'Remember the Ladies': Attacks on Gender Equity Remain a Core Feature of Surging Authoritarianism
(And the fucking, patriarchal, christotheofascist WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
a truly depressing read
‘Remember the Ladies’: Attacks on Gender Equity Remain a Core Feature of Surging Authoritarianism
PUBLISHED 6/3/2025 by Suzanna Danuta Walters
From abortion bans to anti-trans policies, attacks on gender freedom are not fringe—they’re foundational to the new authoritarian agenda.
In this photo illustration, UK newspaper front pages display stories on the re-election of former US President Donald Trump on November 07, 2024 in London, England. Republican Donald Trump has won a second term to become the 47th President of the United States of America, beating Democrat Kamala Harris (Leon Neal / Getty Images)
In the whirling, swirling hellscape of illegality and cruelty that is the current American political scene, it’s hard to keep track of all the individuals and groups demonized, deported and derided by an administration seemingly motivated by a Machiavellian desire for power that might make Machiavelli himself blush with shame. In the midst of an apocalyptic news cycle, one targeted segment of the population seems to be fading from view: women. Yet we now live in a country led by a man convicted of sexual assault, filled with a Cabinet and policy-making apparatus that—at my last count—had at least a dozen of his inner circle credibly accused of sexual harassment, domestic violence or assault.
One of the first acts of the administration was to issue Executive Order 14168, titled, with no hint of irony, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” What Trump refers to as “gender ideology” is the core of feminism: that gender is a social construction riven through with relations of power and dominance, and that because it is socially produced—much like our concept of “race”—how we live it personally and engage with it politically is changeable. As feminist foremother Simone de Beauvoir so cogently put it, “One is not born but rather becomes, a woman.” (Or a man, for that matter.) Like so much else in the upside-down world of Trumpland, where violent insurrectionists are innocent victims and no-nothing anti-science conspiracists are in charge of that science, the avatars of violent masculinity are now claiming to “defend” women. Women do not need “defending.” We need—as Ruth Bader Ginsburg (riffing off abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Grimke), famously said—for men “to take their feet off of our necks.”
The demise of Roe in the 2022 Dobbs decision and the subsequent collapse of the right to bodily autonomy (for women and others capable of gestating) in dozens of states and counting, was exactly the opposite. It was the reassertion that women’s necks, and indeed entire bodies, were not theirs in the first place. Add to that the explicit call for women to be baby machines, from people like Vice President Vance and rabid baby daddy and neo-eugenicist Elon Musk, and musings by transportation secretary Sean Duffy on tying funding to high birthrates. The Gilead-esque intentions of this administration should be apparent to all. Indeed, they are screaming it from their manly rooftops: Go back! Back to the home, back to secondary status, back to being objects and not subjects. Back to sexual assault chalked up to boys being boys.
. . . . .
Let us not, as Abigail Adams wrote so many years ago, forget the ladies.
(Corbis via Getty Images)
In 1776, witty Adams penned an oft-quoted letter to her husband John, then a member of the Continental Congress and working with, yes the other men, to draft the Declaration of Independence. “I long,” she wrote, “to hear that you have declared an independency. And by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” Perhaps knowing he would, alas, ignore these mild pleas for a modicum of equality in the new nation, she added a bit more forcefully, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. *************Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.” *************
https://msmagazine.com/2025/06/03/gender-equity-abortion-forced-birth-trump-authoritarianism-trans-women/
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