Dear Meteor readers,

I am sure you are still reeling from SCOTUS’s decision last week to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. I have been reflecting on these words from an interview our editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll did with journalist Rebecca Traister: “We are living in minority rule.” We are. That has to change. And, right now, I have to believe that one day it will.

Today, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate a milestone you might have missed amid last week’s chaos. My newsletter co-sherpa Shannon talks to Alexandra Brodsky about the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

But, first, we try to make sense of all this news.

Xo,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

The Disappointment party: Abortion advocates are increasingly frustrated with the response from Democratic leadership to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Despite having seven weeks to plan thanks to the same leaked documents we all saw, they have largely met the moment with flaccid displeasure instead of fiery rage. The only plan leadership has presented is to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Vote for what, my guy?? We voted the first hundred times around and y’all are not delivering! Someone, please engrave this line from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez onto Pelosi’s desk, “We simply cannot make promises, hector people to vote, and then refuse to use our full power when they do.” So we will vote, but we’re going to complain the entire time until AOC turns 35.

Truck of horrors: On Monday, a semi-truck containing migrants attempting to cross the border—most of whom had suffocated to death—was found abandoned on the side of the road in San Antonio, Texas. According to Time, Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security have stopped the entry of an estimated record-breaking 200,000 migrants in May alone. Why? Trump administration policies like Migrant Protection Protocols and Title 42, which have left the border “all but closed to legal migrants and asylum seekers” are still in place. The Biden administration has barely lifted a pinky to undo these policies; in fact, it fought to keep Title 42 in place. Yet all of this didn’t stop professional clown and Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott from blaming these deaths on Joe Biden’s “deadly open border policy.” Read a fucking book, Gregory.

Small wins: So-called “trigger bans” continue to go into effect after last week’s decision, but abortion providers in Texas, Utah, and Louisiana are fighting back. In Utah, doctors will temporarily be able to perform legal abortions (up to 18 weeks) after a judge granted a temporary restraining order on the enforcement of trigger laws. Similar restraining orders have been granted in Texas and Louisiana as well, although, in the case of Texas, patients can only legally have an abortion if they are within the six-week threshold. (You’ve probably heard this a million times but it is worth repeating: most pregnant people don’t even know they are pregnant until around eight or nine weeks.) Click here to find out what you can do for those seeking abortion right now.

AND:

• Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is reportedly removing social media posts related to abortion pills on the grounds that they violate the company’s standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.” Well, at least someone is being honest about the fact that uteruses in this country are now considered regulated goods.

• If you’re confused about how the overturning of Roe could affect ectopic pregnancies, here’s a helpful explainer.

• Justice Stephen Breyer will officially be stepping down from his post on Thursday—and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s time on the court will begin. Godspeed, Justice, we’re all going to need it.

• R. Kelly has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking. After years of credible accusations and survivors’ stories being ignored, often because they were young Black women, let’s hope this provides some semblance of justice.

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY

Could Title IX Go the Way of Roe?

An assessment from Alexandra Brodsky, who's spent her career fighting to expand this now-50-year-old law

BY SHANNON MELERO

AN NCAA BASKETBALL PLAYER SPORTING TITLE IX LANGUAGE ON HER WARM UP TEE (PHOTO BY ELSA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

If you missed the 50th anniversary of Title IX on June 23—no one would blame you. The gutting of reproductive rights in America happened the very next day, robbing all of us of any sense of joy.

Which is why it’s so crucial to celebrate the few victories we still have. Title IX—the 1972 law that significantly curtailed sex-based discrimination in education—carved a pathway for women and girls to compete in school athletics. This aided in the formation of professional women’s leagues and is why its birthday has been an orgy of well-produced commercials for sneakers and energy drinks.

While Title IX is best known for changing the sports landscape, it’s also done a lot of other things for girls, women, and non-binary people—like limiting gender-specific dress codes, allowing women to enroll in academic institutions previously closed to them, and, importantly, compelled schools and campuses to take steps in handling sexual assault.

To understand what the 50th anniversary of Title IX means—and whether it, like Roe, could be at risk—I spoke to Alexandra Brodsky, an attorney, advocate, founder of Know Your IX, and author of Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash.

Shannon Melero: So Title IX is most closely associated with protections for women in athletics, but can you get into what other protections it offers? 

Alexandra Brodsky: Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in schools and other educational programs that receive federal funding. That includes all public schools for every age group, and almost all private colleges and universities. Title IX requires equal access to educational programs, like STEM classes, for students of all genders. It prohibits schools from discriminating against pregnant and parenting students. It forbids anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. It forbids sex discrimination in school discipline. As I discuss in my book, Title IX also requires schools to prevent and address sexual harassment, including sexual violence.

We are now living post-Roe, a reality that felt improbable for quite some time until it just wasn’t. Are we at or near the risk of losing protections given to us under Title IX?

I don’t think Title IX itself is going anywhere, but I do think we are seeing a concerted effort by anti-feminists to water it down. The Trump administration fought Title IX's protections for queer and trans students and weakened the rights of student survivors of sexual harassment—something Biden [has begun to fix]. Courts keep imposing technical obstacles to Title IX’s enforcement.

Going back to 50 years ago, was there a catalyst event that led to the birth of Title IX? 

Title IX was passed in 1972, during a wave of federal civil rights legislation. And it was passed to address widespread, blatant discrimination in education. Women were just fed up. Back then, it was taken for granted that women and girls would have fewer athletic opportunities. They were also often excluded from traditionally “male” academic disciplines. Many colleges and universities didn’t allow women to attend at all, or set strict quotas to limit their attendance. And female teachers faced blatant sex discrimination, including lower pay.

DESPITE TITLE IX PROTECTIONS, CAMPUS SEXUAL ASSAULT IS PRESENT AS EVER (PHOTO BY CHELSEA GUGLIELMINO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Is there a specific case we can point to in Title IX’s history that functioned as a turning point—in the way that Roe was so defining for abortion rights? 

There's nothing quite so path-determinative as Roe, but the first Title IX case heard by the Supreme Court in 1979 was Cannon v. University of Chicago. Geraldine Cannon sued the University of Chicago’s medical school over its discriminatory admissions policy. By the time the case made its way to the Supreme Court, the question was whether private individuals like Geraldine could bring Title IX lawsuits on their own behalf, or whether they had to depend on the federal government to enforce Title IX. And the Supreme Court said, yes, Geraldine could bring her own suit. I know that probably sounds boring and technical but it’s so important. We’ve seen from the Trump administration that students can’t always depend on the federal government to care about sex discrimination in schools. Students have to be able to advocate for themselves.

Another big case is Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, and it really demonstrates the dual sides of Title IX’s history. [A parent sued the Monroe County, Georgia BOE on behalf of her daughter claiming the school did not do enough to prevent sexual harassment between students.] There, the Supreme Court said that schools had a responsibility under Title IX to address student-on-student sexual harassment. That was huge! But the Court also announced a legal standard that would require schools to address only “severe and pervasive” harassment, and said they only had to respond in a way that wasn't “clearly unreasonable.” Basically, schools could mistreat survivors so long as they didn't mistreat them really badly. So even in this moment of triumph, we saw the Court imposing real limitations on students’ rights.

To your point, how have we seen Title IX develop over the last 50 years? Have protections shrunk or expanded? 

The answer is really both. Courts and advocates have, over the years, recognized Title IX's breadth, and seen how it can protect students who experience all these different kinds of sex discrimination. That progress is still ongoing. Just last week, a federal appeals court published a big opinion explaining that Title IX forbids discriminatory dress codes that impose different rules on boys and girls. And recently we've seen advocates successfully use Title IX to challenge transphobic school policies and state laws. So, in that way, protections have expanded.

But, at the same time, courts have adopted rules and standards that make it quite difficult for students to enforce their rights. For example, the Supreme Court has established a very high bar for student survivors to hold their schools accountable in court for mishandling sexual harassment allegations. Many courts have also held that students can't sue over what we call “disparate impact” violations—basically when a school's policy isn't discriminatory on its face, but disproportionately hurts women and girls. Opinions like those have shrunk Title IX's power. 

How is the media doing at covering Title IX and campus or high school sexual assault? 

We've seen media coverage of sexual harassment in schools do a lot of good, and also do a lot of harm. In the early years of my organizing, smart reporting by journalists like Katie Baker and Tyler Kingkade did a lot to spur public attention and policy reform. And USA Today has recently been doing a lot of great investigative work into the nitty-gritty of how schools respond to sexual violence. But we've also seen media promote a narrative that support for survivors poses a direct and unjust threat to men and boys—[even] though a man is more likely to be sexually assaulted himself than to be falsely accused of doing so. And that narrative has had terrible policy consequences, ultimately leading to Trump's Title IX regulations.

What can the average person do to ensure that we don’t lose the protections that we’ve gained under Title IX? 

National advocacy is certainly important, so it’s great if people can contribute their skills or support to organizations like Know Your IX or the place I work, Public Justice. But there’s also so much work that can be done on the local level. In recent years we’ve seen K-12 and college students organizing to push their schools to do better by sexual assault survivors. We’ve also seen really effective protests of discriminatory dress codes that have resulted in concrete policy changes. So my answer is basically: figure out what students are doing at your local high school, or at a nearby college, and follow their lead.

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Dear Meteor readers,

This Sunday, we have a special send for you. My friend and editor Megan Carpentier talked to reproductive rights activists and advocates from places where abortion was or is currently banned (including pre-Roe America). These women share advice with us on the long road ahead. Hope is important but elusive; these stories might provide some.

With love,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

DEPT. OF HOPE

“We’re Stuck for a Minute… But it’s Just for a Minute”

Stories of strategy—and resilience—from people who have been where we are now

BY MEGAN CARPENTIER

A CELEBRATION OF DECRIMINALIZED ABORTIONS IN COLOMBIA, 2022 (PHOTO BY ELIZABETH PALCHUCAN VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

For many of us, the official news on Friday morning that the Supreme Court had overturned the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade was a devastating loss.

That devastation was not helped by the knowledge that Justice Clarence Thomas, who the day before had authored the decision significantly restricting the ways in which states can regulate handguns, was also suggesting that the Court should revisit its decisions to legalize birth control, to decriminalize consensual sex between same-sex adults, and to legalize same-sex marriage. All those decisions were equally reliant on the Court’s prior interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

But the truth is that we’ve known this decision was coming since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion leaked less than eight weeks ago. Plus, the anti-abortion movement has, for decades, been working on the state level to pass laws that could either restrict access to abortion within the confines of Roe— see also: Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzales v. Carhart—or present the Court with an opportunity to overturn it.

And now they’ve done so.

So the question for Americans who value reproductive rights is: What happens now? How do we help each other, help our friends, and, ultimately, win back our freedoms?

But American women need not start from scratch on this new, old ground. Abortion restrictions exist around the world, and we asked leaders who have lived under them to share their advice and stories.

“What you need to do with that sadness—that rage—is to use it as a catalyst to keep on resisting.”

—Angie Contreras, spokesperson, Mujeres Vivas y Libres campaign in Mexico, where abortion was illegal until September 2021, when activists helped win a Supreme Court decision to legalize it

Abortions are going to continue existing whether they are illegal or not.

In Mexico abortions have always existed and, in states where they are prohibited, there are still abortions. That has been thanks to networks of women who have confided in other women, in other organizations, in allies, in collectives that are going to resist and inform them. Because the state cannot prevent us from exercising our rights over our bodies; only we can decide that.

This is a reminder that women won these rights for [themselves], and we have to continue defending them because we can’t always rely on the state.  We need to create networks among women to help each other to continue fighting for our rights.

It’s valid to be sad [after Roe] because they’re prohibiting the exercise of a right that women had already won. But what you need to do with that sadness—that rage—is to use it as a catalyst to keep on resisting. Women have historically always needed to resist. We were sad for a while too, but then we organized, and we are going to continue to organize because the reality is that we don’t need the state to continue having abortions.

Also, this is a good moment to learn about other strategies: In Mexico, we learned from our sisters in Argentina and Colombia.

And this is a reminder that we are not alone, because when we talk about a life free of violence and with the security of access to abortion, it’s for everyone. Not just for women in Mexico or in the United States. We want the same for all women—and, in Latin America, we know that it is possible to achieve this.

“Maybe it's time for people in the States—for women particularly—to look at where you can find hope.”

—Catherine Heaney, director and chair, DHR Public Relations, and former chief executive of the Irish Family Planning Association, Ireland, where abortion was legalized by referendum in 2018

I started working with the Irish Family Planning Association around 2001 and, at that time, obviously, there was a ban on abortion—but the government had started making very small moves to be more supportive of women in crisis pregnancies.

Then, a key moment was the death of Savita Halappanavar [an Indian dentist living in Ireland who died of sepsis in 2012 after being denied an abortion during a miscarriage]. That was a huge shock to the nation. People really related to her…and that drove so many people out onto the streets.

On a very personal level, it was the first time I started to hear from relatives and people that I would never have discussed abortion with—even though I was a public voice on abortion for many years—that people were just outraged by it. Women were out in the streets, men were out in the streets and many of us brought our children out onto the streets around the time of her death.

[Waiting for the referendum results], I met somebody who was out there fighting for abortion rights 30 years before. She stuck with it and was there…and it was a joy. It's really important to be resilient and stick with it.

America gave me great hope when I was at IFPA. Now maybe it's time for people in the States—for women particularly—to look at where you can find hope. There's a lot of really progressive stuff happening across Europe, not just in Ireland, on reproductive rights and health in general.

To me, I think there's lots of potential to be hopeful, but it does require hard work.

ABORTION RIGHTS PROTESTORS IN BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND 2019 (PHOTO BY CHARLES MCQUILLAN VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

“I think there is a need for health care professionals in the U.S…to really band together and make their voices heard.”

—Rostom Deiparine and Ana Maria R. Nemenzo, steering committee members, Philippines Safe Abortion Access Network (PINSAN), Philippines, where abortion is illegal except where deemed necessary to save the life or health of the mother

Ana Maria: PINSAN — which literally means “cousin”—is a coalition of reproductive health, reproductive rights, and women’s groups that felt after the passage of the reproductive health law, that it was time to…expand the full meaning of “reproductive health” to address the issue of abortion.

Rostom: There are real restrictions on safe abortions [even when it’s legal]. Still, there is [an] understanding among women and health care providers that abortion is illegal under all circumstances, and not many providers are trained to provide safe abortions at all.

Ana Maria: The main campaign we embarked on was to demystify, destigmatize and decriminalize abortion. It took us quite a while to get women in the communities to discuss the issue [but] we thought it was time to bring it out into the open – discuss it, address it, face it – so that we can do something about it. And we really framed it as a public health issue. [There are an estimated 610,000 illegal, unsafe abortions in the Philippines every year.] But the Catholic Church has continued to oppose even the reproductive health law at every twist and turn for religious reasons.

Rostom: Personally, I feel there is a need for the American community, particularly women, to revisit and define and strengthen the community of care among themselves.

“It’s never only about taking away the right to abortion.”

–Jinna Rosales, executive director of Grupo Estratégico por la PAE, Honduras, where abortion is illegal

First, keep calm. Analyze the social context and acknowledge first of all that you’re in a country that has always had battles over reproductive rights. Remember, too, that this is a country that for years and years has had people who believed in these rights. So now it’s time to identify those political actors and call on them for assistance in the restitution of these rights.

It’s also really important to identify those actors who are working to take these rights away in the United States and ask yourselves: What’s behind this decision? And what are they really playing at with this? Because it’s never only about taking away the right to abortion—there are other themes that maybe we aren’t seeing and those are the things we need to keep an eye on, too.

I think organization is very important: In general, you need to have an organization that is intersectional—which is to say that they must include the experiences of both older women and young women in order to build strategies.

PROTESTORS IN NEW YORK, FRIDAY EVENING (PHOTO BY JOHN SMITH VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

“We can get past this because number one, we’re more educated now.”

—Donna Morris, senior director of administration, In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, who was involved in abortion politics in the U.S. pre-Roe

Before it was Roe, we had a plan for Roe. So let's get a plan for afterward. Let's let women know there is light at the end of the tunnel. They're not going to stop us. We're badasses. And this is just a little bump in the road.

We can get past this because number one—to me, as a woman that is 73, getting ready to be 74—we're more educated now. Back in my day, we were basically swimming without a raft—on our own. Most of us young women were more hip and educated than our mothers were because they were old school: “I’m just a mother, I'm just a wife.”

We are not that anymore. So, we can come up with some slick ideas, some creative things, some things to meet the moment that, yes, we're stuck in for a minute…but it's just for a minute.

You can still help those seeking abortions who need it most by clicking here or sharing this newsletter. 

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Dear Meteor readers,

The Supreme Court has just reversed Roe v. Wade in a 6-3 decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito writes, “Guided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of the Nation’s concept of ordered liberty, the Court finds the Fourteenth Amendment clearly does not protect the right to an abortion.”

In other words: The right to abortion no longer exists.

We knew this day was coming. We knew. But still, our tears—maybe yours—are flowing. And we’re thinking about all of the pregnant people who will be denied care as trigger bans go into effect in (at least) 13 states—a process happening as you read this newsletter.

If you want to help those patients right now, click any of the states below to be taken directly to the relevant abortion fund:

• Arkansas
• Idaho
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• North Dakota
• Oklahoma
• South Dakota 
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Wyoming

These abortion funds provide transport, counsel, and crucial care to people seeking abortions right now in states that have whiplashed back to a pre-Roe age. They’ve never needed our support more.

In the immediate aftermath of today’s decisions, we will see anger and pain, finger-pointing, and blame games. We will see pregnant people being turned away from clinics, and horror stories of patients, and families, torn apart because they weren’t able to get a necessary medical procedure.

In the middle of all our rage—there will be confusion. But that’s what the right wants. We are holding close to the advice reproductive justice advocate Renee Bracey Sherman gave us last week: “It’s going to be utter chaos…But what we’re asking people to do is to avoid the sensationalism and the wanting to freak out. People will be trying to get abortions in that moment and they won’t know whether this tweet or that information is correct. So take a breath and fact-check.”

But in the end, it’s a dark day for women, for poor people, for science, for health care, and for the basic idea of the will of the people (since this is a minority-rule opinion). As Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan wrote in their dissent, “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”

Winning back those rights will be a long journey—but we will fight. We will keep having abortions and helping the people we love do so safely. We will fight, together, with everything we have.

In love, solidarity, and service,

The Meteor

Please share this newsletter with anyone looking for answers right now. 

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Dear Meteor readers,

Does anyone else feel like SCOTUS is angling for a daytime Emmy with all of the drama the justices are building up over the release of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision? After not issuing the ruling yesterday, the court has added a last-minute decision day for Friday of this week. We’ll take the days we can get—abortion patients and providers need them—but the anticipation is also killing me.

Ahead of what we believe will be The Big Day, Samhita spoke to reproductive justice leader Renee Bracey Sherman about what to expect when the decision comes down.

But before we get to the goods, let’s get through the news.

Patiently,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

No return: Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas is set to be demolished and a new facility built over it. Uvalde’s mayor explained during a press conference, “You can never ask a child to go back or a teacher to go back in that school ever.” (A similar decision was made after Sandy Hook.) Just before the press conference, the head of Texas state police had his own announcement: openly admitting that as many had suspected, the behavior of the officers on the scene that day was an “abject failure.” But the commanding officer has not yet been disciplined for how he chose to handle the operations of that day.

1.6 million reasons: If you don’t follow football closely, the name Daniel Snyder probably means absolutely nothing. Allow me to change that. Snyder, who owns the NFL’s Washington Commanders, was accused of sexually harassing and assaulting one of his employees in April 2009. Three months later, the issue was settled to the tune of $1.6 million, in a confidential settlement. Snyder is now facing another accusation of sexual harrassment. Meanwhile, the entire Commanders organization is under scrutiny by the House Oversight Committee, who’ve determined that Snyder obscured the findings of an internal investigation into the overall rampant culture of sexual harassment within the organization. The Committee  also argues that Snyder “led a campaign” against women who had made claims about “widespread harassment.” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has been curiously absent from these proceedings but will be hauled out before the Committee this week to answer for what appears to be a gross lack of oversight. To borrow a line from an old superhero movie: “Who watches the Watchmen?” (And why are they doing such a bad job?)

Unsung heroes: On Tuesday, Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman took the stand during the January 6 hearings—and displayed an unimaginable degree of bravery. Moss is a longtime election worker who was threatened, harassed, and made to fear for her life after Donald Trump made false claims about the 2020 election results, and, with the help of  Rudy Giuliani, accused her and her mother of being part of a grand conspiracy to unseat him. Moss’s mother, who also worked the polls that year, testified via video, “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere...Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” I strongly recommend you watch their entire testimony.

A LITERAL PATRIOT, SHAYE MOSS. (PHOTO BY KEVIN DIETSCH VIA GETTY IMAGES)

AND: 

• The International Swimming Federation (FINA) has decided—during Pride month no less—to severely restrict trans swimmers from competition. Any trans swimmer looking to compete at the Olympic level will need to have begun transitioning before puberty to be in line with FINA’s new policy. Since most young people do not have the access or funds necessary to start their transition in their tweens, this may as well be an outright ban.

• Back to the issues of the NFL for a moment. Of the 25 total sexual misconduct lawsuits brought against NFL star Deshaun Watson, 20 of them have now been settled out of court. Watson’s attorney claims that the terms and the amounts of these settlements will not be shared with the public and neither will the truth of Watson's actions. I cannot say it enough, it is a travesty this man is still signed to an NFL team.

• Colombia has chosen Francia Márquez as the first Black Vice President in the country’s history! You can read up on Madame VP’s journey here and check out her conversation with The Meteor’s Paola Mendoza last year.

• The Senate’s unprecedented bipartisan gun legislation closes the “boyfriend loophole” but still allows people convicted of intimate partner violence to get their guns back after five years, as long as they don’t commit any other crimes. Crazy idea but stay with me, what if we didn't allow violent offender to get their guns back at all?

RETROGRADE

“It’s Going to be Fucking Chaos”

Renee Bracey Sherman on the impending overturn of Roe, and what to expect in the first 48 hours

BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY

THE FUTURE COULD LOOK LIKE THIS EVERY SINGLE POST-ROE DAY. (PHOTO BY CHIP SOMODEVILLA VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

As you know, the Supreme Court of the United States of America is set to overturn Roe v. Wade. The decision could come as early as tomorrow or likely in the next 10 days. If our worst fears are realized, this decision would set women’s rights and the rights of anyone with a uterus back generations.

In the days, weeks, months, and years ahead there will be, most likely, a lot of thinking, strategizing, protesting, and rabble-rousing (along with crying and fist-shaking). The path forward will be a long one. But what should we do in the very short term—the moment the decision comes in?

In anticipation of this moment, I sat down with Renee Bracey Sherman, a decades-long reproductive justice leader who, through her organization We Testify, has worked to elevate the stories of people who have had abortions. She also led the charge on the steps of the SCOTUS on the day the court heard oral arguments on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that will determine the future of abortion rights.

A LOVELY STROLL AROUND JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH'S NEIGHBORHOOD. (PHOTO BY BONNIE CASH VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: So, say the abortion decision comes in and it’s what we expect—meaning it overturns Roe v. Wade. What do the next 24 hours look like, especially in trigger-ban states? What happens if you have an appointment? 

Renee Bracey Sherman: My real answer is just, it's going to be fucking chaos, utter chaos.

In states with the trigger bans, [say] someone is in a clinic waiting for care—they might be mid-care, mid-counseling. And I just really feel for those people who will schedule their appointment and go in and get as far as doing the counseling, doing the ultra[sound], maybe even have their legs in the stirrups, and then when the decision comes down, [they] will have to get off the examination table. And I don't know that people realize how heartbreaking that’s going to be.

And then they’re not going to be able to just go down to another clinic on the street or not even to the next state. And we've already seen the cruelty of states like Oklahoma, that saw that people [coming from Texas, where abortion is largely already banned] needed care, and then turned around and said, “Cool, we're going to get rid of this so you can't come here.”

We’ll [also] have lawyers reading through the decision. Let’s say we are overturning or reversing Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But then you have to [look] at the fine print of the decision. What about Roe is wrong? What about Casey is wrong? Are there legal grounds for us to sue? What is that in comparison to what the state laws are, or the state statute? What laws are still on the books? Because there are a lot of places where laws from the 1800s are still on the books. Roe [negated] those. Do those laws go back into effect? Is there kind of a cross mix? It's pure chaos.

A lot of clinics will have to stop providing immediately because of the trigger bans, but also because their lawyers are going to advise them to stop until they can read through the decision and assess the level of risk.

And it’s not going to be [just] 24 hours, but months and maybe even a year, because there’s going to be lawsuits. And so there are questions of, “Can we provide abortions today? Can we not?”

And I think that's the saddest part about it: that people are just not going to be able to have clear information. So what we're asking people to do is to avoid at all costs the sensationalism and the wanting to freak out. Because people are trying to get abortions in that moment and they won't know whether this tweet is correct or this information is correct, and it's just exhausting and chaotic.

And I don't know that people realize how heartbreaking that’s going to be. 

It's interesting to consider the idea of staying calm at that moment.

Somebody did a tweet saying that Plan B had been banned in a state and that tweet got tens of thousands of retweets. Plan B hasn’t been banned anywhere! Your insurance might not cover it and that sucks, but it’s not banned. The anti-abortion movement has a vested interest in sowing dysfunction and chaos because they don’t want anyone to be able to get an abortion. What they want is for people to think, This is just too hard, I'm going to go to jail. It's going to be bad. It's going to be unsafe, and give up.

The thing is that, as we’ve known for the last 4,000 years, people who have abortions never give up. We’ve been doing it for a long time. We will keep doing it. That’s not going to change, but what we can do is ask people to take a breath and fact-check the information before spreading it widely and turning into alarmists. Is that a word?

That is a word! This idea of keeping calm and making sure your information is accurate, that’s a really important call to action. What other advice do you have for people who want to help right after the decision? Should we hit the streets? Should we be chaining ourselves to fire hydrants? 

We need all tactics. People absolutely should take to the streets and protest and make their voices heard. I do love a good protest and I want to make sure that we don’t have a couple of protests and then it dies off and people go back to accepting this as the new status quo and normalize this, which I feel is what’s happened over the last decade.

What’s really challenging at this moment is that we are being attacked from eight million different directions and so people do lose interest, because there's another tragedy or another horrible decision to come down. So how do we keep the stamina to actually make a change so that the people who are harmed in the process aren’t forgotten?

Yes, absolutely protest. Absolutely vote, for sure. Vote for pro-abortion candidates up and down. Become a single-issue voter. If your candidate is not super supportive of abortion, I promise you they’re probably not good on a whole lot of other issues either. I've never met an anti-abortion candidate who was excellent on Medicaid coverage of healthcare and immigration and literally everything else.

But then getting involved in your community is really what I ask people to do. Open up to your community. Become a person that people can go to, to receive care. Whether that’s opening up your home, opening up your car for rides, giving up your time at a local clinic or clinic defense, if that’s what the clinic wants. And then, of course, show up and become a monthly donor to your local abortion fund. Also, know the self-managed abortion protocol. You may not need it, but someone in your life may need it.

I think it's really, really essential that people look around at what’s happening in their communities because there is a lot of work happening already. You do not have to recreate the wheel. Do not try to create an “underground railroad”; just stop. That's really anti-Black language. It's terrible. Just get involved with the people who are doing [that kind of work already] because there are a lot of security protocols and if you can’t give of your time or your money, that’s fine. You can just show up with love and support for the people in your life who need abortions and start the conversation at home. That’s really where we need to do the work.

You’ve been doing reproductive justice work for over a decade. How are you feeling right now? 

I feel like I constantly swing between tired, frustrated, feeling a lot of despair, and also feeling like this sucks [but] we've got this. And I think there are days that it's extremely draining because we didn't have to be here if people [had taken] racial justice, economic justice, access to healthcare, and feminism seriously. But also, I'm in the middle of co-writing a book on the history of Black and brown people's experiences with abortion, and in working on that…I feel a little bit hopeful. Reading a lot of books on the history of abortion, it puts it in perspective when I'm thinking about this as something that's been [an] issue for thousands of years.

So I have to just remember that this moment in time is one blip on the large, expansive history of humankind and the history of abortion and that there has always been some sort of white supremacist, white Christian nationalist forces to try to tamp down, not just abortion, but sex and sexuality and people just living their lives. So I have to go, “Okay, this is part of it, and we can survive through this.”

Please be sure to share this newsletter with anyone else wondering what to do once this decision comes down. 

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Dear Meteor readers,

Dare I say it? I’m feeling pretty good this week. I’ve been deeply entrenched in two docuseries and it’s proven to be a welcome hours-long break from reality. If you’re looking to fill time before the next catastrophe, I highly suggest Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (about Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) on Netflix or if you’re staying away from crime docs, ESPN’s latest 30 For 30 installment, Dream On, which covers the creation of the 1996 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team.

We’ve got a busy weekend ahead of us with Father’s Day and Juneteenth. In commemoration of the latter, Meteor editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll asked six brilliant Black women their take on the holiday—from its significance to the pitfalls of commercialization. We’ve even got the official unofficial playlist for the day.

But first, some news.

In joy and freedom,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

Baby got vax: Fantastic news for the toddler set—the FDA has approved Covid-19 vaccines for children under five, just in time for summer vacation. Both Pfizer and Moderna shots have been deemed safe (sorry Johnson & Johnson, you don’t get a final rose) and doses will start finding their way into chunky baby arms beginning June 20th, the Biden administration said in a statement. Considering the lack of mask mandates and the decreased chatter about variants, we may act as if the virus is no longer a threat, but COVID and her horrid stepchildren Delta and Omicron are still very much among us and who knows when they’ll be inviting their distant cousin Epsilon over to party. Be well, bbs!

Iowa 👎🏼: On Friday, Iowa’s Supreme Court took an enormous step backward and declared that abortion is not a protected right under the state’s constitution, just as the country is on pins and needles waiting for the Dobbs decision. This move overturns a previous court’s decision that abortion was protected under the privacy rights laid out in the Iowa constitution. What’s changed since the last decision? The new Iowa court is filled to the brim with conservative Republican judges hell-bent on limiting the freedoms of their citizens. What do we do when Republicans try to block our rights? We donate to the Iowa Abortion Access Fund.

AND:

• Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective argues Black Americans are still waiting for “a real age of emancipation” and that Juneteenth falls short of the promises of its predecessor “Jubilee Day.”

• Larry Nassar has lost his final appeal. Good riddance is all I’ll say.

• The British government has signed off on extradition paperwork for Julian Assange, who can now legally be brought back to the U.S to stand trial for an earth-shattering data leak that most of us no longer remember. (We do remember his rape charges, though.)

• Michelle Goldberg talked to our own Samhita and other feminists about the state of mainstream feminism in The New York Times. Is it cool or is it not cool? Maybe it doesn’t need to be cool.

• Stephanie McMahon has been named interim CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and maybe that seems unimportant but there is some real Succession shit going on in that company right now and Stephanie is a more cunning Shiv Roy.

• In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, enjoy these five shorts about incredible women in sports, including the queen Sedona Prince who exposed the wild inequalities in NCAA basketball.

• Beyoncé. That’s it. That’s the news.

SAY IT LOUD

Six Black Women on the Meaning of Juneteenth

Its history, its future, and yes, that dumb ice cream

BY REBECCA CARROLL

A JUNETEENTH REPARATIONS RALLY HELD IN NEWARK, 2022 (PHOTO BY MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Leave it to Texas to pretend they didn’t hear that slavery was over. While the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in 1863, the then-still border state of Texas was like, “What? No, uh-uh. We don’t know her.” On June 19, 1865, though, Union troops arrived in Galveston to take control of the state and make sure that all enslaved people were freed. That day became Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the official abolishment of slavery. A holiday for us—for Black folks.

One hundred and fifty years later it’s now a commercial holiday—used in brand campaigns and Walmart’s failed ice cream—and I feel ambivalent about that. What’s to prevent it from turning into another MLK Day or Black History Month, both of which feel more like lip service as opposed to an actual appreciation of what we’re meant to be commemorating? I mean, this is America: How can we trust the country built on the backs of Black folks—a country that continues to be as happy-pants racist as it wants to be—to honor the day we got free?

So, yes, I have questions and concerns about Juneteenth, but I also really wanted to find a way to commemorate it in a meaningful way. I decided to talk to a group of brilliant Black women—writers, creatives, and artists—to offer some perspective on the holiday.

First, about that commercialization. Do you think it has undermined the historical value of Juneteenth for Black folks in America? 

“Juneteenth will remain a significant holiday—because of its symbolic meaning and historical legacy—regardless of recent commercialization efforts. We live in a capitalist society, which means that we can almost always expect companies to exploit holidays—and just about anything—to yield a profit. Plus, it is certainly easier for companies to sell goods and services than to find concrete ways to redress past harms or address current discriminatory practices. Still, I am encouraged by the swift public response when companies go too far. It’s a reminder that we can play a key role in demanding better from those that drop the ball.”

–Dr. Keisha N. Blain, professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University 

What would be the best possible reason for the hashtag Juneteenth to go viral? 

“The best reason for #Juneteenth to go viral [would be] Black Americans actually receiving meaningful reparations for the enslavement of our ancestors, because we know that will not happen in 2022. The second best reason for #Juneteenth to go viral [would be] the announcement that the rich history of Black Americans since they were brought to these shores in bondage, will be taught in schools. No longer just a paragraph about Martin Luther King and how enslaved Africans were akin to migrant workers, all students would learn how we built this country. I don’t see that happening either, so how about #Juneteenth goes viral because all Black people get the Friday closest to June 19th off from work? Just us.”

–April Reign, equity and inclusion advocate, and creator of #OscarsSoWhite

REPARATIONS AND LAND!  (PHOTO BY MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

What is the single most important thing to get right about Juneteenth as a journalist?

“Journalists should speak of Juneteenth as an ‘is’ instead of a ‘was.’ It’s not a siloed moment of history. What it represents—the willfully delayed emancipation of Black people—speaks directly to this perilous time and the denial of our rights. It must also be framed within the context of anti-CRT/American history laws that will gut the significance of Juneteenth by erasing from libraries and classrooms the nearly 250 years of chattel slavery that preceded it.”

–Renée Graham, journalist and opinion columnist for the Boston Globe 

What’s funny about Juneteenth? 

“It’s ‘hilarious’ that we finally have a national holiday to celebrate our freedom, yet we’re still not truly free.”

–Yvette Nicole Brown, actress (Big Shot) and TV host

If you were making a playlist called Juneteenth, what 10 songs would be on it?  

Alright - Kendrick Lamar

A Chance to Say My Piece - Taylor McFerrin

Formation - Beyoncé

This Is America - Childish Gambino

My People…Hold On - Eddie Kendricks

Can You See? - Madison McFerrin

Every Nigga Is a Star - KeiyaA

Say It Loud - I’m Black and I'm Proud - James Brown

Post Black Anyway - THEESatisfaction

Baltimore - Nina Simone

–Madison McFerrin, singer/songwriter

IT'S SCIENTIFICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO CREATE A PLAYLIST THAT DOESN'T INCLUDE KENDRICK LAMAR (PHOTO BY SANTIAGO BLUEGUERMAN VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Why is Juneteenth important to you as a mother? 

“Black history is American history. But in our house, what I tell my daughter is that Black history is also a master class in hope. To me, Juneteenth matters because it says: ‘Keep going, the future you want is coming.’”

–Veronica Chambers, editor of narrative projects at The New York Times, and author of Shirley Chisholm is a Verb

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Dear Meteor readers,

I hope you are well. I am trying to keep calm while we wait for the SCOTUS to make decisions.  I am distracting myself with the things that are good: my cats, the sunshine, and all of you loyal and committed readers.

Today, my dear friend, writer, and professor Syreeta McFadden talks to award-winning journalist Linda Villarosa about her new book, Under the Skin, and what she’s learned in her years as a health reporter. It’s a really freakin’ good conversation.

But first, the news.

It’s dark and hell is hot,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

Labor woes: Employees at various Starbucks locations are working to unionize and the company’s overlords are pushing back by threatening to limit access to healthcare for trans employees. According to Them, workers have filed a charge against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Board for creating a “coercive and hostile environment” including threatening the loss of gender-affirming health benefits if they vote for union representation. (Starbucks did not respond to the charge but their stance on the matter is made clear on their union-busting website.) You know what we’re not going to do in the month that we celebrate our Lord and savior Marsha P. Johnson? Remain idle while workers, trans or otherwise, are stripped of their rights. So until Starbucks comes around, consider putting your money into that local coffee shop instead of paying a small fortune for your non-dairy venti secret menu unicorn frappuccino with extra whip.

#BringBGHome:  WNBA star Brittney Griner’s wrongful detention in Russia has been extended once again to July 2. The Russian court system has moved Griner’s hearing, on the alleged charge of possessing cannabis paraphernalia, which means she will remain in the custody of Russian authorities where she has been held without due process for over 100 days. As a professor of military and strategic studies told ESPN, “Dragging out her detention, missing court deadlines–these are key indicators that we should question the legitimacy of her arrest, precisely why the U.S. classified it as a wrongful detention.” So why is President Biden—a man who claims to love women’s sports so much he practically adopted the USWNT—dragging his feet on this issue?

Party crashers: The Proud Boys and other far-right groups have been interrupting family-friendly drag events across the country during Pride month (which is painfully ironic considering their name is Proud Boys). One such event was a drag queen story time where Bay Area drag queen, Panda Dulce was reading story books to children. Imagine getting so enraged about story time that you pull up to a children’s event to yell? Get a life. Despite these ongoing expressions of hateration, Pride events are going forward thanks to the fearless queens who have been attending and the businesses that have been supporting them (like Rabble Rise Doughnuts in New Jersey who put on a WONDERFUL Drag Queens and Doughnuts event for families.)

AND:

• Google will be paying out a $118 million gender discrimination settlement to over 15,000 women who’ve been underpaid by the company. Sounds like a lot—but not when you divide amongst that many women (about $7,866 each!).

• WTF headline of the week: “White Nationalists Want to Reclaim Nature as a Safe Space for Racists.” Who’s going to tell them we’re all living on stolen land? I’d say my Taino ancestors are spinning in their graves but they weren’t given the dignity of burial so 🤷🏼‍♀️.

• Speaking of ancestors, the web browser of the pioneers, Internet Explorer, has been put out to pasture. She lived a good life.

• Am I the only one who didn’t know about the tampon shortage until just this week?

HEALTH REPORT

“Something* About Being Black Is  Creating a Health Crisis”

*It's racism! 

BY SYREETA MCFADDEN

YOU SEE THAT GLOW? IT'S THE SHINE OF INCREDIBLE KNOWLEDGE. (IMAGE VIA LINDA VILLAROSA.COM)

Linda Villarosa has been raising the alarm about African American health for nearly forty years. First, as a health reporter and editor for Essence Magazine in the late 1980s and ‘90s, and later in her book, Body & Soul: The Black Woman’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. Her prolific reporting for The New York Times has examined the infant and maternal mortality in Black mothers and babies, racial disparities in both the HIV and COVID pandemics, and life expectancy in Black communities, namely her hometown of Chicago. Just this past weekend, she wrote the cover story for The New York Times Magazine about the grotesque, continuing practice of legalized forced sterilizations of poor Black and brown women.

Villarosa’s new book, Under The Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, is out this week and is a culmination of decades of extensive reporting and research exploring racism in healthcare. Through profiles of Black women and men from different backgrounds, supplemented with extensive studies, Villarosa lays bare the forces that account for Black people living sicker and dying quicker than their white counterparts.

Her findings are profound. For example, regardless of education and income, Black Americans still live in more polluted areas, suffer more from chronic illnesses, and have higher death rates from conditions like diabetes, stroke, and heart disease than white people. College-educated Black mothers have higher infant mortality rates than white mothers who haven't graduated from high school.

“Yes, something about being Black is a creating a health crisis,” Villarosa writes, “and that something is racism.”

As I read Under The Skin, I had frequent flashbacks to my own experiences navigating health care and reading Villarosa’s articles in Essence when I was younger. (Her articles were so popular, she tells me, that people would Xerox and share them.) So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to her.

ROUND OF APPLAUSE TO SEAN GERARD CLARK WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS GRIPPING COVER ART. (SCREENSHOT VIA INSTAGRAM)

Syreeta McFadden: In this book, you challenge dominant—as well as your own—assumptions about the root causes of racial health disparities. Why was it important for you to flip the gaze on yourself? And what did you discover that you had to unlearn?

Linda Villarosa: It’s been a real challenge because I’m an American, born and raised in a culture that teaches you that personal responsibility is everything. And that you, as an individual, are in charge of your own destiny, your own health, and your own wealth, without looking at the structural, institutional, and historical discrimination and racism that we as African Americans have faced.

My family was a bootstrapping kind of family. My grandparents came up from Mississippi [to Chicago], and my parents finally managed to dig their way out of [there]. I ended up at Essence magazine, where the thinking was if you empower each individual Black woman, who is usually in charge of a family, you can change the health of Black people. So it was if you know better, you do better kind of thinking. And I worked really hard to get as much information as I could to Essence readers. At the time, Essence had a huge reach among Black women.

[In 1991], I went to public health school, and I started learning that not everything is individual, there are health policies, and there’s the history of [racism in] America. And later, my own pregnancy, showed me I was doing everything right, [but it still] wasn’t that easy. It was much more fraught than I would have expected, given my insurance status, my health status, my income, and my education.

 I still believe that taking the best care of yourself is smart. But now I see that to achieve optimal health, we have to explore what has happened to us in America and the effect of living in a discriminatory or racist society.

In the book, you share a much more complete history of the origins of Dr. Arline Geronimus’s “weathering hypothesis.” 

Arline is probably 70ish [and has] been thinking about this theory of “weathering” since she was in college. The idea is that the discrimination we as Black people especially as Black women face has a weathering effect: which means it's prematurely aging our bodies. And it's the culmination of at minimum micro at worse macro aggressions. And she spelled it out for me and I really liked the poetry of the word weathering. Weathering is at once the effect of discrimination and everyday insults, as well as big picture insults on our bodies, like the way a storm weathers a house, it knocks the paint off the outside, it messes up the roof, it pulls the shutters off the hinges. But then we also as people weather the storm, and we have kinship and we have community and we have friends and we have spirituality. So I really liked that dual meaning of weathering.

There’s a chapter where you write about the medical community’s understanding and recognition of pain in Black bodies. Could you talk a little bit about that?

I really dug deep into that when I was working on my 1619 Project essay [which explored the dangerous fallacy of pain tolerance in Black people]. During the years of slavery, there were doctors and scientists who were also enslavers; they owned human beings and they had a vested interest in keeping slavery in place. And one of the ways they did it was to use science and “data”—to push the false idea that Black people have super high pain tolerance. So that allowed people to not feel bad when they worked us from sunup to sundown, beat us, whipped us, castrated us, took our children away, killed us—all the things that happened. And it desensitized people to our pain. If we have a superhuman tolerance to pain, then it was okay to treat us badly, and it was okay to also perform medical experiments on our bodies.

Slavery is over, but that idea is stuck in the American consciousness. Even as recently as 2016, there was a study of [about] 220 white medical students and interns, and they found that 40% had believed at least one false idea about Black people. And the most common one was that we had a higher tolerance for pain. In another [study], the question they asked was, if two people, one Black, and one white, got their hand slammed in a car door—what would the pain feeling be? And even these, you know, educated people who are the doctors of tomorrow said, oh, a Black person would feel that less. That was 2016.

In the book, and in The New York Times Magazine cover story, you write so movingly about the Relfs, two sisters in their teens who were forcibly sterilized in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. Their case revealed that over 100,000 Black and brown women were sterilized by US government programs for decades, harm that has continued. 

The article grapples with how to deal with reparations for Black people—and it's not just Black people, it’s Latinx people, it's sometimes poor white people—who were sterilized against their will or without informed consent. There were eugenics laws on the books in 32 states [but] they went away in the 70s and the United States still kept sterilizing people in prisons, and immigrants. So if we're looking for a concrete way to [repay] people who were sterilized, reparations is a way to do it. Three states have done it: Virginia and North Carolina had programs to give reparations to people who were sterilized, and California is in the midst of it right now. People like the Relf sisters, who are alive [but] never got a dime for their sacrifice, deserve an apology. And they deserve some kind of financial payment for the sacrifice they made.

How do you hope this book will transform the conversation around racism and health?

I hope this book is a data-driven, research-based, evidence-based tool to help people understand, people who really have been trying to talk about it and don't have the tools. I don’t want people in the healthcare system to feel defensive—that I'm saying, you're racist—because I think we all have blind spots. Health care providers are heroes, but we still all have blind spots. And if we understand them and confront them as a country and in the healthcare system, that’s how we can make things different.

I also don’t want our folks to be afraid of the health care system. But I want us to go in with our eyes open—to go in with support, to go in with questions, to go in with, you know, knowing, and to gently push back. And if you can’t do it for yourself, bring someone with you.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you find this newsletter enlightening? Spread the love and the info by forwarding this email to a friend. 

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Dear Meteor readers,

Happy second Saturday of Pride! This week, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of the first two episodes of Ms. Marvel, the new series out on Disney+. Based on the comic book of the same name, the TV show stars the very charming Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American superhero who gets her power from an ancient family heirloom bangle. I was hooked.

I’m not exactly a comic book nerd, but lucky for you my newsletter co-sherpa Shannon is, and she’s written a beautiful reflection on how it feels to watch the series as a Muslim and superhero obsessive. She talks to Meteor founding member Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who also happens to be one of the directors.

First, some news.

xoxo,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

About those insurrectionists: It only took seven years, but Ivanka Trump has finally said something truthful. In recorded testimony played Thursday night for the Select Committee overseeing the January 6th hearings, Ivanka stated that, after the 2020 election, she had “accepted” Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement that there was “no sufficient evidence” to overturn her father’s loss. (Trump responded today by ranting that his favorite child simply did not know what she was talking about.) There was a time when people had hoped Ivanka would temper her father’s wrongdoings. This testimony makes clear: She knew full well his claims the election had been stolen were delusional; she just did nothing about it. People died, and we still don’t know what this means for the state of our democracy. But thanks for being honest, I guess.

AND:

• Britney Spears got married! But apparently, we still can’t leave her alone. Spears’s ex-husband Jason Alexander crashed her wedding and managed to film the entire thing. Why are men!?

• Travelers flying into the U.S. will no longer need to provide a negative Covid test before entering the country because along with Covid funding and free tests, America has run out of shits to give.

• A 24th, TWENTY-FOURTH, woman has filed a civil lawsuit against NFL star Deshaun Watson for sexual assault. And yet: Watson is still employed and will remain so, in line with the NFL’s policy not to punish players unless there is a criminal charge.

• Mercury is finally direct but is capitalism in retrograde? Liz Plank is on the hunt for the answer in this illuminating interview about whether all capitalism is as evil as we think.

• Politics reporter Felicia Sonmez was fired by the Washington Post, and the details are complicated. But it’s a big loss, as Sonmez—an assault survivor who sued the paper last year—was an important voice on everything from reproductive rights to local politics.

COSMIC

Kamala Khan on TV Is a Revelation  

...especially for all us Muslim nerds.

BY SHANNON MELERO

IMAN VELLANI, MY QUEEN, MY LEADER (PHOTO BY JON KOPALOFF VIA GETTY IMAGES)

In the first opening minutes of Ms. Marvel, the new series on Disney+, Kamala Khan (played by Iman Vellani) says, “Finally the moment everyone has been waiting for,” and although nothing had actually happened yet, I teared up. I’ve been waiting for an on-screen version of Kamala—a scrappy young Muslim Jersey girl who discovers she has superpowers—since May 2014 when I walked into Midtown Comics and purchased the first issue.

That first “Ms. Marvel”—written by G. Willow Wilson, with art by Adrian Alphona and Ian Herring—followed the early hero days of 16-year-old Pakistani-American Kamala Khan as she works her way up to be the new Ms. Marvel, a title formerly held by Carol Danvers (before her promotion to Captain Marvel).

Finally, I thought, a Muslim hero who wasn’t going to get stuck in an outdated trope where her religion or ethnic background would be the only defining quality of her character (like Dust, a little-known member of the X-Men universe who hails from Afghanistan and wears niqab and whose superpower is turning into sand). From the beginning, Kamala was something more, a three-dimensional teenager who also happened to be Muslim.

My initial excitement paid off immediately—the very first panel of “Ms. Marvel #1” is an absolutely delightful scene where Kamala and her friends are at a corner store and she’s bent over a sandwich display lusting after a BLT. As a young Muslim woman, I too stare longingly at pieces of pork. (What I wouldn’t do for a guilt-free bite of crispy fried pork salami). It was that moment of connection, that playful wink and nod to a widely shared Muslim experience, that made me a fan.

WHEN I SAY I'VE BEEN WITH THIS GAL SINCE DAY ONE I REALLY MEAN IT (PHOTO BY SHANNON MELERO)

And the series premiere is everything I could have hoped for. It is visually stunning, a testament to the artwork that made the comics stand out on the shelf. It’s lighthearted and funny and is about so much more than a journey to superherodom: there’s intergenerational family dynamics, a burgeoning crush situation, dad jokes, teen shenanigans and homage to the unique weirdness that is living in Jersey City.

Kamala lives in a world of fantasy—she is a visual artist, makes costumes, and edits videos of Captain Marvel’s adventures for Youtube. She daydreams about winning a cosplay contest with her creations. She is a diehard Captain Marvel fan—which, same!—and she’s marked not just by her nerdiness but by the fact that she’s Pakistani in a school brimming with white kids. At one point, after Kamala is caught sneaking out of her house, the episode culminates in a confrontation with her mother, Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) asking her daughter, “Do you want to be who we raised you to be…or do you want to to be this cosmic head-in-the-clouds person?”

With a huge grin, Kamala answers, “Cosmic.”

I screamed. That brief exchange was, for me, the essence of what Kamala represents. When you’re a Muslim person, your religion is often the only identifier people remember. But Kamala is so beautifully multi-faceted and unfettered by a single part of her life.

Choosing to live in fantasy or pursuing creativity isn’t something that children of color or children of immigrants often get to do. When your parents uprooted everything to give you a better life—it’s generally frowned upon to follow your “cosmic” urges. I’ve always wanted to become a writer, but the first thing my mom asked when I told her was, “How will you make money?”

ALL HAIL, ALL HAIL (PHOTO COURTESY OF MARVEL STUDIOS) ©Marvel Studios 2022. All Rights Reserved

But how can we not pursue our fantasies when we are the very product of our parents’ dreams for bigger and better? That is the question Kamala is answering, and she does so with incredible flair. Finally seeing her on-screen was so meaningful: So few women of color, fictional or otherwise, get to bask in a fantasy of their own making and take joy from it.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the Oscar-winning documentarian who directs the fourth and fifth episodes of Ms. Marvel, says it best, “I have told stories of ordinary women who do extraordinary things for the better part of two decades…they are superheroes without capes. Ms. Marvel is an extension of that work. Her story will resonate with millions around the world who will see a reflection of their families and themselves in her. The birth of Kamala Khan onscreen is historic—it shows that anyone can be a superhero.”

Critics often turn their noses up at the superhero genre. But what creators like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee is no different than what Homer did. It’s all myth. It’s all an examination of the human ethos, of humankind’s struggle with itself, and of the fight between good and evil. But this time around the Pakistani-American girl from New Jersey gets to be the hero.

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Dear Meteor readers,

Like me, you’ve probably been completely fixated on Lori Harvey and Michael B. Jordan breaking up. (Oh, no? Just me?) They were just so beautiful!

The fan reactions have been WILD (short version, since it’s clear you haven't been following: Harvey chose herself), but fundamentally, the whole thing is none of my business, and neither is the fact that Feminist Icon Keanu Reeves was seen holding hands with his girlfriend this week, which feels like a satisfying incident of gender justice.

At any rate, celebrity stories are meant to be an escape from political life as we know it, which is yet another reason the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial was such a bummer. It inspired an orgy of hate against Heard, and in this issue, Meteor editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, scholar, and activist Salamishah Tillet to understand what it all meant—for the legal system and for survivors.

But, first, the news.

🥰,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

“We were betrayed”: Justice for the victims of former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor Larry Nassar has been elusive. Over 90 of them are now suing the FBI for mishandling the investigation into Nassar, which resulted in him continuing to abuse young women for months after a first victim had come forward. Listed among the plaintiffs are gold medalists Alexandra Raisman, Simone Biles, and McKayla Maroney; the lawsuit, which calls for a total of about $1 billion in damages, comes after the DOJ failed to prosecute the FBI for the agency’s “gross failure” to properly investigate Nassar. I for one cannot wait until this army of extremely athletic women (metaphorically) beats the FBI into such submission that they have to change the name of the J. Edgar Hoover Building to the All the Girls You Couldn't Silence Building.

Tits out for abortion: On Tuesday night the WNBA’s New York Liberty absolutely shellacked the Minnesota Lynx in Brooklyn. But not before a group of topless women stormed the court (which is very dangerous to players and officials btw!) to advocate for abortion rights. Some of the protestors, who were apparently with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, ran on the court topless, while more unfurled a large green banner that read, “Overturn Roe? Hell no!” The on-court protestors were removed by security and in response, the organization tweeted, in part, “We are calling on those who can stop the overturning of #RoeVWade: THE MILLIONS of ppl who support #abortionrights. YOU! No business as usual. Shut the country down!” And while we're at it, don't forget you can do your part by donating to local abortion funds.

AND: 

• Protestors in Dallas, Texas came out in full force to a *checks notes* family-friendly drag Sunday brunch to yell at parents and children trying to enjoy a show that featured Kidz Bop hits. The protestors instead suggested that the children should be in church, which is the same place that serves kids wine and calls it the blood of Christ. Sounds like drag in liquid form if you ask me.

• Did you know that only 4% of healthcare research and development in the United States goes towards women's health even now in the year of our lord 2022? You can be a part of changing that just in time for Equal Research Day on June 10th!

• Only seven states have raised the age of purchase for those looking to legally obtain semi-automatic rifles—and now advocates are hoping the other 43 follow suit. Apparently, it's a long shot, which is horrifying because NO CIVILIAN SHOULD BE ABLE TO PURCHASE A SEMI-AUTOMATIC ANYTHING!

• Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of killing two white men during a protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake*, is having a hard time getting into college.

• Employees at a Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts are working towards creating the company’s first union.

• An armed man who was allegedly upset about the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade was arrested not far from Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house. Enough with the freakin guns already.

• Did someone say Princess Diaries 3?????? (It was me, I said it, take me to Genovia).

AFTER THE VERDICT

#MeToo Is Not Dead

But the justice system is on life support. 

BY REBECCA CARROLL

THE INCOMPARABLE DR. SALAMISHAH TILLET (PHOTO BY EMMA MCINTYRE VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

The Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial was in turn high camp, a searing commentary on celebrity culture, and a fairly excruciating thing to watch if you have any personal experience of sexual assault. I wanted to talk it—and the verdict—through with someone to make sense of it all. So I sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, scholar, activist, and survivor Dr. Salamishah Tillet, whose organization A Long Walk Home empowers people to end violence against girls and women.

Rebecca: It has been almost a week since the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial ended. You said you did follow it. In what way did it feel like news to you?

Salamishah: Well, there are three parts. There was the actual trial itself, and the ways in which Amber [Heard’s] op-ed was under such scrutiny for defamation—that’s an unusual response to what we think of as a #MeToo allegation, to have a high-profile person like Johnny Depp using the court system to defend himself from accusations of violence. And then there was the intense fan frenzy in which people traveled great distances to just sit outside the courtroom to catch a glimpse of Depp. And finally the online aspects—a lot of real vitriolic attacks against Heard. All of that made it newsworthy to me.

Rebecca: I know a lot of women and survivors of sexual assault, myself included, who had moments of feeling triggered or just despondent, hopeless, or enraged while following the trial. How did you feel?

Salamishah: I felt deep compassion for her. But also I think the hardest part was to [witness]  “bro culture” turn into celebrity addiction. It's interesting to see how these people can remain heroes and remain worthy of being idolized. And I think violence against women is not just commonplace, but something that's taken so lightly that you can have thousands of people celebrating Johnny Depp as an actor, and therefore, that means that it was impossible for him to commit any acts of violence against her. I mean, that's the part that's disheartening, right? As if we needed any other mechanism for silencing people, we have a high-profile case showing how effective this process may be to sue someone for defamation if they've accused you of gender-based violence.

EVEN THE DOG DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHY THESE PEOPLE ARE WASTING THEIR TIME WHEN JOHNNY DEPP WASN'T EVEN AT THE VERDICT READING (PHOTO BY KENT NISHIMURA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Rebecca: I’m curious what you think about the inordinate amount of disdain for [Amber Heard].

Salamishah: Amber Heard was alone essentially. Depp had a support system created by his wealth, his celebrity, his gender, and race that she just didn't have. It proves again that you actually need an arsenal to counter men in power. It was a complicated case, yes, but it was a very lonely place for her to exist in. There was no support compared to what Johnny Depp had.

Rebecca: I want to go back to what you were saying about the legal implications of this defamation win.   As someone who is a lifelong activist in this space as well as a survivor, what do you think it means?

Salamishah: I’m working on this big project called In Lieu of the Law: #MeToo and the Politics of Justice. And I bring that up because [as a result of #MeToo and other movements], we may have these personal disclosures, and this really private healing, but we still don’t have any legal justice. I went to the assistant district attorney in Philadelphia [where my assault took place], but at the time, in 1992, physical coercion had to accompany a sexual assault. My sexual assault didn’t fit under the legal definition of rape. It does now because people have advocated to change those laws. But at the time, no means no, wasn’t enough. The person had to threaten your life, and also sexually assault you. And even though the laws are more expansive now, and the cultural attitudes may have shifted, we're still butting up against legal systems and legal parameters that make it easier for people to get away with violence against women. And that's essentially what we saw here too.

Because I was sexually assaulted in college and because I’m a college professor, I really pay attention to the college movement that preceded the #MeToo global movement. [And during] the college sexual assault reform movement that dominated the first decade of the 2000s, students would come forward with allegations of sexual assault and started suing their universities under Title IX protections. What’s fascinating is that now we’ve seen a really strong backlash from mostly men—mostly white men—who’ve been accused of sexual assault, suing the university. And, oftentimes [they] either have their records unblemished or been able to receive restitution from the university. To me, that is an indicator of the trend that we’re going to also see with these #MeToo cases. It’s already been tested in college and university environments.

STUDENTS AT PACE UNIVERSITY DURING A WALKOUT AGAINST SEXUAL ASSAULT ON CAMPUS, 2018 (PHOTO BY DREW ANGERER VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Rebecca: So if we’re talking about the way that the #MeToo movement or your organization A Long Walk Home are creating “safe spaces” —there’s this real discordance with what is happening in the actual legal system.

Salamishah: There's a really good book—it’s called Redefining Rape by Estelle B. Freedman, and she looks at rape reform movements in the suffrage era and the Jim Crow era. And she opens this book with this really obvious but really important idea that the laws around sexual violence or gender-based violence have always protected a particular class of Americans—and that's disproportionately white men. So it’s not as if this moment is ahistorical in that sense. We're just seeing more sophisticated ways of challenging accusations of violence against women—the novelty of the [defamation] claim was pretty surprising—but it's part of a larger history.

Rebecca: I was struck by something that [me.too movement founder] Tarana Burke said in her statement after the verdict was announced, in response to media speculation that the #MeToo movement is dead. And she said, “The movement isn't dead, the system is dead…In the meantime, millions of people who have never been able to utter the words, 'It happened to me' have released this shame that wasn't theirs to carry in the first place.”

Salamishah: I published my story of multiple sexual assaults in my feminist college newspaper in 1997. And so that was my kind of #MeToo moment, in terms of revealing my story, the trauma that I had experienced, and wrestling with the shame and the self-blame that so many victims have. So I clearly remember. And I'm a writer, so for me to write that publicly was cathartic, and I think a transformative moment for me politically and personally. In that sense, I think #MeToo as a global movement is both an epiphany, Oh, I am a victim of violence, and the public acknowledgment of the trauma. That’s what’s historic about #MeToo—this global coming together. I think that is pretty remarkable, and still is part of its seismic, shifting legacy.

Rebecca: And so what would you say to young women and girls—survivors—about how we move forward from here, facing a “dead” system?

Salamishah:  It’s on us to continue to agitate for reform in terms of legislation, in terms of the criminal justice system, and in terms of the court of public opinion. Otherwise, people will continue to be harmed without any repercussions. And so it's on us for using what Tarana said is a dead system. It's on us to revive it or revolutionize it.  So that’s what I think.

Rebecca: Well, all right. God damn.

Dear Meteor readers, 

Happy Pride! Or…is it? Since there have been (checks watch) more than 300 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced so far in this short, stressful year, we wouldn’t blame you for wondering exactly how festive to feel.

So how do you celebrate during a backlash? I asked my dear friend and former Teen Vogue colleague, Phillip Picardi, and he was emphatic: He is celebrating. This year, he told me, “we need to define our pleasure in order to identify what is worth fighting for, what's worth protecting and nurturing.”

Phill joins us in today’s newsletter, in conversation with another friend: trans writer, activist, editor, and all-around icon Raquel Willis, about how to move beyond just celebrating Pride to using it as an opportunity to remember our history and clarify the priorities of the LGBTQ+ movement.

But first, the news!

Sippin’ slushies,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

Leaning out: Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from her role as COO of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, aka your favorite home for disinformation and flourishing white-supremacist conspiracy theories. Sandberg, prior to being one of the faces of democratic erosion, was the head captain of workplace feminism through her New York Times best-selling book, Lean In. The book was a hit and a miss—both a refreshing, sometimes galvanizing voice in the change-resistant world of tech and business, and also, at its heart, a tome to individualistic, corporate feminism. Perhaps Sandberg, too, has accepted that you cannot have it all (even when you do have it all). In a statement posted to, obviously, Facebook, she says she’s leaving to focus more on her family and her philanthropic work, “which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women.” Sounds great! Let’s start by supporting an organization that is fighting disinformation.

233: On Wednesday, an armed gunman walked into a Tulsa hospital and killed four people, two doctors, a receptionist, one patient, and himself. He had bought the firearm, an AR-15, earlier that day; Oklahoma has some of the laxest gun laws in the country: you don’t need to register your firearm, get a background check, nor do you need a permit to buy, carry or conceal a gun. (It even has an “anti-red flag” law, which bans police from taking guns away from people who may pose violent threats, even temporarily. Truly.) Tulsa marks the 233rd mass shooting in 2022. Last night, President Biden appealed to the nation, saying that we *must* take action on gun violence, calling for a ban on AR-15s and pushing for red flag laws. Show your support for universal background checks and sign up to march for sensible gun legislation on June 11th here.

AND:

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues his campaign to bring Florida back to the 1800s—this time by trying to ban transition care for minors and Medicaid holders. A new twist on the war on trans youth: including poor people, too.

• The French Open women’s finale today will be a nail-bitter: America’s Coco Gauff vs Poland’s Iga Świątek. I will be watching it, even if the director of the French Open claims it’s difficult to schedule the women’s matches for primetime because it’s been hard to find the right “confrontation or star.”

• There have been so many good pieces weighing the impact of the Depp/Heard verdict. Over at the Guardian, Moira Donegan called it an “orgy of misogyny” and evaluated the trial as the “tipping point” of #metoo backlash. At Rolling Stone, essential reporting from EJ Dickson exposed the impact the trial is already having on survivors, who was told by advocates that they are now hesitant to come forward, let alone consider legal action.

• Stop saying Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall are in a “catfight.” It’s more complicated than that.

IN CONVERSATION

How to Celebrate Pride in the Middle of an Anti-trans Backlash

Phillip Picardi talks to Raquel Willis

NAME A MORE FABULOUS DUO? WE'LL WAIT. (PHOTO BY ASTRID STARWIAZ VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

I’d love to start this newsletter off with a “Happy Pride!” but, to be honest, it’s hard to feel happy right now. As an out gay man who’s worked in the media for over a decade—I’ve never felt more disheartened by what I’m witnessing in the zeitgeist. I’m not just speaking of the senseless acts of police brutality, gun violence, and judicial overreach we’re witnessing in our country. I’m specifically speaking to the war being waged on the LGBTQ+ community, specifically on queer and transgender youth.

Let’s make no mistake about it: We are once again in a dangerous era of American history for LGBTQ+ people. Our nation’s slide toward conservatism is not just nigh—it’s upon us. And newly emboldened, our enemies are betting that the complacency of cisgender, heterosexual people will allow them the opportunity to criminalize and demonize us once more. Many of us are starting to wonder if they’re right.

Trans activists have been warning us about this shift for years. One of them is my friend and former colleague, Raquel Willis, a community organizer who’s worked with the Transgender Law Center and formed Black Trans Circles, a healing and leadership-building program specifically for Black trans women in the South. She was also one of the lead organizers of the historic March for Black Trans Lives in 2020. Raquel and I grew close when I was editing Out and she became the publication’s first Black trans woman to hold a position of leadership, as our executive editor. In every editorial meeting, Raquel always asked us: Who’s missing here? Who is not in our pages? She was constantly holding a mirror up to us as journalists, as people, and as a community to take inventory of who we were valuing and who we were leaving out.

I was honored to talk to Raquel about what it means to “celebrate” Pride this year, where our movement is heading, and to hear more about her radical vision for gender justice.

“Happy” Pride.

THE BLUEPRINT, MARSHA P. JOHNSON (PHOTO BY BARBARA ALPER VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Phillip Picardi: How are you feeling about Pride Month this year?

Raquel Willis: I always feel conflicted about Pride. For me, it's about acknowledging the queer and trans ancestors who furthered progress for the LGBTQ+ community and who built a foundation for us. [But], these last few years, we've seen the most concerted anti-queer and anti-trans legislation in the history of the United States. Not enough has been done to safeguard the rights and lives of queer and trans youth in particular, and unfortunately, it seems like the movement as a whole is solely on the defensive. Also, all of these attacks—against abortion access, voting rights, gun control—are swirling in the same pot. We've been conditioned as an American society to see these issues as separate, and because of that, we are not only fighting against the GOP, but we’re fighting against each other on the progressive side, just to be heard.

PP: It’s interesting how abortion and queer rights have always been linked. I was watching the Gloria Steinem documentary yesterday, and she was talking about the importance of feminists voting to make abortion a part of the women's rights movement. In the same convention, they also voted as to whether or not discrimination against lesbians should be considered a feminist issue [they did so]. It reminds me of today: Some cis women say they should not include trans women as part of the feminist movement, that trans women are somehow infringing upon cis women's rights.

RW: We have to contend with the fact that we live in an individualistic, white supremacist, cishetero patriarchal capitalist system. That means that a scarcity complex has been present even within the most leftist, most progressive circles. When you look at the larger movement for feminism, we have seen so many splinters throughout history—Black feminism, lesbian feminism, trans feminism, queer theory, etc.—because those wounds of exclusion have never been adequately addressed. They’ve continued to be weaknesses that conservatives have been able to exploit. When we talk about conservatives, we’re not just [talking about] cis, white, privileged straight men. It is also trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs).

PP: We know that conservative organizations are deliberately working to disguise bigotry as common sense talking points—which are then being parroted by people who we consider to be on the left.

RW:  A lot of what is being parroted by figures like JK Rowling, or Dave Chappelle, or Ricky Gervais, or Bill Maher is a regurgitation of a fascistic, fear-mongering ideology that comes from the GOP. They release it out into the zeitgeist because they can take advantage of confirmation bias—these baseline ignorant ideas that the average person has about queer and trans people or people of color. There has to be a villain. The villain becomes the Other. As a Black trans woman, I'm constantly disgusted by how trans people are discussed, particularly in niche media, like Black media. They know if they put up our image or our experiences without context, the average person within their target demographic is going to feel negatively about us.

YES, PLEASE END GENDER REVEALS. (PHOTO BY MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

PP: It’s especially disconcerting because people demonize trans people using familiar tropes that revolve around them being an “impostor”, or a ”traitor” to their gender. Similar tropes have commonly been employed to target women and especially Black women. People in the feminist movement were often called “angry lesbians,” or they were assumed to be ugly and sexless. Some Black women in the public eye who do not fit the mold of White Eurocentric beauty standards have been compared to animals. These are all ways to strip people of their personhood, and particularly to strip people of their womanhood. It is frustrating to see how people can't relate these two issues and find solidarity among them.

RW: Absolutely. No one should be moving through this world thinking that their lives are not political. Everything about your existence, everything about what you have and don't have, is political. We're all being impacted by these restrictive ideas about what it means to be a man or woman, or nonbinary, or everything and nothing all at once. And the sooner we can grasp that, the sooner we can come up with the solutions to make our families, our communities, and our societies better.

PP: You mentioned earlier that a lot of advocates warned that resting our laurels on Roe [to protect abortion access] could be dangerous. You could say the very same thing about the Gay Rights Movement’s very deliberate move to adopt marriage equality and military representation as their pet causes. The driving idea at that time was obviously palatability. We knew that if we could appeal to we're just like you, we're people, love is love, let us serve, let us be patriots like you, that we could win public approval. And ultimately we did. What the movement didn't anticipate was that those rights could be stripped away less than a decade later.

RW: When I think about this long arc of the LGBTQ+ movement, there have been those people who thought that if they could just move into cis-hetero society, then all of their issues would be fixed. So when cis gay men and lesbians were thinking about what political power looked like, they wanted to assimilate and be palatable because that was the extent of their imagination.

And there were decisions made along the way to exclude trans folks, and gender non-conforming folks, and nonbinary folks. We have to contend with that history and we have to contend with the fact that our infrastructure nationally has been built with that mindset in place. And so that's why our movement has not been ready to react in a moment where conservatives have pinpointed the Achilles heel of our movement: the exclusion of trans and nonbinary folks.

THE LESBIAN AVENGERS, NYC PRIDE PARADE 1995 (PHOTO BY STUART LUTZ VIA GETTY IMAGES)

PP: And now that our "wins" are being rolled back, we need to rely on each other more than ever—by banding together as a community that doesn't prioritize the cis-hetero patriarchy. One of the things that I do find to be extremely practical and inspiring about trans liberation is that I, myself, was considered a gender traitor. I was an effeminate young boy who refused to act more masculine, who insisted on wearing pink, and loving the Spice Girls, and wearing makeup, and putting on my mother's clothes. I was policed, and bullied, and called names often by people in my own family. That doesn't make me trans, but it reinforces my belief that trans liberation, had it existed back then, would have laid some sort of blueprint to say: You don't need to conform, you can be exactly who you are, you can be beautiful, and you can be loved.

RW: I think you get to an essential element of what ties everyone's experience together. It's not that I believe that everyone is trans. No, honey, I don't think everyone is that gifted, that brilliant, that colorful, and that's okay! But everyone is “gender nonconforming,” and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can break down all of these expectations that are not only hurting trans and gender-nonconforming folks, and queer folks, and women, but [also] hurting these cishet men who dream of embodying a toxically masculine ideal.

PP: A lot of what you're saying reminds me of your speech at the Brooklyn Trans Liberation March in 2020, where you said, "I believe in my power. I believe in your power. I believe in our power. I believe in Black trans power." Can you tell me a little bit about how that worked in your mind and why it's an important rallying cry moving forward?

RW: One thing that was always clear to me is that there’s something about queerness that forces you to look at people differently. It forces you to understand that there's this whole interior world that everyone has. Hopefully you get to a point in your journey where there's healing and you understand at least a smidge of your own power.

I figured along the way that if I was going to have to have this difficult life that I was told I was going to have by religion and community and society, then I was like, well, let's fuck some shit up along the way. And how do I inspire other people to fuck some shit up along the way? Because if we're going to be damned, honey, then I want to be damned and cute and at least have these little moments of joy that I can grasp at. I think that's where I'm at with movement work and with social justice and with our society. We have so many deep issues within our world that it will probably take centuries to figure out some better way forward for everyone. The best we can do is figure out how to be a part of that fight and also have whole, full, and joyful lives along the way.

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