Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.
Amid the social upheaval of World War II, women entered the American workforce on an unprecedented level. And, for younger Chinese American women in the San Francisco Bay Area, the war made it possible to smash not just entrenched gender barriers, but racial ones as well.
“Partly because of a scarcity of English-language sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did not share the experience of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” she reports. But she uses newspapers, company records, and oral histories to push back on this view.
Many Chinese American women already worked out of economic necessity. Yet racial discrimination and social isolation typically restricted them to jobs in Chinatown enclaves.
“It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to,” Zhao explains. “The decades-long isolation had also limited the ability of immigrant Chinese working women to communicate with the outside world.”
During the war, women were also encouraged to adopt domestic roles—preparing “nutritional food” for their families and “show[ing] our fighting men that we are… absolutely behind them.”
But World War II still marked a major turning point—especially for younger, unmarried daughters of Chinese immigrants. Many of these women had either a high school or college-level education.
“With relatively few household responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had the freedom and independence to work outside the home,” Zhao writes. “Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese American women were among the first American women to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force.”
In fact, Zhao’s research turned up only four women who were older than forty during their wartime jobs. Still, those wives and mothers capably juggled their duties at home and on the home front. (snip-More; it’s a worthy click!)
The Emmett Till Memory Project teaches new generations about the tragedy that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. Preserving its digital assets is vital.
On a late August day in 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, Till stopped with his cousins at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy chewing gum. There, Till whistled at the clerk, a brazen act that violated the norms of the Jim Crow South and so angered the clerk’s husband and brother-in-law that they killed the boy.
The events and locations that tell the story of Till’s life and death have been memorialized in different ways and forms over the ensuing decades. The Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), an app, is one of them. It uses digitized archival documents, photos of those involved and of sites central to that fateful August day, and more so that users may educate themselves about who Emmett Till was and why his death still resonates. The ETMP’s digital assets are vital to ensuring the ongoing preservation of Till’s memory as well as his legacy.
That’s where Portico comes in. Dedicated to digital preservation, Portico has partnered with the ETMP to ensure the safekeeping in perpetuity of these digital artifacts.
Historian Dave Tell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, as well as the co-founder and director of the Emmett Till Memory Project, spoke with JSTOR Daily’s Sara Ivry about the Project and why its partnership with Portico is so critical.
Sara Ivry: How did you first learn of Portico?
Dave Tell: Kate Wittenberg reached out to me as part of the DEI efforts of her organization, specifically, a pilot project to support the preservation of archival content about under-represented topics that might be at risk. Kate contacted me about the time that we were massively reorganizing the Emmett Till Memory Project. She asked if she could just come along and preserve the site as it existed. I said, “Well, yes, you can, but we’re also trying to make it way better.” She sat in on development meetings over the last few years with us and has been an integral partner, not only in helping us think about preserving the site but helping us make design decisions that would render the site preservable.
Can you describe a little what the site was before you revamped it and what you were trying to do in the renovation?
The short story is we went live in October of 2019, and then in the pandemic, we used our last $10,000 of grant money to pay a DEI consultancy to tell us what we did well and what we did poorly. They did this entire audit, focus groups, they talked to the family, they talked to scholars. They looked at analytics, and they came back to us. Essentially, they told us great content, very bad design, which in retrospect is not surprising. Everyone on the project had been a content expert; we had never had design people on board. We had never had UX people.
The design only works for people who already know the story, they told us, which of course was a devastating blow to us. They also said this reads as if it was written by a middle-aged white guy and I’m like, “Well, I wrote it and I’m a middle-aged white guy—so fair enough.”
So, we hired a woman named Renee Payne out of the Rhode Island School of Design who runs a graphic design firm called included. She specializes in computer design for veterans of the Civil Rights movement; her clients include the families of Andy Young, Harry Belafonte, and family of Malcolm X. She assembled a team of young designers of color, and I said to them, “Nothing is sacred here. Let’s make this as good of a project as it can be,” and they reimagined it from the ground up.
When exactly then did Portico come on board?
Kate came in in the middle of this revamped process, and one of the specific things she encouraged us to do was to avoid third-party dependencies. The example that I understood was if you embed a YouTube video, your content is only as secure as YouTube, which you have no control over.
We really thought long and hard about what technologies we could preserve, and Kate and her colleague Karen Hanson pushed us to think about what exactly we’re preserving. The technologies we are currently depending on do not last forever, right? We changed our mindset. We don’t want to preserve this project so that like it will look the same for everyone into the future, but we want to preserve the assets.
Make images preservable, the text—the component parts.
Eventually we’re going to have a lot of immersive stuff on there. It’s only halfway there now. Portico helped us understand better to preserve the components that make up immersive pieces. In the future, people can use whatever technology is then current, use our same data, and create their own project.
I hadn’t thought about the built-in obsolescence of technology, and that we have to account and plan for that in the design of an app or site as well as in the design of an archive. Had you considered that before Portico got involved?
No, I’m a humanist by training, so when I first started thinking about digital preservation, probably a decade ago now, my gut instinct was we make the website just like a book. It’ll sit there unchanged forever. And Portico has been instrumental in changing the way I think about preservation—that first of all, forever might not be the goal.
Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley on the exterior of the house they lived in from 1950–1955. Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP
Second, what gets preserved is not necessarily the sort of same experience that our users have today. What really matters and what needs to be preserved is what we have. The Emmett Till Memory Project has amazing artifacts. We have hours of audio with the family that they’ve given us permission to use that no one else has. We can tell the story in incredibly intimate ways and that’s super important. When you open this app, you’ll hear the voice of Reverend Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin, narrating the story as all this stuff flashes on the screen behind you—I don’t care if the flashy, immersive technologies are preserved forever. But I care deeply that the audio files—and the voice of Rev. Parker—gets preserved. Someone else can build their own tools with that stuff. My ability to make that distinction is a testament to Kate and Portico.
Why is digital preservation of these assets critical in any case?
It’s almost hard to answer this question without going into cliche other than to say: Ignoring the past is a critical component of white supremacy. Full stop. What we want to do and what the family wants to do is tell the story—not that telling the story is sufficient for the change that they and I want to see, but it’s a critical part of the change that they and I want to see.
The Interpretive Center—what’s the first line of their mission statement, “We believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth,” right?—that’s a sentence that accurately describes the vision of the Till family and it certainly describes my vision.
What was the origin of this app?
If you start from the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 you have to count 49 years and 11 months before the state of Mississippi dropped a single dollar on the Till story. Eighteen citizens of Tallahatchie County thought that was ridiculous; they put up a commemorative sign that got shot, defaced with acid, spray painted.
Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour sign, ca. 2015. Photo by Pablo Correa via ETMP
In 2014, I got invited to go down, I’d been writing about Till for a decade and a half by then, and the question was: How do we tell Till’s story in the context of vandalism?
It’s easy to shoot a sign in the middle of the country. It’s harder to shoot an app.
What are some of the assets on the app that stand out to you?
My favorite by far are the hours of audio, oral history we have of Reverend Parker that was taken in his church in Chicago. We also drove him from site to site; we put a microphone on his lapel and on the sun visor of the car. And we just asked him what these sites meant to him as we went from place to place. All that audio’s not up yet, but we have it. (snip-a bit More)
This year’s Transgender Awareness Week (the leadup to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 19) has felt particularly macabre, arriving on the heels of a presidential election that will be disastrous for trans rights. Still, there’s never been a better time to help trans communities across the U.S. find shelter, obtain medical care, and protect themselves from state violence — and if you’re reading this, you can help by getting involved in mutual aid.
Although there are plenty of well-known LGBTQ+ nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups throughout the country, mutual aid funds prioritize giving directly to marginalized people in need, in order to survive crises and improve their material conditions. Numerous trans-led mutual aid funds exist on local, state, regional, and national scales, and while many may not be tax-deductible, we think that’s a small price to pay in order to help trans folks find safe shelter, obtain gender-affirming care, change legal identity documents, and more.
The phrase “we keep us safe” may have originated in prison abolition organizing, but it definitely applies to LGBTQ+ folks as well. Below, we’ve highlighted just a few trans mutual aid funds that are open to donations — or applications for assistance, if the trans person in need is you — as of November 2024. For more, check out our state-by-state list of mutual aid funds and advocacy groups. You can also search for #TransCrowdFund on your preferred social media platform to find individual trans people fundraising for their own needs.
Organized by the Louisville, Kentucky-based nonprofit Change Today, Change Tomorrow, the Black Trans Fund offers “unrestricted assistance” for Black trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. According to organizers, the fund has distributed over $35,000 for “bills, travel, food, medical needs, and recreational needs” over its four years in existence. Donations are tax-deductible. (snip)
Based in Utah, Genderbands offers individual grants for trans people seeking help with medical costs (including surgeries for those over 18), travel, name and identity document changes, and special grants for trans youth with parental consent. Any trans person in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico may apply, although surgical grants are limited to U.S. residents; the application period for 2025 grants, including one dedicated grant for a masculinizing top surgery procedure in Salt Lake City, ends November 30. Donations of gently used binders are also accepted. (snip)
A project of the Iowa Mutual Aid Network, this fund is dedicated to providing aid for gender-affirming medical care throughout the state, and has distributed over $100,000 since 2021, according to its website. Grant seekers may apply every month, and may receive funding for hormone therapy, surgeries, therapy, and some other medical fees, as well as name change costs, travel expenses for medical care, and gender-affirming clothing. (snip)
One of the largest trans-led mutual aid networks in the U.S., Point of Pride has raised millions for trans mutual aid through its annual TikTok fundraisers. The organization funds gender-affirming surgeries, hormone therapy, hair removal, clothing, and more through its various dedicated funds, and offers free binders and shapewear for those who cannot afford to buy their own. In 2024, Point of Pride reported giving $163,000 to 117 trans people through their HRT Access Fund alone, including 49 Black recipients thanks to funding from the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition. (snip)
Based in Pensacola, Florida, STRIVE’s anticapitalist organizers say their mission is to “provide moral and material support to trans people who need it,” in the form of emergency housing, hormone therapy, food support, transportation, and “any other items needed for our survival.” In addition to its aid funds, STRIVE also holds trans community events and weekly political organizing meetings. (snip)
Although most of its organizers are based in Missouri, Transitional Justice seeks to facilitate travel and “temporary, transitional housing” for trans people fleeing harmful legislation throughout the U.S., as well as “people who have been evicted from their homes, fired from their jobs, or denied access to healthcare.” Applicants can request assistance by filling out the organization’s web form. (snip)
Founded in 2013 through the South Carolina nonprofit We Are Family, the Trans Love Fund offers microgrants up to $200 for assorted “medical, legal, and emergency living expenses.” Grants are available to trans South Carolinians ages 16 and older, with applications opening one week out of every month (usually the first week, per the fund’s FAQ). We Are Family also operates the “Closet Case Thrift Store,” which offers free gender-affirming clothing to trans and gender-nonconforming youth. (snip)
We got our vaccines and tRump’s plan for mass for profit prison detention camps for migrants.
There are some distortions because I moved a lot due to pain in my hips and back. But it looks OK but if you want just listen to the audio. I put a lot of effort into the video. Hugs
November 15, 1917 About 20 women peacefully picketing for universal suffrage (right to vote), who had been arrested in front of the White House a few days earlier, were subjected to beatings and torture at Occoquan workhouse in Virginia. The National Women’s Party and other organizations had been picketing the White House and President WoodrowWilson as he traveled around the country eversince the inauguration of his second term.
Mary Winsor The incident became known as the “night of terror.” Wilson had led the country into the European war (later called World War I), by characterizing the U.S. mission as “making the world safe for democracy.” The women demonstrating outside in Lafayette Square called attention to the need for complete democracy at home, where half of its citizens lacked complete voting rights.Many women, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, had been arrested several times, usually for obstructing the sidewalk, and imprisoned before. When a judge learned of the abuse he freed the women. Public outrage over their treatment increased sympathy for the suffrage movement. left: Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse, Washington, DC. right: Alice Paul, New Jersey, National Chairman, Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; Member, Ex-Officio, National Executive Committee, Woman’s Party, ca 1915.
November 15, 1940 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription. Draft inductees leaving Wilmington, Delaware in November, 1941
November 15, 1943 Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler’s head of the SS (Schutzstaffel or protective rank), Gestapo, the Waffen SS and the Death’s Head units that ran the concentration camps, made public an order that Gypsies (more properly the Roma) and those of mixed Roma blood were to be put on “the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.” Gypsy prisoners arriving at a Concentration Camp
Himmler was determined to prosecute Nazi racial policies, which dictated the elimination from Germany and German-controlled territories of all races deemed “inferior,” as well as “asocial” types, such as hardcore criminals. Gypsies fell into both categories according to the thinking of Nazi ideologues and had been executed in droves both in Poland and the Soviet Union. The order of November 15 was merely a more comprehensive program, as it included the deportation to the Auschwitz death camp of Gypsies already in labor camps. The Gypsies in Germany Gypsies: Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust
November 15, 1957 U.S. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was founded. Thirty years later on November 20, SANE merged with the Nuclear Freeze organization (dedicated to freezing all nuclear weapons testing worldwide) at a joint convention in Cleveland to form SANE/FREEZE. Its successor is known as Peace Action, the largest U.S. peace organization. Sane Nuclear Policy poster, 1960 SANE history Peace Action
November 15, 1969 Following a symbolic three-day “March Against Death,” the second national “moratorium” against the Vietnam War opened with massive and peaceful demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“New Mobe”), an estimated 500,000 demonstrators participated as part of the largest such gathering to date. It began with a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House (while Pres. Nixon watched the Purdue-Ohio State football game on TV) to the Washington Monument, where a mass rally with speeches was held.
Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary, and four different touring casts of the musical “Hair” entertained the demonstrators. The rally concluded with nearly 40 hours of continuous reading of known U.S. deaths (to that date) in the Vietnam War.
November 15, 1986 A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicted American Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA operative, of delivering arms to Contra rebels and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He had been arrested when his plane was shot down by Sandanista troops. He was pardoned a month after his conviction (his last name means “rabbit’s foot” in German). Hasenfus under arrest
On Monday, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore honored one of his state’s most beloved military veterans, Harriet Tubman, by promoting Tubman posthumously to the rank of brigadier general in the state National Guard. Why yes, that’s General Harriet Tubman, who in addition to being a famous abolitionist and “conductor” on the Underground Railroad was also the first woman to lead a US military operation during wartime.
Tubman’s history of military service doesn’t get the same attention as her activities as an abolitionist and helper of those who freed themselves from enslavement, which was already plenty enough to make her a hero. But after her final expedition to guide escapees from slavery North, she put her skills of disguise, concealment, and familiarity with Southern territory to use for the US Army when the Civil War broke out in 1861, serving as a spy, scout, and eventually, as the joint leader of an 1863 Army raid on plantations in South Carolina, which freed nearly 800 enslaved people and burned several of the plantations.
Here’s a cool thing: A 2022 CIA website article acknowledges that well before she formally became a military operative, her work for the Underground Railroad “applied sophisticated tradecraft including the use of disguises, clandestine communication, and assets and allies, who provided safe houses, transportation, and funding” — genuine praise for an intelligence operative.
Tubman was recruited for the Union cause by Massachusetts Governor John Andrew and sent to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she was assigned to work under Major General David Hunter, the head of Union operations there and in Georgia and Florida. As the CIA explains, she was trained as a nurse, and worked as one, but that also gave her the documents and funding necessary for her secret work, recruiting a spy ring of Black volunteers in the area, who gathered intelligence on plantations, commerce, Confederate troop positions, and the locations of “torpedoes” — barrels of gunpowder in rivers that could blow up any Union boats. Tubman was unable to read or write, but had an outstanding memory, making her a valuable spy without leaving any notes behind, encrypted or otherwise.
In 1863, Tubman moved from spying and reconnaissance to actually commanding Union troops in a raid on plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina’s “Lowcountry” region. Although she was not a commissioned officer, she planned and shared leadership duties with Col. James Montgomery, an abolitionist in charge of a Black Army regiment, the Second Carolina Volunteers. The goal of the raid was to rescue enslaved people, recruit the freed men to join the Union Army if they were willing, and to wipe out the rice plantations in the area.
Montgomery commanded about 300 men, and to prepare for the raid, Tubman was in charge of a group of eight scouts who made maps of the area and helped her get news of the coming raid to enslaved people so they could be ready to run for the Union gunboats from which the attack would be launched.
“She was fearless and she was courageous,” said Kate Clifford Larson, historian and author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. “She had a sensibility. She could get Black people to trust her and the Union officers knew that they were not trusted by the local people.”
On the night of June 1, 1863, Tubman, Montgomery, and the troops boarded three Union gunboats to head up the river; on the way, however, one of the steamboats ran aground and the troops had to transfer to the remaining vessels. Tubman’s reconnaissance of the area proved invaluable in avoiding torpedoes in the river, and for guiding the ships close to shore, where they launched smaller boats full of raiders to attack the plantations.
Just before the raid got underway, the gunboats broke formation and headed to different parts of the river, with Montgomery commanding one, the Harriet A. Weed, and Tubman leading the 150 soldiers on the John Adams. Just want to underline this: Tubman wasn’t serving as an adjunct to Montgomery, she was in charge of half the attacking force. In the wee hours of June 2, they attacked their assigned plantations.
Tubman later recalled that when the signal to attack was given, she saw enslaved people running to escape toward the Union boats at the riverside, with women carrying their babies and children and whatever supplies they could take along, including chickens, pigs, and pots of rice. The enslavers tried to chase them down, firing guns on them, reportedly killing one girl. We’ll hand off the narrative here to History.com, and add that we’d watch this movie:
As the escapees ran to the shore, Black troops in rowboats transported them to the ships, but chaos ensued in the process. Tubman, who didn’t speak the region’s Gullah dialect, reportedly went on deck and sang a popular song from the abolitionist movement that calmed the group down.
More than 700 escaped slavery and made it onto the gunboats. Troops also disembarked near Field’s Point, torching plantations, fields, mills, warehouses and mansions, causing a humiliating defeat for the Confederacy, including the loss of a pontoon bridge shot to pieces by the gunboats.
After the raiding gunboats docked in Beaufort, South Carolina, the first press report of the raid didn’t name Tubman, but it did say that the raid was led by a “She-Moses” under the command of Montgomery, and that the raid came off without a single injury to the Union forces. A later report in a Boston newspaper named Tubman as the hero; the editor was a friend of hers. At least 100 men freed during the raid joined the US Army.
Illustration via Library of Congress.
For all the news the story made at the time, Tubman didn’t get paid, and even after the war her petitions to receive a soldier’s pay for the raid were turned down, because women simply weren’t allowed in the Army, you silly goose. She later received a military pension on behalf of her late husband, a Union soldier, but not for herself. But when she died in 1913, she was buried with military honors; the US Army’s Military Intelligence Corps also inducted Tubman into its Hall of Fame in 2021.
Prior to the war, in 1858, abolitionist and eventual insurrectionist John Brown met Tubman and nicknamed her “General” for her courage. That was made official by Gov. Moore’s Veteran’s Day proclamation Monday, naming her a one-star general in the Maryland National Guard.
After Moore read the official order promoting Tubman, he presented the proclamation to Ernestine “Tina” Martin Wyatt, Tubman’s great-great-great-grandniece, as a representative of Tubman’s family.
Thank you again for your service, General Tubman. Now if we can just get you on the $20 bill to replace that racist fuck-knuckle Andrew Jackson. (Snip)
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joins Meet the Press to discuss his criticism of the Democratic Party and what’s next for Democrats after Kamala Harris’ projected loss.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump walks from the podium after speaking at a campaign rally at Lee’s Family Forum, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Henderson, Nev. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
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FILE – Protesters advocating for transgender rights and healthcare stand outside of the Ohio Statehouse, Jan. 24, 2024, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Patrick Orsagost, File)
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FILE – Jude Armstrong and fellow Benjamin Franklin High playwriting class students perform their play, “The Capitol Project,” on the steps of the Louisiana Capitol in Baton Rouge, La., March 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
We knew he was going to go to this, but remember the only one talking about trans people was the republicans. Harris never mentioned them. This is totally a manufactured outrage. No one cared before a few religious republicans got talking constantly about it. I think you all need to ask yourself how trans people affect your lives? There are what 1,400 trans people in the country? There are 5 trans kids in sports? There has never been a trans woman sweep the awards at any event yet that was the constant talking point. Trans women who they mistakenly call men / boys are going to steal your daughter’s trophy. But it never happened and they couldn’t show it. How was this something people voted to switch the election on? Think on it right wing voters on how you were played. So silly and stupid. Plus the religious people now in charge of the military intend to remove trans people and gay people. That will not only harm readiness because the military keeps saying it doesn’t affect the readiness at all. I know from experience that if you remove the LGBTQ+ from the military, it will gut the military entirely and that will harm readiness. Hugs
Transgender youth in the United States have been flooding crisis hotlines since the election of Donald Trump, who made anti-transgender themes central to his campaign. Many teens worry about how their lives could change once he takes office.
During his presidential bid, Trump pledged to impose wide-ranging restrictions and roll back civil rights protections for transgender students. And his administration can swiftly start work on one major change: It can exclude transgender students from Title IX protections, which affect school policies on students’ use of pronouns, bathrooms and locker rooms.
One ad that aired over 15,000 times crystallized Trump’s stance on rights for transgender and nonbinary Americans: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
For one Alabama teen, the ad seemed to paint transgender and nonbinary people as a threat to society. The weekend before Election Day, the 16-year-old teen, who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns “he” and “they,” called a crisis hotline at the Rainbow Youth Project. The group that serves LGBTQ+ young people has received more than 5,500 calls to its crisis hotline in the past 10 days, up from the 3,700 calls it typically gets every month.
The teen was in despair and struggling with suicidal thoughts, according to his mother, Carolyn Fisher. She said she hadn’t realized the depth of her child’s depression and how painful it was for him to see political ads that felt like a personal attack.
With the help of crisis counselors, Fisher said her teen has begun feeling better. But bullying at school has gotten worse, with some students telling her child Trump is going to make him “go back in the closet,” Fisher said.
”The kids who have taunted him are now proud of themselves, and they rub it in,” she said.
Opposition to transgender rights was a focal point of Trump’s campaign: Republican ads attacking political opponents over transgender or LGBTQ+ issues have aired over 290,000 times on network TV since March 2023, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact.
The messaging may have resonated with many Americans. More than half of voters overall — and the vast majority of Trump supporters — said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide.
President Joe Biden’s administration expanded recognition of transgender rights just this year. Interpretation of Title IX, a landmark sex discrimination law, is largely up to the executive branch, although court rulings can affect enforcement.
Originally passed in 1972, Title IX was first used as a women’s rights law. This year, Biden’s administration said the law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, but Trump can undo that. Biden’s new guidance had limited implementation in any case: After a spate of lawsuits, courts had issued injunctions pausing the rule in 26 states.
“Title IX will be a top priority. It is emblematic of all the culture war issues that have been created over the past few years surrounding gender identity versus sex,” said Candice Jackson, a lawyer who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the first Trump administration.
Trump also has said he would ask Congress to pass a bill stating there are “only two genders” and to ban hormonal or surgical intervention for transgender youth in all 50 states. Most Republican-controlled states already have banned gender-affirming health care for transgender youth under age 18 or 19, and several have adopted policies limiting which school bathrooms trans people can use.
While Biden’s election-year guidance did not extend to transgender students in sports, Trump has promised to end “boys in girls’ sports.” The administration likely would “approach these issues from a traditional understanding” of what Title IX has meant, “with a biological, binary understanding of sex,” said Bob Eitel, who served during the first Trump administration as a senior counselor to the education secretary.
In the U.S., 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender and another 2.2% question their gender, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released last month.
The survey found 72% of transgender and gender-questioning teens experienced persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness in the past year. These teens also reported higher rates of bullying at school compared with peers. About 1 in 4 transgender students said they had attempted suicide in the past year, the CDC said.
LGBTQ+ advocates are mobilizing to address the despair they see rising among transgender and nonbinary youth. The Rainbow Youth Project, for one, has increased virtual peer groups and town halls so LGBTQ+ youth can connect. Another organization, It Gets Better, has focused on reaching young people online through social media platforms like Twitch and YouTube to create supportive environments even if legal protections are rolled back, said Brian Wenke, the group’s executive director.
Across the country, particularly in conservative areas, LGBTQ+ youth are discussing whether it would be safer to live somewhere else.
Jude Armstrong, a transgender high school senior in New Orleans, has led protests against Louisiana laws that regulated pronoun usage and discussions of gender and sexuality in the classroom. With the potential for federal changes on the horizon, Armstrong, 17, said he has thought of going to school in the United Kingdom, but worries about leaving behind the queer culture and history he loves at home.
“How do you feel like you’re protecting your own community when you’re leaving that community and going to another country?” he asked.
FILE – Jude Armstrong and fellow Benjamin Franklin High playwriting class students perform their play, “The Capitol Project,” on the steps of the Louisiana Capitol in Baton Rouge, La., March 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
Alejandro Jimenez, a sophomore at Texas State University, dreams of being a theater teacher in Texas. He knows how important it is for trans kids to see someone like them in the classroom. Now, he’s not sure if he’ll stay in his home state.
Already, tensions have risen on his campus in a way that makes him feel unsafe. The day after the election, two protestors held up signs that said, “Homo sex is sin” and “Women are property.”
“I feel it’s my duty to stay here, but I’m scared of being pushed out,” said Jimenez, who is transgender.
Under the new Trump administration, advocates worry efforts anywhere to accommodate transgender and nonbinary students could face scrutiny. Trump’s platform called for pulling federal funding for any school pushing “gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
“It sounds really dystopian to say that trying to be more inclusive could actually result in punishment from the federal government. But that is a risk,” said Elana Redfield, federal policy director for the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
With so much uncertainty, Eli, an 18-year-old trans college student in New York, stressed the importance of community, especially online for youth who feel concerned right now.
“You are not alone,” said Eli, an ambassador for It Gets Better, who asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons. “We will come out the other side. There are queer adults who have lived long and happy lives, and you will get there too.”
OK this is me just ranting before bed. Sorry. See I was an abused kid. Most of you who come here already know and don’t need any extra help in that to show you how badly I was abused. So I don’t need to show you more than my occasionally over the top ranting about my childhood abuse or the republicans claiming the republicans are stealing kids at the border … which is really what the republicans did. They separated parents from children and then gave the children to Christian adoption agencies to sell for profit. I wonder how their god feels about that. But please let’s keep talking about how Biden lost all these kids … who were never lost. Does any one else mind they are doing this????? Because as a human trafficked sexually abused and traded person … I fucking sure DO! Hugs.
I am so very very tired and sorry if I hurt anyone tonight. It just hurts what the republicans are doing and keep doing. They hurt adults … They hurt kids. They care for no one.
I wrote this post days ago and fell asleep before I could publish it. Hugs
Mary Winsor
Scottie's Playtime 