I am unable to figure out if the Florida Real ID driver’s license that the state forced everyone to get a bunch of years ago. I remember having to go to the driver’s license place with a folder of information including utility bills in my name and with my birth certificate and my marriage license. It was touted as the “Real Id” that was the only one we would need. It was OK even for flying. When I told Ron about this he was adamant that after his surgery we get me a passport no matter the cost. I explained that we both should have them in case our same sex marriage gets invalidated. We have one out that I am sure my abusive adoptive parents did not plan to give me. They were Canadian citizens here on green cards and my birth certificate shows me as their kid, something I have always hated. Current Canadian laws let me apply to Canada for asylum or simply to immigrate with my spouse. But it clearly shows this is an attempt to restrict those who have the right to vote to do so. Hugs
The law’s requirements for proof of citizenship to register to vote and stricter voter ID rules won’t take effect until next year.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that is akin to President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act at the national level.Matias J. Ocner / Miami Herald via Getty Images file
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Wednesday that will require proof of citizenship to vote and impose stricter voter ID restrictions on Floridians.
The new law, most of which won’t take effect until after the midterm elections, is Florida’s version of the federal SAVE America Act, a bill President Donald Trump has championed. That measure is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, where it lacks the 60 votes needed to advance under current rules.
“This bill protects and expands integrity in our voter registration process,” DeSantis said. “Our Constitution in the state of Florida says only American citizens are allowed to vote in our elections, so we need to make sure that is the law.”
Democrats and voting rights advocates warn Florida’s law will disenfranchise eligible voters who lack ready access to the documents that are needed to vote.
Already, the League of Women Voters of Florida and a coalition of advocacy groups, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have filed a federal lawsuit to block the law.
“We are most concerned about impact as it relates to the most vulnerable Florida voters,” said Jonathan Topaz, attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This could mean older Black voters who grew up in Jim Crow South who don’t have access to birth certificates, this could be naturalized citizens — we know naturalized citizens are flagged as noncitizens all the time.”
Voters who were born in Puerto Rico, have changed their name or have lost documents may struggle to meet the requirements of the new law, he said.
Supporters of the legislation note that millions of Floridians have already shown government officials their passports or birth certificates when obtaining a REAL ID. They also argue the law is necessary to prevent voter fraud, despite little evidence of it occurring.
More than 9% of American citizens of voting age do not have proof of citizenship documents readily available, according to a study commissioned by the Brennan Center for Justice. Based on that metric, advocates fear that more than 1 million Floridians could struggle to cast a ballot starting next year, when the law will be fully implemented.
Other states have tried to impose documentary proof of citizenship requirements in the past, but courts have ruled they violate federal law. To comply with one such ruling, Arizona now has a bifurcated election system that allows those who haven’t proved their citizenship to only vote in federal elections.
The system offers a window into the kinds of people who do not have access to the documents required by proof of citizenship laws. In Arizona, they are disproportionately voters of color and younger voters, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center. Votebeat reported that Arizonans who are only eligible to vote in federal elections often live around college campuses, suggesting they are students without their citizenship documents on hand.
Florida’s law has different requirements than Arizona’s, however. It asks election officials to verify voters’ citizenship after registration. For Floridians who have shown their passport or birth certificate to government officials when getting a driver’s license, their citizenship will be affirmed and their registration approved.
Those without this information on file will be asked to prove their citizenship within a month or they could be removed from the voter rolls.
Wendy Sartory Link, the supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County, said implementing this law will be a major challenge for election officials, particularly those in larger, more diverse counties.
Link said her office will need to roll out new rules and forms — all of which do not yet exist and will need to be written by the state — and rush to begin preparing for the proof of citizenship requirements that go into effect in January.
She said that computer systems will need to be updated — the voter file doesn’t currently include a space for citizenship proof — and that new systems will need to be created among agencies to share data. Link also said she will need to hire new staffers to handle the increased workload, though the bill didn’t give her any additional funding to pay for it. Once voters are asked for proof, she said, she’s worried long lines will form with voters bringing proof of citizenship.
She also said she has many unanswered questions: Can she accept proof of citizenship over email even if she can’t touch the raised seal to be sure it’s an original document? Does she need to ask voters to prove their citizenship every time they update their voter registration? Does she need new trainings to evaluate the proof that voters may bring her?
“If somebody brings a birth certificate and it’s an Idaho birth certificate, I don’t know what that looks like. Am I supposed to know whether or not that’s a fraudulent birth certificate, or do I just accept it because it says Idaho birth certificate?” Link said.
Florida’s new law also restricts the kind of photo IDs that voters can use to prove their identities at the poll, eliminating the use of retirement community and student IDs.
At polling sites near college campuses and retirement communities, Link said, this change could trigger long lines as more students fill out provisional ballots and need to later affirm their identities.
Out-of-state students may struggle to obtain the required ID unless they plan months ahead, too. In her community, she said, it also takes time to get an appointment for a Florida driver’s license.
Lawmakers in a dozen states have advanced legislation this year that would require residents to prove their U.S. citizenship to register to vote or bring photo ID to the polls, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that tracks election legislation. Utah and South Dakota have also sent bills imposing a proof of citizenship requirement on to their governors.
I know about the ginned up outrage dragged up by the Mills campaign. The dozens of years ago old Reddit posts that Platner responded to head on, explained, and I have seen him with women around him and he doesn’t act like a misogynist. He doesn’t try to justify the comments and denounces them. He does explain the mindset at the time he wrote them. A man in a male dominated macho military infantry unit who had been in combat was letting off steam in writing, not acting physically. He doesn’t believe that stuff now but the internet is a forever machine. He has changed from that angry young man into a thoughtful adult. If I were in Maine I could clearly see what he brings to the table vrs what Mills does. I strongly support Platner. Hugs
Rev. Barber: We have to start teaching people that when we talk about politics, there is not an aspect of your life—from your birth to your death—that is not impacted.
When we look at the midterm elections, we have to start with the basics. We are electing every member of the United States House of Representatives and one-third of the United States Senate. In most places, we are electing their entire state general assemblies, and many are electing governors, attorney generals, and so forth. We are electing the very people who impact every aspect of our lives. These elections determine whether we will have people in office who want to ensure everyone has health care or who want to take health care away; whether we want people in office who will vote to make sure everyone is paid a living wage versus just giving more money to corporations; whether they will care about poor and low-wage voters and the resources for people to afford a basic life, or whether all they will care about is giving more wealth to the already wealthy. That is what’s on the line.
Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign speaks at the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival Rally at the US Supreme Court on October 27, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Repairers Of The Breach)
What is at stake is whether or not you have a Congress that will demand that the President, whoever that President is, cannot just act unilaterally, but must get congressional approval for war; whether or not we have a budget; whether or not TSA agents are paid; whether or not government employees are paid; whether or not we have a Congress that will stand up and not just be a rubber stamp to what an authoritarian President wants to do or will just “go along to get along.”
We have to start teaching people that when we talk about politics, there is not an aspect of your life—from your birth to your death—that is not impacted. You’re not officially recognized without a birth certificate, which is the result of a political decision. You can’t guarantee your Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security without political decisions. Even as you die, people must understand that politics is not just about personality; it’s about people being put in place and the kinds of policies and vision they will enact.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, is a Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He serves as President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign
Not about bathrooms, but about testing women. Either test everyone, or take people’s word for it, when reporting is required.And all should prepare for the consequences of this. Women will need more protection from molestation than before, and transpeople need to specifically have that protection, as well. I think the XY carriers will be fine, of course, but they should be tested, too.I mean, who knows, right? And this should not happen in US communities at all, but the door will be wide open.
On Thursday, the International Olympic Committee announced that it would ban transgender women and many cisgender women athletes from competing in women’s events and institute mandatory genetic screening of all female athletes. The decision is significant—the Olympics has allowed transgender women to compete since 2004, yet none has ever won a medal, and only a single transgender woman has ever competed: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand, who failed to place at the 2021 Tokyo Games. The ban applies to all sports, including those where no male performance advantage exists, and will require every woman to undergo a genetic test to participate. It will also exclude many cisgender women who produce elevated testosterone due to genetic or medical conditions, such as two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya. And it is not the first time the Olympics has subjected women to mass sex testing—the last time it did, from 1992 to 1999, the results were disastrous, with cisgender women discovering they had intersex conditions they never knew about, leading to public humiliation, career destruction, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished.
Under the new policy, every woman seeking to compete in a female event at the Olympics or any IOC competition must undergo a one-time SRY gene screening—a cheek swab or blood test that detects the presence of a gene on the Y chromosome associated with male sex development. The test is similar to the one the IOC abolished 27 years ago after it produced disastrous human consequences. Because the screening identifies the presence of XY genetics, it will target not only transgender women but also intersex people—including cisgender women who carry a genetic condition that some argue makes them “male” despite having been born with a vagina and uterus, raised as girls, and having lived their entire lives as women. In at least 15 documented cases, women with 46,XY karyotypes—the same genetics this test screens for—have successfully carried pregnancies to term and given birth, including women with XY karyotypes that naturally produce testosterone. Under the IOC’s new framework, a woman who has been pregnant and delivered a child could be classified as male and barred from competition for failing this test.
Genetic sex testing was introduced at the Olympics in 1992, but it existed for only a short time. In the two Summer Games it covered—Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996—over 20 female athletes who were assigned female at birth, had lived their entire lives as women, and had female anatomy were told they were genetically “male” due to conditions they had never known about. The consequences were disastrous. Dr. Myron Genel, a Yale physician who was a prominent critic of the program, reported that the testing was “highly discriminatory” and caused “emotional trauma and social stigmatization” for women with intersex conditions who had been screened out of competition. For athletes from countries where being labeled male could carry severe social or physical consequences, the disclosure was not merely humiliating—it was dangerous. Indian swimmer Pratima Gaonkar died by suicide after her failed sex verification test became public and she was subjected to blackmail attempts; Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan attempted suicide after being stripped of her Asian Games silver medal. The testing was abolished in 1999.
The ban also applies to sports where a male genetic advantage is dubious or nonexistent. In rifle shooting, ESPN reported that women are “as good as, if not fractionally better than, men” in 10m air rifle, and yet these athletes will still have to prove their femininity with a genetic test. In sailing, the competition was mixed for nearly a century at the Olympics, from 1900 to 1988. In archery, men and women shoot the same 70-meter Olympic distance and the world records are extremely close. In December 2025, women’s Olympic champion An San exactly matched the men’s indoor qualification round record of 599 in Taipei. And outside the Olympics, transgender bans have spread even further—to darts, pool, disc golf, competitive dancing, and even chess.
The scientific evidence, meanwhile, does not support the blanket ban the IOC has imposed. A 2026 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine—the most comprehensive to date, drawing on 52 studies and nearly 6,500 participants—found that while transgender women on hormone therapy for one to three years retained higher absolute lean body mass than cisgender women, there were no statistically significant differences in upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or aerobic capacity. The researchers concluded that “the convergence of transgender women’s functional performance with cisgender women, particularly in strength and aerobic capacity, challenges assumptions about inherent athletic advantages” and that the current evidence “does not justify blanket bans.” A separate review in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that after two years of hormone therapy, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time, and that muscle strength corrected for lean mass, hemoglobin, and cardiovascular capacity were no different from cisgender women. No study has demonstrated that transgender women on hormone therapy for more than two years retain a measurable performance advantage in any specific sport.
Some intersex athletes who would be impacted by the decision are already speaking out. Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was assigned female at birth in South Africa and has naturally elevated testosterone levels due to a difference in sex development. On Sunday, she expressed her disappointment with IOC President Kirsty Coventry, a fellow African woman and former Olympic swimmer. “Personally, for her as a leader, she’s an African, I’m sure she understands how, you know, we as Africans, we are coming from, as a global South, you know, you cannot control genetics,” Semenya said at a press conference in Cape Town. “For me personally, for her being a woman coming from Africa, knowing how, you know, African women or women in the global South are affected by that, of course it causes harm.”
“Reintroducing sex testing brings the IOC back to policy that it had discontinued exactly thirty years ago. Back then, they rightfully concluded that sex testing was scientifically inconclusive and caused considerable harm to athletes. Then, in 2021, they approved a Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination to best support trans athletes and athletes with sex variations. Now, they are retreating from their own decisions and ignoring the recommendations of various UN bodies, the World Medical Association, and athletes worldwide. But the evidence is clear: sex testing exposes women and girls to privacy violations, public humiliation, and abuse. And it is profoundly discriminatory, too. No one is asking men and boys to undergo these tests. Women and girls shouldn’t either,” said Gurchaten Sandhu, ILGA World Director of Programmes.
The policy takes effect at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games and is not retroactive. Affected athletes are expected to bring challenges before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, as Caster Semenya has done with previous eligibility rules. Over 100 civil society organizations, including the Sport & Rights Alliance, ILGA World, and Humans of Sport, have called on the IOC to reverse the decision.
This person Same is interviewing is from the Cato Institute. Sam and David talk about the bigotry and attempt to purify the country of non-white people. tRump and his racist administration claim to want to remove 100 million from the US. There is no where near that number of undocumented people in the country. That number is almost 1/3 of the US population. Undocumented immigrants were estimated at 14 million in 2023 at the highest. So where are the rest of these people coming from? Legal documented immigrants and non-white citizens born in the US. That is why they are rounding up brown people who immigrated here legally and why they are trying so hard to end birth right citizenship. The goal has become clear and it is scary to me. To cement the white majority for as long as possible and stop the slow decline of the white majority / rize of minority demographics. Stephen Miller and the other racists in tRump administration want an apartheid state like the former South African one was. They want no rights for non-whites. They want no non-whites in positions of authority. The administration is going after businesses and higher education for not prioritizing whites over any other group. They feel no white male is less qualified than any non-white. If a non-white person scored 95 and the white person scored 75, these racists feel the white person is still more qualified because of their skin color. The racists feel the only DEI that should be allowed is the promotion of white males over everyone else. Hugs
This is about the save act. Chip Roy and the republicans constantly say it is no problem for people in the US to get a identifcation or be able to vote if they have changed their name via marriage. Fact is even Chip Roy’s own staff is struggling to get it done. And as Sam says that staff member gets the time off work and has the backing of a high level boss. The Save Act allows states to let people use the marriage license as a document but doesn’t require it. So only the blue states run by democrats will. Florida wont. And the state I was born in doesn’t allow for birth certificate changes without a court order. Roy says he doesn’t want to publicize this flaw or give it credit because the republicans want women / and gay men who might have changed their names to be blocked from voting. Again it is about promoting their view of a perfect world / and voter. A straight cis Christian white male who votes only for restrictive republicans and has a right wing ideology. Hugs
To me, this is basic misogyny; soon it will be simpler for the Olympics to ban women and girls entirely. I will note that it doesn’t seem that they’re going to check for trans men. I wonder if trans men ought to play in women’s sports, under this “logic”? Meanwhile, all the girls and women who are a little too tall, a little too strong, a little larger built in the shoulders, etc., etc. are going to be excluded along with other women who passed through male puberty before transitioning. The illogic of this makes my head explode.
I will add that there is a special place in hell for women who undermine other women; especially those who get somewhere, then yank the ladder up behind them. Lookin’ at Kirsty Coventry, pictured below, now IOC President.
GENEVA (AP) — Transgender women athletes are now excluded from women’s events at the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy on Thursday which aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
“Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” the International Olympic Committee said, to be determined by a mandatory gene test once in an athlete’s career.
It is unclear how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level. No woman who transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Summer Games, though weightlifter Laurel Hubbard did at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 without winning a medal.
The eligibility policy that will apply from the L.A. Olympics in July 2028 “protects fairness, safety and integrity in the female category,” the IOC said.
“It is not retroactive and does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programs,” said the IOC, whose Olympic Charter states that access to play sport is a human right.
After an executive board meeting, the IOC published a 10-page policy document that also restricts female athletes such as two-time Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya with medical conditions known as differences in sex development, or DSD.
“We know that this topic is sensitive,” IOC President Kirsty Coventry said in an online news conference to explain the policy.
Coventry and the IOC have wanted a clear policy instead of continuing to advise sports’ governing bodies who previously have drafted their own rules.
“At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming, said in a statement. “So, it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”
She set up a review of “protecting the female category” as one of her first big decisions last June as the first woman to lead the Olympic body in its 132-year history.
“This was a priority for me way before President Trump came into his second term,” Coventry said. “There’s not been any pressure (on) us to deliver anything from anybody outside of the Olympic Movement.”
Before the 2024 Paris Olympics, three top-tier sports — track and field, swimming and cycling — excluded transgender women who had been through male puberty. Semenya, who was assigned female at birth in South Africa and has testosterone levels higher than the typical female range, won a European Court of Human Rights judgment in her years-long legal challenge to track and field’s rules which did not overturn them. (snip-there is more, sort of pleading for understanding, but go see the rest of it if you like)
The expert group agreed the current gene test is “the most accurate and least intrusive method currently available.” The saliva, cheek swab or blood sample screens for “the SRY gene, a segment of DNA typically found on the Y chromosome that initiates male sex development in utero and indicates the presence of testes/testicles.”
Still, the mandatory gender screening — already conducted by the governing bodies of track and field, skiing and boxing — is likely to be criticized by human rights experts and activist groups.
Athlete appeal to CAS?
The IOC policy can — and likely will — be challenged at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in the Olympic body’s Swiss home city Lausanne, perhaps by an athlete acting alone.
Track athletes Dutee Chand of India and Semenya challenged previous versions of their sport’s eligibility rules at the court.
Any potential appeal would examine science underpinning IOC research which was not published Thursday. A case could occupy much of the near-28 months until the L.A. Olympics open.
“As we know in today’s world,” Coventry said, “any and all rules and regulations at any point in time could always be challenged.” (snip)
The White House welcomed the IOC’s decision, describing it as the result of the executive order.
“The IOC aligning their policy with President Trump’s executive order ahead of the 2028 LA Games is common sense and long overdue,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement.
The sexual abuse allegations against Chavez have rocked them. But their focus is still on protecting other women.
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra and Marissa Martinez of The 19th. Meet Chabeli, Shefali and Marissa and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon.
Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades.
The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded.
Monica Ramirez, founder of Justice for Migrant Women, said the farmworker community has been “shaken to its foundation” by the allegations against Cesar Chavez. (Courtesy of Monica Ramirez)
“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.
“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said.
Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.
Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12.
In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse.
“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”
Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others.
She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.
Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta sits during an interview in San Francisco, Saturday, June 8, 2024. Huerta revealed she was raped by Cesar Chavez and pressured into sex during their years organizing together, disclosures she kept private for decades while building the farmworker movement. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)
In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.
Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.
Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.
“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.”
Licolli felt that echoed this week.
“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.”
Magaly Licolli, co-founder of Venceremos, pointed to a pattern in organizing spaces where women who report abuse are doubted, ignored or pushed out. (Courtesy of Magaly Licolli)
A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.
A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said.
A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment.
None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers.
But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences.
Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager.
“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”
California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women.
“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez said movements are led by a collective and warned against placing any one individual on a pedestal. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP)
Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people.
Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said.
And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs.
Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said.
Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.
On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.
Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.
“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”
Scottie's Playtime 