The big media story of the week is that Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that, by barring reporters from the Associated Press from the White House press pool, the Trump administration has engaged in viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. You may recall that when President Donald J. Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the AP stylebook folks were all like, yeah, no.
Which pissed Trump off, so he ordered Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to kick the AP out of all White House events which caused this prestigious agency to sue. The lawsuit isn’t over, but until it is, the White House must restore the AP’s access.
In other words, the answer to these outrageous attempts to use our Constitution and laws to explode reality is to sue them. Sue them hard. And keep suing them until we win.
This leads me to the other explosion of reality that has been happening at White House press events. “On at least three recent occasions,” Michael M. Grynbaum of the New York Times reported yesterday, “senior Trump press aides have refused to engage with reporters’ questions because the journalists listed identifying pronouns in their email signatures.”
Naming your pronouns has long been mocked on the right: it’s part of their war on transgender and gender-fluid people, even as one of their clever ways of insulting say, me, on X is to call me a “man.” In other words, it’s not just that hatred of trans people became a key element of the MAGA toolbox during the 2024 campaign, it’s that not being classically masculine or classically feminine, even if you are not trans makes you an enemy of the people.
This irritation even extends to the cisgender male reporter, a guy-guy who lists “he/him” in his email signature, or the very feminine reporter in a dress whose emails end in “she/her.” Nope, say MAGA spokespeople, this will not do and is evidence of a severe character flaw:
“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, wrote to a New York Times reporter who had inquired about the potential closing of a famed climate research observatory.
A few weeks earlier, Katie Miller, a senior adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency, declined to answer questions from another Times reporter who asked about the legal status of the department’s records.
“As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to people who use pronouns in their signatures as it shows they ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts,” Ms. Miller wrote in an email. She added in a separate message, “This applies to all reporters who have pronouns in their signature.”
But there is a more serious policy issue at the heart of all this silliness: the attempt to legally and socially erase the idea that trans people exist. Under Trump’s gender policies, a trans person who has identity documents that do not reflect the gender on their original birth certificate cannot leave the country without risking being charged with identity fraud on re-entry. That person also cannot go to Florida or Texas, rent a car, and not risk being jailed on state level charges of identity fraud.
To return to the performative bullshit in the White House press office, this is all taking place in an administration where nearly everyone, male and female, has had some form of gender-affirming care and is definitely not presenting as who they were at birth—or even, in some cases, two or three years ago. This includes dyed hair, facial surgeries, Botox, lip fillers, dental work, and boob jobs. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is probably the most extreme example, but these procedures are pervasive enough in the Trump inner circle to have a name: the MAGA face. There are Donald Trump’s multiple scalp surgeries and speculation about medically-assisted weight loss prior to the 2024 election.
But who am I to judge? People ought to be free to actualize the identities that best express who they are and still be considered the equal of any other American. It is not only very American, but also one of the great legal and civic achievements of the 21st century United States. Arguably, Mr. Jefferson and the Continental Congress said it best when they told the King of England to f*ck off down the road, proclaiming that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That the authors of these words were the same fellas that enslaved others, and were gender and civic elitists, is historically important but does not prevent us from salvaging the point: inhabiting the gender we choose, and that makes us happy, hurts no one.
Yet, one of the great contradictions at the heart of MAGA is that despite its frequent references to “freedom” and “liberation,” the Trump administration seeks to not only exert extreme control over human behavior, speech, and personal presentation, but also claim that it is liberating us from some kind of mortal danger.
There is no better example of this than the demonization of transgender people, specifically transgender women, in a site that has become sacred to the extreme right, the women’s bathroom. Thus, the January 20, 2025, Trump EO that falsely declares that gender and sex are the same, and that there are only two of each, is titled: “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT” (caps in original.)
The purpose of the act? That trans people and their allies are an explicit danger to “women” and to the nation:
Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
In this context, what Karoline Leavitt and the other White House boobie girls are up to makes perfect sense. As do the ugly, public attacks on Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), who Speaker Mike Johnson, at the behest of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) barred from women’s bathrooms at the Capitol. Then, when that didn't shame the first trans congressperson into resigning her seat and running back to Delaware in tears, other Republicans repeatedly referred to her as “Mr. McBride” and the “gentleman from Delaware.”
Anti-trans campaigns rely on a very simple, erroneous, and familiar narrative about human sexuality: that at best, people who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth or the sexuality they are supposed to have, are confused or mentally ill. At worst, they are sexually deviant and a danger to “real women.”
As a cultural strategy, it is embedded in a long history of saying the same things about lesbians. But as a political strategy, it is quite recent, and a tactic that right-wing operatives have perfected on social media and Fox News. Choose a marginalized group, make a broad, categorical claim (another example would be undocumented immigrants are rapists, murderers, and violent drug dealers), elevate a few sensational stories about such people that may or may not be true, and then dare anyone to oppose the measures you plan to take against these terrible people.
Transforming women’s bathrooms into a site for this fear and loathing is, of course, not new on the right, and culturally, it taps into something primal for straight, liberal women as well. Any woman who presents as masculine of center, as I do, knows this. Morte seriously, the idea that women deserve the most protection when they are going potty was one of the key arguments against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in some states. As my friend Neil J. Young wrote in 2015, after Houston, Texas voters voided that city’s anti-discrimination law, during the fight over ERA, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly “reduced the matter of constitutionally protected nondiscrimination to the question of bathroom safety.” Distinguishing between the sexes would become illegal if barriers to discrimination were unilaterally dissolved.
As Young parses Schlafly’s position,
If the ERA eliminated sexual difference—a ridiculous but incredibly effective argument that its opponents made—then no laws could prevent men from entering women’s bathrooms. Anti-ERA materials described rapists finding safe haven in women’s bathrooms, a perfect spot to await their prey. Pedophiles would lurk in stalls ready to attack young girls.
Fast forward 50 years: transgender people and immigrants have become the groups that Republicans not only love to hate, but who no one should care about because they are the visible barrier to a prosperous, secure nation. While this may not be immediately obvious, these two groups share one common trait, other than being vulnerable. They are people who the right can easily characterize as imposters, and imposters—even if they have not committed a crime (yet)—are, in the right-wing imagination, inherently untrustworthy.
Fear-mongering about transpeople and migrants, as well as the institutions and networks that support them, were not just an ugly aspect of the 2024 Trump campaign: it has become a form of eliminationism that, Donald Trump and his MAGA minions promise, will purify the nation and deliver it back to “real Americans.”
So, how do you fight this stuff? Well, there’s a young person who has an idea, and she has acted on it. Her name is Marcy Rheintgen, she is 20, she lives in Illinois, and she has become “the first known case of someone being arrested for challenging a law that bans transgender people from using bathrooms in government buildings that do not align with their gender at birth.”
That’s right. Marcy prepared for a visit to Florida, where it is illegal for her to use the women’s bathroom in the Capitol, by writing dozens of letters to officials in Florida, detailing her plans to do just that. Just to make sure she was arrested, Marcy “included a photo of herself because, without it, she did not think officials would be able to tell that she was the person breaking the law.”
Interestingly, however, she was arrested on charges of trespassing after being told not to and was not charged with violating the “Safety in Private Spaces Act” signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023.
Could it be that the politicians who pass these laws know, in their hearts, that they are not any more constitutional than the public accommodations laws that sought to preserve safe spaces for Whites before they were struck down by the courts?
I think they do. So, let’s step up and make MAGAs enforce their damned laws. It’s time to become very real to them.
Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.
Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie.
Reprinted with permission from Substack.
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