Republicans derail women's history museum with anti-trans rulehttps://www.advocate.com/politics/national/republicans-derail-women-history-museaum 🔗Orion Rummler (27 May 2026)
The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum has been years in the making — and now, transphobia is threatening to derail the whole thing.
A bill to approve construction of the museum failed to pass on a 204-216 vote, with House Democrats voting in opposition. The Democratic Women's Caucus pulled support after Republicans amended the legislation to require that the museum exclude transgender women.
That rule would exclude trans women like Lynn Conway, an American computer scientist who guided the microchip design revolution of the 1980s, and Rachel Levine, former assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who helped coordinate the national COVID-19 pandemic response — not to mention the film directors behind The Matrix and Emmy-winning star Laverne Cox.
During an hour of debate on the House floor Thursday, Democrats cautioned that the amended version of the bill also gives Trump too much sway over the museum's design —and leaves progress on the Museum of the American Latino up in the air. Their attempt to return to the original bipartisan version of the bill failed.
"This bill used to be a bipartisan success story," Democratic Rep. Emily Randall of Washington state said on the House floor. "Republicans inserted culture war language limiting the museum to biological women. That language was not added to improve the museum, it was added to erase trans women from American history."
