Rolling Up Our Sleeves, Part 1: Fighting the New Trump Administration's Wave of Extremist Actions
(helpful, encouraging read)
Rolling Up Our Sleeves, Part 1: Fighting the New Trump Administration’s Wave of Extremist Actions
PUBLISHED 1/29/2025 by Carrie N. Baker
As Trump’s second term begins, feminist advocates are mobilizing to counter his administration’s extremist agenda. From swift legal challenges to strategic state-level protections, a fierce resistance is ready to defend democracy and women’s rights.
Skye Perryman speaks as student loan borrowers and advocates gather for the People’s Rally to Cancel Student Debt on Feb. 28, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Jemal Countess / Getty Images for People’s Rally to Cancel Student Debt)
A fierce feminist resistance is ready to defend women’s rights at the federal level—and creatively expand equality protections in the states. This is the first in a four-part series on the steps activists are taking to fight for our rights amid Trump’s attacks on democracy. Part 1 covers the organization Democracy Forward and its new initiative Democracy 2025, which is working to counter the Trump administration’s antidemocratic acts with swift legal challenges and other strategic responses. Part 2 (coming Thursday, Jan. 30) will discuss the Democratic governors and attorney generals who are working to “Trump-proof” their state’s existing laws and fight for legal protections for their residents. Next Wednesday and Thursday, Part 3 will tackle more specifics of state law and advocacy, while Part 4 will get into the issue of federal funding under Trump.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Feb. 12. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
After a narrow political victory in November, a second Trump administration is now threatening to reverse decades of hard-fought gains for women and girls. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for ending abortion; curtailing contraception; cutting programs supporting mothers and their children; eliminating Head Start childcare; rolling back women’s workplace rights and equal pay measures; undermining LGBTQ+ rights; gutting Title IX protections against sexual assault and harassment; investigating and prosecuting universities and other entities over the use of diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and so much more. “There is no mandate for this extremism,” says Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward, a progressive legal nonprofit. “We need to hold on to what we know the vast majority of people in this country want and believe. We must also hold on to the fact that in our democracy, we do still have many protections that the courts are going to have to be active in enforcing.”
Rising to the urgency of the moment, tens of thousands of activists, attorneys and officeholders are poised to fight harmful Trump administration actions and to work with state leaders to protect and even expand women’s rights. They will use novel strategies to enforce long-neglected state equality laws and new state protections like the equal rights amendments recently passed in Nevada and New York. They are pledging to use the looming crisis to fight for long overdue advances, such as paid parental leave, robust public funding for child- and eldercare, accessible and affordable abortion and contraception, pay equity and new protections from men’s violence against women.
“Having fought for women’s rights for decades, I think that there will be many opportunities, including opportunities that aren’t foreseeable right now,” says Sue Frietsche, executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Pennsylvania. “We need to be alert, we need to be networked in and we need to be ready to pounce. We have to be strategic, full of energy and relentless.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/DCXJLu3Pplw/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=0621ea9f-22d5-47e3-b351-0773f5d4dd8b
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The Winter 2025 cover of Ms. magazine.
Perryman is optimistic given Biden’s appointments to the federal bench.
“President Biden has appointed more than 200 pro-democracy judges,” she says. “Many of them are professionally diverse as well as demographically diverse. Judges who have advocated for civil rights and women’s rights and labor rights are now on our federal bench.” She says it’s likely that by the time Biden left office, the majority of judges in the federal judiciary were appointed by pro-democracy presidents. While these judges will protect against extreme and illegal actions by the new administration, Perryman points out that during Trump’s first four years, progressive activists also succeeded before judges who were ideologically conservative, including those appointed by Trump himself. “We’re quite confident that there are a range of things the Trump-Vance administration will seek to do that will violate the law, and that the courts will be critical to ensuring that conduct stops,” Perryman says. But first, advocates are ready to challenge political appointments made by Trump—in an effort to prevent illegal conduct from occurring at all. Perryman is particularly concerned about anti-science appointees. “Last time, Trump put a lot of those people into positions in the government,” she says. “We are really concerned about the manipulation of science and evidence.”
Feminist advocates hope to also use the courts to expand federal women’s rights as they did during the previous Trump term. In 2020, for example, Trump’s FDA refused to remove an in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, despite lifting such requirements on all other drugs during the pandemic. Reproductive rights groups challenged the action, winning a federal court decision that ordered the FDA to lift that restriction during the COVID-19 emergency. Eventually the in-person dispensing requirement was lifted permanently, which actually increased access to medication abortion, including telemedicine abortion. “We know from the prior administration that extremists will overreach, and when they overreach, there are often opportunities to build power, either through litigation and positive court decisions, or through public outrage that then becomes public accountability,” Perryman says. “There will likely be a number of opportunities … to find ways to ensure that we’re not just seeking to protect rights, but also seeking to expand some rights.”
https://msmagazine.com/2025/01/29/feminist-resistance-trump-extremism-democracy-forward-republicans-maga-courts/