It was important to show up in a radically defiant way and let the world know, and let our electeds know, that we are not going to allow this disrespect and this disregard for our lives,” Raquel Willis, co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement and one of the organizers of the demonstration, told Mother Jones. “Trans folks deserve access to the restrooms like anyone else.”
Organizerssaid about 15 people were arrested for crowding and obstructing, including Willis and Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower who leaked troves of classified government records about Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. According to The 19th, Capitol police threatened protesters with sexual misconduct charges, although a Gender Liberation Movement spokesperson said no such charges were filed.
Intelligence whistleblower Chelsea Manning is escorted from the Capitol in handcuffs after protesting the policy prohibiting trans people from using the bathrooms that align with their gender identity.Courtesy Alexa B. Wilkinson
The demonstration, which Willis said was inspired by civil rights sit-insof the past, was in response to the efforts spearheaded by Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican who, weeks after the election, vowed to propose a trans bathroom ban to target the first openly trans person elected to Congress, Democrat Sarah McBride from Delaware. After Speaker Johnson announced that bathroom access would be restricted—which he did on the Trans Day of Remembrance—Mace went still further, announcing that the ban she proposed would be extended to include all federal property, including museums and national parks. “Oh you thought threatening me would silence me?” Mace wrote in a post on X. “No. I just doubled down and filed a new bill to protect women and girls across the entire country on all federal property everywhere.”
After the protest, Mace called protesters an anti-trans slur in an X post.
“These attacks aren’t just about trans people. These are attacks that will be continued, that will be utilized against other communities on the margins.”
“Every person deserves dignity and respect, both in daily life and in more symbolic places like the US Capitol,” Manning, whose sentencing for leaking classified information was commuted by then-President Barack Obama after a seven-year imprisonment, said in a statement. “As someone who has fought against similar rules, I know what it’s like to feel pushed aside and erased. But I also know the incredible power and resilience our community has.”
Trans bathroom ban proposals have proliferated across the United States, with 14 states enacting restrictions since 2021, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Most recently, Ohio enacted a bathroom ban encompassing all K–12 schools and colleges, affecting trans students’ access not only to school restrooms but also to university dormitories.
Proponents of the bans, including Mace, argue that they’re necessary to protect the safety of women and girls from would-be assaulters. Researchers, however, have found no link between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety risks. In fact, research shows that trans people face greater risk of sexual harassment and assault when restrictive bathroom policies are in place. Even without such bans, trans people already face a disproportionate risk of violence, particularly sexual violence.
Willis said that as attacks on trans rights escalate, it is critical that allies—including Democratic elected officials—push against anti-trans policies and rhetoric. She described Democrats as “missing in action” while a coordinated wave of anti-trans legislation has spread across states since 2021. “These attacks aren’t just about trans people,” she said. “These are attacks that will be continued, that will be utilized against other communities on the margins.”
To Republican lawmakers, the 2024 election results were the mandate they’d been hoping for to justify their attacks on transgender rights. After a historically anti-LGBTQ campaign cycle in whichmore than $200 millionwas pumped into anti-trans advertisements, GOP elected officials from Congress to state legislatures are feeling emboldened by Donald Trump’s victory—and moving fast to put the next wave of transphobic policies in place.
Ohio is a case in point. Just a week after Trump was declared the president-elect, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a law banning transgender peoplein K-12 schools and colleges from using “single-sex” facilities that align with their gender identity—everything from bathrooms to locker rooms to dormitories. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who made national headlines almost a year ago when he vetoed the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors (quickly overridden by the GOP statehouse supermajority), quietly signed the new law Wednesday morning. He issued no statement.
The new law prohibits all public and private schools and colleges from offering multi-stall bathrooms that are gender-neutral. Schools can—but are not required to—establish single-user restrooms. Otherwise, to safely use bathrooms, trans students will have to ask permission to access faculty facilities.
“I just don’t foresee a scenario in which schools that are already historically underfunded are going to be able to drop everything and build new bathrooms,” Mallory Golski, civic engagement and advocacy manager at Kaleidoscope Youth Center, a queer youth support organization in Columbus, told Mother Jones after the bill passed. “It’s just not possible.”
Ohio’s ban makes it the 14th state to restrict trans people’s access to restrooms since 2021, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Most bans apply only to K-12 schools; in a few states, including Florida, the ban applies to all government buildings and carries criminal penalties. Ohio’s law explicitly authorizes schools to use students’ birth certificates to verify gender assigned at birth, but doesn’t include an enforcement mechanism—other than the fear it creates in trans students to police themselves.
“I just don’t foresee a scenario in which schools that are already historically underfunded are going to be able to drop everything and build new bathrooms. It’s just not possible.”
Meanwhile in Washington, Republicans have targeted Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first openly trans person elected to Congress. After GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina launched an effort to ban trans people from U.S. Capitol bathrooms, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) vowed to fight any trans woman she sees trying to use a women’s restroom, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that restrooms on Capitol Hill were “reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” Mace then proposed a bathroom ban for all federal property, including museums and national parks.
Republicans contend—without any evidence—that banning trans people from using gender-aligned bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorms is a way to ensure student safety. To the contrary, researchers have found no link between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety risks.
Indeed, according to the US Department of Justice, trans people are victimized by violent crime at 2.5 times the rate of their cisgender counterparts, and queer people in general are more likely to experience sexual violence. Research has shown that trans students face greater risk of sexual harassment and assault in schools with restrictive bathroom policies.
Ohio’s bathroom ban was originally introduced in May 2023, but this summer it was added to an unrelated, bipartisan bill to reform a state program allowing middle and high school students to take college classes for credit. Then the bill sat until the legislature returned from recess after the November election.
“Ohioans and Americans, quite frankly, across this country, don’t want boys in girls’ sports, don’t want boys in girls’ locker rooms, they don’t want boys in girls’ bathrooms,” Sen. Kristina Roegner, a Republican representing the northeast Ohio suburb of Hudson, said during the Senate floor debate in mid-November. “This message was sent loud and clear last week during the national election. I say we listen.” The bill passed 24 to 7, along party lines.
“It’s really not about the bathrooms. It’s about demonizing and frightening people,” Democrat Nickie Antonio, the Ohio Senate minority leader and the first openly gay person elected to the Ohio legislature, said on the Senate floor. “We are telling our children: There are people that are ‘less than,’ they are not the same, they are not allowed to behave exactly like ‘the rest of us.’ That is a terrible message.”
The message rings loud and clear in the ears of Ohio’s trans youth, says Golski of Kaleidoscope Youth Center. Many trans young people who have lived in the state their entire lives—who otherwise want to stay—are taking steps to leave. Golski doesn’t blame them.
“You can’t say, ‘Oh no, stick it out,’” Golski says. “It’s like: Go, run for the hills. Go anywhere but here.”
Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown—and with him, any sense that Ohio was still a swing state.
Brown, who served three terms, maintained an edge for most of his US Senate reelection bid against Moreno, a former luxury car dealership owner from Colombia. But in the end, a windfall of cash from national Republican groups boosted Moreno over the top. Just before midnight, Moreno lead Brown by 5 points.
It’s not surprising that a Republican would win a Senate seat in Ohio, but the fact that this particular Republican beat a well-liked incumbent suggests how much Ohio has changed in less than a decade.
As a Rust Belt state devastated by deindustrialization, automation, and in recent years, an epidemic of drug addiction, Ohio tends to gravitate toward candidates who are dutiful in their support for middle-class and working-class voters. But Moreno doesn’t have a pro-worker reputation: As we previously reported, he was found liable for withholding wages from employees and was sanctioned by a judge for disposing of documents relevant to that case. He additionally faced lawsuits from former employees who accused him of racial, gender, and age discrimination. More recently, he’s blocked voters from recording his events by using audio jammers.
Moreno also struggled to refine his message on reproductive rights, a topic 57 percent of Ohio voters said they supported in 2023 when they approved a ballot measure enshrining abortion access. “You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said in a leaked video from a recent town hall. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else,'” Moreno mocked. “OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but—especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”
But Moreno did have something Brown could never dream of—nor desire: an endorsement from Donald Trump. That endorsement was likely pivotal for Moreno, says Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. It gave him the edge against state Sen. Matt Dolan, a more traditional Republican who was Moreno’s biggest competition in the primary race. With no political experience and, until recently, not much name recognition, “he doesn’t really have a strong track record” otherwise, Beck says.
While Brown is a political progressive—supporting LGBTQ rights and reproductive freedoms—he has maintained a healthy distance from the rest of his party in recent months. He didn’t campaign with Harris. He stayed home this summer while fellow Democrats threw their celebratory, celebrity-filled nominating convention in Chicago. Brown also garnered the endorsement of the only Republican who ever defeated him in an election: former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who bested Brown as he sought reelection as Ohio’s secretary of state in 1990.
Known for sporting union-made suits and driving union-made cars, Brown’s 2024 campaign also attracted long-standing appreciation from prominent labor union leaders. The senator often wears a canary pin on his lapel to symbolize 20th-century coal miners who were subjected to dangerous working conditions before collective bargaining advanced job safety.
His populist persona and these contradictions are the same ones that helped Brown win the Senate seat three times in 2006, 2012, and 2018. It’s not that Brown has changed. It’s that Ohio has.
Ohio used to be a political microcosm of the country. Without fail, between 1964 and 2016, Ohio’s presidential pick was also the nation’s choice of president. The consistency inspired the phrase, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”
In the early 2000s, the state’s population growth began lagging behind the rest of the country. Over time, Ohio became less educated, older, whiter—and, accordingly, redder. When Trump ran in 2016, his brash, America First persona appealed to Ohioans who felt they had been forgotten by elite politicians prioritizing globalism over their kitchen-table issues. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won the state by more than 8 points. That trend has continued this cycle: As of 11:30 pm ET, Trump was nearly 12 points ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Ohio.
In the end, Brown’s legislative history and broad coalition of blue-collar devotees couldn’t propel him to a fourth term. In today’s Ohio, only Trump’s support mattered.
Florida’s six-week abortion ban will remain the law of the land, as an abortion rights constitutional amendment failed Tuesday night.
With 91 percent of the vote tallied as of 9:20 p.m., support for Florida’s Amendment 4 hovered around 57 percent, according to Associated Press projections—shy of the 60 percent threshold required to pass. The amendment would have protected the right to an abortion until fetal viability, or until about 24 weeks’ gestation, and after viability if a medical provider determined that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.
The amendment’s failure isn’t just a loss to the political momentum following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022; it’s a major win for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wielded the power of his office to defeat the measure. “A bipartisan group of voters today sent a clear message to the Florida legislature,” a representative from Floridians Protecting Freedom, the campaign behind the amendment, said in a Tuesday night livestream. That message to lawmakers? “End the ban.”
DeSantis proclaimed victory within minutes of the final polls closing at 8 p.m. “Amendment 4 has failed,” he wrote in a post on X. More than a million more Floridians voted for Amendment 4 than voted for DeSantis in 2022.
Most obviously, it needed to garner 60 percent support—more than the simple majorities that were needed to pass abortion protections in red states like Ohio, Kansas, and Kentucky. But DeSantis’ administration also challenged the measure in unprecedented ways, including by threatening television stations that ran pro-amendment advertisements, releasing a massive report weeks before the election accusing Floridians Protecting Freedom of “widespread election fraud,” and using a state agency website as a virtual billboard to oppose the amendment.
Since coming into effect in May, Florida’s six-week abortion ban has upended access to the procedure across the South. Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans, and Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans. The number of abortions in Florida plummeted by 30 percent in the first two months of the ban, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Amendment 4’s defeat marks the first failure of a state abortion rights amendment since Dobbs. Voters in seven states have passed abortion protections, and voters in nine other states have similar measures on their ballots.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, GOP consultants were fighting over strategy: Would going all-in on anti-trans messaging deliver then-President Donald Trump the suburbs in his race against former Vice President Joe Biden? Or should his campaign stay away from the issue, given widespread support among the electorate for LGBTQ rights like same-sex marriage? “This might become a hot cultural issue, but it’s not a thing yet,” one Republican consultant told Politico in the summer of 2020. “Right now, it’s just an easy issue for the other side to attack us on. They will call us bigots.”
So much has changed, as a network of conservative and religious-right groups coordinated to push hundreds of bills to wipe out trans youth health care, bar them from sports teams that match their gender identity, and censor discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools. With more than 129 anti-LGBTQ laws passed across the country in the last twoyears, GOP candidates now are betting that they’ve seeded enough anti-trans sentiment among voters to use transphobia as a motivating issue. It doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans that trans issues still tend to rank last among voters’ priorities: From August through early October, GOP candidates dropped $65 million on anti-trans advertising, according to a New York Times analysis. The hateful rhetoric has been deployed all the way down the ballot, in Senateraces, statehousecontests, and state constitutional amendment campaigns.
Now, as the presidential race draws to a close, Trump’s campaign has made anti-trans ads the biggest focal point of its spending. The TV spots and social media posts spread falsehoods about medical care for trans youth, cast trans athletes as predators, and link support for trans people with support for (nonexistent) “partial-birth abortions.” Sports fans will recognize the constant refrain—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”—from game-day commercial breaks.
None of this bodes well for trans rights under either Trump or Harris, no matter what happens on Election Day, or in the weeks afterward. “I’ve been calling this the most anti-LGBTQ election since 2004,” says Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which works to elect queer and trans candidates. In 2004, George W. Bush used same-sex marriage as a wedge issue in his reelection campaign, betting it would drive conservatives to the polls. (As it turns out, right-wing voters were motivated by other priorities.) “They’re doing exactly the same thing now,” Meloy says. “Gay and lesbian people are understood and represented, and now they’re trying to dehumanize and use trans people and their experiences to get votes.”
Trump has pledged to defund gender-affirming care—and to ban it for minors.
Just being exposed to hateful political rhetoric can harm trans youth. Last year, in a Trevor Project survey, 86 percent of trans and nonbinary youth said debates about anti-trans bills negatively affected their mental health; half said they experienced cyberbullying; and a third didn’t feel safe going to the doctor. And when states pass anti-trans laws, the consequences for mental health are devastating: A study published in NatureHuman Behavior in June found suicide attempts by trans youth ages 13 to 17 rose by as much as 72 percent a year after anti-trans laws were enacted.
Such laws are now the norm in Republican-dominated states.“In either scenario in November, we’re still facing that reality, where transgender people’s and also LGBTQ people’s rights more broadly depend almost entirely on what state they happen to live in,” says Logan Casey, director of policy research for the Movement Advancement Project. Already, trans people and their families are facing a “really difficult choice,” he says. “Stay in the place that they call home, seek healthcare somewhere else, or move out of state for potentially safer environments.”
If Trump wins the presidency, Casey says, the attacks succeeding now on the state level can be expected to graduate to the federal government. In his first term, Trump already provided a model for targeting transgender people. He banned them from the military; permitted anti-trans discrimination in health care; rolled back protections for trans students; and created a broad license for businesses to discriminate based on “religious objections”—often against LGBTQ people. More clues for a second term come from Project 2025, much of which was written by former Trump administration members, which equates “transgender ideology” with pornography and declares that it should be banned. The blueprint for a second Trump administration proposes wiping the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” completely out of all federal policy.
And if the GOP wins both Congress and the White House, Trump has pledged to go further than before—cutting off federal funding for gender-affirming medical care and making it illegal nationwide for doctors to provide such care to minors.
But even without Congress, Trump would still have immense power to target transgender people through executive agencies. First on the list: reinterpreting federal laws in ways that eliminateprotections for transgender people. That includes the Affordable Care Act, as well as Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination in education. Are schools and doctors expected to treat people according to their gender identity? The Obama and Biden administrations said yes. But in the years between, Trump appointees reversed those rules. “What they mean in terms of bathrooms, what they mean in terms of sports, what those regulations look like is very dependent on, is [Betsy] DeVos in charge or not?” says Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice.
Legal and policy experts who specialize in LGBTQ rights also warn that Trump appointees could create broad religious exemptions to federal nondiscrimination rules. One potential consequence: Government contracts going to organizations that exclude queer and trans people or insist on misgendering them. For example, during the first Trump administration, Catholic Charities was the only organization in Texas contracted to provide foster care placements for refugee children. The organization disqualified a lesbian couple, allegedly because they did not “mirror the Holy Family.” (Lambda Legal sued, and won.) Jennifer Pizer, Lambda Legal’s chief legal officer, says she’s particularly concerned about federal agencies giving contractors free rein, because the people they serve are often in dire need. “Whether it’s providing shelter or food or disaster relief, when they discriminate, then the people who are entitled to receive services, they don’t necessarily stay,” she explains.
The Project 2025–obsessed loyalists and ideologues who will staff a second Trump administration will not only set a tone for the massive federal workforce—one likely to be hostile to LGBTQ employees—but they’ll also be in charge of deciding how federal program money is distributed. “That money can go to responsible, community-based organizations and professional institutions that provide services consistent with professional standards, in a nondiscriminatory way,” Pizer says, “or to expand the religious infrastructure that we have in this country.”
“No matter which way the regulations go, no matter what they say, there’s always going to be litigation.”
Pretty much any agency moves are guaranteed to wind up in the courts, where lawsuits are already raging over trans-inclusive interpretations of Title IX and the ACA. Even when the Supreme Court weighs in—as it did in 2020 when it ruled that Title VII, the federal law banning sex discrimination in employment, protected transgender workers—the underlying issues aren’t put to rest. “No matter which way the regulations go, no matter what they say, there’s always going to be litigation,” Braverman says.
So it matters immensely who’s on the bench—another presidential power. During Trump’s first term, he appointed nearly 200 judges, reshaping the federal judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court. As a result, those justices didn’t just overturn Roe v. Wade, they widened religious exemptions to civil rights law in ways that let more business owners refuse to serve LGBTQ clients. And, with all the recent state laws targeting transgender youth, a profusion oflitigation over trans issues is making its way through the federal court system. In the most prominent case, United States v. Skrmetti, the DOJ has teamed up with trans families and has asked the court to decide if states can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth while permitting the same treatments for cisgender patients.
Oral argument for Skrmetti is scheduled for December—meaning the case should be submitted before the next president takes office. Pizer notes thatit remains to be seen whether a Trump White House would try to reverse the DOJ’s current position on the case, and whether the justices would allow it.
In some ways, the backsliding in support for trans people is bipartisan. Democratic candidates this cycle have often appeared tentative or afraid of how conservative messaging about trans issues has already shaped public opinion.
Some Democrats have adopted anti-trans rhetoric defensively, referring to trans people not by their gender identity but by the sex they were assigned at birth. “Let me be clear, I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” said Democratic Senate candidate Texas Rep. Colin Allred, running against Ted Cruz in Texas, in his response to a right-wing attack ad. Some LGBTQ-rights advocates chalked Allred’s response up to “messy” allyship; others called it a “dog whistle.” Either way, anti-trans activists were thrilled: “Beautiful Ted gets a major W here,” American Principles Project president Terry Schilling posted.
Even Kamala Harris, who dedicated an entire interview to describing her support for trans people during her first run for president in 2019, and who otherwise has a strongrecord advocating for the queer community, has stopped short of giving a robust defense of trans rights in her campaign. When attacked for allowing incarcerated people to access gender-affirming care, she shot back that such care was offered in federal prisons under the Trump administration. Gender-affirming care “is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary,” Harris elaborated under further questioning by NBCanchor Hallie Jackson.
“It feels like that’s a long way from ‘we see you and we love you,’ which was your message to trans Americans in May,” Jackson pushed back. “What do you want the LGBTQ+ community to know as they’re looking for a full-throated backing from you for trans Americans?”
“I believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, period, and should not be vilified for who they are, and should not be bullied for who they are,” Harris replied.
To some queer and trans observers, Harris’ general rebuttal about a need for inclusion is a disappointment, failing to meet the intensity of the anti-trans backlash. Others see it as an appropriate calculation for a dangerous political moment. “There are attacks against multiple groups of people, and so a counter-message that says, ‘Targeting people is not good, we need to come together as a country, we need to be inclusive as a country’—that is an apt message for these times,” Pizer says.
The stakes of the rhetoric are extremely high. While the average American’s opinions about transgender policies—from bathroom bans to gender-affirming care restrictions—are largely unformed and in flux, according to research from the University of Minnesota, politicians’ anti-trans messages have broadened support for restrictive policies. “As public opinion continues to evolve in this area,” the researchers concluded, “much will depend on the behavior and framing offered by elites.”
And the anti-trans rhetoric from Trump and his allies has already had a profound impact on queer people—none more so than the trans women and drag queens featured in the ads without their consent. “I haven’t been able to sleep,” Gabrielle Ludwig, a trans woman whose college basketball career was exploited in multiple ads, told The Hill. “I don’t want my family affected. I have granddaughters, daughters who are in college. I only did this because I love to play basketball. That’s all it ever was.”
With so much ultimately beingup to the courts—and political battles sure to continue in the states, if not the federal government—Braverman believes a Harris win could be a chance to change the narrative. “The demonization and the discussion and the ‘let’s just debate people’s humanity’—that is the thing that is really making life hard for people,” they say.
Harris cannot unilaterally reverse the tide of anti-trans legislation in states; beyond her ability to affect policy areas like health and education, her greatest power lies in her words. “Laws and regulations are really important,” Braverman says, but “there needs to be more. There needs to be education, there needs to be understanding. There needs to be support from people in power.”
J. Ann Selzer has earned several nicknames throughout her 37-year-long stint leading the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll. She’s called the “Outlier Queen” when she breaks from what appears to be the consensus of political polls. And when her final pre-election polls paint a complicated picture for otherwise favored candidates, political insiders refer to her as the “Harbinger of Doom.”
Now, as the Election Day countdown timer inches toward zero, Selzer’s latest polling may be the specter that has worried some Republicans—the rageful spirit of Iowa women who lost abortion access this past summer. Contrary to every other poll, this poll of 808 likely Iowa voters shows that Kamala Harris has a 3-point lead over Donald Trump in one of the reddest red states. It’s within the poll’s margin of error but a far cry from Selzer’s previous tallies: In September, Trump enjoyed a 4-point lead over Harris, and in June, he was 18 points ahead of President Joe Biden.
“Nobody in their right mind would predict it,” Selzer said on the self-described “Never Trump” podcast The Bulwark. “Our methodology is to make no assumptions, and we made no assumptions.”
“Nobody in their right mind would predict it. Our methodology is to make no assumptions, and we made no assumptions.”
Selzer has gone against the polling consensus before—and has been proven right. She was one of the few pollsters who predicted Trump’s significant lead over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she broke from the crowd in 2008 when her poll predicted Barack Obama’s 2008 win in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The driving force behind the latest shift? Selzer says it’s women—particularly older and independent women—incensed by the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to allow a six-week abortion ban to go into effect.
The state Supreme Court’s June decision overruling a lower court’s block on the six-week ban may have come as a surprise, considering previous court decisions. In 2018, four years before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, the Iowa court upheld the fundamental right to abortion, striking down a 72-hour waiting period and dooming the six-week ban, which was then the most restrictive abortion law in the United States.
But this past summer’s opinion wasn’t a fluke; as I reported in July, it was the desired result of a yearslong scheme to rig Iowa’s courts against abortion. The GOP, which holds every statewide office and controls both legislative chambers, used its unencumbered power to overhaul the judicial selection process, giving Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds majority control over the committee that nominates justices. Her conservative appointees changed the makeup of the court. When lawmakers passed another six-week ban last year, the justices delivered on the Republican promise to restrict abortion—despite Iowans repeatedlysignaling their support for abortion rights. The shift of a significant number of Iowa voters toward supporting Harris represents more than just anguish at the fall of abortion rights; it’s a strong rebuke to the GOP for its manipulation of the court.
The court’s opinion has likely produced what Selzer called a “jaw-dropping” result: Women age 65 and older, a typically Republican group, favor Harris over Trump 63 percent to 28 percent. Women overall favor Harris by 20 points, while Trump has a 4-point lead among men. “You need to win with women more than you lose with men,” Selzer said, “and we’re seeing that in these data.”
For his part, Trump dismissed the poll as “heavily skewed.” But Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst says the results reflect what Democrats have been seeing on the ground. “They are sick and tired of politicians interfering in their doctor’s offices and are looking for people up and down the ballot who are going to actually fight for their freedoms,” Konfrst told the Des Moines Register. “And this issue is salient and real, and the fact that Vice President Harris all the way down to candidates for the Iowa House are talking about the same rights and freedoms shows that this is what Iowans are looking for.”
Earlier this month, Louisiana became the first state in the country to classify the two most common drugs used in medication abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol, as Schedule IV controlled substances, creating stiff penalties for their unauthorized use. Medical providers sounded alarms when the GOP-controlled legislature passed the law: Abortion is already banned in the state in nearly all cases, and the new classification would delay lifesaving care for people experiencing miscarriages and health conditions unrelated to pregnancy.
Now, in a just-filed lawsuit, doulas, medical providers, and women denied care under the state’s abortion law argue that the new classification of mifepristone and misoprostol runs afoul of Louisiana’s constitution. By separating the drugs from others with similar risk profiles, the suit contends, the new law discriminates against people on the basis of their physical conditions, ones that are treated with mifepristone and misoprostol.
In Louisiana, controlled substances fall into five categories depending on their medical indications and risk for abuse—Schedule I being the highest risk, and Schedule V the lowest risk. The current list of Schedule IV drugs includes opioids, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines, all drugs with high potential for addiction. The classification of mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous drugs subjects them to tight regulations. But they’re not dangerous drugs, nor do they have abuse potential like their Schedule IV counterparts; more than 100 studies have shown them to be safe and effective in ending pregnancy. Contrary to their current classification in Louisiana as having addictive potential, the Food and Drug Administration—which approved the drugs decades ago—has never found the medications to lead to physical or psychological dependence.
Misoprostol and mifepristone have proven to be effective in a variety of contexts. Both are used in miscarriage care, mifepristone is used to treat ovarian cancer, and misoprostol is crucial to managing postpartum hemorrhages. Under Louisiana’s law, anyone in possession of either drug—except for pregnant women—is subject to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The classification, the lawsuit argues, subjects the drugs to a “highly regulated legal scheme” that delays care. Previously, misoprostol was commonly stored in obstetric hemorrhage carts or in staff’s pockets. But under its new status, only a provider licensed to administer controlled substances can retrieve the drug from locked cabinets where other scheduled substances, like narcotics, are stored. As a New Orleans OB-GYN told my colleague Julianne McShane, in a medical emergency, time is of the essence, and even a delay of several minutes can have disastrous consequences.
Pregnant women were already being denied care before the medications were reclassified. One of the plaintiffs, Kaitlyn Joshua, was denied miscarriage care by two hospitals because of the state’s abortion ban. “Now lawmakers have passed yet another law making it harder to get care during a miscarriage, and they did it without following the requirements of the State’s constitution,” Joshua said in a news release.
Earlier this month, Louisiana became the first state in the country to classify the two most common drugs used in medication abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol, as Schedule IV controlled substances, creating stiff penalties for their unauthorized use. Medical providers sounded alarms when the GOP-controlled legislature passed the law: Abortion is already banned in the state in nearly all cases, and the new classification would delay lifesaving care for people experiencing miscarriages and health conditions unrelated to pregnancy.
Now, in a just-filed lawsuit, doulas, medical providers, and women denied care under the state’s abortion law argue that the new classification of mifepristone and misoprostol runs afoul of Louisiana’s constitution. By separating the drugs from others with similar risk profiles, the suit contends, the new law discriminates against people on the basis of their physical conditions, ones that are treated with mifepristone and misoprostol.
In Louisiana, controlled substances fall into five categories depending on their medical indications and risk for abuse—Schedule I being the highest risk, and Schedule V the lowest risk. The current list of Schedule IV drugs includes opioids, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines, all drugs with high potential for addiction. The classification of mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous drugs subjects them to tight regulations. But they’re not dangerous drugs, nor do they have abuse potential like their Schedule IV counterparts; more than 100 studies have shown them to be safe and effective in ending pregnancy. Contrary to their current classification in Louisiana as having addictive potential, the Food and Drug Administration—which approved the drugs decades ago—has never found the medications to lead to physical or psychological dependence.
Misoprostol and mifepristone have proven to be effective in a variety of contexts. Both are used in miscarriage care, mifepristone is used to treat ovarian cancer, and misoprostol is crucial to managing postpartum hemorrhages. Under Louisiana’s law, anyone in possession of either drug—except for pregnant women—is subject to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The classification, the lawsuit argues, subjects the drugs to a “highly regulated legal scheme” that delays care. Previously, misoprostol was commonly stored in obstetric hemorrhage carts or in staff’s pockets. But under its new status, only a provider licensed to administer controlled substances can retrieve the drug from locked cabinets where other scheduled substances, like narcotics, are stored. As a New Orleans OB-GYN told my colleague Julianne McShane, in a medical emergency, time is of the essence, and even a delay of several minutes can have disastrous consequences.
Pregnant women were already being denied care before the medications were reclassified. One of the plaintiffs, Kaitlyn Joshua, was denied miscarriage care by two hospitals because of the state’s abortion ban. “Now lawmakers have passed yet another law making it harder to get care during a miscarriage, and they did it without following the requirements of the State’s constitution,” Joshua said in a news release.
Two years after the US Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, tens of millions of Americans will go to the polls this November hoping to protect access to the procedure—whether their lawmakers like it or not. Ten states— some already with robust protections, others with near-total bans—have measures on their ballots to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions. The expected outpouring of voters, including in key swing states, could help determine control of the White House, Congress, state legislatures, and state supreme courts.
Reproductive freedom has proved to be one of the strongest currents shaping the outcome of American elections since 2022. So far, voters in seven states have reacted to the end of Roe v. Wade by passing ballot measures aimed at restoring, and even expanding, Roe’s protections. In a few of those states, the voter-initiative process empowered the public to bypass GOP-dominated legislatures and supersede decades-old restrictions. Reproductive rights organizers are hoping to continue that winning streak on November 5.
But faced with the broad appeal of abortion initiatives in GOP-led states such as Ohio, Republican officials have gone to sometimes extreme lengths to undermine the latest measures. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged a multifront war on Amendment 4, threatening television stations that air ads favoring the measure and issuing a 348-page report accusing the Floridians Protecting Freedom campaign of “widespread petition fraud.”
While most of this year’s measures have a common objective—protecting reproductive access—they take very different approaches to reaching that goal. Here is a rundown of what’s on the November ballot, which we will update as election results become available.
Arizona
In anticipation of the end of Roe, Arizona Republicans passed a 15-week abortion ban in early 2022. But they also left in place an 1864 statute that outlawed nearly all abortions and threatened providers with jail time—a “zombie” law that was moot as long as Roe was in effect. This past April, the Arizona Supreme Court revived that Civil-War era ban by a 4–2 vote. The GOP-controlled legislature quickly repealed the old law, but many Arizonans were outraged at what the court had done, and the campaign to put Proposition 139 on the November ballot exploded. Prop 139 would enshrine a fundamental right to abortion in the Arizona Constitution and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion until the point of fetal viability—about 24 weeks. Abortions would be allowed later in pregnancy to save the mother’s life or to protect her physical or mental health. The amendment would also protect anyone who helps another person obtain an abortion.
A coalition of reproductive rights groups certified more than 575,000 signatures this past summer—the most ever validated for a citizens initiative in the state’s history, supporters said. In a New York Times/Siena College poll in late September, Prop 139 was ahead among likely voters by a resounding 58 percent.If it passes, Prop 139 could be used to challenge almost 40 abortion laws on Arizona’s books, including the existing 15-week ban, a prohibition on telehealth abortions, and a parental consent requirement for teenagers.
Colorado
Long before the Dobbs decision, Colorado legislators passed numerous lawssafeguarding access to abortion. But after Dobbs, reproductive health advocates in the state concluded that even the strongest statutes weren’t strong enough—Colorado needed to enshrine those protections in its constitution. The measure they put on the November ballot, Amendment 79, wouldn’t just establish a right to abortion; it would repeal a 40-year-old constitutional provision that prohibited the use of state dollars to fund abortion. Sponsored by a coalition called Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom, the measure needs 55 percent of votes to pass.
Surrounded by states with bans or heavily restrictive laws, Colorado is a crucial abortion access point for the West. With no gestational limits, the state is also a haven for anyone seeking an abortion later in pregnancy, as it is home to one of four clinics in the US that offer third-trimester procedures. Repealing the ban on state funding would allow Colorado to use its state Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions, making the procedure more accessible for low-income patients.
Florida
Florida’s Amendment 4 would enshrine in the state’s constitution the freedom to seek an abortion before fetal viability, and after viability if a medical provider determines that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.
Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendment—including sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions.
If the measure passes, it would dramatically improve access to reproductive care in Florida, which since May has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Before that, the state permitted abortions up to 15 weeks, and before Dobbs, until 24 weeks. The impact of the Florida vote will be felt throughout the Southeast: Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans; Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans, and North Carolina’s 12-week ban is made more burdensome by a 72-hour waiting period.
The stakes for passage are high, and so are the barriers. Over the last several election cycles, Florida has turned out more conservative voters than liberal ones. While reproductive rights are popular across the political spectrum, the state has a 60 percent threshold to approve constitutional amendments; the other red states that have passed abortion-protective measures since Dobbs—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio—only required simple majorities. Meanwhile, Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendment—including sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions, ostensibly to root out fraud. If the measure passes, DeSantis and his allies are widely expected to fight just as hard to overturn the results.
Maryland
Maryland’s Question 1, which was placed on the November ballot by the state legislature, does not mention “abortion”—much to the chagrin of supporters and opponents alike. Instead, the amendment broadly establishes the constitutional right to “reproductive freedom,” including the freedom to decide whether to continue or end a pregnancy. It needs a simple majority to pass.
Maryland already has some of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country: There is no gestational limit, state Medicaid covers the procedure, and a shield law protects patients who travel from states with abortion bans. This has made the state a critical access point for abortion seekers further along in pregnancy, as well as people traveling from the South. Abortion protections are widely popular in the state; in a recent poll by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 69 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for Question 1.
Missouri
Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effectmere minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—making it the first state in the nation to broadly prohibit abortion.Abortion-rights advocates soon set about crafting a ballot initiative to end the ban, inspired by wins in other states. Now, with Amendment 3, voters will decide whether they want the right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved by a simple majority, the amendment would set up a legal battle to overturn the current ban and challenge the many other Missouri laws that regulated abortion providers nearly out of existence even when Roe was still in effect.
Amendment 3’s proponents, a coalition known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, have traveled a rocky road just to get the measure before voters. They’ve overcome blatant obstruction by top state GOP officials, multiple legal challenges, and deep internal divisions over whether the initiative should allow the state to ban abortions after fetal viability. The final text protects abortion rights until viability, and permits later abortions if needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.
Montana
Constitutional Initiative 128 establishes the right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including abortion. If passed, it would allow the state to regulate abortion after fetal viability, so long as those restrictions don’t prevent abortions that health care providers deem medically necessary. The amendment, which requires more than 50 percent of the vote, would also prevent the government from criminalizing patients and anyone who helps a person exercise her abortion rights.
If top Republican state officials had it their way, the measure would not even be on the ballot. State courts intervened at multiple points; the Montana Supreme Court overruled Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s initial rejection of the proposed amendment, nixed Knudsen’s drafted ballot language saying the amendment “may increase the number of taxpayer-funded abortions,” and threatened Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen with a contempt charge because she refused to hand over the sample ballot petition to the campaign behind the amendment, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights. After abortion rights supporters submitted nearly double the required 60,000 signatures, Jacobsen even tried changing the rules to throw out the signatures of inactive registered voters, until a district court ordered her to stop.
Thanks to the state supreme court, abortion is currently legal in Montana until fetal viability, despite the best efforts of Republican state legislators to restrict access. Montanans have already brushed off one GOP attempt to stigmatize abortion; in November 2022, 52 percent of voters rejected a legislature-initiated statute that would have made it a felony for doctors to not provide care to infants born aliveafter induced labor, a cesarean section or an “attempted abortion.” (The law wasn’t necessary since Montana, like every other state, already makes infanticide a crime.)
Nebraska
Nebraska voters will see dueling abortion amendments on their November ballots. Initiative 434restricts abortion rights, banning the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy with limited exceptions. That’s essentially the same law already on the state’s books—but the measure would enshrine it as a constitutional amendment, making it much harder to repeal. And because the amendment doesn’t protect abortion before the 12-week mark, state politicians could always go further and pass a complete ban, as Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has pledged to do.
By contrast, Initiative 439expands abortion rights, creating a “fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.” In practice, the amendment would roughly double the length of time for pregnant people in Nebraska to get an abortion. Crucially, it would block lawmakers from passing a total ban.
If the double initiatives sound confusing, well, that’s the point. Anti-abortion activists have repeatedly tried to muddy the waters about which ballot initiative is which, as Rachel Cohen at Voxhas reported. They’ve also tried to get the pro-abortion initiative thrown off the ballot on a technicality, but the Nebraska Supreme Court shot them down.
Nevada, one of the swingiest states in the 2024 election, has its own version of the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by voters in 2022. But it didn’t explicitly mention protections for abortion.Question 6 constitutionally enshrines the right to abortion until fetal viability or for the health or life of the mother, as determined on a case-by-case basis by health care providers. Any pre-viability restrictions must be directly related to promoting the health of the pregnant person and “consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice.” This year’s vote is just the first step in a multiyear process; assuming a simple majority of voters approve it, the measure must be passed again in 2026 to become part of the constitution.
Thanks to a law passed in 1973, abortion has been legal in Nevada until 24 weeks. Because voters passed a referendum on that law in 1990, it can only be changed by a direct ballot measure. Protections for abortion are very popular in Nevada; a University of Maryland poll conducted over the summer found that about 70 percent of state voters oppose criminalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The campaign behind the amendment, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, has raised nearly $10 million since January, according to campaign finance reports; the Coalition for Parents and Children PAC, which successfully sued to block an initial version of the amendment that covered reproductive healthcare more broadly, hasn’t raised or spent any money.
The proposal is a broad version of the Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running feminist effort to guarantee women’s rights in state and federal constitutions. Right now, New York’s constitution only forbids government discrimination on the basis of race and religion. Prop 1 adds more protected categories to that list: disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those types of discrimination are already banned under state law, but by enshrining protections in the constitution, Prop 1 would make them harder for legislators to attack in the future—for example, if New York politics keep trending rightward.
Here’s where abortion comes in: The amendment also bans discrimination based on “pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Not only does that definition go farther than any other state, it leaves little room for judges to interpret in ways that might limit abortion access, according to Katharine Bodde, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Yet while New York Democrats initially viewed Prop 1 as a surefire way to boost voter turnout, their right-wing opponents have seized on transphobic messaging to great effect—making this blue-state fight unexpectedly close.
South Dakota
South Dakota’s current abortion ban is one of the most extreme in the country, with all abortions banned except when needed to save a pregnant person’s life. Amendment G, backed by a group called Dakotans for Health, would replace that law with a trimester-based system allowing increasing restrictions on abortion as a pregnancy progresses.
In the first trimester, the state would be banned from interfering with “a woman’s abortion decision and its effectuation.” In the second trimester, the state could restrict abortion in ways “reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.” Third-trimester abortions could be banned, except when necessary to preserve a pregnant person’s life or health. The amendment needs a simple majority to pass.
Planned Parenthood and other abortion-rights groups aren’t supporting Amendment G, which they’ve said doesn’t go far enough. But the conservative Republicans who dominate state politics are still so terrified of the measure that they passed an emergency law to let voters revoke their petition signatures—then opponents of the measure led a phone banking effort to dupe signers into pulling their support. Why are state Republicans spooked? “If you can do it in South Dakota, it will strike fear into the hearts of every red-state legislature in the country,” Dakotans for Health co-founder Adam Weiland told the American Prospect.
Madison Pauly, Abby Vesoulis, Julianne McShane, and Nina Martincontributed reporting. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Top image photo credits: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty; RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty; William Campbell/Getty; Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Getty; Getty(3)
Every Monday morning, the staff of the Abortion Fund of Ohio’s intake line starts fresh, answering calls, following up on voicemails, and doling out cash to people who can’t afford to go to their abortion appointments. The team of three fields as many financial requests as they can until the money allotted for the week runs out. Lately, that’s been by Tuesday. Sometimes they can stretch the funds until Wednesday.
The Ohio Fund, one of the largest abortion funds in the United States, didn’t always operate this way. When I first spoke with the fund in August 2023, it didn’t even have monthly caps on the amount of money it gave callers. Back then, even though the wave of “rage donations” that followed the end of Roe v. Wadehad receded, there was still enough money to pay for patients’ medical costs, travel, and child care.
But as costs of care—and daily life—have risen, so, too, has demand for the fund’s services. Ohio’s relatively new constitutional protections for abortion—the result of a ballot measure approved last year—have made it a destination for needy patients from nearby states where onerous restrictions remain in place. When national abortion rights organizations suddenly announced this summer that they would be slashing the amount of money they devote to defraying patients’ medical costs, the financial problems escalated.
To put all this in perspective: In July 2023, the Ohio Fund spent about $100,000 helping 300 or so people get abortions. This past July, they fulfilled twice as many requests for help with half as much money—and the number of calls has continued to rise. People who might once have been able to pay for their own abortions are now begging for assistance, and people who always would have needed financial assistance are begging for more.
“The first word that comes to my mind is helpless,” says Taren Holliman, the Ohio Fund’s program manager. “It feels very helpless when you are not able to fully bridge the gap, or help bridge the gap, in a way that actually allows a person to access the health care that they deserve.”
It’s not just the Ohio Fund that is struggling to meet callers’ needs. Every abortion fund I spoke with, from the East Coast to the Great Plains to the Deep South, is in varying stages of crisis, with many taking unprecedented measures to ward off looming disaster. As the abortion issue dominates the 2024 elections, from Kamala Harris’ campaign to the battle for the Senate to ballot measures in a record 10 states, the frontline groups that have taken on the lion’s share of the post-Dobbs burden—the clinics that provide abortions, and the funds that get people to their appointments—are barely able to keep their doors open and phones on the hook.
“What I’m seeing looks like the collapse of the abortion care system.”
Just days after the state’s voter-approved constitutional amendment officially took effect in December 2023, the Ohio Fund closed shop until February due to a lack of money. That was despite a record-breaking year for the fund, during which it almost doubled the money it doled out, to $1.5 million, and nearly quadrupled the number of abortion seekers it helped.
As Ohio’s courts begin implementing the ballot measure, the financial strains are likely to grow. With its six-week ban permanently struck down, and its 24-hour waiting period and restrictions on medication abortion temporarily blocked, the state is poised to become an even more vital access point for abortion patients from neighboring states with near-total bans, including Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana.
Ohio’s abortion-rights measure has been a model for many of the ones on the ballot. But the nationwide lack of abortion funding infrastructure presents a stark reminder of the post-November reality, even if Harris wins: Protecting the right to abortion is very different from ensuring that patients, particularly low-income ones, can access abortion care. Draconian laws, stigma, and a lack of buy-in from large donors and local and state governments have produced a funding catastrophe that has been decades in the making—and is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. Dr. Diane Horvath, director of an independent abortion clinic in Maryland, a state with robust abortion laws and an abortion-rights amendment on the November ballot, put it bluntly: “What I’m seeing looks like the collapse of the abortion care system.”
For low-income women in particular, access to abortion has long depended on the benevolence of donors. For nearly 50 years, the Hyde Amendment has prohibited federal funds from going toward abortions except when a woman’s life is threatened or in cases involving rape or incest. Many states implemented their own versions of Hyde, barring state Medicaid funds from being used for abortions; some states also passed laws banning private insurers from covering abortions in their states.
Despite the promises of Roe, abortion remained far from accessible—and unnecessary regulations on abortion providers and mandatory waiting periods that delayed care only exacerbated the access problem. Grassroots funds, mostly funded by small, individual donations, cropped up in communities across the country to offer financial assistance and, crucially, stigma-free emotional support to people seeking abortion care.
In 1993, an alliance of 22 local organizations in 14 states established the National Network of Abortion Funds to better connect abortion seekers to help and advocate for abortion rights. Now made up of almost 100 funds, the network gave out more than $18 million in grants last year, tax filings show. The fall of Roe produced a swell of “rage donations” to national organizations and local funds alike, enabling some funds to expand their staff, service areas, and funding amounts. But those donations have since dried up.
For years, and especially since Dobbs, local abortion funds and the people they serve have relied on two big national organizations to help defray the medical costs of procedures for patients who meet financial eligibility requirements: Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation. Planned Parenthood funds abortions at its own clinics, and NAF funds abortions at NAF-member independent clinics.
Local abortion funds fill in the gaps, helping pay for things like plane fares, motels, and babysitters; many, like the Ohio Fund, do not have income limits or other eligibility requirements that cut some pregnant people off from national assistance. Although NAF has a limited fund for non-appointment expenses like travel and child care, the overwhelming burden of practical support falls on the shoulders of local organizations.
Immediately after the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, NAF and Planned Parenthood committed to funding up to half of patient medical costs, and NAF offered additional assistance to patients in emergencies. Before the Dobbs decision, NAF spent, on average, $50,000 a month to defray abortion costs, president and CEO Brittany Fonteno says. In the two years after Dobbs, it spent $6 million a month.
But this past July 1, NAF cut its abortion funding in half; going forward, it would only cover 30 percent of qualifying patients’ appointment costs. Fonteno says the decision was difficult but necessary to ensure the organization’s future. “Our funding has not been able to keep pace with the need,” Fonteno tells me. “We were set to run out of funds by fall if we had continued to fund at the pace that we were funding at previously.”
Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, joined a campaign called Abortion Access Now that aims to pass federal abortion protections in the next decade. On the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, the campaign launched with $100 million from national groups including the ACLU, National Women’s Law Center, and the Center for Reproductive Rights. A week later, Planned Parenthood’s patient appointment funding cuts, which mirror NAF’s, went into effect.Planned Parenthood did not provide comment by publication time.
“It is disheartening to be engaged in this work and, in moments of political crisis, to witness groups that should be our partners in the fight—uplifting, investing in, and centering our expertise and critical role—fail us, too.”
Local organizations like the Ohio Fund felt the impact immediately; they were inundated with more patients needing more money, even as their own donations were drying up. “It actually feels repulsive to offer someone $200 who has a $1,500 appointment cost and says that they can’t afford to eat or pay their rent,” says Lexis Dotson-Dufault, the Ohio Fund’s executive director. “What do we do? Because if we cover your whole appointment cost, that’s our budget for the day.”
And big institutional donors, like foundations, haven’t stepped in to help. Dotson-Dufault pointed out to me that when large donors decide to fund reproductive rights, they usually pour their money into national organizations. Planned Parenthood, for instance, which has over $330 million in net assets (despite losing nearly $68 million last year), received a $275 million donation in 2022 from billionaire MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to increase abortion access nationwide.
More than 30 local abortion funds went public with their frustrations in an open letter published in August in The Nation. “Abortion funds exist because governmental and political systems have failed our communities—primarily Black, Indigenous and Native, immigrant, rural, and low-income—and abandoned us in times of need,” the letter reads. “It is disheartening to be engaged in this work and, in moments of political crisis, to witness groups that should be our partners in the fight—uplifting, investing in, and centering our expertise and critical role—fail us, too.”
The leaders behind national groups counter that local abortion funds are partly to blame for the low cash flow. An anonymous organization leader working on abortion ballot campaigns in multiple states told Vox in September that local funds’ visions for the future—for example, making abortion (and all health care) free and eliminating parental consent laws—alienate more mainstream would-be donors. “If you’re only communicating in very extreme messaging about abortion access, you’re not broadening your base of donors, you’re just talking to the 12 people who already agree with you,” the anonymous source said. “A lot of people who would love to donate to funds and probably don’t understand the need are turned off before they even get in the door by the language and behavior.”
Dotson-Dufault offers a different perspective. She attributes the lack of institutional funding to deeply rooted stigma around abortions, which large donors share and are continuing to perpetuate. “I think a lot of people want to say that they’re supporting abortion,” she tells me, “but not go as far as paying for the abortion itself.”
The thing about abortion is that it is inherently time-sensitive. And with each week that passes, the procedure gets significantly more expensive.
In Ohio, the cheapest option—medication abortion—costs about $650, and it’s only available until 12 weeks’ gestation. Costs for an in-clinic procedure, which is legal until 22 weeks, range from $735 to over $1,600, depending on how far along the pregnancy is. Just delaying care for a week—for example, to secure money from an abortion fund—raises the cost by several hundred dollars. That’s because patients having later-term abortions require more complex care; what can be completed in one appointment in the first trimester requires multiple days and pricey anesthesia in the second or third trimester.
And for nearly all people whose pregnancies are beyond the point of viability, getting an abortion requires travel and a lot of time. There are just four clinics in the US that offer third-trimester abortions, and three of them are in the DC metropolitan area. The Brigid Alliance, which helps cover travel costs for patients beyond 15 weeks’ gestation, spends an average of $2,300 per client on non-medical expenses. Between plane tickets, childcare and multiple-day hotel stays, the costs for some clients can approach $10,000, says The Brigid Alliance’s Sarah Moeller. That’s on top of costs for the procedure itself, which can exceed $15,000 in the third trimester.
Abortion patients have always relied on local funds to fill the funding gap, especially low-wage patients who can’t afford to take time off from work, much less pay for travel and child care. But those gaps are increasingly urgent—and nearly insurmountable. “Something that’s become more common is people are coming to us with these gaps the day before or the day of their appointment,” says Alisha Dingus, development director at the DC Abortion Fund. Patients are calling the fund needing as much as $10,000, sometimes from inside the clinic waiting room. In the months after Dobbs, such last-minute requests were something the DC Fund, one of the most well-resourced local funds in the country, used to be able to cover without a second thought. Not anymore.
Now, it’s not unusualfor the DC Fund to put out emergency requests for donations on social media. It’s not a policy change that came lightly; the DC team had decided against such callouts before. “We don’t want to create this sense of panic across our community, because we are such a critical fund,” Dingus says. “The other funds say, ‘Oh, if DCAF is in trouble, then what’s going to happen to callers who need care after 28 weeks?’”
We have two callers with appointments on Tuesday with a $8,300 gap. We are calling on this community to dig deep & show up to close this gap. We have seen y’all do it before & we hope you can again We keep us safe! https://t.co/IWBAHrRgG3
The answer, increasingly, is that the independent providers who offer the costliest and least accessible abortion care are operating at a loss so as not to turn patients away. Even in states like Maryland, which has no gestational limits on abortion, Planned Parenthood does not offer third-trimester abortions. So later-pregnancy abortion care falls to a handful of independent clinics, many of which don’t have years of savings to dip into when patients come in crisis.
The DuPont Clinic in DC, for example, spent about $100,000 to offset patients’ funding gaps in the first two months after the NAF cuts, Karishma Oza, the clinic’s care coordination director, says. DuPont is often a clinic of last resort; by the time someone ends up there, they’ve likely been turned away from other providers that can’t afford to subsidize their medical care. “Every week, our case management team has to reassure patients to come to their appointments despite not having all their funding together,” Oza tells me.
“We are in a position where, if things don’t change, if we’re not able to find alternative sources of funding, then we will have to close.”
It’s a similar situation at Partners in Abortion Care, a clinic in Maryland that provides abortions up to 34 weeks’ gestation. Since opening after Dobbs, Dr. Diane Horvath, its medical director and co-founder, says the clinic has always helped cover medical costs for patients. But since NAF slashed direct patient subsidies, women are coming in with significantly greater funding gaps. Partners in Abortion Care, like many independent clinics, relies on block grants from NAF to offer emergency financial help. With its own grant cut in half, the clinic now shoulders the bulk of patient medical costs.
“We’re operating at a loss,” Horvath told me in September. She and the clinic staff want to give people the care they need, “but we are in a position where, if things don’t change, if we’re not able to find alternative sources of funding, then we will have to close.”
Even in states with strong abortion protections, abortion providers and funds don’t often receive local or state government support. Horvath’s clinic receives no grant from Maryland, for instance. Many abortion funds told me they rely on small donations from community members for the bulk of their money supply. As costs rise, and demand for funds’ help alongside it, small donations aren’t enough.
Faced with increased need and a declining cushion of cash, the DuPont Clinic in DC has formed The Lavender Fund to beef up its emergency reserve of money for patients who can’t afford their appointments. Meanwhile, many funds, like Ohio’s, have implemented monthly or weekly funding caps or have slashed limits already in place. It’s not just money funds are worried about; they are trying to balance a drastic rise in demand with their workers’ and volunteers’ emotional wellbeing.
Many of the people who volunteer or work at abortion funds—especially those who staff call lines—have themselves had abortions. The Ohio Fund’s Holliman, for instance, became involved in reproductive justice after facing barriers to her own abortion care while in college. It’s not just passion that drives the people who operate local abortion funds; it’s the intimate knowledge of everything that impedes care, from appointment fees to confusion about laws to a lack of support—and what it means if a fund cannot make up a person’s outstanding cost.
“You’re literally looking at a crossroads of two completely different futures in front of you,” Holliman says. “As much as I hate to say it, there are going to be people who are not able to access the care that they need.”