More Than A Magazine, A Movement
At the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, a right-wing media firestorm spread disinformation that Imane Khelif of Algeria was transgender. As this article from the October 1988 issue of Ms. reminds us, sex testing in women’s sports is nothing new—and its origins are blatantly unscientific.
“Sports are not democratic. They’re elitist. The tallest play basketball. The shortest are jockeys. The ultimate would be to break the Olympics into biological classes and run them like the Westminster Dog Show.”
This summer, the antiabortion movement is mounting an offensive against bipartisan bills to establish federal data privacy protections for Americans and long-overdue online protections for children.
While many unregulated pregnancy clinics, or crisis pregnancy centers, claim HIPAA compliance, they operate under no legal requirement to protect client confidentiality. Thus, they are free to share sensitive information they are collecting from pregnant people as they wish.
“No one should have to worry about their personal health information falling into the hands of anyone who might seek to use that information against them.”
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.
The United States has entered into a cyclone of “historic firsts” for Indian Americans—from the GOP presidential bids of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, to the whirlwind Democratic nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris.
But these moments of mainstream attention offer a unique opportunity for the American public, and specifically South Asian Americans, to move past celebrating identity politics and to invest in liberation politics.
From Caitlin Clark’s success this season, to the Women’s Basketball Team shot at The Olympics this week, the history of women’s basketball has been paved by Title IX.
“It’s now over 50 years since Title IX was passed and it’s amazing how great U.S. women athletes are doing [at the Olympics]. Finally hearts and minds are getting closer to matching the law. People are investing in women’s sports as a business, not a charity,” said Billie Jean King.
(This article originally appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
Each month, we provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
Here’s this month’s list of 16 releases we’re excited about!
Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate for the 2024 election.
Walz, 60, is a former high school teacher and football coach, non-commissioned officer in the Army National Guard, and member of the U.S. House. He was elected as the state’s top executive in 2018 and again in 2022. He is a strong supporter of abortion rights, called to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy related to LGBTQ+ people serving in the military in a speech delivered several years prior to its repeal, and has advocated to legalize recreational marijuana.
Abortion legislation in the U.S. has, from the outset, been motivated by political and economic ends, rather than health and safety.
While there have been some positive decisions on abortion access in the United States in the past month, there is still an overwhelming amount of confusion regarding abortion medication and reproductive legislation.
Decades of clinical and epidemiologic evidence documenting the experiences of millions of people over a quarter century have demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of abortion medication. Still, many people are scared to use it.
Project 2025 is a wishlist of rightwing policy goals for the next conservative president.
I took a dive into the Project 2025 cesspool and fished out some of the choicest morsels, which I’ve organized into several categories: rebuilding the patriarchal family; ending sex discrimination … against men; reproductive rights and wrongs; demonizing our enemies; oil and gas will save the country; and eliminating government as we know it. Enjoy!
This year marks the 52nd anniversary of Title IX, a landmark civil rights law that has transformed the landscape of U.S. education. The Biden-Harris administration’s new Title IX regulations, set to take effect Aug. 1, represent a significant step toward acknowledging and addressing the unique challenges faced by student who face discrimination and sexual violence, especially female, LGBTQ+ and pregnant or parenting students. But Republicans hope to block these Title IX revisions and revert them back to the restrictive Trump-era Title IX guidelines.
In this historic election year, with President Biden stepping down from the presidential campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris stepping up as the new candidate, the stakes are even higher.