Author: Felicia Kornbluh

Felicia Kornbluh, Ph.D. (she/they) is professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies, and director of Jewish studies, at the University of Vermont. She is the author, most recently, of A Woman's Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove Press, 2023) and writes regularly for the scholarly and popular press. Find them @VTFeminist on X and via the University of Vermont History Department.

‘Feminism, Fascism and the Future’: Sociologist Laurie Essig on Dissolving Democracies in Russia and the U.S.

Sociologist and author Laurie Essig has decades of experience studying and visiting Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union). Her first book, Queer in Russia, chronicles and analyzes the time between the dissolution of the USSR and the solidification of Putin’s non- (or anti-)democratic rule in Russia.

As Trump’s second term intensifies anti-gender rhetoric, sociologist Laurie Essig draws chilling parallels between rising U.S. authoritarianism and decades of state-sponsored repression in Putin’s Russia.

“One of the things we can learn from Russia is just how important resistance is. There were moments when things could have gone differently. They didn’t, but I don’t think that was pre-ordained. …

“Every strongman, every dictator we look at, had anxiety about masculinity.”

On America’s 250th Anniversary, Let’s Remember Women’s Stories: The Ms. Q&A with Jill Hasday

The United States’ 250th anniversary in 2026 presents an opportunity to include women in the stories America tells about itself, according to Jill Hasday, author of the important new book, We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality.

We the Men tells the stories “of so many women who deserve to be remembered,” said Hasday. It also explores the ways in which forgetting women’s ongoing struggles for equality has perpetuated injustice and promote complacency. Remembering women’s stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality.

Trump’s Detention of Pro-Palestinian Protester Marks Dark Turning Point in U.S. Jewish History

Days before Purim, the Jewish “festival of the lots,” the Trump administration arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. green card holder whose spouse is a U.S. citizen, because of his role in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protest activity at Columbia University.

This is a terrible breach of civil libertarian principles and university cultures of critique and dissent. Immigration and naturalization are being pulled back, it seems, into an early-20th-century mode in which ambiguous standards of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable political speech become grounds for admission or deportation from the U.S.

Conservative Supreme Court to Rule on Right to Be Trans, Medical Care, Parents’ Rights, Constitutional Sex Discrimination—and the Right to Be Different

“I’m here to stand up for my kid,” Brian Williams told me outside the Supreme Court on Dec. 4. Williams and his wife Samantha have been fighting for their daughter—known as L.W. in the legal papers the ACLU filed to challenge Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors—for years.

Though difficult to sit through, the two-plus hours of argument in United States v. Skrmetti—a challenge by trans youth, their families, the ACLU, Lambda Legal and the Biden administration to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors—was a nearly perfect distillation of this moment in our gender politics.

Stop Trashing Trans People. Get Smarter About Gender.

Throwing trans and nonbinary people under the bus is a terrible compromise to the very authoritarian ambitions that liberals say they’re stepping up to fight. We need more love and support for people who are stigmatized and under assault, not less. And we desperately need more understanding of sex, gender and sexuality.

Let’s equip ourselves with the intellectual tools that will help us understand how would-be tyrants use gender to divide us.