Author: Chloe Nazra Lee

Dr. Chloe Nazra Lee, M.D., MPH, is a resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. Her professional interests include women’s mental health, trauma disorders, and working with survivors of abuse.

Kristi Noem Is Out at DHS—But Women May Not Be Safer Under Her Replacement

As frontline witnesses to the worst of humanity, physicians carry the heavy burden of moral distress—the anguish of seeing harm unfold and feeling powerless to stop it. This feeling has only grown with the rise of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its current form. Its inhumanity under former DHS Security Kristi Noem’s leadership—reflected in the anxieties of our patients, many of whom are avoiding essential medical care out of fear—has us despairing with helplessness.

So, yes, many of us were excited to see Noem go.

The hope that swelled with Noem’s ousting vanished quickly with news of President Trump tapping Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) as her replacement, a former MMA fighter and co-sponsor of the SAVE America Act, which disproportionately targets women’s voting eligibility. Mullin holds extremist views on abortion, opposing even exceptions to save the mother’s life. Deeply disturbing is Mullin’s 2013 vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

While Noem’s firing is a step in the right direction, appointing a manosphere-adjacent fitness bro whose rhetoric of “protection” echoes the same ideology predicated on women’s forced subjugation—and whose political track record shows a distinct disdain for women’s lives—as her replacement is absolutely not the move.

We Know What We Saw in Minneapolis

For women who recognize the dynamics of abuse, the killing of Renee Nicole Good—and the official response to it—follows a chillingly familiar script.

To me, she doesn’t seem to be agitating or obstructing—she appears to wave the ICE vehicles through before masked men emerge from one van, bellowing, “Get out of the fucking car!” She seems to be a scared woman trying to flee violent men, a scenario that resonates acutely with me and many other survivors.

What followed was an Orwellian schema that every abuse victim will instantly recognize: Deny. Attack. Reverse victim and offender. With impunity. 

Sacrificing Women for the Church of Men: Medical Conscience Rights and Christian Hypocrisy

The Woman grew up in a small Christian town in northeastern Tennessee. Community values—kindness, compassion, love—are deeply cherished. She’s never moved; why would she? She enjoys the simplicity of her little community.

But the tide turns with a growing political movement seemingly predicated on bigotry and punitive, hypocritical morality. The news cycle churns frenetically, each day bearing more distressing confusion.

Her state representatives are unresponsive to your concerns, and she has a serious one: She’s pregnant and unmarried in post-Roe America, and cannot get care in her state. Legally, a doctor can decline to provide care for you.

She’s not trying to cause problems. But she’s terrified and she wants answers. How did we get here as a nation? And can we ever go back?

A grave truth transcends: Christian fundamentalism has insidiously inserted itself into American policy, perverting its own values to legalize discrimination.

Bigotry doesn’t always present as a Unite the Right rally or violence in our nation’s capital. Sometimes, it comes with a demure smile and a sweet, “It’s just my personal belief.” It’s still bigotry.

An Open Letter to Rep. Kat Cammack From a Medical Doctor: It’s Abortion Bans That Make Doctors Afraid to Act, Not ‘the Radical Left’

No woman may escape the cruelty of the nebulous and varying restrictions on reproductive healthcare in the post-Roe world—as Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) discovered in May 2024 when faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect. Concerned by the lack of clarity in the wording of the law on the limits of intervention in pregnant patients, doctors reportedly delayed administering intramuscular methotrexate to terminate the pregnancy, out of fear of prosecution.

I’m a doctor. In this chaotic landscape, where reproductive healthcare policy and medical reality appear woefully divorced, my colleagues and I don’t know what misstep could land us in senseless litigation or with felony charges.

Rep. Cammack, your voice and your story have power. I hope you use them to reintroduce nuance and common sense to the discussion on women’s lives. There are many of us who will extend a hand across the aisle and work together with you to right some of the senseless wrongs. 

Outperforming Men, Undervalued Anyway: How Conservative Myths Undermine Women in Medicine

Medical literature extensively documents differences in practice by a physician’s gender. Women are more likely to practice evidence-based medicine and adhere to clinical guidelines. Nationally, women outpace men in both college and medical school enrollment. In medical training, women outperform their male peers on clinical assessments and are more likely to attain an honors degree.

Therefore, the merit-based hiring practices that the Trump administration vociferously demands should logically reflect these data. Yet, in 2022, women accounted for 38 percent of active physicians in the U.S., up from 26 percent in 2004. 

Might this indicate that men, not women, are the “diversity hires” of medicine? 

The ‘Pro-Life’ Party Has a Funny Way of Respecting Women

Tony Hinchcliffe’s categorically unfunny appearance at Donald Trump’s recent rally in Madison Square Garden leaves me wishing that whoever discovered him left him sleeping in his car behind The Comedy Store in Los Angeles. (It’s how he opens the 12-minute set.)

Most of the ensuing backlash targeted Hinchcliffe’s puerile reliance on racism as humor. But another underreported moment that caught my attention was Hinchcliffe’s “joke” about Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce becoming “the next O.J. Simpson,” referencing Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder, widely believed to be the responsibility of her known abuser.

The joke hinges on the idea that Kelce might murder his girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Hinchcliffe referenced Swift’s political endorsement of Kamala Harris immediately after this joke. His punchline: If a woman voices her opinion, intimate partner violence is a hilarious solution. It’s an interesting stance for the so-called pro-life party to broadcast publicly.

The Paradox of JD Vance’s Misogyny

The collective female rage in response to JD Vance using the “childless cat lady” archetype as an insult is driven by shared hurt at the mockery that reduces us to our reproductive capacity in a political context where women are already devalued. It demeans our dreams and aspirations outside motherhood. It seems small, but those three words carry so much emotional weight for us.

The fight is exhausting and there will come a time when I stop. But I pray that other women fight. All of us—intentionally childfree, mothers, delayed in motherhood, deprived of motherhood, stepmothers, more—certainly have a stake in the future: a hope that we may be cherished, not for the services our bodies offer men and society at large, but merely for our humanity and the women we are.