At Texas Tech, even the Vikings are too queer to teach, thanks to new restrictions on teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation.
LGBTQIA+
LGBTQIA+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual/agender and the myriad of other sexual and gender identities. Ms. readers can find stories in this archive of people that claim those identities and face struggles because of discrimination and stigma—from topics like trans healthcare, to Pride parades, to (under)representation in media.
Abortion Rights Win Again: Voters Reject Missouri Ban, Protect Reproductive Freedom in Three States
Two years ago, Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, overturning one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans. Now, they’re being asked to undo it.
Feminists and reproductive healthcare advocates urge Missourians to vote no on Amendment 3.
Meanwhile, voters in Idaho, Nevada and Virginia are considering measures to protect or expand abortion rights.
Ms. spoke to Hannah Ledford, executive director of the nonprofit Fairness Project, about what these midterms mean for abortion rights. The Fairness Project works on ballot measures around the country on issues including minimum wage, paid sick days and Medicaid expansion.
This Midterm Season, Five States Are Voting on Anti-Trans Ballot Measures
The midterm elections are ongoing; your last day to vote is Nov. 3.
This year, wealthy and powerful individuals and organizations have pushed to get major anti-trans initiatives on the ballot in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Washington. If passed, the measures could restrict trans people’s access to sports and bathrooms, limit gender-affirming healthcare, pressure schools to out children to their parents and introduce invasive sex tests for young girls.
Keeping Score: Women Marines Pass Tougher Fitness Standards; Congressional Candidate Hopes Rape Survivors ‘Have the Baby’; Sotomayor Questions Colleagues’ Understanding of First Amendment
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too, in this biweekly roundup.
This week:
—”That is my greatest fear: that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. Some of my colleagues don’t either, by the way. And I’m not joking about that,” said Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
—A congressional candidate hopes rape survivors “have the baby.”
—Almost 70 percent of American women have experienced sexual violence, and 61 percent reported intimate partner violence (IPV).
—California passes new law finally banning child marriage.
—Mothers of young children remain dramatically underrepresented in government: Only 7.2 percent of Congress members are moms with minor children, compared to 18 percent of the adult population.
—Harvey Weinstein is resentenced to 15 years in prison in New York.
—Amazon accused of discriminating against pregnant employees using reasonable accommodations or medical leave.
—Public pressure led a district attorney to reopen cases against the “Cornell 7” fraternity members accused of gang raping a fellow student.
—Trump flip-flops opinion on mail voting ahead of the November election.
—Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear calls for Democrats to be a “party of compassion and empathy” towards trans students.
… and more.
Tools of the Patriarchy: What Book Bans Take From Women and Girls
Tools of the Patriarchy is a column on the tools that establish men’s dominance in society, or, in other words, uphold the patriarchy. Whether or not these tools are used intentionally, they contribute to a world in which women are not equal to men.
The books disappearing from shelves are not random. Censorship campaigns continue to sweep up stories about women’s sexuality, sexual violence, reproductive autonomy and girls coming of age, alongside books about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Stories are also one of the places girls first encounter women who leave, resist, desire, survive, refuse motherhood, question authority or name the harm done to them.
Another gendered aspect of the censorship story: the people expected to absorb the backlash. Librarians are trusted to help children find books and create welcoming spaces … until their professional judgment includes a book about queer identity, reproductive autonomy or sexual violence. Then the helpful librarian can quickly become an “activist.”
For Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, speaking against censorship at a public library board meeting turned her into a target. She was accused online of promoting pornography to children and subjected to harassment and threats. Her experience shows how quickly a librarian defending access to books can be recast as the danger herself—especially when a woman in a feminized profession refuses to quietly enforce someone else’s definition of what is “appropriate.”
‘The Story Is Not Finished’: Robin Morgan, Feminist Pioneer and Former Ms. Editor in Chief, in Her Very Last Interview
I had the privilege of interviewing Robin Morgan this summer. It turned out to be her last ever interview, as it was only a few weeks for her death.
On a hot afternoon in August, I arrived at Morgan’s New York home, situated on a tree-lined block. “Come in, come in!” she exclaimed, gesturing with her hands from her front door.
Then there were the rows upon rows of books lining nearly every wall, all neatly organized. There were no nooks and crannies in Morgan’s apartment, only books. “I wish I’d written more,” she said to me quietly, looking at her overstuffed shelves. “I should have written more. I know I’ll be on my deathbed thinking, ‘I should have written more.’”
As we walked outside, she smiled and gestured at the true source of her pride: her garden. I marveled at the lush greenery and took great pleasure sitting under the shade of a large, ancient-looking linden tree while listening to the gentle bubbling of a small water fountain.
“I used to sleep out here,” Morgan said, pointing to a reclining day bed and smiling wistfully. Parkinson’s disease had reshaped her body, her speech, the ability to travel freely and her relationships. She was trying to “make something of the disease, rather than what it would make of me.”
Her formal politicization, not surprisingly, was rooted in the liberal left—and then it was not. The left, like all ideological political groups in those days, was male dominated. She joined leftist movements believing in shared liberation and thinking the genders “were marching together toward freedom and we were all equal—but we weren’t,” she said.
“The women were doing all the shit work, and the men were running around being leaders and heroes. It made me furious.” Her fury lit a spark under her and she wrote “Goodbye to All That,” a direct name-naming attack on the male left.
In ‘Lotus Leadership,’ Kamini Ramani Explores What Immigrant Daughters Owe the Mothers Who Taught Them to Be Strong but Quiet
Before any of it, there was a girl on a bus. Kamini Ramani grew up in Bombay, trudging through knee-deep monsoon water to board the Number 122 red double-decker while watching for men who would try to grope girls in the crowd. She was also raised on stories about goddesses—fearsome women who fought back.
Ramani is clear about what came with those stories: pressure to achieve, expectations that women be humble and meek, and rules about whom they could marry or love. Every Indian daughter is handed two things at once: goddesses who fight back, and a warning never to be one of them. Her new book, *Lotus Leadership*, treats the two as separable.
In the interviews I’ve done for this series and for a book of my own, the story that surfaces is often about a mother: whether she made a single refusal or still resents that she never did. Either way, the daughter is the one who finds out what it was worth—and which parts of that inheritance she wants to carry forward.
(This piece is part of an ongoing series, Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care. The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility.)
Amid Reproductive Rights Rollbacks, a New USPS Stamp Honors Sarah Orne Jewett, Who Imagined Lives for Women Beyond Marriage
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) issued a new stamp late last month honoring 19th-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett—putting a woman whose work centered on female independence and unconventional lives, into mailboxes and collection books across the country.
The stamp, the 35th in USPS’ Literary Arts series, was unveiled in Jewett’s hometown of South Berwick, Maine. Its portrait of Jewett appears against the Maine coast, a reference to her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs. USPS says renewed interest in Jewett’s writing has been driven partly by her strong female characters.
In 2025, Ms. selected Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade, edited by Karen Weingarten, as one of the most anticipated feminist books of the year. The published collection brings together literature documenting abortion before Roe v. Wade, including an excerpt from Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.
Jewett never explicitly writes the word “abortion” in the published passage. Instead, one of the novel’s central characters, Mrs. Todd, is an herbalist who gathers plants and receives women who arrive privately at her door seeking remedies and whispered instructions. Weingarten said she included the passage because abortion exists in its subtext, reflecting a period when reproductive knowledge could be encoded in language about women’s networks of care.
That history makes the timing of Jewett’s stamp particularly striking. More than four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion remains banned outright in 13 states, with additional states enforcing early gestational limits. Battles over reproductive healthcare continue at both the state and federal levels—from access to medication abortion, to funding for family-planning services.
Jewett’s face is now traveling through a postal system caught up in that debate, across a country still contesting reproductive freedom. The stamp itself makes no claim about voting or reproductive rights. But there is something notable about a federal institution commemorating a woman whose work has become part of the literary history of abortion at the same moment reproductive autonomy is again being fiercely contested.
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Keeping Score: Texas GOP Candidate Brandon Herrera’s Vile Attack on Mothers and Children; Rest in Power Gloria, Dolly, Robin Morgan, Annie Dillard and More
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too, in this biweekly roundup.
This week:
—The Trump administration proposed a rule that would eliminate quality standards for the Head Start preschool program.
—Todd Blanche was confirmed as attorney general, after promising to remove abortion rights nationwide.
—Democrats in the Senate call out Trump administration’s attacks on Title IX and mark its 54th anniversary with a bicameral resolution: “They will fearmonger about trans kids until the sun comes up, but the fact is this administration has all but decimated the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, leaving egregious instances of sexual harassment and assault, and so much else, totally unaddressed.”
—Kindergartener Liam Tadeo and his father, Victor Martinez Nieto, both Austin residents, were detained by ICE on their way to a soccer game and later deported together to Mexico after being held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.
—The six recipients of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize are all women.
—Voters in battleground states say it’s important that lawmakers protect access to reproductive healthcare.
—At least 152 ICE or CBP agents have faced disciplinary action or criminal penalties for violent crimes.
—Women make up 35 percent of non-acting Emmy Awards, matching the record high.
—Actor Anne Hathaway, currently pregnant with her third child at age 43, faced social media hate and rumors that she faked her pregnancy, after showing her bump on a red carpet.
—Florida professor Vinita Prabhakar was fired for assigning a “political” short story in a freshman English class. The story “Bettering Myself” focuses on an alcoholic teacher at a Catholic school and is commonly taught at colleges across the country. Prabhakar is now suing to uphold her First Amendment rights.
—Aisha Wahab won the special election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who resigned after sexual assault allegations. Wahab is the first Afghan American elected to Congress, and will be on the ballot for a full term in November.
… and more.
Activists Have Fought for Disability Justice. So-Called ‘Sickfluencers’ Still Face Medical Sexism.
Mainstream legacy media in the U.K. has found a new target: young disabled women.
Last week, Telegraph editor Poppy Coburn published “How having a disability became cool,” arguing so-called “sickfluencers” are “turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend.” Just a month earlier, Times of London columnist Kathleen Stock suggested the disproportionate number of Gen Z women diagnosed with what she called “vague syndromes” may be experiencing “social contagion.” Both pieces cast suspicion on young disabled women and the ways they discuss chronic illness and use mobility aids, reflecting a growing strain of far-right rhetoric that treats disabled women’s accounts of their own bodies with suspicion.