"'Women' is a banned word": Trump uses trans panic to strip rights from all women
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/women-is-a-banned-word-trump-uses-trans-panic-to-strip-rights-from-all-women/ar-AA1yKadE?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=01e82f487a614188b64fb0f043072112&ei=5
Story by Amanda Marcotte (10 Feb 2025)
In a country where 1 out of 6 women have experienced rape or attempted rape, Republicans believe they've found the real threat to female safety: The slim possibility that a cis college athlete might tie for 5th place in a swim meet with a trans woman. It happened once, and according to Donald Trump and his followers, it's the worst thing that has possibly happened to a woman in all of human history.
That the anti-trans panic is a stalking horse to strip rights and protections away from all women is most bluntly seen in the world of medical research... The National Science Foundation was told to comb through thousands of active research projects and defund any deemed too "woke." That's a big project, so they've been given a list of keywords deemed red flags for "wokeness." Among those words: "female," "women," and even "trauma."
All this certainly exposes the lie that Trump or the MAGA movement cares about "protecting women." What they actually care about is protecting gender hierarchy... Unlike cis women, who are about half the population, trans people are a small and vulnerable minority, making it far easier to demonize them, especially to credulous centrists. But MAGA was never going to stop at harassing trans people. Creating the scare term "gender ideology" was inevitably going to create space to attack anyone who doesn't conform to a rigid, misogynist worldview, including cis women who want to go to college or join the military.