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Women’s Sports Were Built by Letting Girls In
When the Supreme Court upheld West Virginia’s ban on transgender girls participating in girls’ school sports in West Virginia v. B.P.J., it said the ruling was about protecting the safety and fairness of women’s and girls’ sports. I hear that claim against everything I actually lived.
Thirty years ago, in United States v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that generalizations about “the way women are” cannot justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description. That principle didn’t just build my generation of athletes. It built a generation of women: the litigators and judges, the surgeons, the CEOs and entrepreneurs, the senators and governors, the police officers and firefighters and fighter pilots, the women who were the first of everything. Every one of those doors was held shut by the same argument Virginia made: Most women wouldn’t want this, most women couldn’t do it.
Women of my generation didn’t fight to be seen as individuals—as athletes, as leaders, as whatever they had it in them to be—only to watch that principle eroded now, in their name and over their objection.
More than half a century ago, this country decided that girls who had been told they didn’t belong on the field belonged there after all. I got to live the proof of that promise. The work now is to keep that promise for every kid who wants to play.
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From ‘Love Island’ to Election Day: How Close Is the U.S. to Deciding Elections by Phone?
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Making Americans Smokers Again: Trump Administration Cuts Anti-Tobacco Programs
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Can You Believe They Put This in Writing? The Wildest Quotes From Heritage’s ‘Project 2026’
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A Single Abortion Clinic Closing Rarely Makes Headlines. What Happens When None Are Left?
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American Democracy on Fire (with Steve Vladeck and Moira Donegan)
In this episode of On The Issues, we confront American democracy on fire. How did we get here and who lit the match? In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the United States Supreme Court gutted a fundamental provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), landmark legislation enacted by Congress at the height of the civil rights movement to eradicate entrenched patterns of voter suppression and promote equality at the ballot box. With key mandates in the VRA now eviscerated under the hand six justices on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, what’s next? The Court has the lowest approval ratings since confidence in the court has been measured. Many Americans now wonder—can the Court be trusted?
The Supreme Court has emphasized that if women want reproductive freedom and don’t like abortion bans, they should go vote. But what happens when the Court plays a strategic role in diluting voting power and making voting more difficult by stripping away protections?
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Join Ms. Magazine and Get Our Landmark FEMINIST 250 Print Issue for This Pivotal Moment in American History
As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, questions loom over the celebration: Whose America gets remembered, whose gets erased—and how do we imagine and build a democracy that includes all of us?
In the Summer issue of Ms., we revisit the nation’s founding through a feminist lens, reclaiming the stories too often left out of the official narrative: women who challenged the authors of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution for deliberately writing women out of America’s founding documents, Black women who resisted oppression from the start, Indigenous societies built around women-led governance, queer lives in revolutionary America, Asian women’s struggles for belonging and the long fight to make disability visible in our history.
We also look back at 54 years of feminist reporting from the pages of Ms.—proof that the battles for bodily autonomy, equality and democracy did not begin yesterday—and forward to the bold new ideas that could shape a freer, fairer future for the next 250 years.
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A Single Abortion Clinic Closing Rarely Makes Headlines. What Happens When None Are Left?
Picture a map of the United States. It’s 2022, and in southern states like Texas and Tennessee, there are clusters of black dots that represent independent clinic closures. These are abortion care black holes: communities where it’s no longer possible to get an abortion at a nearby clinic.
Fast forward to present. It’s 2026, four years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and black dots have multiplied in states across the country. It no longer matters if the state is red or blue, governed by conservatives or progressives. None are immune to the increasing weight of political pressure, financial strain and operational difficulty that are forcing independent clinics to close or stop providing abortion care.
Each of these black dots is a community suffering a healthcare crisis, and they are proliferating across the United States at a rapid rate.
Independent clinics are often the only places to get clinical abortion care, unbiased information and support for pregnancy options. They are where people go to feel safe and respected, whether they are getting an abortion, continuing a pregnancy or getting gender-affirming care. In small towns and rural spaces, these clinics are often the only safe place for many people, especially those who are LGBTQIA+. If clinics close, there is often nowhere else to go.
And once abortion clinics close, it’s not as simple as reopening when they can, if they can. Even if a specific restriction is lifted, severe financial constraints, continued political hostility, threats of violence and legal uncertainty still stand.
