Frederick II (1712-1786) has gone down in history as ‘Friedrich der Große’; but was he really so great? And if he was what made him so…?

If you ask a hundred Americans to name a single Prussian ruler, it’s likely the only one they would be able to name (if any) would be Frederick II, though it’s not likely they would know of the ‘2nd’ nomenclature; but three centuries after Der Alte Fritz’s legendary exploits, his name still rings a bell with Americans and Europeans even if few non-Germans would be familiar with his father the odious Friedrich Wilhelm or his illustrious grandfather, Friedrich ‘der Große Kurfüst’ (the Great Elector), who paved the way for Friedrich II’s astonishing reign.

To assess Frederick the Great’s legacy, it is first necessary to understand what Prussia was before he came to the throne. Friedrich II von Preußen was one of dozens of ruling princes from the House of Hohenzollern whose roots lay deep in medieval Germany. The ‘Prussia’ that Frederick inherited was in fact composed of two geographically separate and even culturally distinct principalities: the Markgravate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia. Mark Brandenburg was a small, marshy patch of land in what centuries later would be the center of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic), a.k.a., ‘East Germany.’

If one had to guess which German principality would become the dominant one and which would eventually unify all of the hundreds of big and small principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, it is safe to assume that no one in the 15th or 16th centuries would have put their money on Mark Brandenburg, a poor, swampy, obscure bit of Germany without a single real city: Berlin at the time was but a village.

But at the same time, no one would have considered Prussia a candidate for greatness either: this distant, obscure principality lay outside the boundaries of the Heiliges Römisches Reich and was originally not even German — the original ‘Prussians’ were a Baltic tribe who spoke Old Prussian — now an extinct member of the Balto-Slavic group of Indo-European languages. At one point ruled by the Teutonic Knights (Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem, a.k.a., Orden der Brüder vom Deutschen Haus der Heiligen Maria in Jerusalem or Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum, Deutscher Orden, Deutscher Ritterorden), Prussia came into the House of Hohenzollern when Albrecht von Preußen of the Brandenburg-Ansbach branch of the House of Hohenzollern was invested with the duchy of Prussia in 1525; the 37th Grand Master of the Teutonic Order converted to Lutheranism & established a principality independent of the Teutonic Order and of Poland.

One cannot know how devout Albrecht was at heart, but he certainly seemed to have a taste for extravagantly large and stylish picture hats. But Prussia far from Brandenburg and separated from the Hohenzollern heartland by hundreds of miles of land controlled by Poland whose relationship with the Hohenzollern was rarely friendly.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which laid waste to so much of Germany ironically gave the House of Hohenzollern the opportunity to raise Brandenburg to the status of a significant if still minor power. Georg Wilhelm (13 November 1595 – 1 December 1640) Markgraf (Margrave) and Kurfürst (Elector) of Brandenburg, vacillated between neutrality and support for the Protestant princes arrayed against the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II; his son, Friedrich Wilhelm I, succeeded to the throne in 1640 and allied Brandenburg with Sweden and the France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.

The Große Kurfüst’ (the Great Elector) used French subsidies from the Cardinal to rebuilt Brandenburg and his great-grandson would say of him, “He was praised by his enemies, blessed by his people; and posterity dates from that famous day the subsequent elevation of the house of Brandenburg.” Less admirably, Frederick William also granted a charter to the Brandenburg African Company, the first organized attempt by a German state to take part in the Atlantic slave trade, transporting 17,000 to 30,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas before the Brungenburger Gold Coast was sold to the Dutch in 1721.

Despite this appalling behavior, Friedrich Wilhelm I nonetheless must be credited with laying the groundwork for Brandenburg-Prussia’s future greatness.

Frederick William I’s son was the first to call himself a Prussian king— after paying a fortune for the title — but because of the odd and almost bizarre rules of the Holy Roman Empire, Friedrich I could only call himself ‘König *in* Preußen’; his grandson would be the first to call himself ‘König *von* Preußen.’

Friedrich I’s son would become known as the ‘Soldatenkönig’ and it was the dream of the Soldier King to build himself an army of giants; towards that end, Friedrich Wilhelm II pid agents to find the tallest young men in Germany and Europe, even going so far as to kidnap some. Frederick William I was a violent alcoholic who beat his son and though him effeminate for playing the flute and preferring to speak French rather than German.

Frederick the Great’s biographer Nancy Mitford believed that the evidence suggested that Friedrich Wilhelm II had porphyria —the same disease that his distant relative George III (who remained Elector of Hanover as well as king of England, Scotland and the United Kingdom) would suffer and lead to his confinement after bouts of apparent madness.

Friedrich Wilhelm was enraged by his son’s affairs with other young men, including the king’s page Peter Karl Christoph von Keith; but it was the crown prince’s plan to flee to England with his tutor Hans Hermann von Katte that drove the king to extreme measures: he had Lieutenant von Katte executed before Friedrich’s very eyes— though according to some accounts, young Fritz fainted before the sword struck von Katte’s head off; it was for good reason that young Friedrich feared for his life as long as his raging violent alcoholic father still lived; nonetheless, there were a few moments of tenderness and appreciation between father and son and Frederick later in life expressed genuine respect and admiration for his father’s rule.

But Friedrich II was no doubt extremely relieved when he came into his inheritance in 1740 — becoming the first ‘König *von* Preußen’ and according to many, its greatest. Frederick’s first act was his boldest and most daring, invading Silesia and forcing the young Maria Theresa to defend the richest province in the Habsburg empire; her father Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI had spent most of his reign seeking agreement to the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ that would have European powers recognize his elder daughter as the rightful heir to the Habsburg Erblande (hereditary lands); but he should have spent those years trying to renovate the creaky old empire that he passed onto his daughter. Frederick’s invasion of Silesia would provoke Maria Theresia’s comprehensive reform of the ramshackle empire though she would never recover Schlesien; instead, the wealthiest province in her empire would provide the basis for Prussia’s greatness as Friedrich surmised; with its majority Protestant population and coal mines, Silesia was the most industrialized province in a largely agrarian Habsburg empire and though it took the First and Second Silesian Wars to secure it and the enormous loss of life as well as financial resources the wars entailed, the acquisition proved to be worth it in the long run in terms of state building.

Friedrich’s reputation for military prowess is ironic given his father’s doubts about his masculinity and commitment to the code of the warrior king; but of course Frederick had both successes and defeats. Rossbach was one of his greatest successes and helped gain him a Europe-wide reputation for military genius.

Nonetheless, the Seven Years’ War that Frederick’s ambitions set off nearly destroyed him and Prussia. Friedrich gained only one firm ally — the United Kingdom — while prompting Maria Theresa to form an alliance with the Habsburgs’ old enemy, France; this ‘renversement des alliances’ would make Louis XV the most important ally of the Holy Roman Empress — only ’empress’ of course because her husband was elected Holy Roman Emperor (women being barred from that office; perhaps even more dangerously, Frederick provoked the enmity of Elizaveta Petrovna; the daughter of Peter the Great had seized power in a coup d’état — wearing a guardsman’s military uniform no less — and had an almost irrational hatred of Friedrich; the empress sent an enormous Russian army against Frederick, surrounding Berlin and threatening his destruction and that of the Prussian kingdom; only the sudden and unexpected death of the tsarina in 1762 saved Friedrich as Elizabeth’s heir Peter III was not only German (duke of Holstein) but an enormous admirer of Frederick; Peter immediately called off the war, outraging the Russian élite and contributing to his eventual overthrow by his wife in her own coup détat.

The Seven Years’ War is accounted by some historians as the first world war, having been fought on three continents; Frederick was able to bring the Seven Years’ War to a successful conclusion in 1763 and Maria Theresa was forced to accept the permanent loss of Silesia. In 1772, Catherine and Frederick conspired in the First Partition of Poland — making no fans for either among Polish nationalists; after the second and third partition, Poland would be wiped off the map of Europe.

A few words need to be said about Peter III’s wife, Sophia von Anhalt-Zerbst who would overthrow him and declare herself Catherine II, going down in history as Catherine the Great. Catherine has frequently been linked with Frederick the Great as the other most famous example of Enlightened Despotism; but the truth is that Friedrich was far more enlightened while Catherine was far more despotic; she may have invited Denis Diderot (editor of the famous Encyclopédie) to St. Petersburg but they quarreled and she eventually sent him packing. While Catherine dabbled with liberal Enlightenment ideas, in the end, she deepened the oppression of the serfs in order to secure the support of the Boyars; in contrast, Frederick genuinely deserves the appelation ‘Great’ for instituting important reforms such as instituting freedom of speech and freedom of the press throughout his kingdom.

Like Catherine, though, Frederick was a great patron of the arts; he employed Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff (born in 1699) to design Sans Souci in Potsdam as well as its gardens.

Knobelsdorff apparently warned the king that the height of the palace needed to be greater than Frederick wanted it to be or it would not be sufficiently high to be seen easily above the gardens from the bottom of the cascade; Knobelsdorff was clearly right about that:

Nonetheless, the palace is clearly a masterpiece of Baroque architecture and Sans Souci’s gardens are a masterpiece of landscaping and a sheer delight to stroll through (as I did on my one and so far only visit to Potsdam).

And the interior is a masterpiece of Rococo interior design; this is the chamber in yellow is the room where Voltaire took up residence during his time at Frederick the Great’s court.

François-Marie Arouet left Potsdam in 1752 after quarreling with Frederick the Great. Friedrich der Große was a huge admirer of Voltaire from afar, but two years of the Frenchman’s residence at Sans Souci was enough to sour Frédéric le Grand on the acerbic Enlightenment wit.

Frederick is accounted “one of the most well documented homosexuals in history” (“Frederick the Great: Gay King of Europe“) in numerous YouTube videos and somewhat more discreetly in Nancy Mitford’s gossipy, fun but very well researched biography (Nancy Mitford, “Frederick the Great,” New York: Harper & Row, 1970). One might ask about the relevance of the king’s sexuality; I would argue that one cannot understand him without understanding his sexual orientation. Of course, the term ‘homosexual’ was not invented until the late 19th century and the term ‘gay’ (for male homosexual) did not come into common parlance until the 20th century, so Der Alte Fritz would not have identified with either of those terms; as a king, he could not afford to identify with the pejorative term ‘sodomite’ or any other term with negative connotations.

But the evidence from Frederick’s correspondence and poetry makes fairly clear that his primary sexual and romantic orientation was to other males and there is in fact no concrete evidence that he ever had sex with any woman — including his queen consort — who of course was opposed on him by his aggressively heteronormative father.

Der Alte Fritz had no son or daughter and so when he died in 1786, his hapless nincompoop nephew Friedrich Wilhelm inherited the crown, quickly proving that he was not even close to his uncle’s level of leadership.

Der Alte Fritz’s reputation suffered somewhat because of an association with the Nazi Third Reich that he no doubt would have utterly despised; one can’t blame Frederick for the fact that Adolf Hitler and other German fascists admired Friedrich for the role they ascribed to him as the leading German nationalist of his day; it isn’t even clear that he himself would have seen himself as such; he had his ambitions, but they were for Prussia, not for Germany which in his day was at best a ‘mere geographic expression’ — as Napoléon famously said of pre-Risorgimento Italy. One cannot necessarily admire Frederick’s unprovoked attack on Silesia but despite the appalling human cost of the two Silesian Wars, there is no question that his act of aggression helped build the kingdom and provide the basis for the Prussia of Otto von Bismarck that enabled the Eisenkanzler to unify Germany under Prussian leadership.

Like Frederick, Bismarck was both brilliant and ruthless; but also like Friedrich, the Iron Chancellor never made war for its own sake; it was a means to clearly conceived ends; the Haus Hohenzollern that both served so ably would collapse when Kaiser Wilhelm II blundered into World War I after dismissing Bismarck.

In the end, whatever one thinks of Friedrich, there is no question that he is one of the most important and most fascinating figure in German and indeed European history.

Pauline Park is an LGBT and Palestine solidarity activist and writer who lives in Queens; she received her Ph.D. political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994; she spent two months in Berlin in 1990 and six weeks in Regensburg (in Bavaria) in 1991.

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I am delighted to facilitate a workshop as part of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association’s Asian American pre-conference institute at Creating Change 2026 on the topic of Palestine. Allow me to suggest at least seven compelling reasons why Palestine is a queer issue and in fact a queer Asian/Pacific Islander (API) issue and why LGBTQ people in the United States and around the world should be supporting the cause of Palestinian liberation.

1) Americans live on unceded indigenous land that was home to Native Americans for millennia before the coming of the white man.

The parallel with the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians is unmistakeable and the tragic irony is that the United States is now funding that dispossession with $3.8 billion a year in US taxes + more than 7 billion in new funding; all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress support the violent ethnic cleansing of illegally occupied Palestine and Apartheid Israel’s pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

The origin of the current ‘conflict’ (as it is rather inaccurately characterized) lies in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1.3.1916) between the British and French in which they carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey, the British taking Ottoman Palestine by force and then having the League of Nations award a ‘mandate’ that legitimized the British Mandate Authority in Palestine. The French got Lebanon and Syria in exchange for British control of Palestine and Iraq; the consequences of this shabby deal have been a century of war, conflict, death and destruction. 

2) APIs should understand connections between ethnostate imperialism, colonization and fascism in Asia and the US  and that in illegally occupied Palestine; think of the parallels with China, Korea, etc.; in fact, the United States participated in the carving up of Qing China along with the European powers and Japan.

And that leads to an important point: imperialism is not the preserve of European powers or the United States: Russia and China are imperial powers and fascist Japan subjected Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, much of China and virtually all of Southeast Asia to a brutal regime of colonization in the 1930s and 1940s.

There is an enormous irony that while Korea was ruthlessly exploited by fascist imperial Japan in one of the most brutal foreign military occupations of modern times, many contemporary South Koreans support Apartheid Israel over occupied Palestine because around 40% of South Koreans are Christians and most of those are right-wing Christian fundamentalists; in fact, they form the backbone of the homophobic and transphobic political elements blocking adoption of LGBT rights legislation in the Republic of Korea.

3) And that leads to a crucially important point: the US is the biggest supporter of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the Zionist machine is the key element in maintaining US support for the occupation; a majority of Zionists are Christians and many if not most Christian Zionists are Christian fundamentalists who are the biggest support for anti-LGBTQ legislation across all of the 50 states; the enemies of the LGBTQ community in the US are the enemies of Palestinians in the occupied territories. While Democrats on the whole are better on LGBT issues than Republicans, those centrist Democrats who are triangulating around transgender issues (Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, Tom Suozzi) are also among the biggest Zionist supporters of Apartheid Israel.

4) The Zionist machine has used ‘pinkwashing’ to try to generate support within and outside the LGBTQ community for Apartheid Israel: an attempt to use Israel’s record on LGBT rights to attempt to justify its illegal occupation of Palestine; it’s a non sequitur of course because a good record on LGBT rights does not legally or morally justify a state to occupy foreign territory or subject its indigenous population to violent ethnic cleansing, dispossession or genocide. Zionist pinkwashing is a strategy to generate queer support for Apartheid Israel but it is based on entirely false notions. Palestinians are almost never given asylum in Israel based on sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact they are surveilled and blackmailed in illegally occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may be better than that of neighboring Arab countries but is inferior to that of the Western European countries with which Zionists like to compare Israel (‘the villa in the jungle’); but even if Israel’s record on LGBT issues were better, it could not possibly justify the illegal occupation, apartheid regime and genocide. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may compare favorably to that of neighboring dictatorships (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, non-Arab Iran) but is mediocre at best in comparison with the Western European countries Zionists like to classify Israel with (Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, etc.); Israel even participates in the Eurovision Song Contest even though Israel isn’t located on the European continent.

Pauline Park with Abu Rabiyah in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (1.10.12)

5) A significant proportion of Palestinians living under illegal occupation are LGBTQ and they get no special ‘pink card. While there is homophobia and transphobia in Palestinian society, there is homophobia and transphobia in American society but no American would accept that as justification for foreign occupation of the US; in fact, when the Israeli authorities discover LGBTQ people in the illegally occupied West Bank, they blackmail them into becoming agents for the Israel state, putting them in real danger if they are discovered. It is likely that a significant proportion of Palestinians killed in the Gaza genocide have doubtless been LGBTQ whether or not they were able to openly identify as such. And to the extent that Palestinians see LGBTQ support for BDS, that increases acceptance of LGBTQ Palestinians in Palestinian society. 

Pauline Park with Abu Nidal in Mas-ha (1.10.12)

6) LGBTQ people should be supporting the oppressed (Palestinians) rather than the oppressor (Apartheid Israel) on principle. As MLK would say, an injury to one is an injury to all; liberation of the human spirit must necessarily include Palestinian liberation; LGBT rights should not be separated from human rights for all; true liberation is found through global thinking informed by progressive feminist intersectional analysis. Sarah Schulman provided an example of that progressive feminist intersectional analysis when she joined me at a forum on Israel/Palestine at Queens Pride House (6.4.13); co-sponsored by New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), the forum remains (to my knowledge) the only public forum about Israeli occupation and apartheid both hosted and sponsored by an LGBT community center anywhere in the United States and the furious Zionist response to the event is a lesson in itself about both the power of the Zionist machine and the commitment to Palestinian liberation that those who stand in solidarity need to exhibit in order to make that solidarity real (Pauline Park, “Queens Pride history: the 2013 Israel/Palestine forum,” 21 July 2013). Schulman organized the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine and invited me to join; the historic venture took place in January and we spent an entire week touring the West Bank; we meet with queer and non-LGBTQ Palestinians from Hebron to Nablus to Nabi Saleh and stayed two nights in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank); at the end of the tour, we met with the founder of Zochrot, the Israeli organization attempting to educate Israeli Jews about the violent ethnic cleansing of the Nakba that was the basis for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 (Pauline Park, “Palestine: the first US LGBTQ delegation tour in pictures,” 4 April 2012).

Pauline Park & Sarah Schulman at Queens Pride House (6.4.13)

7) Those who wish to advance a progressive agenda for social justice and social change cannot accept the Zionist ‘Palestine exception’: as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, an injury to one is an injury to all. LGBT organizations that have attempted to square the circle or straddled the fence have only risked discrediting their own claims to be involved in the pursuit of social justice. It is actually the National LGBTQ Task Force that provides one of the best examples of this equivocation: at the Creating Change 2016 conference in Chicago, A Wider Bridge organized a reception for Jerusalem Open House. A Wider Bridge’s mission was to ‘pinkwash’ the occupation and generate support for Israel within the LGBT community in the United States; it was not in any real sense a genuine LGBT community-based organization but rather a front organization for the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby that supports it. AWB deliberately tried to mislead the community and the public about the nature of the event that the National LGBTQ Task Force initially cancelled and then uncancelled, insinuating that those opposed to the reception were targeting the shabbat service that is scheduled to precede it and Jerusalem Open House, which is a co-sponsor of the event. 

Cancel Pinkwashing protesters at Creating Change in Chicago

In fact, activists who spoke with Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, made clear to her that they were not objecting either to the shabbat service or to the participation of JOH, but rather to the reception and AWB’s use of it to promote the Israeli government and its illegal occupation of Palestine. Despite, this, AWB dishonestly portrayed the #cancelpinkwashing initiative as ‘anti-Semitic,’ even though several of the activists involved with it were Jewish. AWB board member Dana Beyer even went so far as to write a blog post on HuffingtonPost.com entitled, “National LGBTQ Task Force Censors the Jews” (1.17.16), in which she called the Task Force’s initial decision to cancel the AWB event “an act of bigotry against Jewish LGBTQ persons as mean-spirited as any other,” ignoring the fact that  Sue Hyde, who made that decision, is herself Jewish.

Pauline Park & Nakba survivor Abu Hassam in the ruins of Lajun (1.11.12)

In the statement issued by the Task Force on Jan. 18 announcing a reversal of its earlier decision, executive director Rea Carey wrote, “It is our belief that when faced with choices, we should move towards our core value of inclusion and opportunities for constructive dialogue and canceling the reception was a mistake,” adding, “We are aware that our original decision made it appear we were taking sides in a complex and long-standing conflict.” But in fact, by reversing its original decision and re-scheduling the pinkwashing event, the Task Force was taking sides, providing a platform for Zionists to use the conference to promote LGBT support for the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, risking making the Task Force indirectly complicit in the occupation as well (Pauline Park, “Creating Change or pink washing Israeli apartheid? A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing,” 17 January 2017).

And the reference to ‘inclusion’ rings false when LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation are not included, given that Palestinians need special permission from the Israeli authorities to leave the West Bank, rarely granted. A Wider Bridge went out of business at the end of 2025 after falling into deficit and following a scandal in which its executive director was accused of sexual misconduct. An organization cannot insist that it is on the cutting edge of the pursuit of progressive social and political change when its annual conference promotes the pinkwashing of Israeli occupation and apartheid; it is this year’s conference and this workshop in particular that confirm the Task Force’s rather belated decision to ‘allow’ for discussion of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

Pauline Park at the apartheid wall in Al-Wallejeh (1.9.12)

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. In March 2011, Park co-founded New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and in January 2012, she participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, a seven-day tour of the West Bank and Israel that included meetings with LGBT- and non-LGBT Palestinians and Israelis. Park did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pauline Park with New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani in Manhattan (7.20.23)

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“Don Giovanni” is considered by many to be the greatest opera ever written and while I do not think one can single out one opera for that distinction, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s masterpiece would certainly be on any musicologist’s top ten list; but for a work first staged in 1787, it is surprisingly and perhaps even startlingly relevant to today’s heated debates about class and gender and even current political scandals and controversies in New York and beyond; and so while Ivo van Hove’s production now being revived at the Metropolitan Opera is an impressive one, the director may be accused of trying too hard to make this 18th century music drama relevant when it requires no special pleading.

One need only sketch out the plot of the opera to make its relevance to contemporary concerns clear: Don Juan  (a.k.a., ‘Don Giovanni’) is a wealthy aristocrat who seduces and discards thousands of women — “Ma in Ispagna, son già mille tre” (but in Spain, there are already 1003) — including the vulnerable Donna Elvira (Leporello tells Elvira); the sexual predator climbs into Donna Anna’s bed only to be pursued by her father; Giovanni turns on his pursuer and then kills the Commendatore — with a gun rather than a sword in this production. Later, Giovanni tries to part the peasant groom and bride Masetto and Zerlina as the seduction (“Là ci darem la mano”) turns into a scene of attempted rape. Giovanni’s crimes eventually become clear to all, including Anna’s fiancé, Don Ottavio; and in the end, cosmic powers at work ensure a kind of divine justice: “Questo è il fin di chi fa mal e de’ perfidi la morte alla vita è sempre ugual” (Such is the end of one who does evil and his death is like his life) sing Giovanni’s antagonists as they bring the curtain down with the concluding sextet — one of those moments of music touched by divinity for which there is no explanation other than sheer genius.

Shades of the Epstein files — not to mention the scandals engulfing the current president and a certain notoriously predatory former governor as well as a British prince of the blood royal — in a work written 238 years ago. I saw this production with friends new to “Don Giovanni” and they were struck by its themes of gender and class; it could well be called the opera of the #MeToo moment or even of the erstwhile #OccupyWallStreet movement; a production needs no modern dress or other modernization for intelligent and informed audience members to make such connections in their own minds.

Van Hove’s decision to costume the cast in modern dress neither added nor detracted anything from the basic drama, though putting Giovanni, Anna and Elvira in 18th century costume in the first act finale seemed  intended to make some sort of point not obvious to this viewer; even odder, given the period costumes employed in the scene, those three ‘mascherati’ did not wear masks — compelling the ‘Met Titles’ (the subtitles on the back of the chair in front of the audience member) to omit reference to them as masked guests. The Brutalist architecture in the set in which all the action takes place until the finale was crudely effective but the only truly impressive staging was that of the dénouement — with demonic creatures projected against a backdrop that reminded me of those in “Le Jardin des Délices” (“The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch). Oddly enough, Met Titles repeatedly translated ‘cavaliere’ as ‘gentleman’ even though there is a word for ‘gentleman’ in Italian (‘gentiluomo’) — softening the class conflict inherent in Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto — when the more accurate translation would be ‘aristocrat.’

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted efficiently in a production that is truly a rara avis — a cast of “Don Giovanni” without a single weak lead: Kathleen O’Mara (Donna Anna) and Janai Brugger (Donna Elvira) had medium-sized voices that only seemed small in comparison with the large voices of Hera Hyesang Park (Zerlina), Ryan Speedo Green (Don Giovanni), Adam Plachetka (Leporello) and Ben Bliss (Don Ottavio). Green made a suave and commanding Giovanni and Plachetka made the most of the comic possibilities in a role that takes on increasing importance and dramatic weight as the drama proceeds. O’Mara delivered emotional weight in her ‘vendetta’ aria “Or sai chi l’onore” and an elegant line in “Non mi dir,” Anna’s two arias only marred by a few strained high notes when her voice became somewhat shrill and unfocused. Brugger demonstrated deft comic timing as Elvira and skillfully negotiated the difficult passages in “Mi tradì.” William Guanbo Su carried off Masetto’s arias with athletic aplomb as a very butch country bumpkin. Adam Palka was a commanding Commendatore, though the director’s inexplicable decision to have him walk around the stage instead of appearing as the head of a statue in “O, statua gentillissima” diminished the impact of the chilling invitation to Don Giovanni to dine with him. To my ear, the two standouts vocally were Park and Bliss: the Korean soprano had an unusually powerful voice for someone cast in a soubrette role and articulated Zerlina’s two arias with the strength of a spinto voice and the clarity and adroit skill of a soprano d’agilità. And the one tenor in the cast was the best Ottavio I have ever heard; the da capo ornamentations of his “Dalla sua pace” and his “Il mio tesoro” were superbly elegant and sung with baritonal strength and depth without any apparent strain in reaching the high notes; Bliss also played Ottavio as a passionate partner to his beloved Anna, avoiding the usual wimpy characterization of her perennially frustrated amato bene.

The renowned German theologian Karl Barth famously said, “It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach; I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” ends with a startling vision of a vicious sexual predator being dragged down into hell with some of the most heavenly music ever written and one could hardly find a better starting point for an exploration of Mozartean opera than this superbly sung and wonderfully engaging revival of Ivo van Hove’s Met production of this immortal masterpiece.

Pauline Park is an activist and writer based in Queens and has written widely on politics and the arts.

…a musicological note on “Don Giovanni”:

Mozart established the very concept of an operatic repertory with “Le Nozze di Figaro” (The Marriage of Figaro) in 1986 — the first opera never to leave the repertoire; he followed this with the second of his four operatic masterpieces, calling “Don Giovanni” a ‘dramma giacoso’; today, we might call it a ‘dramedy’; the genius was his use of the language of opera buffa (comic opera) to create a large-scale architectonic and for the first time in opera, dramatic movement through ensembles; “Figaro” may thus be called the first true music drama in history and “Don Giovanni” the second, skillfully blending elements of the by then old-fashioned opera seria (‘serious’ or tragic opera). Donna Anna and Don Ottavio are characters straight out of opera seria, while Zerlina, Masetto and Leporello are stock opera buffa characters. Donna Elvira is essentially an opera buffa character as demonstrated by her association with the ‘buffo’ keys of E-flat and B-flat; Don Giovanni has three arias but it is only through the ensembles and his interactions with the other characters that he reveals his true character. As Charles Rosen writes in his classic and never surpassed analysis of the music of Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, “The Classical Style,” Mozart tonal key relationships and the sonata allegro form that Haydn created in order to forge this extraordinary and revolutionary language of music drama; how ironic that Haydn himself never used it in his own operas.

“Così Fan Tutte” is the third of the operas with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte and is every bit the equal of “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” even if there is nothing as overtly political in the last of the da Ponte operas which significantly is the only one that is entirely original to da Ponte. It would be Emanuel Schikaneder who would write the libretto to Mozart’s last opera and “Die Zauberflöte” would be both the culmination of his operatic career as well as a distinct break from the three great Italian operas. Others would follow who arguably equalled Mozart’s achievements in music drama but none has ever surpassed them.

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(photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro for the New York Times)

I’m posting the full text of this article not because the NYT reporter gets it right — the thesis that Nicholas Confessore is pushing is profoundly wrong-headed in my view — but because it is an important even if fatally flawed analysis of the steps that led to the defeat over Skrmetti. There is much that I could say about this but I’ll simply say while it’s true that pure self-definition coupled with an emphasis on unhindered access to gender-affirming care created the perfect pretext for a right-wing Supreme Court majority to uphold Tennessee’s unjustified ban on gender-affirming care for legal minors, the majority opinion was inevitable given the composition of the court regardless of what arguments Chase Strangio presented in oral arguments…

How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost
The inside story of the case that could set the movement back a generation.
By Nicholas Confessore
Nicholas Confessore is an investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine. For this article, he reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and interviewed former Biden administration officials, lawyers at L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups and the A.C.L.U. and dozens of civil rights experts and current and former L.G.B.T.Q. activists.

New York Times
19 June 2025

One day last December, a clutch of dark-suited lawyers descended the steps of the Supreme Court to a hero’s welcome. The lawyers, from the American Civil Liberties Union, had that morning joined counterparts from the Biden administration in asking the court to block a Tennessee law that bars doctors from providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery to young people who feel that their bodies are the wrong sex. In the plaza outside the court, L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups had turned out hundreds of supporters, who hugged, cheered and waved rainbow and pink-and-blue flags. Club music filled the air, clashing against the country songs blasted by a smaller group of counterprotesters. Photographers roamed, capturing images and videos that would later populate the A.C.L.U.’s social media feeds.

Later, in a private briefing for the group’s top donors, an A.C.L.U. official declared victory. “We set out to deliver a clear message to the Supreme Court that law, science and the court of public opinion are absolutely on our side,” she said. “And I have to tell you: Boy did we demonstrate that yesterday.” Another A.C.L.U. executive, posting on Instagram, declared that “HISTORY WAS MADE, Y’ALL!!” — referring not to the case, exactly, but to a different milestone: Chase Strangio, an A.C.L.U. lawyer and burgeoning celebrity of the cultural left, had just become the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the court. When Strangio himself addressed the crowd that day, the particulars of the case, known as United States v. Skrmetti, receded even further. What mattered more, he suggested, was that after generations at the margin of American life, transgender people had forced the court to reckon with their existence. “Regardless of the outcome in June, trans and nonbinary people have always been here,” Strangio said. “We are in it together. Our power only grows.”

By most other measures, however, the movement for transgender rights was approaching its nadir. Weeks earlier, Donald J. Trump had swept to re-election, buoyed by tens of millions of dollars in attack ads asserting that his opponent, Kamala Harris, was for “they/them,” not “you.” Post-election polling showed that even most Democrats believed that doctors should not prescribe puberty blockers and hormones to minors — the treatments at the heart of the Skrmetti case. While Joe Biden framed transgender equality as “the civil rights issue of our time” and fought for a broad expansion of transgender rights, Trump set out to eradicate them.

Since taking office, he has sought to strip trans people of the right to choose the sex marker on their passports and bar them from the military, arguing that they inherently lack the integrity and moral fitness to serve — that their very identity is a dishonorable lie. He has threatened to withhold federal funding from health care providers that continue to offer blockers, cross-sex hormones or transition surgery to minors. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” one executive order asserted. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding Tennessee’s ban in a 6-to-3 decision. In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. It effectively closed the door on extending new constitutional protections to trans people. Some advocates fear that Skrmetti could open the door to banning medical transition for adults and perhaps other health care that some conservatives oppose, like birth control or in vitro fertilization — even vaccines. The fate of a once-obscure medical treatment could have profound consequences for American law.

What makes the defeat all the more striking is the remarkable string of victories the broader L.G.B.T.Q. movement was winning until a few years ago. Tailoring its message to reach skeptical audiences, careful to ride near the crest of shifting public sentiment, it pursued incremental legal and regulatory wins that, ultimately, sparked deep social change. Beginning in the 2010s, gay people won the right to marry and, along with trans people, serve openly in the military. The movement defeated “bathroom bills” aimed at trans people in states like North Carolina and Texas, persuading even some Republicans that such measures were unnecessary and cruel. Just five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that employees could not be fired for being gay or transgender. But with Skrmetti, the movement bet its future on a far more fraught question: whether children have a constitutional right to treatments that halt and redirect their physical adolescence.

Not long ago, the idea that a major Supreme Court case would turn on medical care for transgender children might have seemed far-fetched. But during the last decade, as L.G.B.T.Q. groups were notching victory after victory, the number of adolescents identifying as transgender roughly doubled; it is now estimated to encompass roughly 3 percent of American high schoolers. A small but growing portion of those young people sought medical treatment for gender dysphoria, the diagnostic term for the distress people experience when their physical bodies do not align with their own sense of self. To many clinicians and L.G.B.T.Q. activists, these treatments were not only uncontroversial but transformative, an innovation that could set more young trans people on the road to happiness. Yet by 2021, when Arkansas became the first state to ban pediatric gender treatments, something had begun to shift. Not for the first time in the long arc toward L.G.B.T.Q. equality, the breaking point of wider acceptance was children.

Within two years, nearly a dozen other states, including Tennessee, followed with bans of their own. In challenging these laws, L.G.B.T.Q. groups and the Biden administration hoped not only to expand transgender rights, but to protect medical treatments that many trans people view as lifesaving. Yet in conversations this year with dozens of legal experts, activists, and other veterans of the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. equality, I encountered deep apprehension that taking Tennessee to the nation’s highest court had been a strategic error — one symptomatic of broader problems.

In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the court agreed to hear the case, according to one person briefed on the conversations. On the outside, I heard rising criticism of the strategic and political judgments animating the A.C.L.U.’s litigation — muted by fear that voicing those criticisms more openly, amid the depredations of Trump’s second term, would only give the right more ammunition. “There are a lot of conversations happening right now,” said Dana Beyer, a physician and longtime trans activist in Maryland. “People know the movement is stuck. They know we’ve gone too far. They know we’ve lost the thread.”

For other trans activists and their allies, Skrmetti is the culmination of a powerful Trump-era backlash against the entire progressive project of expanded rights and consciousness around gender identity, artfully stoked by right-wing politicians and abetted by biased media coverage. “I didn’t pick this fight around trans rights,” Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, told me in an interview not long before the decision. “The right-wing conservatives of the MAGA G.O.P. have made this one of their cause célèbre issues as a way to kind of scapegoat individuals, as a way to score cheap political points.”

Romero cast the lawsuits over pediatric gender medicine as the logical next step in his organization’s much longer battle to defend personal freedom. “We’re not a think tank,” he said. “We are responding to demands for justice of people who walk into our front door.” Since 2021, he noted, more than 1,500 bills affecting trans people had been introduced in Congress and state legislatures, addressing pronoun usage, school sports, bathrooms and much more. Skrmetti, Romero argued, was “literally a life-or-death matter” — a case not only worth taking to the Supreme Court, but “the best case in the transgender rights docket.”

Others, however, saw the Skrmetti case as a tragic gamble built on flawed politics and uncertain science. Over the last decade, they told me, the movement was consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn’t grasp or support, radicalizing its politics just as the culture wars reignited and the Supreme Court began moving further right. And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts.

Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama’s ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit against Tennessee. “This case exposes a lot of ethical problems in the practice of medicine,” a law professor with expertise in sex-discrimination law told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of blowback from students and colleagues. “For Skrmetti to be the next step in a progress narrative — an incrementalist would say, This is way far from where we ought to be.”

Along the road to Skrmetti, some believe, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement drove itself toward a cliff — and took the Democratic Party with it, chaining the Biden administration to one of the most divisive issues in American politics at a moment of shifting medical consensus and fierce polarization. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes in the history of trans activism,” said Brianna Wu, a trans woman who serves on the board of Rebellion PAC, a Democratic political-action committee. Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring. It may also have set their movement back a generation.

A few rows back from the lawyers arguing in court in December, wearing a new black suit and a lavender tie, sat one of the plaintiffs, a teenager from Nashville known in court documents as L.W. From a very young age, L.W. struggled to feel comfortable as a boy. By fourth grade, the distress had grown worse; L.W. avoided changing in front of others and began wearing baggy clothes. “I felt like I was trapped in the wrong body,” L.W. recounted in a declaration filed in court in Tennessee. “My guy friends at school were talking about wanting to grow mustaches and beards. I remember thinking that was something I did not want to happen to me.” When a cousin came out as transgender the following year, L.W. felt a sense of recognition.

At around 12, L.W. began using “she” and “her” pronouns. She grew her hair long, changed her name and began wearing girls’ clothes more often. In December 2020, L.W. began to see a therapist, who made a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. She asked her parents to explore medical treatment, and the following August, after turning 13 and feeling “terrified about going through male puberty,” she was prescribed blockers by a doctor at Vanderbilt children’s hospital. Over months of careful consultation with L.W. and her parents, according to the declaration, her doctor described the potential risks and side effects of medical transition. After another year, L.W. began taking estrogen, to ensure that her body would “go through the changes that other girls’ bodies go through during puberty.” Her family, teachers and classmates were supportive. As the treatment progressed, her dysphoria mostly went away.

The course of treatment provided to L.W. was pioneered by gender clinicians in the Netherlands. As a group, trans adults attempt suicide at extraordinarily high rates; the Dutch researchers theorized that the stigma and depression they observed in their older patients might have been avoided if they began to transition much earlier, before puberty shaped their bodies. Boys who take estrogen can begin to grow breasts; girls taking testosterone can develop deeper voices and coarser, darker facial and body hair. In the early 2010s, the researchers published studies demonstrating, for the first time, that medical intervention could improve the well-being of some adolescents with dysphoria. Drugs that blocked puberty, they argued, could give dysphoric young people time to think while exploring the possibility of what was then called “sex reassignment” with cross-sex hormones and, eventually, surgery.

As late as 2008, the researchers had suppressed puberty in fewer than 120 children. But elements of what became known as “the Dutch protocol” were already spreading widely in other Western countries. In 2012, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) incorporated the Dutch protocol into its standards of care, best-practice guidelines meant to serve as a reference for physicians, insurers and others. WPATH recommended an “extensive exploration of psychological, family and social issues” before any medical interventions in adolescents and the delay of genital surgeries — such as the creation of a penis or a vagina — until legal adulthood. Over the next decade, medical associations around the world would issue their own, often similar guidelines.

It was right as this new consensus was emerging that gender clinicians began to see a sharp rise in adolescent patients, most of them female at birth. Most had not reported gender distress until their early teens, after beginning to develop physical signs of puberty. A disproportionate number had other mental-health conditions, such as autism or depression.

How the profession responded to this surge was guided, in part, by changed understandings of sex and gender. Psychiatrists who helped formulate the idea of “gender identity” originally argued that if sex was biological, gender identity was psychological and subjective — “the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs,” as one early paper put it. For decades, “trans” usually referred to people of one sex who sought medical treatment to help them pass as someone of the opposite sex. Within activist circles, though, that idea began to give way to a concept called self-ID, rooting gender identity in bodily autonomy. Activists argued that all people had the right to determine their own gender, regardless of how they dressed or whether they opted for medical transition. Your self-identified gender — not your physical body — should determine what appeared on your driver’s license and which bathrooms you could access.

In the wider culture, concepts of gender were becoming dizzyingly capacious, even confused. Challenging the idea of a rigid male-female binary, academic theorists detached gender from sex entirely, then reimagined it as an infinite spectrum. By the mid-2010s, when Time magazine declared that America had reached a “transgender tipping point,” a trans person might identify as male, female or neither. The gender of a “gender fluid” person might shift from month to month, or day to day. The phrase “sex assigned at birth” — originally devised to classify babies born with ambiguous genitalia or other rare congenital disorders — was now employed to suggest that biological sex was arbitrary, even a kind of fiction. Gender, not sex, was the inherent quality.

This new understanding of gender fueled rising calls to change how doctors approached medical transition. Critics inside and outside the medical establishment argued that overzealous “gate-keeping,” like extended psychological assessments, stigmatized trans people and slowed their access to hormones or surgery. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association eliminated the formal diagnosis of “gender identity disorder,” with its suggestion of pathology, and replaced it with gender dysphoria, a diagnosis with looser criteria. A few years later, WPATH issued a position statement that treatments for dysphoria were a “medical necessity,” the term used by insurers to categorize care they will cover.

In the relatively small community of pediatric gender medicine, physicians increasingly advocated a “gender-affirming” approach, in which clinicians should generally defer to a child’s self-declared identity. Some doctors, citing the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior among trans youths, argued that failing to affirm a child’s expressed gender would put their life in danger. “We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?'” Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the country’s leading gender physicians, told ABC News. In 2018, the gender-affirming model was endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, one of the country’s most influential medical groups.

By then, practitioners like Olson-Kennedy were arguing that trans-identifying children — even those whose dysphoria might be entwined with other mental-health problems — didn’t need extended psychological assessments any more than trans adults did. (“I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin,” she told The Atlantic in 2018.) Some doctors and activists went further. In a 2019 journal article, the trans bioethicist Florence Ashley argued that trans people, including “older teenagers,” should not require a formal diagnosis of dysphoria before gaining access to cross-sex hormones. Rather than relieving supposed distress, Ashley wrote, patients might be seeking “gender euphoria” or “creative transfiguration,” which “sees the body as a gendered art piece that can be made ours through transition-related interventions.”

When Tennessee passed S.B. 1 in 2023, joining a legislative chorus of Republican-controlled states across the country, it was not simply banning gender-affirming care. The state was, in a sense, taking aim at an entire way of understanding — and describing — human identity. Asserting that Tennessee had an interest in “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” the law prohibited health care intended to allow a minor to live as a “purported identity” inconsistent with their birth sex or to treat the “purported discomfort” caused by dysphoria. Lawmakers framed the growing availability of gender-affirming care as a crisis, darkly linking it to child abuse. L.W.’s treatments were now illegal in Tennessee. Her parents scrambled to find out-of-state doctors; they even considered moving. Instead, they sued.

In court papers filed that April on behalf of L.W. and two other children, a legal team led by the A.C.L.U. and Lambda Legal, an L.G.B.T.Q. litigation group, argued that Tennessee’s ban violated the Constitution. Tennessee would be represented by the state’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti.

“L.W. is a 15-year-old girl,” her lawyers wrote, someone who at birth was “designated as male” — a phrase, they advised the court, that was “more precise than the term ‘biological sex’.” Because the law would allow L.W. to take blockers or hormones for reasons other than her desire to live as a girl — such as treating an unrelated condition like precocious puberty — it discriminated against her on the basis of her sex, violating the Constitution’s equal-protection clause. The state’s discrimination could not survive constitutional scrutiny, the lawyers argued, in part because L.W.’s care was “medically necessary” treatment guided by “widely accepted guidelines” like WPATH’s standards of care. “Decades of clinical experience and research,” they wrote, “have shown that gender-affirming health care is safe, effective and improves the health and well-being of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”

Six days later, Biden’s Department of Justice filed paperwork to join the ACLU’s case.

That partnership was the culmination of a profound generational and political transformation within the L.G.B.T.Q. movement. In the 2010s, as a favorable Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage became increasingly likely, movement leaders faced pressure to shift their focus to trans people, long the coalition’s junior partners. Like their gay allies, trans activists wanted laws against hate crimes and the right to serve openly in the military. But trans rights also encompassed novel issues. For those who medically transitioned, for example, simply living as a trans person could require lifelong treatment; widening access to care meant lobbying the government to put more pressure on doctors and insurers.

For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that “saved my life,” as he later wrote. “When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating,” Strangio wrote. “It is survival.” He vowed to work “to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility.”

Like Strangio, the younger people going to work at L.G.B.T.Q. groups leaned further left than their older colleagues. Often identifying as queer — a label that could connote radical politics as much as any sexual or gender identity — they resented the incremental, assimilationist politics that had won the right to same-sex marriage. They sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal — to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them. Strangio wrestled with how to achieve justice for trans and other marginalized people through a system he believed was designed to subjugate them. In interviews and on social media, he has described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with “social power and capital and political power” and to the “fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.” The turn to trans rights would ultimately reopen an old fissure in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement: whether to seek civic equality — or liberation.

In 2016, North Carolina passed legislation requiring people to use bathrooms and locker rooms reserved for their “biological sex,” setting off the country’s first major clash over transgender rights. When a coalition of L.G.B.T.Q. groups began planning an ad campaign, message testing showed that most people were unfamiliar with the movement’s terminology and the physical realities of being trans; the phrase “assigned male at birth” left audiences confused and skeptical. To win them over, the coalition created ads featuring a trans woman with long hair and conventionally feminine clothing. In a spot that first aired on Fox News, the woman is barred from a restaurant bathroom by an angry manager, who backs down after two other women — messaging “validators” the audience could relate to — intercede. “I was born with a male body,” the trans woman says in a voice-over. “But inside, I always knew I was female.”

More than 20 L.G.B.T.Q. rights groups signed on to the messaging plan. The A.C.L.U. did not. Strangio, working on an A.C.L.U. team suing North Carolina, objected to the framing. According to two people present for the discussion, Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” Before the advertisement aired, Strangio elaborated on his critique in an article in Slate. “Many advocates defend the use of the ‘born male’ or ‘born with a male body’ narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand,” Strangio wrote. “Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change.”

Though North Carolina lawmakers eventually repealed the bathroom bill, it was Strangio’s style of politics that began to prevail within the movement. Activists on the left believed that achieving trans rights required a more fundamental social reimagining of sex and gender. There was less and less room for competing views. One person involved in the North Carolina campaign described increasingly tense conversations around the doctrine of self-ID and single-sex spaces. Some argued that women had no right to feel uncomfortable sharing a prison cell or a locker room with a trans woman: Such concerns only validated the trope that trans women were threatening.

Online and off, trans activists attacked journalists and academics who explored whether the sudden rise in dysphoria among teenagers was linked to social media and peer influence or reported on “detransitioners” — people who abandoned a trans identity and sometimes regretted undergoing medical transition. When the journalist Abigail Shrier published her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” — casting the rise in dysphoria among teenage girls as a form of social contagion — Strangio tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

Yet even as it became more doctrinaire, the movement for trans rights was gaining ground. During Trump’s first term, groups like the A.C.L.U. and Lambda Legal were pulling in record donations, turbocharged by the spirit of anti-Trump resistance. Conservative groups struggled to find purchase in the transgender rights battles, even on geographic and political turf they controlled: In 2020, L.G.B.T.Q. advocates won a surprise victory at the Supreme Court, in Bostock v. Clayton County.

The A.C.L.U. represented the only trans plaintiff in the case, a Detroit funeral director named Aimee Stephens, who was fired after telling her employer that she planned to begin living and working openly as a woman. Her case was consolidated with those of two gay men, and the plaintiffs’ lawyers asked the court to rule that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination on the basis of characteristics like race and sex, also protected trans and gay people, as lower courts across the country had ruled. Writing for the 6-to-3 majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch proclaimed it “impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

For all of Gorsuch’s sweeping language, Bostock was, in many respects, a narrow ruling. As it applied only to Title VII, it set no constitutional precedent. It explicitly disavowed judgment on other statutes or issues, like who had the right to use which bathrooms. Instead, the justice presented Bostock as a straightforward, common-sense reading of an old law.

Indeed, as Strangio recounted in an interview later that year, the lawyers had spent months workshopping just such a path to victory, ultimately landing on a simple argument: All the justices needed to accept was that Stephens would not have been fired for asking to wear women’s clothing at work if her sex was female.

“So, fine,” Strangio explained. “Say it’s assigned sex at birth, say it’s whatever you want — but it’s because of sex.” At oral argument, another A.C.L.U. lawyer reassured Gorsuch, who was considered the key vote, that protecting trans people would not lead to social upheaval — assurances that Strangio privately chafed at but that he recognized as tactically effective. “We wanted them to apply the law,” Strangio said. “And we wanted them, particularly Gorsuch, to believe that it wasn’t a big deal.”

Yet in practice, Strangio and other civil rights lawyers believed that Bostock was a very big deal. In their view, they had successfully maneuvered the Supreme Court — a “vile institution,” as Strangio put it — into setting a far-reaching judicial precedent. At the time, other pathways to expand rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people were narrowing. Despite progress in left-leaning states, legislation to enshrine housing, workplace and other protections at the federal level had stalled in Congress, in part because L.G.B.T.Q. groups refused to consider carve-outs — demanded by otherwise sympathetic Republicans — to protect religious institutions. Bostock seemed to offer a way to attain those rights without the compromise and horse-trading of legislation.

Dilan Esper, a California litigator who worked for the A.C.L.U. early in his career, told me he believed that his former colleagues had misread the court. “Bostock built up the confidence of the trans rights legal movement that they could still win major cases even as Trump appointments were shifting the federal judiciary to the right,” Esper said. “But it was always a strategy that carried significant risks, and we’re seeing that play out now.”

Strangio’s confidence, though, was shared by veteran Democratic policymakers preparing to join the incoming Biden administration. Biden had been among the first Democratic politicians of his generation to embrace trans rights. His commitment was rooted in personal relationships — Sarah McBride, now the first openly transgender member of Congress, is a longtime family friend — and in campaign-trail conversations with trans people and their families, former aides told me. For Biden and many of his aides, protecting this vulnerable group was the natural next step toward full civil rights for all Americans.

In January 2021, the new administration initiated an aggressive new phase of L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy, one that would employ many of the same tools as Trump’s searing counterattack four years later: executive orders, arcane federal rules and legal threats. On his first day in office, Biden signed an order mandating that executive agencies interpret the word “sex” in all federal antidiscrimination laws to include “gender identity” — a term that Gorsuch’s reasoning had carefully avoided. A slew of other orders and proposed rules would follow, instructing prisons, schools, the State Department and other institutions to recognize a person’s gender identity without condition — even a child’s. More or less by fiat, the administration had deemed self-ID the law of the land.

But a powerful counterattack was already taking shape. When conservative operatives tested messages around gender issues, they found a deep undercurrent of public unease around children. Many voters who had no problem with gay marriage, or with trans people using the bathroom of their choice, were more sensitive to the question of biology and physical advantage in school sports. By 2021, dozens of states were moving to bar trans athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. At around the same time, Republican lawmakers began taking aim at pediatric gender medicine. “There wasn’t much of a difference in where people were on sports than where they were on sex changes for minors,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a conservative advocacy group. “But we couldn’t get politicians to talk about sex changes for kids until the fight around sports got started.”

In the Arkansas General Assembly, one legislator read aloud a Bible passage indicating that women who wore men’s clothing were an “abomination.” Within months of Biden’s inauguration, bills to ban gender-affirming care had been introduced in 18 other states. While some on the academic left had cast biological sex as illusory, the Republican-drafted bills sometimes suggested that gender identity was imaginary and dysphoria a medical fiction. The lawmakers asserted that they were acting to protect children. Alabama’s ban, passed in 2022, also deemed gender-affirming care “unproven” and “poorly studied,” citing potential long-term risks around diminished bone density and fertility.

The A.C.L.U. and L.G.B.T.Q. groups began challenging the bans in court. “I think they genuinely want to take away rights for trans people and kill trans people,” Strangio said in a round-table discussion with other advocates. Challenging Arkansas’ law, A.C.L.U. lawyers wrote that the state had banned safe and effective” care supported by a “well-established medical consensus.” Whatever long-term risks blockers or hormones might carry, they argued, ought to be weighed by children and their parents — not politicians.

But even as the A.C.L.U. and its allies were digging in, several European countries were backing away. In 2020, citing “limited” research data, Finland’s health agency removed surgery from the treatment protocol for minors with dysphoria and restricted the use of blockers and hormones. In February 2021, an effort to replicate the Dutch studies at Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic failed, finding that puberty blockers had little effect on adolescents’ dysphoria or thoughts of self-harm.

The following month, the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence issued a pair of systematic reviews — studies that pool the literature on a treatment and grade the quality of the collected evidence. A pillar of the discipline known as evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews are meant to ensure that doctors’ recommendations are based on objective evidence, not “habit or misguided expert advice,” according to Gordon Guyatt, a professor of health sciences at McMaster University in Canada and a formative figure in the field.

But research on gender-affirming care, NICE’s analysis showed, provided only “very low certainty” evidence that puberty blockers or hormone treatments actually improved patients’ dysphoria. The consensus repeatedly cited by L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups in the United States relied heavily on small-scale observational studies, patient surveys and the professional experience of gender clinicians themselves — a category that evidence-based medicine ranks as least reliable. Many studies were designed in ways that made it difficult to tease out confounding effects, the reviews found, like whether a patient’s mental health had improved because of taking blockers and hormones or because of some other factor. Even the landmark Dutch studies suffered from “high risk of bias.”

Reviews in other countries were yielding similar conclusions. In February 2022, Sweden followed Finland, sharply limiting access to gender-related care for young people. British officials moved to shut down Tavistock and replace it with new regional centers, after a preliminary review by one of the country’s leading pediatricians, Hilary Cass, found that its overwhelmed staff was delivering inconsistent care, under an affirming model for which evidence was “inconclusive both nationally and internationally.”

The shift reflected a growing worry on both sides of the Atlantic that doctors were approving medical intervention for some dysphoric adolescents without the comprehensive assessments meant to ensure that they would benefit from it. Later that year, a Reuters investigation of 18 pediatric gender clinics across the United States would find that not one practiced the kind of lengthy intake assessments called for by the Dutch and incorporated into WPATH’s standards. No countries banned blockers and hormones outright, as Republican-led states were setting out to do. Rather, they sought to channel young patients into more carefully controlled research settings, where questions about the risks and benefits of affirming treatments could be better answered.

But in the face of growing medical debate and political backlash, gender clinicians and their movement allies closed ranks. In October 2021, two prominent WPATH members — Marci Bowers, a surgeon and WPATH’s president-elect, and Erica Anderson, a psychologist and former president of WPATH’s U.S. affiliate, both of them trans women — went public with concerns about the rigor of pediatric gender care and the potential impact of puberty blockers on later sexual function. Soon after, the two groups released a letter to their members opposing “the use of the lay press” as “a forum for the scientific debate of these issues.”

The following year, WPATH released a new version of its standards of care. Known as SOC-8, this eighth version of the organization’s standards was the first to have a stand-alone chapter on adolescent care. Acknowledging the debates happening in public view, the chapter noted that “a key challenge” was “the quality of evidence evaluating the effectiveness” of treatments for young people. “The number of studies is still low,” the authors wrote, “and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood.” Much like earlier standards, SOC-8 strongly recommended that adolescents undergo a “comprehensive assessment” before any medical intervention.

Yet despite the growing restrictions in Europe, WPATH continued to endorse a course of blockers and hormones for adolescents at the beginning of puberty, as had become standard practice at many American clinics. Indeed, the new standards at first explicitly allowed for gender-affirming treatments at earlier ages than in the original Dutch protocol. Teenagers with parental consent could begin taking cross-sex hormones at 14 or even younger, rather than 16. They could also undergo mastectomy by age 15 and most genital surgeries at 17.

Then, shortly after SOC-8 was published online in September 2022, the age minimums were deleted. A notice stated that an incorrect version of the standards had been “published in error.” In an interview with The New York Times some days later, Bowers alluded to a behind-the-scenes dispute over the lowered ages, and to the battles now flaring around gender medicine, saying, “I just think we need more strength for our argument and a better political climate, frankly.”

As the Biden administration grappled with the new bans, several former aides and officials told me, officials there usually deferred to the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups and the medical associations about the scientific questions around gender-affirming care. The administration’s top concern, according to two former aides, was that the bans were so broad that they might limit dysphoric children from even getting therapy. “The internal conversations were entirely about getting kids access to mental health care, and maybe puberty blockers,” one official said. “That is where the president’s head was on these issues: The Republicans are using the power of the state to stop kids who feel gross about their bodies from seeing a therapist.”

Among the administration’s most prominent public voices on gender-affirming care was Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. Levine, a pediatrician and one of Biden’s two highest-ranking openly trans appointees, adopted a maximalist defense. In March 2022, as Alabama’s ban was winding through the Legislature, Levine’s office issued a fact sheet asserting that the treatments had proven clinical benefits for children and adolescents. That April, in a speech urging doctors to fight the bans, Levine seemed to go further, claiming that gender-affirming care broadly was “suicide-prevention care. It improves quality of life, and it saves lives. It is based on decades of study. It is a well-established medical practice.”

At the Justice Department, officials were weighing how and when to deploy the legal might of the federal government. In May, the department joined a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban, in effect turning the Biden administration into a co-plaintiff — a significant escalation. Some legal experts outside the administration told me that they were surprised at the decision to intervene; when the Justice Department involves itself in civil rights cases filed by private plaintiffs, it typically opts to file what is known as a statement of interest, signaling the government’s position on a legal question without committing it fully to the plaintiff’s case.

But Biden officials felt increasing urgency to act — pressure that only grew the following year, as a slew of new bans became law, producing a corresponding flurry of lawsuits. “Every day, we would open the news clips, and there’d be another state getting in the queue,” a former senior Justice Department official said. “It just felt like if the Justice Department didn’t add its weight to this issue, the wave would become a tsunami.” Officials there were confident that at least one of the lawsuits would reach the Supreme Court. When it did, they felt, the Justice Department needed to be involved, not only to signal the administration’s political support but to shape whatever arguments ultimately went before the court.

When Tennessee’s ban passed in February 2023, lawyers in the department’s civil rights division lobbied to move aggressively. The attorney general, Merrick Garland, was at first skeptical. In conversations, Garland and his advisers weighed whether the case was strong enough to merit the time and resources it would consume if the civil rights division were to intervene. Eventually, though, Garland signed off. Most of his team viewed the case as a straightforward matter of civil rights enforcement, built on a legal argument about gender and sex discrimination that administration lawyers — emboldened by Bostock — were already advancing in other kinds of cases around the country. Tennessee was a part of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, where the department believed there were favorable precedents to overturn a state ban.

By then, Strangio and his colleagues were helping litigate legal challenges around the country. The A.C.L.U.’s clout and vast financial resources made it, in effect, the movement’s command center. The cases at first went well. Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. and allied L.G.B.T.Q. groups fighting the bans tended to arrive in court with a phalanx of highly credentialed expert witnesses, backed by amicus briefs from major medical associations. Judges were often dismissive of the physicians mustered by state officials to criticize gender-affirming care.

In ruling to block most of Alabama’s law, a district court reminded state officials of “the uncontradicted record evidence” that “at least 22 major medical associations in the United States endorse transitioning medications” to treat gender dysphoria in minors. In June 2023, a federal judge blocked parts of Tennessee’s law, too, finding that the state had banned medical procedures whose benefits were “well-established.” By that summer, federal judges in a half-dozen states had enjoined bans in whole or part. Strangio was jubilant. “It has been a clear and unanimous rejection of these laws,” he said in an appearance on MSNBC that July. But within weeks, the legal ground began to shake.

In August, a panel of the 11th Circuit lifted the district court’s injunction against Alabama’s law. The next month, a panel of the Sixth Circuit followed suit in Tennessee, in a 2-to-1 opinion written by the circuit’s chief judge, Jeffrey Sutton.

An influential conservative jurist, Sutton appeared profoundly skeptical of the legal and medical arguments advanced by government lawyers and the A.C.L.U. Citing the shifts in Europe, Sutton wrote that medical intervention for trans minors was still a fairly young field — “experimental,” in his view. The scientific uncertainty around blockers and hormones, he argued, made regulating their use presumptively constitutional. “At bottom, the challengers simply disagree with the states’ assessment of the risks and the right response to those risks,” Sutton said. “That does not suffice to invalidate a democratically enacted law.”

He rejected the idea that trans identity should get special constitutional protection, like race or sex. Then he took aim at the left’s expansive reading of Bostock: The Supreme Court’s three-year-old decision on employment rights, Sutton found, had no bearing on the question of gender-affirming care for minors. “A concern about potentially irreversible medical procedures for a child,” Sutton wrote, “is not a form of stereotyping.” More challenges were arriving in circuits across the country, with the potential to tilt the legal landscape even more drastically. Both separately and together, the Biden administration and the A.C.L.U. had to decide how to respond.

Some civil rights experts I spoke with think it was a mistake to take Skrmetti to the Supreme Court. In their view, it was highly unlikely that the court, now with an even larger conservative majority than when it decided Bostock, was prepared to expand constitutional civil rights protections to a new class of Americans — let alone on the grounds of medical transition for minors. “If you get a bad ruling on this, it could be really problematic,” Michael Ulrich, a professor of health law and human rights at Boston University, told me this spring. “If you can’t win a challenge to strike down a gender-affirming care ban, it’s going to be hard to win other cases around trans rights.”

L.G.B.T.Q. groups and the A.C.L.U. might have looked to state courts, seeking incremental wins without the risk of a binding Supreme Court precedent, as the movement had done for years in fighting anti-sodomy laws. They could also have waited for a case on more politically favorable ground, such as restrictions on military service or medical care for trans adults. The A.C.L.U. saw it differently. A few weeks after Sutton’s ruling, the organization petitioned the Supreme Court to review Skrmetti.

In recent months, Strangio and other trans activists have pleaded for broader public solidarity with their cause, arguing that the defense of gender-affirming care is closely intertwined with the defense of reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy for women. But when I asked Romero if the A.C.L.U. had consulted with women’s rights groups before bringing Skrmetti — with its high-stakes claims about sex-discrimination protections — before the Supreme Court, he seemed impatient. “I don’t play ‘Mother May I?’ with a group of sister organizations,” Romero said. “I don’t run a peer-review journal. I make the best decisions for this organization on its own.”

Strangio declined to be interviewed unless I agreed to first discuss the case with him off the record; instead, he answered questions by email. In his view, a Supreme Court case over trans rights — whether medical transition, sports or bathrooms — was inevitable by fall 2023. “The only questions were which case, on what issue and in which term,” he wrote.

Strangio emphasized what he saw as the broader damage that would result if adolescents were barred from medical transition — a perspective I also heard from trans people at other advocacy groups. “Forcing adolescents to undergo physical pubertal changes inconsistent with their gender that may out them as transgender in a world of discrimination and violence, and increase their pain and distress, is both cruel and harmful,” he wrote. For trans people, Strangio seemed to suggest, the choice between accepting these harms and gambling on the Supreme Court was no choice at all.

That still left the question of what the Biden administration — now a party in both cases — would do. In theory, Tennessee was the less developed case. Sutton had issued his ruling off the lower court’s preliminary injunction, on a relatively limited factual record. The Alabama case, by contrast, was a year further along, deep into court-ordered discovery. But the plaintiffs, represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, had asked the full 11th Circuit to review its appellate ruling.

The former senior Justice Department official argued that the Alabama case — awaiting further appellate review and mired in arguments about discovery — wasn’t “a viable vehicle” for Supreme Court review. And once the A.C.L.U. went ahead in Tennessee, this official told me, the Biden administration had to follow. Steering clear of Skrmetti “would have telegraphed loudly to the court that the department didn’t have the courage of its convictions,” the official said. Not long after the A.C.L.U. asked the Supreme Court to hear the Tennessee case, the department filed its own petition.

The solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who would argue the case before the court, was a friend and ally of Strangio’s. In 2020, as a lawyer in private practice, she worked closely with Strangio on a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s ban on trans athletes — the country’s first. Now, in petitioning the court, Prelogar and her colleagues made claims for gender-affirming care that even WPATH had not. “Overwhelming evidence establishes that appropriate gender-affirming treatment with puberty blockers and hormones directly and substantially improves the physical and psychological well-being of transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria,” they wrote.

Strangio declined to be interviewed unless I agreed to first discuss the case with him off the record; instead, he answered questions by email. In his view, a Supreme Court case over trans rights — whether medical transition, sports or bathrooms — was inevitable by fall 2023. “The only questions were which case, on what issue and in which term,” he wrote.

Strangio emphasized what he saw as the broader damage that would result if adolescents were barred from medical transition — a perspective I also heard from trans people at other advocacy groups. “Forcing adolescents to undergo physical pubertal changes inconsistent with their gender that may out them as transgender in a world of discrimination and violence, and increase their pain and distress, is both cruel and harmful,” he wrote. For trans people, Strangio seemed to suggest, the choice between accepting these harms and gambling on the Supreme Court was no choice at all.

That still left the question of what the Biden administration — now a party in both cases — would do. In theory, Tennessee was the less developed case. Sutton had issued his ruling off the lower court’s preliminary injunction, on a relatively limited factual record. The Alabama case, by contrast, was a year further along, deep into court-ordered discovery. But the plaintiffs, represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, had asked the full 11th Circuit to review its appellate ruling.

The former senior Justice Department official argued that the Alabama case — awaiting further appellate review and mired in arguments about discovery — wasn’t “a viable vehicle” for Supreme Court review. And once the A.C.L.U. went ahead in Tennessee, this official told me, the Biden administration had to follow. Steering clear of Skrmetti “would have telegraphed loudly to the court that the department didn’t have the courage of its convictions,” the official said. Not long after the A.C.L.U. asked the Supreme Court to hear the Tennessee case, the department filed its own petition.

The solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who would argue the case before the court, was a friend and ally of Strangio’s. In 2020, as a lawyer in private practice, she worked closely with Strangio on a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s ban on trans athletes — the country’s first. Now, in petitioning the court, Prelogar and her colleagues made claims for gender-affirming care that even WPATH had not. “Overwhelming evidence establishes that appropriate gender-affirming treatment with puberty blockers and hormones directly and substantially improves the physical and psychological well-being of transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria,” they wrote.

Like the A.C.L.U., Prelogar and her colleagues argued that transgender people should be recognized as a protected class under the Constitution, like women or racial minorities. But even if the justices wouldn’t go that far, the lawyers argued, they should find that Tennessee’s ban discriminated against trans people on the basis of their sex, violating the Constitution’s equal-protection clause, which the court has long interpreted as requiring heightened scrutiny of government policies that treat people differently based on sex. The logic of Bostock and other lower-court decisions around gender, they argued, could be found in the Constitution, too.

In some respects, the department’s choice to seek Supreme Court review was simple. Sutton’s ruling had laid out a sweeping rationale that, if accepted, could allow states to ban “any kind of health care if there’s any kind of doubt or uncertainty” about the treatments, Ulrich told me. In the government’s view, Sutton had also proposed to weaken existing constitutional precedents that limit the government from discriminating on the basis of sex — a serious worry for any Democratic administration.

Yet taking Tennessee to the Supreme Court was also risky. The court has not recognized a new protected class in decades. And unlike the civil rights law in Bostock, the Constitution does not contain language about sex discrimination that a conservative judge like Gorsuch could extend to trans people.

Alabama’s lawyers had a different theory of the Justice Department’s choices. In the weeks after Sutton’s ruling for Tennessee, WPATH was in the final stages of turning over thousands of internal emails and other documents to Alabama — documents that remained sealed, but to which Justice Department lawyers would have had access. The case was set for trial that spring, offering opponents an opportunity to more fully air the growing scientific debate around gender-affirming care.

In an amicus brief filed later with the Supreme Court in Skrmetti, Alabama argued that the Justice Department had “strategically” sought Supreme Court review in Tennessee. Even before the court had begun to consider that request, the state pointed out, the department had asked the judge in Alabama to shut down further discovery and pause the case. Lawyers for the state believed that the Biden administration, fearful of what court-ordered discovery was unearthing in Alabama, was trying to make sure Tennessee got to the Supreme Court first.

The Biden administration was not just trying to defend gender-affirming care, Alabama contended. It was trying to hide evidence that showed how flawed WPATH’s standards really were — and hide the administration’s secret role in their creation.

That material began emerging into view last summer, after lawyers for Alabama moved for summary judgment in favor of its ban — and in the process began to make public thousands of internal emails and other documents revealing how WPATH’s standards were drafted in the first place. What doctors and lawyers around the country presented as a set of meticulous scientific guidelines, the lawyers for Alabama argued, were drafted and contorted to win the very political and legal disputes in which it was now being brandished.

“While we value clinical expertise, the battle for legitimacy is being fought in controlled studies,” Eli Coleman, chairman of the SOC-8 team and a psychologist, wrote to colleagues in 2023 as Tennessee and other states were preparing to approve their bans. “All of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations.”

SOC-8 had asserted that “a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Alabama’s legal filings, though, claimed that WPATH had tried to squelch some of its own findings on the question, fearing that they could be wielded against the expansion of transition care.

The group had contracted with Karen Robinson, an epidemiologist and evidence-based medicine expert at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, to conduct systematic reviews for SOC-8’s authors. By August 2020, Robinson was preparing to submit to medical journals three manuscripts based on her reviews of hormone therapy for adolescents and adults. Within days, WPATH’s board approved a new policy mandating that it approve any study based on its data. In a subsequent email, Robinson told an official at the Department of Health and Human Services that her team’s research had produced “little to no evidence about children and adolescents” and complained that WPATH had been “trying to restrict our ability to publish” the reports.

WPATH officials circulated the new policy in an email that fall to Robinson and SOC-8 authors, stating that any manuscripts based on her reports would now be “scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care.” At least one manuscript Robinson sought to publish never saw the light of day.

Citing legal battles over gender medicine, other documents showed, clinicians working on SOC-8 urged colleagues to avoid phrases like “insufficient evidence” and “limited data,” and to emphasize terms that would assume totemic importance in courts across the country, like “medical necessity” and “evidence based.” As SOC-8 authors discussed stating that gender-affirming care for adolescents was a “medical necessity,” one noted how such statements could be “a tool for our attorneys to use in defending access to care.” The entire SOC-8 draft, Alabama later pointed out in a court filing, had been reviewed by a lawyer for GLAD Law, one of the L.G.B.T.Q. groups now suing the state.

Over email this spring, WPATH told me that Alabama had presented a misleading portrait of the group’s work. In stating that systematic reviews of adolescent treatment were “not possible,” a representative said, the adolescent chapter was intended to refer to assessment practices, not blockers and hormone therapy. The publication policy enacted in 2020 was meant only to ensure that research emerging from SOC-8 met “the highest standards of scientific integrity and is presented with appropriate clinical context.” Nor had it blocked Robinson from publishing any of her reviews in medical journals, the representative said. “We do not know why other reviews were not published,” the representative told me. (Robinson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Critics of gender-affirming care, WPATH told me, were holding it to “a harmful double standard.” The collective experience of gender clinicians who had seen young people benefit from adolescent transition, in WPATH’s view, was a valid basis for its recommendations. “Other clinical fields are permitted to use expert consensus and real-world evidence to fill gaps in the research base,” the representative wrote. “Gender care should not be held to a higher or politicized threshold of evidence simply because of who it serves.”

In fending off attacks on gender-affirming care, however, WPATH had itself allowed politics to dictate some of its recommendations. Levine, the Biden Health and Human Services Department official, had been instrumental in WPATH’s mysterious last-minute deletion of the age minimums in SOC-8, documents uncovered by Alabama showed.

After seeing an early copy of SOC-8, Levine and her staff began pressuring WPATH to drop the new age minimums, arguing that “specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” as the group’s president relayed to colleagues in July 2022. That September, the American Academy of Pediatrics — which had also been provided a preview — followed suit, threatening to publicly oppose SOC-8 if the age minimums were not deleted.

The demands set off a furious debate within WPATH. Conservative politicians might attack WPATH for recommending medical intervention at younger ages than before. But Bowers, the group’s president-elect, pointed out that without specific age requirements, “insurers may not grant authorization” for pediatric care. Others worried about capitulating to political pressures in what WPATH intended to present as an “evidence-based” document.

Just as WPATH’s internal emails began trickling into public view, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Skrmetti. Not long after, Levine’s requests to WPATH were reported by The Times. White House officials were blindsided, several told me. Though Levine would later tell Biden aides that she had been trying to protect the president, the West Wing saw it differently: Her request could suggest that the administration thought there should be no minimum ages at all. “Everyone was like, holy cow — did Rachel Levine really go out and lobby for 9-year-olds to get surgery?” one former Biden aide told me. (Levine’s spokesman says she based “all policy recommendations on the best available science.”)

Though still rare, transition surgery for minors was politically toxic. On the campaign trail, Trump had claimed that children were getting sex-change operations at school. Biden was fighting for re-election and scheduled to debate Trump later that week. The scientific debate around gender-affirming care had already been upended once that spring, after Hilary Cass, in a final report submitted to British health officials, declared pediatric gender medicine “an area of remarkably weak evidence.” Gender-affirming treatments were not being singled out for lack of rigor, Cass said in interviews, but rather stood out for their weak clinical basis even compared with other areas of pediatric medicine.

There was also growing tension between the A.C.L.U. and the Justice Department, three former government officials told me. (The A.C.L.U. and a spokeswoman for Prelogar denied this account.) In later briefs to the court, the administration would brush off the Alabama revelations as “out-of-context excerpts” from “a different case.” In private, though, some administration lawyers worried that their allies had pushed them onto thin scientific ice.

Beginning in August, the government’s briefs underwent a subtle shift. They now made less sweeping claims about the proven medical benefits of gender-affirming care. At the same time, Prelogar and her team wrote that — in the view of the government, lower-court judges and some expert witnesses — the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine was no less robust than the research backing other kinds of pediatric care.

Cass’s report sent shock waves across the Atlantic. There was “no evidence” that gender-affirming treatments reduced the risk that trans teenagers would die by suicide, her review found. SOC-8’s adolescent chapter lacked “developmental rigor.” And the much-cited consensus of medical associations was a mirage. Few of the groups endorsing gender-affirming care had actually conducted their own in-depth evidence reviews, her team found; instead, nearly all had relied on older Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines as the basis for their own recommendations.

There was now a dawning awareness within the administration, another Biden aide told me, that its allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care. Unwilling to abandon the broader cause of trans rights, and wary of arbitrating a contentious medical debate, aides drafted statements clarifying that Levine didn’t speak for the administration. “We believe these surgeries should be limited to adults,” the White House told one outlet.

Tennessee’s ban on surgery was not before the justices in Skrmetti. (That provision of Tennessee’s law had remained intact in 2023, after the trial judge ruled that L.W. and other plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge it.) But the Biden administration had now put itself on both sides of a different question before the Supreme Court. As a matter of policy, the White House was now on record opposing part of WPATH’s new standards of care. But in court, Justice Department lawyers had held up WPATH’s recommendations, and those of other medical associations, as reliable guidelines for care. If the federal government could pick and choose from among WPATH’s recommendations, Alabama’s attorney general later argued in a blistering amicus brief in Skrmetti, why couldn’t states? The White House understood its dilemma, two of the aides told me, but concluded that it was more important to prevent Trump from being re-elected.

There was also growing tension between the A.C.L.U. and the Justice Department, three former government officials told me. (The A.C.L.U. and a spokeswoman for Prelogar denied this account.) In later briefs to the court, the administration would brush off the Alabama revelations as “out-of-context excerpts” from “a different case.” In private, though, some administration lawyers worried that their allies had pushed them onto thin scientific ice.

Beginning in August, the government’s briefs underwent a subtle shift. They now made less sweeping claims about the proven medical benefits of gender-affirming care. At the same time, Prelogar and her team wrote that — in the view of the government, lower-court judges and some expert witnesses — the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine was no less robust than the research backing other kinds of pediatric care.

At that point, though, Biden had dropped out of the race, doomed by his calamitous debate against Trump. His successor, Harris, was already on the record supporting taxpayer-funded transition surgery for prison inmates, thanks to a five-year-old A.C.L.U. candidate questionnaire. “By then the ads were running,” the former Biden aide said. “And there was nothing to say.”

When Strangio appeared before the court alongside Prelogar in December, there was little trace of the firebrand. He had spent months preparing for the task, he told news outlets beforehand, and was determined to separate his job as a lawyer from his place in the community he hoped to represent.

In most respects, the movement’s day in court felt like a retreat. Over more than two hours of interrogation, the conservative justices asked questions about gender identity and pediatric gender medicine that many L.G.B.T.Q. activists prefer to consider settled. Pressed on the longstanding claim that gender-affirming care prevented dysphoric teenagers from killing themselves, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence,” he told the court, “that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” adding that “completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.” Engaging with the conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Strangio even uttered the phrase he considered anathema: “born male.” When Prelogar was asked whether the Biden administration had overstated the scientific evidence in its original petition to the court, she, too, retreated to more cautious terms. Gender-affirming treatments, she said, “can be” necessary for “some adolescents.”

The next day, Strangio addressed A.C.L.U. supporters in a private discussion over Zoom. “It was always going to be an uphill battle,” he told them.

After Trump took office in January, the government switched sides in Skrmetti, joining Tennessee in asking the court to uphold the state’s ban. In an executive order, Trump accused doctors of “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children” and ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to review the scientific literature around pediatric gender medicine. The report — whose authors have remained anonymous — followed a few months later, taking a more restrained tone but arriving at similar conclusions. Reversing the agency’s Biden-era support of gender-affirming care, the unnamed authors asserted that psychotherapy offered a safer approach for dysphoric adolescents than medical intervention, with fewer inherent risks.

In May, the department issued an open letter to health care providers and state medical boards that warned against relying on WPATH’s standards and urged them to protect children from “these harmful interventions.” The Trump administration, however, has not merely sought to stop doctors from providing gender-affirming care to minors. It has also canceled research intended to help settle the scientific questions that are the ostensible justification for banning it.

Guyatt, the evidence-based medicine expert, told me he thought WPATH’s guidelines were flawed. The group made what are known as “strong” recommendations for gender-affirming care — indicating that the benefits of the treatments clearly outweighed the risks — without enough evidence to back them up. “When you have low-certainty evidence,” he told me, “you should never be making strong recommendations.” This year, he and several colleagues published yet another set of systematic reviews that found no high-certainty evidence that blockers and hormones delivered clinical benefits to dysphoric youth. “The jury is still out,” Guyatt said.

The reviews were commissioned by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a group of doctors and scientists that has called for more government regulation of pediatric gender medicine. Guyatt, though, opposes bans like Tennessee’s — as do gender clinicians who are otherwise critical of what they consider lax standards in their profession. “Evidence-based approaches value people’s autonomy,” Guyatt explained. In the face of uncertainty, he said, a patient’s personal preferences mattered more, not less. Someone — a teenager in Tennessee with persistent gender dysphoria, for example — might be willing to try a treatment if there was a chance it would help alleviate her suffering. “Or they might say: ‘You’re not sure it’s going to work? Why would anybody want to do it if you’re not sure about it?’ And those attitudes are both legitimate attitudes.”

These questions — how doctors should balance medical evidence against a patient’s wishes — become trickier, Guyatt acknowledged, when it comes to children. Cass has stressed her belief that some dysphoric young people will most likely benefit from transitioning before adulthood — the problem is that doctors cannot yet reliably identify which ones. An unquestioning approach to gender-affirming care, Cass has argued, is precisely the wrong way to handle young people with a more flexible view of gender than earlier generations. “It only becomes a challenge if we’re medicalizing it, giving an irreversible treatment, for what might be just a normal range of gender expression,” she told The Times last spring. Some young people once prescribed blockers, hormones or transition surgery have sued their former doctors, claiming that the physicians misled them about “the lack of adequate clinical research supporting this treatment,” as a lawsuit brought by a former patient of Olson-Kennedy asserted.

In ruling for Tennessee, the court declared that elected officials can decide these questions for everyone: doctors, parents, children. In a few years, L.W. will be 18, and in theory beyond the reach of Tennessee’s ban. But many L.G.B.T.Q. advocates expect that states like Tennessee will now target gender medicine more broadly.

That possibility has left some trans people wondering if it is time to build a new, less dogmatic politics to defend their rights. A movement that could grapple more honestly with scientific uncertainty and the real-world complications of self-ID, they believe, might be more capable of defending their health care and a legal path to transition.

“You help trans people by telling the truth,” Brianna Wu told me. “You help trans people by making sure the health care they get has solid science behind it.” Like many older trans people, Wu told me, she transitioned after puberty, a continuing journey of hormones and grueling surgeries. In fighting to save future generations of trans adults from the same pain, Wu argued, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement failed to confront the complexities around pediatric care. “We’ve built a medical system that is really uninterested in turning people away or saying no,” Wu said. “When you do that, the response is not going to be subtle, either.”

In March, McBride, the Democratic congresswoman, called for the party to “create more space in our tent” for different views on trans rights, especially around issues like sports. (One prominent trans activist promptly denounced McBride on Bluesky as a collaborator.) In public, though, those conversations are unfolding largely outside of the professional advocacy world, on social media platforms and podcasts. “What we didn’t have was a middle voice,” said Laura Targownik, a Canadian physician who hosts a biweekly discussion online called TransNormal with her friend Jo Ellis, who serves as a helicopter pilot in the Virginia Army National Guard.

Like some others I spoke with, the two are dismissive of the younger, more left-wing world of trans activists — “a lot of unhealthy people screaming about what they think is good for people,” as Ellis put it to me. Ellis, who would be barred from Guard service if Trump’s military ban survives court challenges, recently posted a short essay on X working through her thoughts on how society should accommodate people who transition. It began with a statement that many trans activists view as heresy. “There are two sexes: male and female,” Ellis wrote.

Over the phone and by email this spring, Romero told me he believed they could win the case. “So-called experts have said some of our cases were dead on arrival,” Romero wrote. “But we filed them for our clients. We filed them to lay down a marker and make a record for the history books.” I asked Romero whether, if the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban, the case would still have advanced the cause of trans rights. He urged me to think of the A.C.L.U.’s clients — like L.W. — and about the value of making the justices consider their lives and happiness. A loss in Skrmetti, Romero suggested, might just be the beginning of the fight. “One thing I’m certain of is that this organization stays on an issue like water on stone,” he told me. “We don’t win this in a couple of weeks,” he added, “I’m sure my organization is going to be on it for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.”

Julie Tate contributed research.

Source photographs for illustrations above: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Nicholas Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at nicholas.confessore@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on July 6, 2025, Page 30 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Road To United States V. Skrmetti.

Pauline Park, Ph.D.

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Cixi is by any standard the most remarkable woman in the history of China; the Empress Wu was the only woman to rule China in her own name but little is concretely documented about the Tang dynasty Imperatrix; in contrast, Cixi’s rule has been extensively documented in biographies by Sterling Seagrave and Jung Chang among others.

Conversely, Cixi’s reputation in the twentieth century was based almost entirely on slanders by Sir Edmund Backhouse, ‘Wild Fox’ Kang Youwen and others; from the ‘revisionist’ biographies of Seagrave and Chang, an entirely different picture of the dowager empress emerges: a complex woman who made mistakes but who was committed to China and the Chinese (as well as the Manchu) people.

Born to an aristocratic Manchu family, the young Yehenara became a concubine to the Xianfeng emperor; when she gave birth to his only legitimate son and heir (the future Tongzhi emperor), she rose from the concubines’ harem to become mother of the young emperor. Cixi steered the Qing regime through the most tumultuous period of Chinese history, ruling China on and off for half a century; while there is much to criticize in her rule, there is even more to respect and even admire; given the dire circumstances she found herself in, Cixi did as well as any man from the Manchu ruling elite could have done. Far from the reactionary dragon lady depicted by the not very fabulous fabulist Sir Edmund Backhouse, she was a liberal reformer who was relatively progressive by the standards of her day.

Qing China: a timeline

1644: 4.24.1644: Manchus capture Beijing

1644: 6.6.1644: Shunzhi emperor declared the first emperor of the Qing dynasty

1661: 2.5.1661: Shunzhi succeeded by his third son the Kangxi emperor

1722: 2.8.1722: Kangxi emperor succeeded by his fourth son the Yongzheng emperor

1796: 2.7.1796: Qianlong emperor abdicates in favor of his son the Jiaqing emperor

1820: 2.2.1820: Jiaqing emperor succeeded by his second son the Daoguang emperor

1831: the Xianfeng emperor’s reign began

1835: 11.29.1835: birth of Yehenara

1839: 3.18.1839: First Opium War with Britain began

1842: 8.29.1842: Treaty of Nanjing is signed, ending the First Opium War and ceding Hong Kong to Britain.

1850: 1.11.1850: Taiping Rebellion begins, with rebels proclaiming the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

1851: Yehenara became concubine to the Xianfeng emperor

1856: 4.27.1856: birth of Yehenara’s son Zaichun — the future Tonghzhi emperor

1856: death of the empress dowager and primacy of rank of the Empress Nuihuru

1856:10.,1856: the Arrow incident

1858: 6.25.1858: the Treaty of Tianjin

1859: 6.25.1859: Dagu Forts set on fire by the British

1860: Xushun — leader of the Gang of 8 — named prime minister

1860: 9.21.1860: the British and French defeat the Chinese at Baliqiao

1860:9.22.1860: the Xianfeng emperor and the court fled to Jehol

1860: 10.7.1860: Summer Palace captured by British and French troops

1860: 10.18.1860: Summer Palace destroyed by British and French troops

1860: 10.18.1860: Second Opium War began with Britain

1860:10.19.1860: Prince Gong accepted the Beijing Convention imposed on China by Britain and France

1860: 10.24.1860: Anglo French forces captured Beijing

1861: 2.25.1861: Treaty of Beijing is signed, ending the Second Opium War and opening more Chinese ports to foreign trade

1861: 8.22.1861: death of the Xianfeng emperor after Cixi prompted him to declare Tongzhi his heir: Cixi saw Iushun sitting on the emperor’s throne and realized Xushun intended to take power, putting her in mortal danger; she brought Tongzhi from wet nurses to Xianfeng.

The Gang of 8 Announced that they would be the Council of Regents.
Xushun and four others improperly declared themselves Grand Councillors without an imperial edict.

1861: 8.23.1861: Niuhuru was declared CiAn and Yehenara declared Cixi at Jehol and given the imperial seals.

1861: 8.24.1861: Xushun declared Niuhuru empress dowager; opponents demanded that Xushun name Yehenara empress dowager; she demanded that he name them co-empress dowager.
Yehenara rushed to Niuhuru to warn her.

1861: 9.5.1861: Prince Gong, CiAn and Cixi visited Xianfeng in the funeral hall in Beijing. Gong enlisted CiAn and Cixi in a planned coup d’état.

1861: 9.18.1861: procession from Jehol

1861: 11.1.1861: CiAn & Cixi reached the Forbidden City and were met by Prince Gong

1861: 11.2.1861: CiAn & Cixi issued an imperial decree ordering the arrest of the Gang of Eight and declaring the regency edict. forgery; Prince Jun arrested Xushun.

1861: 11.3-5.1861: imperial decrees were issued against Xushun.

1861: 11.8.1861: the indictment of the Gang of Eight was published.

1864: 7.19.1864: the Taiping were defeated at Nanjing. Li Hongzhang was named an earl and viceroy of the Yangzi basin. (Li was made viceroy of Jili at 49 after Zheng’s death in March 1872)

1865: 4.2.1865: Wo Jen got an imperial edict issued dismissing Prince gong from all imperial offices and as prince advisor to the Tongzhi emperor.

1865: 4.4.1865: Prince Jun got a Clan Council to reverse the edict and Gong was restored but Jun was named prince adviser a month later.

1871: 8.14.1871: birth of the Guangxu emperor.

1875: 1.12.1875: death of the Tongzhi emperor from either smallpox or syphilis or murder. Prince Gong enlisted Cixi in a plot to put their nephew Tsai Tien as the Guangxu emperor.

1875: 1.14.1875: Empress A-lu-te’s pregnancy ws disclosed to Robert Hart by Viceroy Li as well as a failed suicide attempt.

1875: 2.12.1875: Treaty of Saint Petersburg is signed between Russia and China giving Russia control over Outer Mongolia

1875: 3.27.1875: A-lu-te’s death announced.

1875: 3.29.1875: Cixi reported ill with a liver ailment. Prince Gong and Li Hungjang had the strongest motive to eliminate Tongzhi, A-lu-te and Cixi.

1878: 6.11.188: Cian and Cixi issued an imperial edict about gossip concerning Guangxi. CiAn died of a viral flue; Cixi was 45 and Guano was 9.

1889: 3.4.1889: Guangxu was enthroned and Cixi retired from the regency at 54.

1891: Prince Jun’s death; Prince Jing was chosen to advise Guangxu but Li Hongzhang was the real power behind the throne.

1891: 3.5.1891: Guangxu had his first audience with foreign ministers at the age of 19.

1894: 7.25.1894: First Sino-Japanese War began as a Japanese squadron intercepted the Chinese SS Kowshing.

1894: 9.17.1894: Japan destroyed half of Li’s navy in the mouth of the Yalu River. Cixi cancelled her 60th birthday celebrations (10 million silver taels). Cixi stripped Li of honors but blocked his removal; Cixi recalled Prince Gong from retirement after tending chrysanthemums for 10 years.

1895: 3.19.1895: Li was shot and wounded at Shimoneseki.

1895: 4.17.1895: Treaty of Shimonoseki signed, ending the First Sino-Japanese War and ceding Taiwan and other territories to Japan.

1895: 10.7.1895: Sugimura Yotaro’s assassination of Queen Min shocked Cixi.

1896: Prince E.E. Ukhtomskii accompanied Li to St. Petersburg for celebrations of Nicholas II’s coronation; Count With bribed Li in a conspiracy to put a Russian-sponsored pretender on the throne.

1898: Jan. 1898: interview with the Zungli Yamen.

1898: May 1898: Prince Gong died. Guangxu invited memorials from the public and Ming Shih reformers responded with denunciations of the Grand Councillors. King Yuwei (‘Wild Fox’ King) was seen as a poseur by the mingxi.

1898: 6.11.1898: Gunagxu issued his first reform edict.

1898: 6.15.1898: Guangxi’s tutor Weng Dengue annoyed Guangxu who fired Weng from the Grand Council.

1898: 6.16.1898:the Wild Fox King Yuen’s only interview with Guangxu.

1898:.9.11.898: Li Hungjang invited Ito Hirobumi to Tianjin.

1898: 9.14.1898: Guangxu asked Yuan Shihkai for help.

1898: 9.18.1898: Guangxi’s second meeting with Yang Shihkai.

1898: 9.16.1898: Guangxu met with Cixi who told him about the Wild Fox Kang’s boasts.

1898: 9.17.1898: guangxu issued a decree ordering Kang to Shanghai.

898: 9.14.1898: Yuan Shikkai told Prince Jing and Li Hongjang of Guangxi’s secret plan to make Ito Hirofumi a special consultant.

1898: 9.18.1898: Prince Jing called a Clan Council and asked Cixi to resume her regency; Censory Yang appealed to her.

1898: 9.20.1898: Yuan Shihkai’s third audience with Guangxu before his audience with Ito Hirofumi.

1898: 9.19.1898: Cixi traveled incognito to witness behind a gauze screen Ito Hirofumi’s audience with Guangxu.

1898:9.21.1898: Yuan Shikai’s meeting with Cixi after which she decided to resume the regency.

898: 9.21.1898: Guangxi’s edict recognizing Cixi’s resumption of a regency prompted Wild Fox King to spread the rumor that Cixi had Guangxu imprisoned in Yingtai Pavilion.

1898: 9.23.1898: Cixi issued arrest warrants for reformers.

1898: 9.24.1898: Guangxu returned to work.

1900: 6.20.1900: Boxer Rebellion began with Boxers attacking foreign embassies in Beijing.

1901: 9.7.1901: the Boxer Protocol was signed, ending the Boxer Rebellion and imposing heavy reparations on China.

1908: 11.14.1908: the death of the Guangxu emperor, succeeded by Puyi.

1908: 11.15.1908: the death of Cixi at the age of 72.

1911: 10.10.1911: Wuchang Uprising begins, leading to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of Ching

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Eric Adams is the most incompetent and corrupt mayor in the history of New York City; the only good news is that his reign of error will be coming to an end in January 2026. Adams has decided to skip the Democratic mayoral primary altogether — clearly because he realizes he would come in a distant third at best — and instead run as an independent in the general election which he will lose badly.

“Dozens of donors to Eric Adams’ first mayoral run have defected from him this year and instead poured tens of thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of two of his top challengers, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Daily News analysis of contribution filings found. Out of the 423 donors who this month gave the legal max amount of $2,100 to Cuomo’s mayoral campaign in its first two weeks, about 10%, or 41 individuals, were financial supporters of Adams’ successful 2021 campaign. In total, the ex-governor raked in at least $126,000 from 135 individuals who have previously made political contributions to Adams — including executives in New York’s powerful real estate, lobbying and finance sectors, records show. That’s nearly 9% of the $1.5 million Cuomo raised total in the two week stretch after his March 1 campaign launch. Ken Frydman, a New York PR veteran who has represented investment firms, said Cuomo’s courting of Adams donors in real estate, lobbying and finance is especially key. Such donors are part of the “permanent government” class that holds extraordinary influence over city politics, Frydman argued,” Josephine Stratman reported for the New York Daily News (Josephine Stratman, “Dozens of Adams donors shifting loyalty to Cuomo, Adrienne Adams in 2025 NYC mayoral race,” New York Daily News, 20 March 2025).

Cuomo’s SuperPAC “Fix the City can be hard to distinguish from his official campaign. It is run by Steven M. Cohen, a member of Mr. Cuomo’s inner circle for decades, and its messaging closely mirrors that of the official campaign. A New York City Campaign Finance Board investigation determined that because the campaign’s messaging was so similar to the super PAC’s, they were most likely colluding,” Nicholas Fandos reported of donations to the Cuomo campaign (Nicholas Fandos, “The Business Interests Bankrolling Andrew Cuomo’s Run for Mayor,” 1 June 2025), noting, “Millions of dollars more have arrived from labor unions, tech companies, real estate developers and landlords who have a direct financial stake in the election’s outcome — grand gestures that, while legal, raise pressing ethical questions about the motivations behind their generosity. Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Myrie, Ms. Adams, Mr. Lander, Mr. Stringer, Mr. Blake and Jessica Ramos, a Democratic state senator, have said that if elected, they would lobby the board to halt increases, even though landlords are increasingly saying they are not making enough to keep units in rentable condition. (Mihir Zaveri, “How the N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Plan to Solve the Housing Crisis,” New York Times, 1 June 2025).

Andrew Cuomo was the frontrunner according to all the polls except the very last Emerson College survey but the worst governor in the history of New York would be a disaster as mayor and came in a distant second on June 24 despite having started with a nearly 40-point lead in the early polls.

Zohran Mamdani was and remains the clear choice of progressive voters (Sahalie Donaldson, “Zohran Mamdani is trying to build a new NYC Democratic primary coalition,” City & State New York, 5 May 2025): he has been endorsed by the Working Families Party (WFP) and by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC DSA), which I recently joined as a member. There are many reasons why I have decided to endorse Mamdani but one is that Zohran is the only mayoral candidate who has clearly endorsed the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement working to end Apartheid Israel’s illegal and genocidal occupation of Palestine as Apartheid Israel is actively ethnically cleansing the West Bank and pursuing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Zohran Mamdani‘s support for Gaza and Palestine alone sets him apart from the rest of the Democratic primary pack and is just one of many indications that he is the choice of progressives. It is significant that U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has chosen to endorse Mamdani (Courtney Gross and Erica Brosnan, “Mamdani picks up endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” NY1, 5 June 2025). In announcing her endorsement, she urged Democratic primary voters to rank Adrienne Adams second, Brad Lander third, Scott Stringer fourth and Zellnor Myrie fifth; but there was no question that her enthusiasm was reserved for Mamdani.

I did not rank Andrew Cuomo if you care about this city: the power-hungry and corrupt former governor left office in disgrace after being accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault by at least 11 different women and after killing more than 15,000 New Yorkers in the COVID-19 pandemic by blithely disregarding public health strictures and moving people infected with the Corona virus into nursing homes. As the Working Families Party suggested, Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor — DREAM~!

While Scott Stringer served as New York City comptroller as well as in the New York State Assembly, the credible allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against him disqualified him in my mind just as similar allegations against Andrew Cuomo disqualify him for me. And Stringer like Cuomo is a rabid Zionist supporter of Apartheid Israel, which is at least as disqualifying as allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In fact, in the June 12 NY1/WNYC debate, Stringer explicitly identified himself as a Zionist and a supporter of a ‘Jewish State of Israel’ and an opponent of BDS, which he falsely labeled ‘anti-Semitic.’

I would have recommended New York State Senator Jessica Ramos and intended to rank her second on my ballot; she represents me in the 13th State Senate district in western Queens; but on June 6, she dropped a stink bomb in the primary race by endorsing Andrew Cuomo while remaining on the ballot (Courtney Gross & Spectrum News staff, “Jessica Ramos endorses Andrew Cuomo, stays on ballot,” NY1, 6 June 2025).

in  2021, Jessica Ramos called for Andrew Cuomo’s resignation in the midst of the sexual harassment scandal that ultimately brought him down; and more recently, she has questioned his ‘mental acuity’; so one has to wonder what prompted her to do a volte face and embrace him for mayor.

Ramos’ reversal shocked her supporters and prompted the New York Working Families Party to rescind its recommendation to rank her fifth on the primary ballot, declaring:

Was Jessica Ramos promised a position as commissioner or even deputy mayor in a Cuomo mayoral administration in exchange for her endorsement…? How interesting that Cuomo made a point of saying that he did not endorse her.

This much seems certain to me: Jessica Ramos has shredded her credibility with progressives in New York; instead, she has thrown her lot in with the profoundly anti-progressive multi-millionaire Andrew Cuomo and the enormously corrupt oligarchy she claimed to be fighting.

It has been reported that Ramos managed to raise only $9,000 — a minuscule amount for a mayoral campaign in any city and especially in New York, the most expensive media market in the country — and perhaps more to the point, managed to rack up more than $250,000 in debt; so perhaps part of the deal with Cuomo was his agreement to allow her to go to his well-heeled millionaire and billionaire donors to help retire her enormous mayoral campaign debt.

I thought Jessica Ramos was a progressive; but there are those moments in which someone reveals herself for who and what she is and it seems to me that this is one of those moments. Interesting that though Ramos did not formally withdraw from the race, she also did not participate in the NY1/WNYC debate on Thursday, June 12; I do not know whether that was her choice or whether those organizing the debate simply thought it was pointless to have her on the stage (Emily Ago, “Claws out for Cuomo, Mamdaniat debate as rivals dig into their missteps, weaknesses,” Politico, 12 June 2025).. As for my part, instead of ranking Jessica Ramos second, I did not ranking her at all; bye, Felicia~!

Adam Gray (@agrayphoto, adamgrayphotography.com) took this shot of Ramos at Cuomo’s ‘victory’ party on primary day and it brilliantly captured her political isolation following her endorsement of the disgraced former governor; significantly, she was the only elected official to appear at the political wake and she is now in nowhere land; even if she manages to hold onto her state Senate seat in 2026, she will have done so after shredding her credibility with the very progressives who helped elect her to the Senate.

I ranked Brad Lander second on my ballot; in the June 12 debate, he said he was a supporter of Israel but he did not identify himself as a Zionist; instead, he said he favored a two-state solution and wanted a ceasefire in Gaza; Lander is far from where he should be on Israel/Palestine but he has been a competent New York City comptroller and his cross endorsement of Mamdani and strong support for the progressive earned him a place on my ballot.

I ranked Adrienne Adams third as a tactical vote even though as New York City Council Speaker the ‘other’ Adams (no relation to Eric) has been at best an establishment liberal and far too supportive of the New York Police Department (NYPD); I ranked her third because she and Andrew Cuomo share much of the same base and ranking her helped cut into his vote share. While I cannot say I have been overwhelmed by Zellnor Myrie, I ranked him fourth and ranked Michael Blake fifth in part because of his willingness to cross endorse with Mamdani.

Mamdani’s winning the Democratic mayoral nomination shocked the political establishment and especially the Democratic Party establishment but he still faces Eric Adams, Curtis Sliwa on the Republican line and possibly Andrew Cuomo on his own party line (the Fight & Deliver Party) in the general election in November.

Cuomo was the worst governor in New York’s history and could rival even Eric Adams for corruption as well as slavish self-interested loyalty to Wall Street, the real estate industry, Apartheid Israel and the Zionist machine; now that Mamdani has won the Democratic mayoral nomination, it is imperative that we work to get him elected and defeat his severely compromised rivals.

Mamdani has staked out progressive positions across a wide range of issues, including LGBT rights. Mamdani is proposing a $65 million investment in public providers to ensure the availability of gender-affirming care (GAC) including $57 million to public hospitals, community clinics, federally qualified health centers and non-profits providing GAC. Mamdani is specifically proposing that $8 million be directed to support virtual and telehealth GAC and the addition of GAC to New York Health+Hospitals Virtual Care. Equally important, Mamdani promises to hold private hospital systems accountable for denying GAC in violation of the state constitution and state and city laws.

Mamdani is also proposing making New York an LGBTQIA+ ‘sanctuary city’ and he has promised to implemented recommendations from the Taskforce on Issues Faced by TGNCNBI People in Custody to ensure that trans and gender-variant New Yorkers in city jails are treated with dignity. Mamdani is also proposing the creation of an Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs to improve the lives of queer New Yorkers and has concrete proposals on housing, education and workforce development for the LGBTQIA community. Taken as a whole, Mamdani’s proposals go far beyond anything any other Democrat running for mayor has proposed not to mention the Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and Mamdani’s proposals compare favorably with the paltry efforts of the Adams administration to date.

The extraordinary enthusiasm for Mamdani and his candidacy was on full display when he appeared at the New York City LGBT Pride March (organized by Heritage of Pride) on June 29 and then the Queer Liberation March (organized by the Reclaim Pride Coalition) afterwards; I was participating in the latter when the putative Democratic nominee showed up and crashed the party, creating a sensation; marchers started to chant his name and dozens of them mobbed him just to be near him; one can’t imagine Andrew Cuomo receiving anything but a polite welcome at the Pride March and he most certainly would have received a hostile reception at the Queer Liberation March.

Pauline Park is a Queens-based activist; she did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she was the first student at any University of Illinois campus to win a Fulbright fellowship for France; the personal endorsement of Zohran Mamdani and the above assessment do not necessarily represent the opinion of any organization with which she is associated or has been associated.

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Donald Trump’s HHS & the British Supreme Court: the triumph of transnational transphobia
by Pauline Park

2025 will be remembered as a banner year for transphobia on both sides of the Atlantic. Donald Trump’s (re) election in November 2024 brought the return of a president who probably personally could not care less about transgender issues but whose far right-wing coalition includes Christian fundamentalists deeply committed to undoing what limited rights members of the transgender community enjoy at the federal, state and local level in the United States. In theory, the British Labour Party is more liberal than either Trump’s Republican Party or the British Conservative Party; but since leading Labour to a landslide victory in 2024, Sir Keir Starmer has been anything but an ally to the transgender community in the United Kingdom.

To begin with the report issued by Donald Trump’s Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) (“HHS Releases Comprehensive Review of Medical Interventions for Children & Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria,” 1 May 2025), entitled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence & Best Practices,” 1 May 2025). The ‘report’ is not so much a report as an ideological attack on the very notion of medical intervention for transgendered children and adolescents, concluding that “The evidence for benefit of pediatric medical transition is very uncertain, while the evidence for harm is less uncertain,” even going so far as to assert that “There is evidence that some medical and medical health associations have suppressed dissent and stifled debate about this issue among their members” (executive summary, p. 9).

The response to the HHS ‘report’ from actual medical professionals has been almost uniformly negative.

“Today’s report is propaganda aiming to delegitimize the perfectly safe, effective, and evidence-based health care that transgender people access to be who they are. Being transgender, just like being cisgender, is not a choice nor can it be reversed by any medical or social method. The same way cisgender people know who they are, so do trans people. The same way cis people receive gender-affirming care, so do trans people. This report is clearly trying to build a case for conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is dangerous, discredited, and opposed by every major medical and mental health association including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and the National Association of Social Workers. Conversion therapy only causes harm. There is no healing in trying to force someone to be someone they are not,” wrote Dr. Aisha Mays, adolescent medicine physician in California and board member with Physicians for Reproductive Health on behalf of the organization. Make no mistake, gender-affirming care is safe, it is effective at treating the dangerous reality of gender dysphoria, and as a result, it is lifesaving. Transgender and queer people, no matter their age, deserve to be trusted and affirmed. I am proud to be in a community of physician advocates committed to listening to the needs of all young people, including transgender youth. Uplifting and embracing trans youth is the only long-term solution that will allow all young people to live whole, healthy, and safe lives.

(“New HHS Report is Dangerous for Transgender Patients,” 1 May 2025).

 The truth about the absurd assertions made in the HHS ‘report’ is to be found in another report: a thousand-page report required by a bill signed into law by Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, which concluded,

“The consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body
changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric [gender dysphoria] patients. The evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer…

“It is our expert opinion that policies to prevent access to and use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] for treatment of [gender dysphoria] in pediatric patients cannot be justified based on the quantity or quality of medical science findings or concerns about potential regret in the future, and that high-quality guidelines are available to guide qualified providers in treating pediatric patients who meet diagnostic criteria…”

“Overall, there were positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes. While gender affirming treatment showed a possibly protective effect in prostate cancer in transgender men and breast cancer in transgender women, there was an increase in some specific types of benign brain tumors. There were increased mortality risks in both transgender men and women treated with hormonal therapy, but more so in transgender women. Increase risk of mortality was consistently due to increase in suicide, non-natural causes, and HIV/AIDS. Patients that were seen at the gender clinic before the age of 18 had a lower risk of suicide compared to those referred as an adult…” (Madison Pauly, “Utah Study on Trans Youth Care Extremely Inconvenient for Politicians Who Ordered It,” Mother Jones, 24 May 2025)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the right-wing Republicans who pushed the transphobic ban on puberty blockers and hormones for legal minors in Utah rejected the very report they commissioned, with co-sponsor Rep. Katy Hall issuing a joint statement with Rep. Bridger Bolinder telling the Salt Lake Tribune,  “We intend to keep the moratorium in place. Young kids and teenagers should not be making life-altering medical decisions based on weak evidence.” In other words, if the overwhelming evidence shows positive health outcomes for medical interventions, simply reject the evidence and call it ‘weak evidence.’

But the right-wing Republican Party is hardly unique in undermining transgender rights: in the United Kingdom, the ostensibly progressive British Labour Party has been undermining the UK’s transgender community.

After 14 years of Conservative Party misrule by a series of increasingly incompetent prime ministers, the British public became fed up with the terrible Tories and tossed them out. In a general election on 4 July 2024, Labour won 63% of the seats (411 seats) in the House of Commons — based on 33.7% of the popular vote — itself an indictment of the British electoral system. Starmer appointed the first openly gay health minister in British history after campaigning on a platform of full access to gender-affirming care for trans people but West Streeting’s first act as health minister was to affirm the outgoing Conservative government of Rishi Sunak’s ban on puberty blockers — a ban subsequently confirmed by the British Supreme Court; established on 1 October 2009, the Supreme Court replaced the House of Lords as the highest in the United Kingdom (Kaz Self, “What Wes Streeting gets wrong about puberty blockers,” Labour List, 17 July 2024).

On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled in favor of For Women Scotland Lt. v. the Scottish Ministers, unanimously declaring that terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act of 2010 should refer to biological sex assigned at birth (Gender GP, “UK Supreme Court Ruling: What It Means for Transgender Rights in Britain,” 24 April 2025); it was a devastating blow to the British transgender community and based on a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between sex and gender and the socially constructed character of sex itself. Many in the community fear that the ruling has seriously undermined the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, though the full impact of the Supreme Court decision will only become clear over time. The ruling addresses single-sex occupancy facilities but does not explicitly address public restrooms, which are a big flash point for transphobic reactionaries attempting to fuel a ‘gender panic’ with visions of predatory men lurking in women’s rooms.

“It’s worth noting that this ruling places the UK increasingly at odds with international best practices regarding transgender rights. Countries like Ireland, Portugal, and Argentina have implemented more progressive gender recognition systems based on self-determination rather than medical diagnosis or biological definitions. The European Court of Human Rights has also previously emphasised the importance of legal gender recognition as a fundamental aspect of the right to private life. This divergence raises questions about whether challenges to the UK position might eventually reach European human rights courts,” notes Gender GP (Gender GP, “UK Supreme Court Ruling: What It Means for Transgender Rights in Britain,” 24 April 2025).

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The Peril & Promise of the Present & the Shadow of the Past
Pauline Park
Chair,
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

Bloom: the Queer & Asian Conference
University of California at Berkeley (UIUC)
24 April 2025

I would like to thank Megan and the organizing committee for inviting me to speak here and I am honored and delighted to have the opportunity to address you today — especially so because it is my second QACON keynote — the first being Launch in 2010 when I spoke about “Articulating Identity, Organizing Community: Re-Launching the Queer API Movement in the United States” (5.1.10).

I return to UC Berkeley and to QACON at a moment of great promise and great peril. The promise is one of a more just society as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) movement moves forward in this country and abroad; the peril is the unprecedented wave of attacks on the transgender community, on migrants and on academic freedom from the highest levels of the federal government as the administration of Donald Trump pursues an agenda that endangers the foundations of democracy itself.

The Trump administration has taken a meat cleaver to the federal government as the richest man on earth leads the absurdly named DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — illegally terminates tens of thousands of federal workers not to enhance government efficiency but rather to undermine the ability of the federal government to act on behalf of the most disadvantaged in our society.

Trump’s attack on ‘DEI’ — diversity, equity and inclusion — has resulted in the removal from the Stonewall National Monument of references to transgender community members who participated in the Stonewall Riots and even elimination of references to Harriet Tubman in the Underground Railroad in order to erase her role in the liberation of enslaved African Americans; the administration reversed itself on Harriet Tubman after an outcry but the transgendered participants in the Stonewall Riots remain erased from federal government websites maintained to promote national monuments and national parks.

Let me begin by addressing a concern that is widespread in the transgender community: I have heard more times than I can count and seen posts on social media platforms people declaring, “my identity was just erased.” I understand the panic and despair but I would simply say that neither Donald Trump nor anyone else has the power to erase your identity so do not give him that power. I would also point out that federal, state and local government recognition of transgender identity in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon: Barack Obama banned gender identity-based discrimination in the federal workforce in 2010 — the same year as QACON’s launch conference — and federal agencies such as the Veterans Health Administration, the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Education, the Labor Department and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) followed suit with various rules, regulations and rulings over the course of the Obama years.

Since returning to office in January, Donald Trump has signed a wave of executive orders including one rescinding Obama’s executive order permitting openly transgendered people to serve in the US military; but note that Trump cannot rescind federal or state laws and of course the Equality Act has not passed Congress and has no prospect of doing so anytime in the near future.

The Movement Equality Project (MAP) notes that 16 states and the District of Columbia have enacted transgender rights laws protecting estimated 42% of trans people in the United States; MAP also estimates that 37% of trans people in the US live in the 22 states and three US territories that have enacted transphobic laws and implemented policies and it is trans and non-binary people and especially youth in these states who are at the greatest risk. MAP also notes that 395 cities and counties fully and explicitly prohibit discrimination against all LGBT people.

Trump has also launched a wave of deportations of immigrants even of migrants with legal status Andry José Hernandez Romero— most notoriously having ICE abduct Mahmoud Khalil and take the Columbia University graduate student from New York to Louisiana despite his having a green card and unquestionably legal status as a permanent US resident; and that is not to mention the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia despite the administration providing no evidence whatsoever that he was a member of a criminal gang; Trump refuses to bring him back to the US despite the administration admitting that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a ‘clerical error.’ Trump also deported the openly gay makeup artist Andry José Hernandez Romero to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador (Alex Bollinger, “Out Rep. Robert Garcia demands answers about gay makeup artist held in torture camp,” MSN, 23 April 2025) apparently based only on the fact that he had a tattoo.

Trump has also declared war on universities and it is tragic and appalling that Columbia University among others is now collaborating with the administration in terminating academic freedom in order to silence critics of Apartheid Israel and its Gaza genocide — most notoriously, Mahmoud Khalil, who pleaded with Columbia University’s administration to protect him from ICE before his abduction (“ICE Denies Mahmoud Khalil’s Request to Join His Wife for Birth of Their First Child,” Democracy Now, 22 April 2025). It is important to point out that there is an exceptionally powerful Zionist machine that includes the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that is pushing a false definition of anti-Semitism as a pretext for undermining academic freedom across the country.

Freedom of speech is at threat as are freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and even due process itself. In short, we are at a moment of great peril and it is not at all inapt to think about the Weimar Republic in 1932 when considering the parlous state of democracy in the United States today.

And of course, it is not only Trump and the Republicans we have to worry about: we have to consider the Democrats’ mixed record on immigration; in fact, Barack Obama and Joe Biden deported far more migrants in his one term than Donald Trump did in his first term. Barack Obama deported 1.57 million migrants in his first term and 1.49 million in his second term — more than any president in US history (Alicia Hagopian, “Trump is promising a deportation surge. How many people did Obama, Biden and Trump actually deport?,” the Independent, 19 November 2024). Trump deported 1.2 million migrants in his first term while a further 805,770 were self-deported or turned away at the border between fiscal years 2017 and 2020, according to the Independent of London. Biden deported 4.7 million migrants, but with the caveat that much of the spike was attributable to the Title 42 order during the COVID-19 pandemic. How many of these migrants were LGBTQ is not known, but one has to assume at least some were.

The one area in which there is a clear difference between Democrats and Republicans is that of social values issues such as LGBT rights and reproductive rights; but even here, there is considerable backsliding going on with regard to transgender rights. California Gov. Gavin Newsome seems to have decided that Clintonesque triangulation will better position him for a presidential run: how else to explain his joining the transphobes in declaring that the participation of trans women and girls in in women’s and girls’ sports is “unfair” (Bill Barrow, “California’s Gavin Newsom opposes trans athletes in women’s sports, splitting with progressives,” Associated Press, 6 March 2025).

Given the daunting challenges facing us, I would like to address the current situation first by talking about identity and erasure and then considering strategies for resistance and practical concerns for students considering the near-term and long-term future. I would like to begin by talking about history. In common parlance, Americans will say “that’s history” or “he’s history” to mean that something or someone is not only finished but now totally irrelevant. William Faulkner once said, “History is not was, it is.” And perhaps more eloquently, in “Requiem for a Nun,” the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

I think we could profitably spend a few minutes talking about those “webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” And I would like to particularly talk about the pre-modern history of Asia and the Pacific as one set of webs that is especially relevant to us as queer APIs. We who stand and live at the intersection of multiple communities and identities must insist on our rightful place in all of them and to do so effectively, we must understand how firmly we are rooted in our countries, cultures and communities of origin.

The year after I spoke here at “Launch,” I gave a presentation at Creating Change in Minneapolis on queer API identity under the rubric “Proto-Transgenderal & Homoerotic Traditions in Asian & the Pacific” — which sounds more like the title of a dissertation than a 20-minute presentation. I won’t repeat that presentation here but if you want to read it — which will take you 10 minutes at most — you can simply go to my website and search for ‘proto-transgenderal.’ First, about that term: I invented it because applying the term ‘trans’ to people in the pre-modern era would be to impose an identity formation on our queer ancestors that they would not have used and might not have fully understood; I thought it would be better to use the term ‘proto-‘ — meaning anticipating — because while they were quite different in important respects, the identity formations that our queer API ancestors would have self-identified through do anticipate contemporary trans and queer identity formations in important ways.

And while there is considerable variation in such identity formations from East Asia to South Asia to Southeast Asia to the Pacific Islands, there are a few generalizations we can make. First, there were what we today would call ‘transfeminine’ forms of gender identity in every pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander society; and there is evidence of various ‘transmasculine’ forms of gender identity in many of them. Second, these identity formations related to either theater or religion and spirituality. Third, many elements of these pre-modern identity formations persist into the present day. For theater, consider Beijing opera, kabuki theater and the Korean touring theatrical troupes known as namsadang that toured villages throughout Korea until the early 20th century, the teenage boys played women’s roles — just as Elizabethan theater in England — and were said very often to be lovers of adult men in the same companies. In terms of religious and spiritual traditions, consider the mudang — the shamanic figure in the original Altaic culture which Koreans brought down into the Korean peninsula with them from eastern Siberia.

This pre-Sinitic mudang culture pre-dates the introduction of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism into the peninsula. In the mudang culture, the shaman is always a woman, but not necessarily female: a significant number of mudang were male — paksu mudang — and evidence suggests that they may have lived as women as well as performing the sacred rites and rituals of the mudang. And the Hijra of India, the Dao Mao of Vietnam and the Bissu of Sulawesi. And there is that most gender-transgressive of Taoist deities, Guanyin, who is said by some to have changed from man to woman and who has become an iconic image for the gender-variant throughout East Asia.

In examining the entire history of homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions in pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander societies, we must not make the mistake of romanticizing such traditions or failing to recognize the significant differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’ — meaning contemporary queer LGBT/queer APIs, especially those of us in the diaspora. Those ancient traditions are embedded in societies which were not characterized by equality of age, gender or class relations, and many of the forms that homoeroticism and transgenderal identity took would offend our egalitarian sensibilities.

The important point is that we as LGBT/queer APIs must known the history of our predecessors in order to counter the narrative of LGBT and queer as foreign, white, Western, and even specifically North American; this is crucial because the discourse which the religious right successfully articulated in communities of color — including in API communities — is one which makes us foreign to our own cultures and communities of origin. The binary opposition of LGBT people as secular atheists opposed to the God-fearing conservative Catholic Filipinos, fundamentalist Protestant Koreans, and ultra-traditional Hindu South Asians who are a significant part of the Asian diaspora in the United States is a false dichotomy, reinforced by the mainstream media who pit an invariably white queer activist calling for a complete separation of church and state against a minister or priest or lay person — often a person of color — in a false ‘debate’ over LGBT rights and especially transgender rights. And that brings us back to the point about ‘erasure.’ And crucially Christian fundamentalists —Asian as well as white, LatinX and African American — are a core part of Donald Trump’s base and one of the driving forces behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Only in re-articulating our position in this long pre-modern queer history can we reinsert ourselves in the governing narratives of our countries, cultures and communities of origin.

And so we challenge homophobia, biphobia and transphobia both within API communities and beyond by noting that ‘queer’ is in fact traditional in Asian and Pacific Islander cultures in a very meaningful sense. The slogan of Queer Nation was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” China alone has homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions going back centuries. The ‘passion of the cut sleeve‘ (duan xiu) — the love of the Han dynasty Emperor Ai (27 BC-1 AD) — for his male favorite, Dong Xian — is the source of the Chinese euphemism for homosexuality (namely, ‘cut sleeve’). The other popular Chinese euphemism for homosexuality — the ‘half-eaten peach‘ — goes back even further, to the Zhou dynasty Duke Ling of Wei (534-403 BC) and his male lover, Mixi Zia. So when it comes to homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender, the truth is that we have been here — in every Asian or Pacific Island society — since time immemorial; so as I like to say, we have been here, we have been queer — some of our heteronormative community members just forgot!

I would like to close with a few thoughts on strategy and tactics as we enter an era of unprecedented authoritarianism in this country as well as many of our countries of origin. Here are a few suggestions.

First, be well informed; use history as I have suggested; challenge fundamental assumptions, especially the ‘viral model’ of identity formation: the absurd notion that some APIs have that we’re queer just because we’ve been hanging around white people too much.

Second, be bold and unapologetic when it is possible to be so; but be careful, cautious and prudent when it merits. So if you lack citizenship or crucial documents, make sure to have contacts and contact information lined up for lawyers and others who can respond immediately should there be an ICE raid or some other such government intervention. And known when to pick your battles and which to pick.

I’ve been involved in Palestine solidarity work since March 2011 and I do not regret it in the least, nor would I ever discourage anyone from engaging in such activism; but I would also caution those who want to to recognize that there are risks and costs and to weigh them carefully. The suppression of freedom of speech and expression in this country and especially on college campuses today is comparable to the height of the Red Scare initiated by Joe McCarthy’s Congressional hearings. It is no coincidence that the Republican senator from Wisconsin’s legal counsel was Roy Cohn — the self-hating closet queen who became a mentor to Donald Trump and from whom the orange fascist learned most of the strategies and tactics he has employed in his disgraceful political career — with disastrous results for the country as a whole and for migrants and trans people in particular.

Third and finally: if you want to do social justice work, consider spending a few years in the corporate world first; I never aimed to be an activist; in fact, I call myself an ‘accidental activist’; my first career was in corporate public relations, and though I found no fulfillment in helping large corporations enhance their public images, I learned things while doing so that I use to this very day in my activism. The very practical benefit of working in the corporate world is that one can pay off student loans and establish oneself financially. But equally important is the knowledge that one gains about how the world really works. Spending a few years in the bowels of corporate America was a revelation for me and ultimately made me a better and more effective activist; those insights might be classified under the rubric ‘know the enemy.’ For example, if you wanted to do environmental law, you could spend a few years working for a big polluter or a law firm that represented polluters; you would come out better prepared to fight them as an activist or environmental lawyer.

For those who see the pursuit of social justice as their life’s work, the most basic question is whether you want to be paid to do it or not; paid staff positions in advocacy are few and far between and one makes compromises to get and keep them just as one would make compromises if one decided that the only practical route would be to get a ‘day job’ to pay the bills and do activism in one’s spare time; either way, it’s a very personal decision that one must make for oneself. I myself have found the truth in the Mahatma Gandhi’s dictum that it is through service through others that one finds oneself.

Regardless what path you choose in life and career, anyone seeking to live an authentic life need look no further than the conclusion from “Walden” for guidance in which Henry David Thoreau writes:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,  and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Thank you.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York, which she co-founded in June 1998, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, the LGBT community center in the borough of Queens, which she co-founded in 1997. Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002). She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute.  Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools bill that became the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body.  She also served on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered person chosen to be grand marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March, the country’s oldest and largest pride parade. In 2012, Park participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine. In 2015, she keynoted the Queer Korea Festival preceding the Seoul Pride Parade which together constituted the largest event in the history of the LGBT community in Korea up until that time, estimated to have drawn more than 35,000 people. She has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations. She did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary by Larry Tung that premiered in 2008.

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“The Wedding Banquet” was a signal moment in the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) Asian & Pacific Islander (API) community: when Ang Lee’s film was released in 1993, queer APIs were featured in a major Hollywood motion picture.

Winston Chao played the more or less openly gay Taiwanese immigrant Gao Wai-Tung living in New York with his white partner Simon (played by Mitchell Lichtenstein); but to please Gao’s very traditional Taiwanese Chinese parents, they pretend that their tenant Wei-Wei recently arrived from mainland China is actually Gao’s fiancée, leading to a wildly rambunctious traditional Chinese wedding banquet and surprising complications; eventual parental acceptance of the actual truth provides the happy dénouement along with complications from Gao’s nuptial interactions with Wei-Wei.

I honestly did not think Ang Lee’s wonderful film could be improved upon until I saw Andrew Ahn’s remake at a special preview for queer API community members. When it comes to the new “Wedding Banquet,” the term ‘remake’ seems inadequate: Ahn’s film is a loving tribute to Lee’s but really more than just a remake — it is (to use Ahn’s own word) a ‘re-imagining’ of the Ang Lee classic.

Instead of a ‘rice and potato’ couple, there is a gay Chinese American and a gay Korean American and a lesbian couple one of whom is Chinese American and the other Native American. Bowen Yang (of “Saturday Night Live” fame) plays the non-dissertating Chris and Han Gi-chan plays the textile-talented Korean immigrant Min while Lily Gladstone is the indigenous-identified Lee who is undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and Kelly Marie Tran plays her ‘soft butch girlfriend Angela. Joan Chen plays Angela’s too PFLAG-perfect mother May Chen and Young Yuh-jung plays Min’s formidable grandmother Ja-Young. If this film were an episode of “The Weakest Link,” it would be impossible to identify anyone as a weak link as all six leads are superb. I will always remember Joan Chen as Puyi’s empress in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”; here, she plays a mother too wrapped up in her own PFLAG stardom to address her daughter’s simmering resentment against her; their reconciliation is just one of the scenes that proves that Chen fully deserves her status as one of the most admired Asian actresses of our day.

But for me, the scene in which Ja-Young recognizes her grandson’s artistic talent as well as revealing a deep secret about her relationship with him as well as with her husband is the touchstone of the film’s genius and Academy Award-winning Youn Yuh-jung brings to the scene an extraordinary sensitivity and skill; to me, this scene is the emotional core of the heart of “The Wedding Banquet.”

Of course you will laugh at least as much as you will cry and the traditional Korean wedding is one of the funniest scenes in the film; but it is a measure of Ahn’s adroit handling of the material of the screenplay he wrote with James Schamus that Ahn can extract laughs while still showing the utmost respect and even reverence for the ceremony itself.

And in fact, while Ang Lee’s film was firmly rooted in the Sinitic cultural world, Ahn significantly Koreanizes the scenario by making the driving premise of the film the need for Min to please his (entirely unseen) Korean grandfather back in Korea through a heteronormative marriage. But Ahn also updates the scenario to the present day where — unlike in the world of Ang Lee’s 1993 film — same-sex couples can legally marry and have children with both partners legally recognized as parents. And so the climactic scene at City Hall becomes the historically updated riposte to the original film with the marriage license actually available to Min and Chris as well as Min and Angela.

One does not need to be LGBTQ — much less queer API — to fall in love with this film; but I think queer APIs will especially appreciate the subtle humor of the movie’s articulation of the fault lines in Chinese and Korean —and Chinese American and Korean American —culture and their intersection with contemporary queer culture and identity. While there are plenty of contemporary references from the United States c. 2025, there is an emotional heart and an adroit dramaturgy here that I am guessing will stand the ‘test of time’; I am guessing that this film will bring knowing smiles and tears to audiences long after all of those watching it in 2025 have passed from the scene.

Pauline Park is an LGBT activist based in Queens who co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York — the first organization for LGBT/queer Koreans in the city — in January 1997 and led it as coordinator until May 1999; she has written widely on LGBT issues and queer API history and identity and was the first transwoman of Asian descent to lead an LGBT community center in the United States as executive director when she served in that capacity from 2012 to 2015.

Gay City News published this review on 21 April 2025 under the title “Andrew Ahn’s ‘The Wedding Banquet’ is a loving tribute to Ang Lee’s original film.”

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I grew up with classical music but not opera and I first fell in love with that ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’ (as Samuel Johnson called it) in my sophomore year in college; more than 40 years later, I love opera more than ever but having seen most of the operas in the standard repertoire, I have become more selective in what I see in the theater. There have been thousands of operas written since 1600, but in my estimation, there are only two or three dozen truly great operas and perhaps another hundred or so that have bits and pieces that are worthwhile; for a list of my 30 favorite operas, see my blog post, “15 favorite operas and 15 more.”

I had a conversation with a friend who was new to opera and decided to put together a list of 20 numbers that are the absolute pinnacle of the art form, in chronological order (but with the Wagner numbers grouped together). To begin with, a little introduction: opera began with the Florentine Camerata and the composers Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, who wrote “Euridice,” performed in Florence on 6 October 1600 at the Palazzo Pitti with Peri himself singing the role of Orfeo.

1 — Claudio Monteverdi is the first great composer in the history of opera and his operas like his madrigals and instrumental music represent the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque. I saw an English National Opera production of his first opera “Orfeo” at the Coliseum in my first week in London in August 1981 and was stunned by the magnificent opening; two years later, in the summer of 1983, I saw Monteverdi’s last opera at the Glyndebourne opera festival on the Sussex Downs. “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” is Monteverdi’s crowning achievement in opera (pun intended) and it closes with the sublime duet between Nero and Poppea, “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” (I gaze upon you, I adore you).

2 — Baroque opera came to a brilliant climax with the works of Georg Friedrich Händel who — though German — not only mastered the Italian da capo opera form but wrote some of the greatest arias and ensembles in the Italian language — among the most profound expressions of Handelian genius being the duet “Per le porte del tormento” (Through the gates of torment) from “Partenope” (1730).

3 — Handel’s greatest opera is “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” (1724) and Cleopatra’s seduction of Julius Caesar is brilliantly portrayed in “V’adoro pupille” (I adore your eyes).

4 — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — along with Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner — is considered one of the three greatest composers of opera and in his all too short life, he created the operatic repertoire with his first great opera, “Le Nozze di Figaro” (The Marriage of Figaro) (1786) — the first opera never to leave the stage and the beginning of the revolution that would transform the genre by creating out of the ‘sonata-allegro’ form a structure for dramatic movement for the first time in the history of opera. Mozart’s partnership with Lorenzo Da Ponte — arguably the greatest librettist in the history of opera — would produce two more great masterpieces: “Don Giovanni” (1787) and “Così Fan Tutte” (1790). Many consider Mozart’s Don Juan opera the greatest ever written and it certainly has one of the most thrilling finales to any opera as the Don’s five victims sing “Questo è il fin di chi fa mal” (Such is the end of all those who do evil).

5 — “Così Fan Tutte” is the most underrated and most misunderstood of the ‘big four’ and has some of the most divine music Mozart ever wrote, including the trio “Soave sia il vento” (May the winds be gentle).

6 — After writing three of the greatest Italian operas, Mozart ended his all-too-short career with “Die Zauberflöte” (The Magic Flute) (1791), to a libretto by his fellow Free Mason, Emmanuel Schikaneder. Among the most magical moments in this most magical of operas is the quintet “Hm! Hm! Hm!” which demonstrates Mozart’s genius for taking the lowly ‘Singspiel’ form of popular German opera and raising it to the level of high art.

7 — Even those who do not know opera would recognize the overture to Giaochino Rossini’s last opera, “Guillaume Tell” — even if they would most likely call it the theme to “The Lone Ranger.” By common consent, “Il Barbiere di Siviglia is Rossini’s greatest opera, but my all-time favorite Rossini opera is “La Cenerentola” (1810) and the sextet “Questo è un nodo avviluppato” is the quintessence of Rossinian wit.

8 — “Norma” (1831) is universally considered Vincenzo Bellini’s masterpiece and while I find most of the opera less than compelling, “Casta diva” (Chaste Goddess) — the Druid priestess’s invocation to the moon — is without a doubt the peak of bel canto opera and one of the greatest arias ever written.

9 — Richard Wagner’s operas are all interminably long and boring but each of his great operas has around half an hour or more of music of absolute sublimity. “Tristan und Isolde” (1865) may well be the most influential opera ever written and the prelude ushers in the dissolution of the diatonicism that was central to European art music (i.e., ‘classical’ music) from Monteverdi to the mid-nineteenth century; but it is the Liebestod (Love Death) (“Mild und leise wie er lächelt“) (Mild and quiet as he smiles) that concludes the opera that is overwhelming in its power and almost makes it worth sitting through several hours of sheer boredom to get to that finale.

10 — “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) (1868) is billed as a comedy but it is surely the unfunniest comedy of all time; six hours or so of sheer boredom are introduced with a rousing overture and concludes with a magnificent Preislied (Prize Song) and is punctuated with one moment of sheer divinity — the quintet “Selig, wie die Sonne” (Blessed, like the sun).

11 — “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods) (1876) is the fourth and final installment in “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (The Ring of the Nibelungs) which together constitute by far the longest opera ever written; Rossini quipped that Wagner’s music had great moments but boring quarters of an hour; in the case of this ‘tetralogy,’ it’s not just quarters of an hour — it’s whole hours. Nonetheless, in each of the four operas, there are moments of sheer genius that one cannot imagine anyone but Wagner producing — including Siegfrieds Tod und Trauermarsch (Siegfried’s Death & Funeral Music) near the end of “Götterdämmerung.”

12 — Georges Bizet wrote the most popular opera of all time but sadly died before he could see “Carmen” (1875) become an international sensation and establish itself in the repertoire of every opera house in the world; despite becoming something of a cliché because of its ubiquity and countless mediocre productions over the years, one need only listen to the quintet “Nous avons en tête une affaire” to realize what a work of genius Bizet’s only hit is.

13 — Camille Saint-Saëns is most famous for his “Carnivaux des Animaux” (Carnival of the Animals) but his “Samson et Dalilah” (1877) has one of the greatest seduction scenes in all opera (“Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix“).

14 — Giuseppe Verdi loved William Shakespeare’s plays which he read in Italian translation because he did not read English and Shakespeare inspired Verdi’s last two operas: “Otello” (1887) and “Falstaff” (1893) with Arrigo Boito writing both masterful libretti — one a tragedy that is a fairly straightforward musical adaptation of “Othello” and the other a comedy that is loosely based on “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Henry IV.” For me, the high point of “Otello” is Desdemona’s great scena — “Piangea cantando… Salce, Salce… Ave Maria” (She cried, singing ‘Willow, Willow’; hail Mary) — usually referred to as the “Willow Song & Ave Maria.”

15 — Verdi concluded the greatest career in the history of Italian opera with a German fugue, undoubtedly baffling the audience at its premiere; “Falstaff” is nonetheless thoroughly Italian and in it, he achieved the ‘endless melody’ that Wagner always spoke of but while maintaining interest from beginning to end. “Sul fil d’un soffio etesio” (At the edge of a breath) is one of the few arias in the opera and may well be the most enchanting fairy music in any opera.

16 — “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry) (1898) was Pietro Mascagni’s only hit but it became an international sensation and is arguably the greatest one-act opera ever written and often paired with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s one-act opera “Pagliacci” (1892) in an operatic double bill (‘Cav/Pag’); the Intermezzo from ‘Cav’ is the only purely instrumental number I have included in this list because of its transcendent beauty which absolutely captivated me when I played it in my high school orchestra.

17 — “Rusalka” (1901) is the only one of Antonín Dvořák’s operas that is staged outside of Czechia these days and frankly, I do not find it very interesting; but it has one moment of sheer divinity: “Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém” (“Song to the Moon”).

18 — The music of Richard Strauß is the end of the line of German Romanticism and “Der Rosenkavalier” (The Knight of the Rose) (1911) is the culmination of the tradition of German Romantic opera that began with “Der Freischütz” of Carl Maria von Weber (1821). Rosenkavalier has two of the greatest moments in all opera. The first is the Presentation of the Rose scene (“Mir ist die Ehre“).

19 — The second peak is the final trio (“Marie Theres’… Hab’ mir’s gelobt“)

20 — I would argue that Giacomo Puccini managed to achieve what Richard Wagner claimed was his objective ‘endless melody’ but does so in his five greatest operas while keeping the audience fully engaged rather than nodding off. For “Madama Butterfly” (1904), Puccini wrote the greatest love duet in all opera (“Bimba dagli occhi pieni di malia“) (Girl with the eyes full of mischief) whose extraordinary musico-dramatic achievement is not undermined even by the most searching critique of the opera’s problematic Orientalism. “Turandot” (1924) is Puccini’s last and greatest opera and the last Italian opera to secure a place in the repertoire of every major opera company around the world; there are so many great moments in this grandest of grand operas including the tenor aria “Nessun dorma” that Luciano Pavarotti popularized but I would cite the death of Liu as the most moving; the most extraordinarily inventive scene is the quartet “Fermo! Che fai? Notte senza lumicino” (Stop! What are you doing? Night with a little light) with Calàf, Ping, Pang and Pong which demonstrates Puccini’s extraordinary ‘optique du théâtre’ better than any other. Olà, Pang! Olà, Pong!

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Palestine solidarity is the target of HR 9495 & this legislation is a direct threat to democracy
by Pauline Park

15 Democrats joined every Republican in the House of Representatives but one to pass the Terror-Financing & Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act (H.R. 9495) by a vote of 219-184, on 21 November 2024; what are the implications of this legislation should it pass the Senate and be signed into law either by Joe Biden or Donald Trump…?

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted in a press release before House passage of the bill that it “would give the incoming Trump administration new power to muzzle, punish, and effectively shut down tax-exempt organizations without transparency or appropriate due process. This misguided piece of legislation would impact a wide range of tax-exempt organizations, including nonprofits, universities, and even news outlets” (American Civil Liberties Union, “Ahead of House Vote on Bill That Would Stifle Dissent, ACLU Sounds Alarm Again,” ACLU press release, 20 November 2024).

“This bill is a five-alarm fire for anyone who seeks to protect free speech, civil society, and democracy. This bill is part of a broader MAGA assault on the fundamental right to public protest that begins with attacks on Palestinian rights groups and is aimed at outlawing all social justice movements fighting for progressive change,” said Beth Miller, political director for Jewish Voice for Peace. “It is shameful that the House of Representatives passed a bill that is straight out of the well-worn authoritarian playbook. The Senate must ensure that this bill to dismantle fundamental freedoms does not move forward or become law” (Julia Conley, “15 Democrats Join House GOP to Pass ‘MAGA Assault’ on Nonprofits,” Common Dreams, 21 November 2024).

“JVP noted that H.R. 9495 has its roots in the right-wing policy agenda Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist initiative Project Esther, which claims to combat antisemitism but is aimed at denying resources to groups that support the human rights of Palestinian people,” noted Conley.

What are the most pernicious aspects of this legislation?

First, it gives the secretary of the treasury the legal authority to designate any 501(c)(3) not-for-profit a terrorist organization.

Second, there is no clear appeal process beyond the secretary of treasury beyond resort to a legal challenge and the current composition of the US Supreme Court does not inspire confidence in the potential for having this legislation struck down as unconstitutional if it is signed into law.

Third, the clear target of this pernicious legislation is the Palestine solidarity movement and the obvious objective is to silence critics of Apartheid Israel and its Gaza genocide.

Fourth, this legislation could be used to silence all dissent under the new Trump administration and bears striking similarity to legislation enacted by the Italian parliament under Benito Mussolini and the German Reichstag under Adolf Hitler.

Fifth, there are already precedents for criminalization of Palestine solidarity activists and their organizations. Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights condemned Joe Biden’s treasury department for  adding Samidoun to the ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ (SDGT) list in October 2024 — in advance of the 2024 presidential election (Palestine Legal, “Palestine Legal & the Center for Constitutional Rights Condemn US Designation of Palestine Advocacy Group as Genocide Escalates,” Palestine Legal press release, 30 October 2024). Another example was the unjust prosecution of the ‘Holy Land Five’: Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain (Umar A. Farooq, “Holy Land Five: Palestinian American released to halfway house after two decades in prison,” Middle East Eye, 12 December 2024).

In short, HR 9495 is a clear and present danger to freedom of speech in the United States and to the Palestine solidarity movement in particular.

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