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      ‘Better martyrs’: the growing role of women in the far-right movement

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      Researchers who track how the far right in the US mobilizes, self-promotes and recruits are reporting that women are playing a growing role in the movement.They often work behind the scenes to advance conspiracy theories through social media and softly attract new women into the fold. But at the same time, in recent years “alt-right” women have also shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics.They have taken prominent roles in events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol, count US congresswomen in their number and have seen the emergence of powerful new groups like Moms for Liberty.“[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” said Dr Sandra Jeppesen, a professor of media and communications at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.Despite their seemingly understated presence in extremist groups and far-right politics, they can be effective organizers, responsible for bringing thousands of people to the Capitol for the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and now mobilizing against inclusive education.Some women figures on the far-right scene have a lot of money, especially the most prominent ones, said Tracy Llanera, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. The most high-profile far-right conservative women are involved in social media production because they fit the mold of what Llanera calls “the acceptable faces of conservative propaganda”.They include Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren and Canadian far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern, who produce conservative media and rightwing propaganda, amassing a huge following and millions of dollars.Even so-called “Tradwives” – such as the TikToker Estee Williams, who promotes strict adherence to traditional gender roles – generate income from their social media content. The Global Network on Extremism & Technology recently linked Tradwives to “alt-lite” and “alt-right” ideologies.“I think women definitely want power,” Jeppesen argued. “I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”Like men in the movement, women commit to far-right politics believing there is a crisis and they have to commit to extraordinary action, she stated. In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump.The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol, Jeppesen explained.While Greene’s social media presence attracted insurrectionists to Washington DC, the far-right election-denial group Women for America First ultimately held the permit for the rally outside the White House, helped to coordinate the march that became the January 6 riot, and eventually organized fundraisers for election audits in Georgia and Arizona in 2021, Vice News reported.Other female insurrectionists played a pivotal role in the riots and spreading election denial conspiracies during and after.Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keepers member and founder of the Ohio State Regular Militia, arranged for both militias to travel to the Capitol, organizing and communicating on site with the encrypted walkie-talkie-style app Zello. She was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison; people such as Watkins are considered political prisoners to members of the far-right movement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Ashli Babbit was killed by Capitol Hill police during the January 6 attack, she was promoted as a martyr, with even the former US president Donald Trump calling her parents. “Women make better martyrs in the ‘alt-right’,” Jeppesen said about Babbit’s lingering effect.Another growing power on the far right is Moms for Liberty, a group that began as a small parents’ rights group but which has spread across the US and is a leading force in promoting book bans.The group – with a fervent membership of conservative mothers – aims to affect US education, attacking anything that meddles with the far-right view of what is suitable for bringing up children, said Llanera of the University of Connecticut. “Mothers protect their offspring, out of the private sphere where they are most relevant,” she added.Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University and researcher at Lakehead University, explained that rightwing sects will use a broad appeal to a general issue like children’s safety in order to spread far-right ideas.“Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?” Ulthiin said.Far-right mothers start building rapport with other parents, using the vulnerability of their children to open the door to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment.The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the “mommy blogger aesthetic” on Instagram, known for sharing photos of “lovely, enviable lives”, become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories.Most notably, film-maker Sean Donnelly produced an eight-minute documentary, QAmom: Confronting My Mom’s Conspiracy Theories, about his mother’s transformation from a new age Californian to an outright conspiracy theorist who believed well-known celebrities would be arrested for pedophilia.Ulthiin said that women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles. “It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult,” they said. More

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      What it’s like to cover abortion while pregnant: ‘People saw me as a container for a child’

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      I was six weeks and two days gone when I found out I was pregnant. I had just gotten back from covering the US midterms in such a sickeningly frantic way that I hadn’t had time to think about the changes going on in my body, but the signs were there: a creeping nausea that felt like seasickness, breasts as sore as swollen pimples, sheer exhaustion that willed me into bed for three days upon my return.I had reasoned this was a normal response to a week spent shuttling across hundreds of miles, working 21-hour days on the abortion beat in the fury of election season.If I had wanted an abortion at that stage of my pregnancy, I would have already lost that right in 15 US states. On 24 June 2022, five months before I discovered my pregnancy, the US supreme court had undone the constitutional right to abortion, curtailing the rights of some 22-million women of reproductive age as easily as untying a shoelace.An influx of bans and restrictions quickly followed suit. Old laws sprang back into action, some of which had been written in the Victorian era – before women had the right to vote or had a legal protection against being raped within marriage. New laws were introduced, too, although their content – including murder charges for people who have abortions, and allowing members of the public to track anyone down like a bounty hunter, clearing the way for them to sue for “aiding and abetting” abortions – felt equally antiquated.I’ve driven across America’s varied terrain as a reporter throughout this tidal wave, bearing witness to a monumental assault on women’s rights. I have faced, head on, the fury that comes from anti-abortion extremists for daring to write about abortions. And I have seen the dogged organization and jubilance of those who have protected abortion rights in their states after months of pounding on doors, rain or shine.None of it has changed the way I’ve reported the news. It’s our job as journalists to see what is happening, not what we want to see. But covering this beat, especially while pregnant, has changed my depth of vision. To see this assault up close and personal is to see it for what it is: not a journey to protect life; but to stifle, suppress and suffocate freedom.I am not one of those people who loves the experience of being pregnant. I’m not excited about birth; I don’t believe it will be magical. I’ve been lucky enough to be healthy throughout my pregnancy but I miss being able to put my own socks on and being able to bend over with ease; I miss playing sports; I miss getting a full night’s sleep.I have, at the best of times, felt complicated emotions when it comes to learning to love the thing inside me, and all the changes in my body that come with it. I’m a fiercely independent person, and I have a tendency towards wanting to control my body and what happens to it. I’ve often fixated on the idea that I can undo bad experiences in my life by bolstering my health. In that vein, I have raced in a mini-triathlon, learned to do clap pushups and lifted heavy weights at the gym.Early in pregnancy, as double the amount of blood began to flood my body like an enemy army, ramping up my blood pressure, I felt I no longer knew myself. I felt trapped in my new body, denied all my usual escape routes. I realized I wouldn’t be able to compete in the New York City half marathon, an event I was looking forward to. I was used to running regularly, now speed-walking to the station felt like a humiliatingly difficult ordeal. My old stress relievers became suddenly out-of-bounds.These are all small things. But small details about a person matter. Small things make a person who she is, and influence how she interacts with a life-changing, all-consuming, body-throttling experience like pregnancy.Here in America, where abortion is now banned or severely restricted in 20 US states every person I report on is as complicated as me.It’s July, and I am hurtling across Kansas City in a rental car covering a monumental vote. In just a few days, Kansas will be the first state to directly ask its people if they want to protect abortion rights under the new status quo.Republicans are wide-eyed and hopeful: recent polls suggest people in Kansas, a ruby-red midwestern state, have far more complicated feelings about abortion restrictions than the rest of the country. While lots of American voters do not want more abortion restrictions, in Kansas, in 2022, polling analysis by the New York Times suggests they might be equally split. Nonetheless, it is currently a safe haven for abortion rights in the midwest, where a slew of bans have come down since Roe was overturned. If voters restrict abortion rights in the coming week, a refuge for millions who want access to abortion may soon be lost.I found Christy McNally – a former science teacher, a grandmother and dog lover – through a friend of hers who was working at the Johnston county Republican party. McNally is soft-spoken and sweet. She is the kind of person you feel would stop to pick up a stranger in the middle of a storm and take them where they needed to go.One night, before we speak on the phone, she sends me a photo of her meeting Bill Clinton in 1996. Back then, she was lobbying for an abortion bill aiming to criminalize doctors for performing a dilation and extraction procedure. These procedures are a rarity in the grand scheme of abortion care, because most abortions happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, when simpler, less invasive options are available. Dilation and extraction in the third trimester, which anti-abortion advocates often reference, accounts for less than 1% of abortions each year and is used primarily in cases where the pregnancy is incompatible with life or puts the pregnant person at risk.The language used by the National Right to Life Committee around that bill in the 1990s was deliberately emotive and included a newly invented term: “partial-birth abortion”.Despite the fact these abortions are most commonly performed at a time when the scientific consensus agrees fetuses feel no pain, and often when life is not viable outside the womb, lobbyists switched to a graphic depiction of the procedure, which requires forceps to pass a fetus through the birth canal, in an attempt to foster anti-abortion sentiment.People outside the US often ask me how a country shifts to having no federal right to abortion. This is how: by evoking emotion that humanizes the fetus at all costs – often on shaky scientific grounding – while diminishing the humanity of the person delivering it. Eventually, these ideas are repeated enough, and become part of the mainstream. Today in America, federal judges refer to “unborn children”, “killing” and “personhood” when talking about abortion care even in the earliest stages of pregnancy.In 1996, the bill McNally lobbied Clinton over had no chance of passing. But in 2022 that rhetoric – of broken limbs, fetal pain and the murderous intent of those who perform and seek out abortions – already sat comfortably in the US vernacular.It is also this language that activates a lot of the anti-abortion advocates I have met during my reporting, who do not see themselves as radical. McNally tells me she believes abortions should be allowed in medical emergencies (she has a friend whose fetus had no skull). She also supports exceptions for rape and incest. When I probe, I can see McNally is conflicted on abortion: there are very particular, intimate circumstances where the case for abortion has won her over, but mostly, outright bans are appealing to her. To me, she most wants to talk about abortions in the third trimester – the most unusual, and incredibly rare type of abortion – as do most anti-abortion advocates I speak to.But the vast majority of bills that have been passed since Roe v Wade was overturned don’t target late-term abortions. Almost every single ban is instead a full ban on abortion with limited exceptions.Those limited exceptions are rarely enacted, because doctors are too scared to intervene. I have talked to women who were denied abortions after they were told their fetuses had no skulls – precisely because of the types of restrictions that would surely come if this referendum in Kansas were to pass.Perhaps most American people, including Republicans, know and care about this. In August 2022, 59% of Kansans voted to protect abortion rights in a state where, just a decade earlier, the abortion doctor George Tiller had been murdered. At the watch party on the night of the vote, the room interrupted in cheers, screams and tears as the result was read out.Nearing the end of the night, I noticed an older man happily perched on the corner of the stage, cradling his drink and looking a little giddy. His name was James Quigley. He was a 72-year-old Republican and a retired doctor, and he looked like he wanted to have his say.“Abortion is a much more nuanced issue than anti-choice individuals would have you think,” Quigley told me.“It is deeply personal, sometimes tragic, but also sometimes a liberating decision – and we should trust women, their physicians, and their God on that.”At some point during my pregnancy, I realized that I was no longer considered a full, complete, messy human – one with autonomy, quirks and desires. At best, what I wanted was important only in proportion to my ability to protect my pregnancy. At worst, people saw me as a container for a child.I was frequently advised that from now on, I should not “take any risks”, which, of course, is ridiculously unhelpful advice. “I just don’t see why you would [take any],” one friend told me – seemingly unaware that to leave your house in the morning is a risk. To drive at 28mph on a stressful day when you’re late for an appointment, instead of at 25mph, is a risk. Going for a run is a risk – but so is choosing to forgo exercise.I have found being treated like a child in this way difficult. I don’t have to listen to any of these people, but the experience of constantly being told what to do is tiring; usually becoming an adult means we get to make our own calculations over what’s best for us, pregnant or not.For many pregnant people in America, this is no longer the case. By accident of birth, circumstance, or both, they live in a state that now limits their opportunity to end a pregnancy. If they’re rich, and unafraid, they might travel for care. But often, they don’t have the money, or can’t get the time off work, or can’t spend the numerous days and thousands of dollars to travel to another state for care. Their personhood has been reduced beyond all measure, in defense of the potential person living inside them.In March, I reported on the case of a South Carolina woman who was arrested a year after allegedly taking pills to end her pregnancy. On the police report, her offense was listed simply as: “abortion”.Pregnancy now converts legal behavior for everyone else, into a potential charge of child abuse, or child neglect, or attempted murder just for women – as the CEO of a charity explained it to me at the time.It is hard for me not to feel that viscerally, in a context where I have sometimes had to decide whether it’s worth it for me to go to report in a state with a total abortion ban, where I know miscarriage could make me a crime suspect, or result in me being denied healthcare. Other people don’t get to make that choice, they just live there.In a country where drinking alcohol, overexerting yourself in a yoga class, or hanging out the top of a truck while someone drives fast is not a crime, it could become illegal just for pregnant people. Teenagers whose grade point averages don’t satisfy judges are told they are too immature to have abortions; but not to raise a child. This is not rhetoric: politicians have spoken brazenly about manipulating laws not meant for abortion to police proper conduct in pregnancy since Roe was overturned.Reporting on this while pregnant means I’ve sometimes found it hard not to feel anger when I should have been feeling happy. At our first ultrasound appointment, at six weeks and five days, I struggled to feel joy when the nurse played the “fetal heartbeat” to me and my husband.Watching the zigzags bounce up and down on the screen in a dimly lit room, and seeing my husband’s face light up, I suddenly felt indignant. At that point, our “baby” was barely a yolk sac and some villi. Still, in many places it had more rights than me.“That’s not actually a heartbeat, you know?” I told my husband as soon as the nurse left the room. I felt like a killjoy. This was supposed to be an intimate moment. But all I could think about was the many US states that had brought “fetal heartbeat bills” in recent years. Those were now a legal reality, banning abortions at a point when I did not yet know I was pregnant.At six weeks, a fetus has not yet developed a heart. It has developed a small cluster of cells that may eventually turn into a heart – if the pregnancy is healthy – and the noise is the electrical activity coming from those cells. This is amazing, sure, but it’s not a heartbeat. There is no heart, no chambers, no blood pumping.In these early stages of pregnancy – between four and 12 weeks – pregnancy tissue removed in an abortion looks, first, like something that comes out of your nose; then tiny little egg whites; then more like a sprawling jellyfish. I know this because I worked with doctors to publish photos of what pregnancy tissue looks like after it’s extracted in an abortion before 12 weeks of pregnancy. I have seen early abortions performed at a clinic, and looked at the tissue directly after.Still, to point out what early abortion tissue looks like is often met with rage, sometimes with confusion and disbelief. In a way, I understand this. I wanted to report this story precisely because it goes against the grain of the pregnancy images we are shown. So many pregnancy images show the fetus through a microscope, or make it seem more humanized: when you look at images of early fetal development online, or even scientific imagery provided in textbooks, the depictions are very human-like. Even the perspective on an ultrasound can be misleading, highlighting the fetus in black and white so features are more visible, and showing the growing form in contrast to the tiny surrounding container of the amniotic sac.After I published this story, angry readers sent me ultrasound images; graphic descriptions of what fetuses look like in miscarriage; and videos of early fetal development under microscope. Some sent me the Guardian’s own coverage of Lennart Nilson’s photos of the earliest stages of life, taken in 1965. That imagery shows a nascent embryo, which first forms around 11-12 weeks, at a time when, if you view the fetus through a macro lens, you will see the early beginnings of a trunk and head developing.These are all different perspectives of life – neither I nor any single person can determine which is right. Different perspectives don’t have to discount one another. Sometimes, they just add to the knowledge we draw upon to make decisions about the world. I see it as my job as a journalist to give people more of this information, so they can make more informed decisions.I understand that images are incredibly powerful; I often come back from my scans feeling bursts of excitement; rare moments when I feel ready. I also understand the way in which personifying my pregnancy helps me to connect with it. Early on, my husband and I debated for a long time whether or not to find out the sex. Still feeling detached and confused about the changes going on inside me, I reasoned that knowing more might help me to feel more connected. It has.Later in my pregnancy, I have paid attention to when the little kicks come – sometimes after I eat raspberries, or drink orange juice, or when I have a chocolate bar. “He loves sugar!” I tell my husband – although I actually have no idea what the correlation is.I have also reported on the stories of people who do not feel this way about kicks or scans. One woman, Samantha Casiano, told me every new kick was a reminder of the inevitable moment when her baby would die, after she was refused an abortion in the state of Texas, despite her pregnancy not being viable.I can imagine how the descriptions of whether her fetus is now the size of a mango, or a cantaloupe, might bring on horror and fear. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be bombarded with this imagery after being told you no longer have agency over your own body.Carrying many perspectives can be helpful. It’s not my job to tell you what to believe, or even what to feel – just to let you know that these images are factual, and the lens you choose to put on them is yours, not mine.When I think about the decisions a person who wants an abortion has to make in places where it is banned, I think about the hormones that have cascaded through my body like a tornado during pregnancy.One day was so bad I had to call my friend to come over and console me while I cried for hours in my living room. That was a day when every decision I made felt certain to result in the sky falling in on me: the offending decision was over whether to buy a more expensive bar of soap, that smelled nicer. One day, I cried after a friend gave me a batch of her maternity clothes. I was in my 16th week of pregnancy, and increasingly feeling like nothing was my own. I wanted to go home to London. I worried about losing my career. I was watching my body balloon up in real time, and worried about looking at myself after pregnancy and not knowing who I was any more.Recently, when I couldn’t sleep at 4am, I read a book about the first month postpartum. The author used the word “capacious” to describe the vagina after birth. Even though I knew the word, I felt a need to Google it. “She rummaged in her capacious handbag,” was the sentence example returned to me in the search. I cried again.The changes the body goes through during pregnancy are not small. But in an abortion context obsessed with a very particular kind of religious morality, the changes a body goes through in a pregnancy sometimes feel like an afterthought.When 22-year-old Chloe tells me about being forced to deliver a baby at 37 weeks that did not go on to live, I feel a crushing sense of empathy for her. It is her struggles with her body image that she finds difficult, precisely because it is seen as so unimportant.“I’ve gained a ton of weight. And you know, I don’t know what to do about it,” she told me in a recent phone call. “If I ask anybody for help, people will probably just tell me, you should go work out. It sucks, a lot,” she says.On a reporting assignment last winter, I sat in a doctor’s office nextdoor all day while they saw clients. One woman came in, her face flooded with tears, already knowing the doctor couldn’t help – the state had a total ban. The woman was too poor to afford another child, and too poor to travel out of state to get an abortion.This is not unusual, the doctor told me: people still need abortions all the time. The conflict for the doctor has become what to do. Help, and you risk losing your license, or going to jail. Don’t help, and the patient might be failed at a time when one doctor’s decision could change their lives forever.One doctor told me about a single weekend during which she saw two infected pregnant women on her emergency shift when she checked in. One had gone into sepsis; the second patient eventually hemorrhaged, although she did not die. The doctors, one on the prior shift, and one at another hospital, had ignored them both – too scared to intervene, because administering an abortion was legally risky.They are not wrong to be scared. I’ve documented the consequences for doctors who stick their heads above the parapet: one was fined thousands for speaking out about a 10-year-old rape victim forced to travel to her state for care, another was publicly chased from her job.Working on those stories, I’m often told by people denied abortions that they feel America should be described as pro-birth, rather than pro-life. States have no intention of cleaning up the mess after an abortion has been denied, just to stop it happening in the first place.This exact scenario unfolded for Samantha Casiano, the Texas woman who was forced to deliver her baby with ancephaly. Her baby was breech – for which people are often offered a C-section, to reduce pain and severe complications. Casiano was not offered this, and found the entire birthing experience traumatic. “Your baby is going to pass away so we don’t need to do all that,” the doctors told her.“I felt degraded,” Casiano told me. “There was a lot of things I felt like wouldn’t have happened in a normal pregnancy, but with me, it’s like they were like, ‘OK, let’s just get this over with,” she said.She was made to carry the pregnancy for 13 weeks, knowing her daughter wouldn’t survive – just so, in her eyes, the doctors could “get it over with”.Mostly, the impacts of abortion bans don’t fall on people who are sick; or who have wanted pregnancies; or medically complicated pregnancies. They fall on people who want abortions because giving birth doesn’t fit with school work, with work-work, with raising the children they already have. They fall on people with few economic options, further entrenching inequality along race and class lines. Sometimes, they fall on people in domestically violent relationships. Other times, on people who know they won’t make good parents.These are all complicated reasons why someone might not be ready to have a child. In America, they aren’t good enough reasons to justify an abortion, but what happens after the abortion is denied?I recently moved back to England to give birth and be closer to family for a while. Here, I have often felt that people like to exaggerate America’s differences with the UK, because it helps deflect from our own very sordid political realities. “At least we’re not America,” people often say with a wink and a nod, often bypassing shattering political moments like Brexit, the story of a young Black boy being murdered, or our own legacy of slavery.These are the assurances I am sure people may feel reading this article: that the rest of the world is nothing like America when it comes to abortion.That may be true, but our prime minister has abstained every time he has been asked to vote on abortion since he became an MP; this includes voting to stop protesting outside of abortion clinics and to legalize abortion in Northern Ireland. In the UK, our chancellor of the exchequer has called to cut the time that abortions are legal in half, from 24 weeks to 12. Our health minister said that protesters outside clinics could just be trying to “comfort” women.This is the UK, too: where a woman was this month sentenced to two years in prison for taking abortion pills after the legal limit.As I write this, two weeks before my due date, I don’t know whether to feel hope or despair. Nor do I know what to make of America’s complicated abortion landscape, where people have repeatedly shown at the ballot box that they do not want abortion restrictions; that they are willing to oust politicians who want to bring them; and that they will continue to find innovative ways to continue to protect abortion.It’s a strange dynamic to see play out in a country where people are so obsessed with freedom. Because this is, at its core, an issue of freedom, as well as an issue of equality and fairness. When you curtail abortion – whether it is an abortion you agree with or not – you fundamentally alter someone’s right to make choices about their own chequebooks, their bodies and their families.I’m glad I had a choice, but I still burn with rage at how normal it has become in America for people not to. More

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      Conservative attacks on abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place | Moira Donegan

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      On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live.Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.They’re not alone. Abortion bans have been proliferating wildly in the year since the US supreme court eliminated the right in their Dobbs decision, declaring that any state can compel women to remain pregnant, and creating different, lesser entitlements to bodily freedom and self-determination based on sex. But as the abortion bans have spread like an infection across the American south, midwest, and mountain west, they have been accompanied by a related political disease: laws seeking to prohibit minors and sometimes adults, from accessing medical treatments that facilitate gender transitions.Twenty-five states have enacted pre-viability abortion bans since Roe was overturned last summer, although in some states, like Iowa and Montana, abortion has remained legal pending judicial stays. Meanwhile, 20 states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, with a rush of bills being introduced over the past months. In addition to Nebraska, a slew of states have passed transition-care bans in 2023, including Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida. Texas is soon to join them.It is not a coincidence that the states which have the most punitive and draconian bans on abortion have also adopted the most aggressive targeting of transgender people and medical care. The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.It is no accident that the states that would forbid a teenager from transitioning are the same that would compel that teenager to give birth; it is no accident that the states with the greatest control over what women do with their reproductive organs are the ones where women’s restrooms have become sites of surveillance and control, with patrons, cis and trans alike, subjected to invasive and degrading inquisitions as to whether they are conforming sufficiently to the demands of femininity. That Nebraska combined these two projects into one bill, then, is less inventive than it is a dropping of pretense: the anti-feminist movement is anti-trans, and the anti-trans panic is at its core anti-feminist.The attacks on gender freedom from the right are not only united in their ideology, but increasingly in their rhetoric. Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. It’s an apt and worthy argument, considering that both involve the interventions of medical professionals, both facilitate the wellbeing and happiness of those who receive them, and both result in horrific health complications when denied, from the high rates of mental distress and horrific, needless pregnancy complications that have been ushered in by Dobbs, to the dramatic rates of suicidal ideation and mental health problems in trans people who are denied the ability to transition. But increasingly, the right has begun to attack the notion of abortion and trans rights as healthcare, arguing that neither pregnancy nor non-transition constitute “illness”.At a recent oral argument over the fate of the abortion drug mifepristone, Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee on the fifth circuit court of appeals whose rabidly conservative opinions and trollish affect suggest supreme court ambitions, argued that the drug should be removed from the market in part because “pregnancy is not a serious illness”. “When we celebrate Mother’s Day,” Ho asked, his voice dripping with contempt, “are we celebrating a serious illness?” In that moment, Ho sounded uncannily like anti-trans activists seeking to ban care for young people, who argue, ad nauseam, that “puberty is not a disorder”.The rhetoric suggests a narrow and myopic view of “health”, the notion that bodies have destinies and should be made to fulfill them regardless of the desires of the people involved. A healthy body, we’re told, is one that conforms to socially imposed gender hierarchies, regardless of how miserable that conformity and imposition makes the people who inhabit those bodies.But while these practices of abortion and transition care constitute medicine and while their outcomes encourage health, it would be a mistake to fight the political battle for these services only on the ground of what counts as “healthcare”. Because the truth is that conservatives do not care about health – they don’t care about the integrity of the medical profession, or about patient outcomes, or about bodies, not really. They care about people, and about making sure that those people stay in line. In the grand tradition of feminists and queers alike, we should refuse to.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Quirky, kooky, a joke … but why is Marianne Williamson so popular with the young?

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      Marianne Williamson is taking over TikTokMarianne Williamson, the self-help author who is making her second bid for the presidency, has a history of saying things that can be characterized as either “deranged” or “quirky” depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Some of her greatest hits include: Tweeting that the “power of the mind” might have changed the course of Hurricane Dorian and stopped it from hitting the US in 2019. (She later deleted the tweet.) Publishing a book in 1992 called A Return to Love where she said that “cancer and Aids and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream … sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist.” (She’s since said that she’s pro-medicine and pro-science.) Saying that she would “harness love” to defeat Donald Trump during her closing statement at the Democratic presidential debate in 2019. We all know how that one worked out.Unsurprisingly, Williamson’s presidential campaign isn’t being taken remotely seriously by the media or the White House. The Biden administration has laughed off any idea that she’s a proper contender – when the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was asked about Williamson’s political aspirations in March she joked about not having “a crystal ball”.It’s certainly easy to make fun of Williamson but, while she’s said a lot of questionable things, it’s wrong to dismiss the author as a joke. When she’s not talking about the “power of the mind” Williamson has a lot to say about institutional inequality, the need for universal healthcare, the problems with capitalism, the importance of cancelling student debt, and the complacency of the Democratic establishment. And guess what? An awful lot of young people are listening. Williamson’s very left-leaning videos draw millions of views on TikTok and her speeches often go viral.“If engagement on TikTok is any indication, a Democratic presidential primary held today among people under 50 would result in a landslide for the bestselling author now making her second bid for the nomination,” the Intercept recently noted. And it’s not just TikTok where Williamson is popular: the Intercept further notes that “a recent poll found Williamson hovering above 20% with voters under 30”. Which is a lot better than she was doing in 2020 and is pretty impressive when you consider what a political outsider she is.Then again, of course, it’s the very fact that Williamson is a political outsider that makes her so popular among young people. Williamson has an energy and urgency that is severely lacking in the Democratic party. And she’s not shy about calling the Democrats out for their complacency.Even without a crystal ball, I think we all know that Williamson has zero chance of being in the White House – and I’m certainly not advocating that she should be. But wouldn’t it be nice if the White House adopted some of her energy and a few of her ideas about structural reform? Williamson’s popularity on TikTok isn’t some insignificant online phenomenon – it’s a sign of how disillusioned young people feel with the current system. Establishment Democrats have long preached incrementalism as the only way to move forwards but, when it comes to things like women’s rights, we only seem to be moving backwards. Marianne Williamson isn’t the answer to America’s woes but her TikTok popularity should have the Democrats asking a lot of questions.Half of women have dense breast tissue that doesn’t show up on mammograms“Dense breast tissue is simply tissue that is thicker and glandular, hasn’t turned into fat over time, and it puts women at an automatic four times higher risk of cancer,” Elizabeth L Silver writes. If you have dense breast tissue then a mammogram alone will have a hard time detecting cancer – you need additional screenings such as an ultrasound or MRI. “Yet the decision to supplement a mammogram with this additional screening is, shockingly, one of the largest controversies in women’s health,” Silver explains. “[T]he question has essentially been left to the patient, who knows little about it.”Trump lawyer asks E Jean Carroll why she didn’t scream for help during assault“Women who come forward, one of the reasons they don’t come forward is because they’re always asked, ‘why didn’t you scream?’” Carroll retorted. “He raped me whether I screamed or not.” As Amanda Marcotte writes, Trump’s entire defense in the E Jean Carroll rape trial seems to rest on shameless misogyny.Ghosted is not romantic – it’s a walking red flagChris Evans and Ana de Armas star in a new action-romance called Ghosted with some dire reviews and misogynistic tropes. “What’s sold as a love story, based on following your heart, presents us instead an entitled man who won’t take no for an answer,” Jess Bacon writes in the Guardian. “Sadly, this is nothing new.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNude landlord no excuse for holding back rent, rules German courtA Frankfurt court found “the usability of the rented property was not impaired by the plaintiff sunning himself naked in the courtyard”.At the CEO level, women finally outnumber men named JohnHowever, there are 60 James/Robert/John CEOs compared with 41 women, according to Bloomberg.Thai conservatives vow to legalise sex toys in bid to shake up electionIt is currently illegal to sell sex toys in Thailand although that obviously doesn’t stop it happening. Now the country’s Democratic party wants to change that, arguing that they’re missing out on lots of taxes. They also came up with some social benefits for legalization: “Sex toys are useful because they could lead to a decrease in prostitution as well as divorce due to a mismatch of sexual libido, and sex-related crimes.” Not sure that vibrators are going to stop sex-related crime, but it’s certainly a creative argument.Voluptuous mermaid statue causes outrage in southern Italy“It looks like a mermaid with two silicone breasts and, above all, a huge arse never seen before on a mermaid,” one critic complained. “At least not any I know.”The week in parrotarchyVideo phone calls are for the birds. Or, to be more specific: the parrots. A new study has found that parrots that are allowed to make video calls to other birds seem to become less lonely. Now we just need to get them on Twitter. More

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      Clinging to power does not make Dianne Feinstein a feminist hero | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Feinstein’s feminist farceHere’s a controversial opinion: when you’re no longer capable of doing your extremely important job you should gracefully step away from your extremely important job. I know that may not sound controversial on the surface, but it appears to be quite the topic of debate in Washington DC. It certainly seems to be a contentious issue for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, who recently hit back at calls for the 89-year-old Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein to resign over her health.Feinstein is the oldest sitting US senator (narrowly beating out spring chicken Chuck Grassley who is a few months younger) and there have been concerns about her cognitive health for a while now. Her physical health has also become an issue: Feinstein has been absent from the Senate since February, when she was diagnosed with shingles. She’s missed 60 of the Senate’s 82 votes so far this session. Her absence from the judiciary committee, on which the Democrats hold a one-seat majority, has stopped the Democrats from advancing federal judges for confirmation. Which is a big deal because these judges get lifetime appointments.On Wednesday, multiple Democrats, led by Representative Ro Khanna, called for Feinstein to resign, saying she could no longer fulfil her duties. Not everyone agrees. “I don’t know what political agendas are at work that are going after Senator Feinstein in that way,” Pelosi told reporters on Wednesday. “I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way.”Norma Torres, another California Democrat, also argued that calls for Feinstein to quit were sexist. “When women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside,” she tweeted. “When men age or get sick, they get a promotion.”Do female politicians face unfair double standards and increased scrutiny? Of course they do! But cynically weaponizing the very real sexism that women in politics face to defend Feinstein’s stubborn decision to cling to power is appalling. Feminism isn’t about individual women climbing up the corporate ladder, it’s about working for equal rights. Feinstein represents 40 million Americans and her decisions affect millions more: there is nothing remotely feminist about Feinstein putting her ego above the greater good, particularly at such a critical moment for women’s rights in the US. It’s just selfish.I can understand why Feinstein doesn’t want to resign, don’t get me wrong. Being in government seems to have been very lucrative for her. She’s worth at least $58m. How did she get so rich in public service? Well, Feinstein’s husband was an investment banker and the pair have been incredibly lucky in the stock market. It’s almost like they’ve got access to inside information. Feinstein, for example, sold off a huge amount of shares just before the stock market collapsed at the beginning of the pandemic. The pair faced scrutiny over their stock trades but have denied doing anything wrong. Pelosi and her husband have faced similar scrutiny.Feinstein, to be fair, has now responded to criticism about her long absence from work. On Wednesday, following calls for her resignation Feinstein said that she’d asked the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to allow another Democratic senator to take her place on the judiciary committee until she’s fit to return to work. That’s a good solution for now but Feinstein, who is due to step down in 2025, should think about resigning altogether: she can certainly afford retirement. Real leadership, as Jacinda Ardern has demonstrated, isn’t about staying in power as long as possible, but knowing when it’s time to step aside. It’s way past time for Feinstein to cede some space and make way for fresh leadership.Women are earning more money, but still doing the bulk of the houseworkMen still tend to be the primary breadwinner in heterosexual marriages, but the number of women who earn as much as or significantly more than their husband has roughly tripled over the past 50 years. In 29% of US marriages, spouses earn the same amount. And in 16% of heterosexual marriages women earn more. But despite growing equality in the workplace, women are still doing more of the housework and caregiving while men spend more time relaxing, a new report by Pew Research Center has found.Rupert Murdoch reportedly divorced Jerry Hall by emailHall, the billionaire’s fourth wife, was waiting to meet her husband at their home when she received a curt message saying: “we have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do.”Spanish woman emerges after spending 500 days living alone in caveShe has now broken the world record for the longest time a person has spent alone in a cave. Quite the achievement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere’s still a lot we don’t know about menstruationA review of scientific papers has found there are about 400 studies on menstrual effluent compared with more than 15,000 for semen or sperm. The New Yorker looks at two fascinating new books around menstruation and how “the stigma surrounding menstruation may have had severe consequences for research into reproductive health.”83% of US journalists who cover sport are menPew Research has some interesting (and depressing) statistics on the way in which US journalists’ beats vary according to demographics. Men are more likely to cover sports (83%), political news (60%) and news about science and technology (58%). Women are more likely to cover health, education and families. Meanwhile 76% of all reporting journalists surveyed said that they are white, while 8% are Hispanic, 6% are Black and 3% are Asian. Just 5% of US journalists who cover politics are Black.The week in pawtriarchyShe’s reportedly a “bit of a diva” and “small like a ball”: meet Pearl, the world’s shortest chihuahua. She’s just a bit bigger than a dollar bill and has earned a spot in the Guinness World Records after a vet used a special dog-measuring wicket to verify her size. What a gem.
      This article was amended on 15 April 2023. An earlier version wrote about Feinstein’s husband in the present tense. He died in 2022. More

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      ‘We will not cave’: governors stockpile abortion drugs as access is threatened

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      Several Democratic governors have moved swiftly to protect access to medication abortion in their states after a ruling by a Texas judge late last week threatened access to the widely used abortion drug mifepristone.In an announcement on Monday, Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts said her state had ordered about 15,000 doses of mifepristone, the first of two drugs in a medication abortion regimen that has been approved for use up to the 10th week of pregnancy.Healey also issued an executive order that she said would help protect access to medication abortions and shield providers who perform them.In California, Governor Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, said his state had secured an emergency stockpile of up to 2m pills of misoprostol, the second drug in the regimen that can be used safely on its own, though is slightly less effective as a single medication. That drug, which is used to treat other medical conditions, is also being targeted by anti-abortion groups seeking to remove it from the market.“In response to this extremist ban on a medication abortion drug, our state has secured a stockpile of an alternative medication abortion drug to ensure that Californians continue to have access to safe reproductive health treatments,” Newsom said in a statement. “We will not cave to extremists who are trying to outlaw these critical abortion services. Medication abortion remains legal in California.”Their actions come after US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of Donald Trump known for his anti-abortion views, issued a ruling late on Friday that invalidated the 23-year-old approval of mifepristone by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On the same night, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory ruling that ordered the FDA to maintain the drug’s approval in at least 17 states where Democrats had sued.On Monday, the US justice department appealed the Texas ruling, asking a federal appeals court to place a hold on the “extraordinary and unprecedented order”. Underscoring the legal uncertainty surrounding the dueling orders, the administration separately asked the federal court in Washington state for clarity.With access to the drug imperiled, and Democrats stymied in Washington by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, a handful of liberal state governors said they were taking matters into their own hands.“A judge has made a politically motivated decision to override doctors, patients and medical experts and block access to critical medications,” Healey said on Monday, unveiling the plan at a press conference outside the Massachusetts statehouse in Boston. “Today, we collectively are saying loud and clear: not on our watch.”In anticipation of the Texas ruling, the Democratic governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, announced last week that his state would stockpile a three-year supply of mifepristone in the event the drug became more difficult to access. Days later, Kacsmaryk issued his ruling.Several other Democratic governors and state attorneys general have condemned the ruling while seeking to make clear that, at least for now, the drug remains available. Some went further, promising to keep medication abortion legal and accessible in their states, although without providing further details.More than half of abortions in the US rely on medication abortion, and most of those involve the two-drug protocol. If the appeals court doesn’t intervene, the Texas ruling would take effect on Friday with far-reaching implications for access.The FDA approved mifepristone to terminate pregnancy in 2000, when used with misoprostol. Despite claims made in the Texas lawsuit, there is decades’ worth of scientific research concluding that mifepristone is safe.States have become the epicenter of the fight over abortion rights since the supreme court’s landmark decision last June to overturn Roe v Wade. Since then, more than a dozen Republican-led states have enacted abortion bans or severely restricted access to the procedure.​Anti-abortion groups have long targeted medication abortion, the most common method for terminating a pregnancy in the US. But it became the focus of efforts after the supreme court’s landmark decision last June to overturn Roe v Wade, allowing states to regulate abortion.Although more than a dozen Republican-led states moved quickly to ban or severely restrict abortions​, with scores of new limits pending before state legislatures this session, Democratic-led states have pushed in the opposite direction. Yet if the Texas ruling stands, experts say it would upend access nationwide, limiting the drug even in states where abortion is legal.Abortion opponents in blue states denounced the efforts by Democratic governors to preserve access to medication abortion.“It is appalling that Gavin Newsom is so obsessed with ending the lives of children in the womb that he is attempting to stockpile dangerous and potentially illegal drugs,” California Family Council president Jonathan Keller wrote on Twitter. “California again proves the only ‘choice’ they care about is abortion.”Newsom said the judge’s ruling “ignores facts, science and the law” in a way that puts “the health of millions of women and girls at risk”.“Abortion is still legal and accessible here in California and we won’t stand by as fundamental freedoms are stripped away,” he said.Other supporters of abortion rights similarly denounced the conservative judge’s decision on abortion as “unprincipled” and out of step with the American public. In states where the issue has been put on the ballot, from right-leaning Kansas to battleground Michigan and liberal Vermont, voters have opted to preserve or expand access.“I’ve fought like hell to protect abortion access and I’m not backing down,” Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said on Friday. “I will keep taking steps to expand access to reproductive healthcare and fight against anyone threatening our rights.”Whitmer recently signed legislation repealing the state’s nearly century-old abortion ban, after Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative in November to enshrine abortion protections into the state constitution.Democrats and reproductive rights advocates believe the issue will continue to motivate voters in the coming election cycles after lifting them to victories across the country in the 2022 midterms. Last week’s election of a liberal judge to serve on the Wisconsin supreme court brought fresh evidence of the enduring potency of abortion politics.“This decision will only enrage Americans further and move them to more action,” Mini Timmaraju, president of the Naral Pro-Choice America advocacy group, said on a call with reporters on Monday. “Our eyes are on 2023 and 2024 – 2022 was just the beginning.” More

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘She tried to educate me on why AR-15s aren’t really military-style weapons’

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘She tried to educate me on why AR-15s aren’t really military-style weapons’ One is anti-abortion and pro-guns. The other is pro-choice and thinks ‘war tools’ shouldn’t be in the hands of the public. Could they agree to disagree?Heidi, 62, Price, UtahOccupation Retired school teacherVoting record Usually DemocratAmuse bouche Heidi is an enthusiastic archaeologist and anthropologist. “We can learn a lot about how to use the land and protect it,” she saysJanalee, 59, South Jordan, UtahOccupation Campaigner for God, guns and urban green spaceVoting record Has previously voted Democrat or Independent. Now straight-ticket RepublicanAmuse bouche Janalee’s grandfather, Jesse, had five wives and 44 children. She has 80,000 cousins, she says, “like a multilevel marketing scheme”For startersJanalee We shared an appetizer of loaded rock chips, then I had an omelet with vegetables, bacon and sausage. I was worried we were going to fight. I told Heidi I lost my best friend over Donald Trump, but she wasn’t mean to me about supporting him. It never felt confrontational. We weren’t representing corporations; we were there as grandmothers who care.Heidi I had a Reuben sandwich and fries. Janalee told me she’s a Trump person. I said that’s OK. She said something about a stolen election. I thought, “Oh good grief.” I don’t think the election was stolen. A lot of people like Trump because of his personality, but that’s the reason I don’t like him.The big beefHeidi Janalee tried to educate me on why AR-15s aren’t really military-style weapons. I don’t have a problem with handguns, shotguns and rifles, but these new fancy guns – the ARs, the Uzis that became a problem in 90s – should not be in the hands of the public. It’s a war tool and we just don’t need it. I said no to guns in the classroom, absolutely not.Janalee I prefer to talk about people violence not gun violence. A gun doesn’t do anything – it can just sit on a table fully loaded for 1,000 years. An AR-15 isn’t a military weapon. We have a constitutional right to own them. We did agree that schools should have some kind of sign, maybe like: “Warning to criminals: we protect our children”. We agreed that the news media is irresponsible in the way they report stories about guns.Heidi I agree that some news channels only focus on the group that watches them. That’s true on the left and right. They fearmonger and rile people up.Sharing plateskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJanalee Abortion was the subject that scared us both the most. She said women should be able to get an abortion. So I said: “What’s your understanding of the supreme court ruling?” She said: “To turn it back to the states.” I said: “Yes, it did.” Heidi asked if I could bend on abortion. She said: “Maybe we could agree on 10 weeks?” I said: “OK, maybe we can agree on 10 weeks, but the methods used to kill babies are still barbaric.”Heidi Janalee is totally against abortion. I think every women should have the right to make that decision, and there should be a federal right to abortion up to 10 weeks to ensure the safety of the woman. Most women know they’re pregnant by eight weeks. If you go beyond that, then you have to decide to keep the baby or give it up for adoption. There needs to be more support for women to make that decision privately.For aftersJanalee Heidi is a teacher so I listened and learned a lot from her about how slavery is taught in schools. We learned about it in elementary school. Heidi said high school students probably need a refresher course. I remembered that in school we created a slave cell as a classroom exercise. Someone would be the enslaver and someone the slave. It was really powerful. I said: “Why don’t we do role play about the civil war? One side fights to keep slavery, and the other to end it.” Because America ended slavery. It’s not the evil empire. But I’m sure slavery still exists, like in China.Heidi We have to learn about slavery and other bad things that happened in this country, so we don’t repeat them. Janalee said: “Well, what about other countries?” I said that can be done in a world history class. I just stressed: teach the facts. I want students to think on their own. But we shouldn’t be doing slavery role play.TakeawaysHeidi We live in a conservative state, but we’re pretty mellow about it. People have different opinions, but we’re not going to get in your face about it. We respected each other’s opinions and considered each other’s proposals. Sometimes you have to give a little to get what you want.Janalee Heidi was delightful. We agreed that we need to come together as Americans and stop being divided. We felt like some kind of power is trying to separate us and keep us fighting. We wondered, why is this happening? Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Heidi and Janalee ate at Balance Rock Eatery & Pub in Helper, Utah.Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take partTopicsLife and styleDining across the divide US specialSocial trendsUS politicsAbortionWomenSlaveryfeaturesReuse this content More