Have you ever wondered why Trump has so little sympathy for women who say they were victims of sexual assault or rape? Why he praised Vivek’s Ramaswamy’s ad attacking Amy Acton and belittled her history of being raped by her step-father? Why Trump’s Departnebt of Justice refuses to release all the Epstein files and why those released were heavily redacted?
The House Democrats released a scathing report linking Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities, accusing the Department of Justice of a cover-up, and linking Trump to 11 women who claimed they were raped by him.
Julie K. Brown, the journalist at the Miami Herald who broke the Jeffrey Epstein story open after it was buried and forgotten, writes here about one of the women mentioned in the Democrats’ report.
A new sex allegation has surfaced against President Donald Trump by a former Miss Switzerland contestant who alleges that he brutally raped her during one of his beauty pageants events in 1993.
The details of her story mirror those of other women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse and even rape. But what’s also noteworthy about this story is the gawking and grinning Trump and Epstein did at these model gatherings. They hardly seemed interested in the business of modeling; if true, it was as if they were engaged in an intrasexual competition.
The beauty queen, Beatrice Keul, has previously said she was 24 and attending Trump’s pageant when Trump tried to attack her in a hotel room. She now says that the attack was much more violent than she previously recounted, telling the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that Trump raped her during his American Dream Pageant.
At the event, she also recalled meeting Epstein and that he invited her to parties that he said he arranged for Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
“I’m Jeffrey, Don’s best friend,” Epstein told her at the pageant, according to the report.
The claim is part of a 53-page report compiled by Democrats on the House judiciary committee, which on Monday called for a special prosecutor to investigate Trump’s ties to Epstein and the administration’s “cover-up” of potential sex trafficking crimes by Epstein and other men, including Trump.
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s,” the report says.
There have been more than a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual improprieties, and even assault. Some of their accounts, which were previously known, are also included in the Dem’s report.
One of the women, E. Jean Carroll, successfully sued Trump for raping her in a department store changing room. A federal jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in connection with the 1996 assault in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
Many of the women listed in the Dems’ report have previously gone public with their accounts— and sadly, in some ways, have been forgotten.
Maybe it is time for the public to take a new look.
Imagine this scenario: a candidate for Governor of a major state pays for a campaign ad that portrays his opponent as a liar. That in itself is not unusual. But suppose that candidate’s staff has located the mother of his opponent and has persuaded her (paid her?) to make an ad saying that her daughter is a liar, is possibly mentally unstable, and should not be elected Governor.
But this is what’s left out of the story. The context. The target of the ad–Dr. Amy Acton– has not spoken to her mother in more than 40 years. Between the ages of 9 or 10 and 12, she was raped by her stepfather. He was indicted by a grand jury for child rape but fled the state before trial. The candidate’s mother never divorced the man who raped her daughter. The daughter and her brother were removed from their mother’s care.
The mother is a felon, charged repeatedly for non-violent crimes like fraud, writing bad checks, and even animal cruelty.
The ad in which Dr. Amy Acton’s mother attacks her is the dirtiest trick of the midterm elections. It was funded by Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire who is running for governor of Ohio. Vivek must have gotten tired of hearing his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, talk about living in distressful conditions as a child. Someone on his staff found Acton’s birth mother, who lied on video to hurt her daughter yet again.
How painful for Amy Acton, who suffered through a horrible childhood, was estranged from her negligent mother, and now must endure the pain of being insulted by the mother who failed to intervene to stop the rapes and protect her daughter.
Amy Acton rose above her childhood abuse, went to college, then to medical school and became a doctor. Before she entered the race for Governor, she served Republican Governor Mike DeWine as Ohio’s Director of the state Department of Health.
Governor Mike DeWine urged Ramaswamy to take down the ad; so did other Republican state officials.
But Trump thought it was a terrific ad and urged Ramaswamy to keep running it. Trump tends to side with men accused of sexual assault, never with their victims. Vivek plans to spend $4 million to continue to run the campaign ad.
Trump and JD Vance saw nothing wrong with the ad attacking Acton. Vance said that critics should “stop whining” about the ad and focus on winning.
The one sure conclusion I reach is that these men don’t care if children are sexually assaulted and raped. They side with rapists and pedophiles, not their victims.
To these symbols of “manliness,” women don’t count.
At a rally a few days ago in Dalton, Georgia, Trump made the preposterous claim that five states allow schools to promote transgender surgery.
We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make — somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much.
I’ll see you later. And you say where’s my son? My son is in the hospital. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five — I think Minnesota and some others. I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right? So — and we made English the official language of the United States of America.
He told the same story about the notorious five states repeatedly in the 2024 election, and each time he said it, the news media said it was false. He never produced evidence. Never. Not one single instance.
No teacher. No student. No Timmy. No Tammy.
At first, I was outraged that no journalist called him out for this lie.
But as I read the speech, I realized there were so many lies that it would be overwhelming to correct them all.
Please, if you can stomach it, read the clips from this speech given in Dalton, Georgia, on October 16, 2026.
Trump humiliated himself and our country by his belligerent speech at the United Nations today. He offered a choice to Iran: either make a deal or I will annihilate you. Richardson points out that the animating vision of the UN is a world in which words replace wars, in which diplomacy replaces coercion. Trump doesn’t get it.
Instead, he displayed his idea of “the art of the deal”: do what I say or I will bludgeon you, destroy you, exterminate you.
There is one good thing about his nutty ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. All the other networks refuse to post videos of him
Speaking. That’s a relief for those of us who hate the sound of his whiny voice and know that most of the time he is either boasting or lying. personally, I hope this ban lasts a while longer. By the way, the Justice Departnebt said yesterday that Trump was justified in banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico as a matter of “national security.”
In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”
Central to that effort was the principle, stated in Article 2, that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The U.N. General Assembly has been meeting in New York City since September 8, and today began its high-level General Debate, the annual meeting of the heads of state and heads of government that launches the General Assembly session. At the General Debate, all 193 U.N. member states are invited to address the General Assembly.
By tradition, Brazil speaks first because it was the first to volunteer to speak in 1955 when no other country would. Because the United States is the country that hosts the United Nations, it usually speaks second.
In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Much of the Iranian delegation walked out.
Trump’s immediate switch to a talking point about the midterms suggests that his speech was aimed at U.S. voters more than the U.N. audience, but it should not be overlooked that he stood in front of world leaders and rejected the premise of the U.N.
Touting his own “Board of Peace” and continuing his fiction that he has solved multiple wars, he outlined a fantasy worldview of himself as a powerful dictator, a man of action who rejects the diplomacy at the heart of the U.N.
“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” he declared. “They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.”
Rejecting the principles on which the U.N. was founded, Trump instead embraced the idea that powerful countries will have spheres of influence, dominating their neighbors. This is the worldview advanced by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who seeks to have control over the decisions made by the countries around Russia, including Ukraine. In this worldview, as Trump sees it, the United States will control the western hemisphere.
“To the victor belong the spoils,” he told the U.N. in a perverse echo of the world the U.N. founders set out to change. “You’ve all heard that.”
Trump threatened Mexico and boasted of U.S. attacks on Venezuela that removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, who was willing to work with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil fields.
“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”
“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba,” Trump said, “where the communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under. It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before and it will fall. Marco Rubio is handling a negotiation. He’s deep into negotiations with Cuba. Let’s see what happens.”
The Cuban delegation walked out.
In an echo of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump went full white nationalist, accusing the “U.N.’s top human rights officials” of wanting the U.S. “to open up our borders to gangs and criminals from [the] world’s most dangerous places…. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history. There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation and so should you.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, asked the nations of the world to hold fast to a different vision.
He warned that “we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” whose “reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.”
“At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.”
There are two routes open, Guterres said. Either the world will fragment into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or it will move toward “networked multipolarity,” a “world built on interdependence—and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules.”
Against the backdrop of Russia’s debacle in Ukraine and the U.S. morass in Iran, Guterres noted that the world’s superpowers have learned that “their power isn’t so super. That their power has limits.”
He urged countries to hold fast to the principles of the United Nations: “The primacy of international law. Upholding human dignity. And the pursuit of justice in all its dimensions.”
“It comes down to this,” he said, “Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?”
Force must not “be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter,” he said.
He called out the war in Iran and conflicts in the Middle East; Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza “with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General”; “violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank”; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in violation of the U.N. charter; the war on civilians in Sudan, with millions displaced; and escalating violence in Myanmar.
Guterres added that “[n]o discussion of inequality can ignore its most universal form: The inequality between men and women. Everywhere, women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion, and abuse. Around the world: Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds. And their freedoms treated as bargaining chips.
“This is an outrage—and a profound waste for humanity. Peace is more durable when women are at the table. Economies are more dynamic when women have equal opportunity. Societies are more resilient when girls can learn, lead, and live free from fear. And institutions are more effective when power is shared equally.”
“Equality is not a dream,” Guterres said. “It is a decision.”
“Excellencies,” he said, “The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it.”
“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together.
The family of Tierra Walker, 37, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton because of her death. Walker died in December 2024 after she was denied an abortion that would have saved her life.
Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat James Talarico.
The family’s lawsuit contends that the state’s near-total ban on abortion is unconstitutional.
Walker was 20 weeks pregnant. She had been diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. Her high blood pressure threatened her life.
Walker repeatedly suffered seizures and blood clots. She and her family asked for a life-saving abortion but were rejected by multiple doctors, who refused to treat her because of Texas’s harsh ban on abortions. Doctors who perform abortions will not only lose their license, they may be fined $100,000 and sentenced to life in prison.
The family is also suing the executive director of the Texas Medical Board, the University of Texas health system and individual doctors.
ProPublica reviewed Tierra Walker’s files in 2025, and at best, she was the victim of state-sanctioned malpractice. Under Texas law, the life of the fetus is protected; the life of the mother is not.
ProPublica condensed more than 6,500 pages of Walker’s medical records into a summary of her care with the guidance of two high-risk pregnancy specialists. More than a dozen OB-GYNs reviewed the case for ProPublica and said that since Walker had persistently high blood pressure, it would have been standard medical practice to advise her of the serious risks of her pregnancy early on, to revisit the conversation as new complications emerged and to offer termination at any point if she wanted it. Some described her condition as a “ticking time bomb.” Had Walker ended her pregnancy, every expert believed, she would not have died.
Many said that her case illustrated why they think all patients need the freedom to choose how much risk they are willing to take during pregnancy. Walker expressed that she didn’t want to take that risk, her family says. She had a vibrant life, a husband and son whom she loved.
Under Texas’ abortion law, though, that didn’t matter….
Dr. Elizabeth Langen, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Michigan who reviewed Walker’s case, said a physician comfortable with high-risk pregnancies should have counseled her on the dangers of continuing and offered her an abortion. “The safest thing for her was to terminate this pregnancy, that’s for sure.”
During Walker’s many hospital and prenatal visits, 21 OB-GYNs were among the more than 90 physicians involved in her care. None of them counseled her on the option — or the health benefits — of a termination, according to medical records.
ProPublica points out that legislators in several states who have tried to introduce medical exemptions to their anti-abortion laws have been stopped by activists who claim that any exemption is unacceptable. They say that women will seek abortions under false pretenses and that doctors will prescribe abortion for women with nothing more than a headache.
They should talk to Tierra Walker’s family or at least read the ProPublica article.
Renee Richards shocked the sports world in 1977 when she she sued for the right to play in the U.S. Open; she was a trans woman. She had been a successful opthamologist and an amateur tennis player. After she transitioned, she became a professional tennis player. Some events barred her, and she sued to participate in others. Now, in her 90s, she looks back with regret at some of her decisions, and she explains why. As a fully developed man, she now believes she had an unfair physical advantage. She rationalized her advantage because she was so much older than most if the women she played.
In 1977, Dr. Renée Richards — a well-regarded ophthalmologist who’d spent most of her life as a very good amateur tennis player — sued for her right to play in the US Open.
Richards had played some competitions locally and throughout the country. She had the backing of tennis great Billie Jean King. And she had a tricky left-handed serve.
But Richards was a transgender woman, the first in the sport. Some tournaments allowed her to play, and opponents dropped out in protest. Others, like the Italian Open, accepted her at first only to change their minds days before the tournament’s start. And the US Open barred her completely.
A judge ruled that the US Open had violated New York State’s Human Rights Law, and that Richards could play. Though she was knocked out in the first round that year in singles, she was a finalist in women’s doubles. She went on to play in other tournaments and in 1981, at the age of 47, she retired from professional tennis.
Richards, now 92, describes herself as a steadfast supporter of trans rights. She also calls her own lawsuit “selfish” and says she opposes trans women and girls participating in women’s sports.
A new biography published this week, “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer,” by the trans and nonbinary sportswriter Julie Kliegman, chronicles the challenges and contradictions of Richards’s life and career. Richards won acceptance in part because she was seen as a “one-off,” Kliegman said in an interview.
Competitors like Martina Navratilova, who is now a vocal opponent of trans women playing women’s sports, liked Richards as an individual, Kliegman said: “It’s often sort of easier to accept someone from a marginalized group when you have a personal relationship with them, as opposed to the abstraction of trans people who might be seen as coming to steal scholarships or prize money from cisgender women.”
While Richards is a strong supporter of trans rights, she now opposes the entry of trans women into women’s sport. She believes that she had an unfair physical advantage.
She thinks that the debate about bathrooms and trans people is ridiculous. People don’t make the momentous decision to transition so they can use bathrooms of the other sex.
Why does she now oppose trans women in women’s sports?
She said:
If a male who becomes a female went through male puberty, that person has an advantage over other females who were never males in the beginning and didn’t develop larger long bones and bigger chest cavities and larger hearts and a greater amount of muscle mass and bigger cardiac output and lung capacity. Even if they are deprived testosterone by their transition, that’s only part of the story. It’s not enough.
She added:
I thought I was being fair in competing with cisgender women because the competition was pretty close. I won some matches against top players. I lost some matches against poorly ranked players.
I thought that because I was older than the other players, that negated any advantage I might have had by having formerly been a male. I thought that it was a pretty equal playing field until I played in one match in 1979. I played in the women’s 35-and-over championship at Flushing Meadow, and I beat Nancy Richey, a Hall of Fame player. She won the French Open and a few other big tournaments. I beat her in the finals, and I was only 10 years older than she was.
And after I beat her in the finals, I said to myself, “I don’t think it’s fair. It’s not enough of an age difference.” So that got me to think that my opinion about allowing transgender women to play on the tour was inaccurate. I’ve been saying that it’s been fair because I’ve been playing against women that are 20 or more years younger than I am…
I didn’t think that the age would make such a difference. When I played that match against Nancy, I hadn’t conceived of it until then. I’d been playing against Chrissie (Evert) and Martina (Navratilova) and Tracy (Austin), and they had an advantage over me for sure because of the age difference. No matter the size and the muscle mass and so on, I was at a disadvantage playing Martina and Chrissie and Tracy, and I knew it, and they knew it…
Being a trans woman is something that is a right and should be respected. And if you’re a trans woman congressman, you don’t have any physical advantage over other congressmen or women.
Competitive sports are a totally different entity. Why do you think we have juniors and seniors and junior seniors and 35-and-overs and 150 pounders and lightweights and middleweights and bantamweights and heavyweights? Because sports is different.
As a matter of principle, I believe in the “live and let live” way of life. So long as people aren’t hurting anyone else, their choices about how to live should be tolerated at least and respected at best.
Governor Tim Walz used a memorable phrase that captures the same idea. “It’s none of your damn business!”
That’s my response when Republicans whip up the public to hate or fear transgender people.
Why do they do it? It’s a sure fire winner. It appeals to base instincts. (“How dare they flaunt society’s norms?”) They made it a big issue during the 2024 Presidential campaign.
But it’s overdone.
According to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, about 1% of the population over the age of 13 identifies as transgender. Or, 2.8 million people.
I understand the outrage about biological males competing in women’s sports, most especially, sports where men have a physical advantage, like swimming or track and field.
But I do not understand why Trump and Hegseth have expelled members of the military who are transgender. Many of those who have been booted from the military are decorated veterans who have served their nation with courage and distinction. Some are high-ranking officers with medals and multiple commendations.
I truly don’t understand why the military would expel officers or enlisted personnel who want to serve their nation and who are willing to risk their lives for our protection.
What does their sexual identity have to do with their ability to perform their duties? Does it give them an unfair advantage? I have not heard a convincing argument from Trump or Hegseth to justify their purge of transgender personnel from the military.
It seems to me that this is an open and shut case of bigotry, no different from discrimination based on religion, race, or gender. The transgender members of the military have been discharged because of who they are, not because of any dereliction of duty.
The Republican Party seems intent on banning the very existence of transgender people. In the states, Republican legislatures have passed laws mandating that there are only two biological genders, and you are whatever your birth certificate says. No matter what laws they pass or what executive orders Trump signs, transgender people are not going to disappear. But these official actions can make them miserable and ruin their lives.
A recent article by M. Gessen in The New York Times described the unnecessary harassment of transgender people in Kansas. There, transgender people must have their birth gender on their driver’s license. Why? What governmental purpose does this serve? None.
For 1% of the population, this bifurcation is not true. A tiny percentage of people born male live as females. A tiny percentage of people born female live as males. This is who they are.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went mask-off last week, promising behind closed doors to roll back abortion access even further, and telling religious pro-life hard-liners that he wanted the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the right to abortion to become “permanent in every single state.”
Blanche made the comments in a “prayer call” last Thursday hosted by the White House Faith Office and attended by various faith leaders. The call was not open to press and not on the record, although the entirety of the call is now up on YouTube.
“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said. “If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that.”
“They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs,” Blanche added, singling out abortion pills.
This is a far cry from the answer he offered at his confirmation hearing, when he claimed he would “carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act,” the 150-year-old law that bans the mailing of contraceptives and other things considered to be “obscene.”
He also noted that the Trump administration is “putting practices and policies in place” to block abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol from being sent to states that have banned abortion, a process that would require the Justice Department to invoke the Comstock Act—something President Trump specifically said he wouldn’t do back in 2024 while campaigning.
“A vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote ‘so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,’” Senator Patty Murray wrote Tuesday on X. “Those were his own words to anti-abortion extremists. Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”
What is life like for a military veteran who is transgender, caring for her Trump-loving relatives, living in Trump country? The Washington Post recently featured this interview of Cassandra Williamson, who lives a life of contradictions and faces it with equanimity.
It begins:
The day that a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, Cassandra Williamson was at home in rural Kentucky, washing laundry and checking her mom’s vital signs. Williamson, 66, is a veteran of both the Marine Corps and the Navy, and for the last few years, she has been the primary caregiver for her mother and two siblings. Williamson is also transgender — a fact that has put her at odds with her Trump-loving family and a growing network of conservatives who want to strip trans people of rights.
When prosecutors and public officials said Kirk’s alleged shooter was in a romantic relationshipwith a person who is transitioning from male to female, prominent Republicans called for trans activists to be institutionalized and labeled terrorists. For Williamson, the suggestion felt ludicrous. How could she be a threat to the nation she fought to protect?
Williamson started a satirical blog called “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist” in which she recounts the activities of her daily life as a caretaker. (Video: Cassandra Williamson)
She decided to start a satirical blog.
In “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist,’ Williamson recounts in intimate and often humorous detail the chores and conversations that make up her days. She changes soiled bedsheets. She deploys “a full-scale tactical assault on the laundry pile with extreme prejudice (and a little bit of OxiClean).” She pushes Ensure on her ailing mom, and she makes sure her sister’s Trump hat sits just right on her head as she watches Fox News. In one entry, Williamson writes, “Good to know the best and brightest minds in D.C. are focused on the real threat: a veteran from coal country who can operate a glucometer and a washing machine. Sometimes simultaneously.”
The Washington Post interviewed Williamson about her life, this tumultuous political moment and what she sees as the way forward in an increasingly divided nation. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What were you thinking when you heard Charlie Kirk had been shot?
The first thought that occurred to me when Charlie Kirk had been shot was that I hoped this was not in any way associated with transgender people. I was really sad about it all because I hate seeing someone killed over their political beliefs. It just goes against everything I believe in. And even though he and I would disagree on everything, I don’t want to see people killed over their beliefs. He has a family, he’s got children, he’s got a wife, he’s got a sister. And it pains me enormously the loss that they are feeling now.. Those are all the things that went through my head all within a matter of a couple of seconds.
Why were you scared that it might have a connection to the trans community?
I didn’t want there to be an association because I knew that it would be weaponized against the entire community. And they already have a bull’s eye on our back, essentially, without this.
You posted a video the day after Kirk was shot, and you called for a moment of silence for him, his family and his supporters. Tell me about that.
He’s an American. His family is American. And in that moment of tragedy, it was important for me to show my community, my part of this American community, another life had been lost. I think that we needed to have that moment of silence, recognizing that there are people who do agree with him. We don’t agree with him or them, but they’re still Americans and they deserve that respect.
And you’re someone who has served this country.
I served for everyone, even the ones I disagree with, even the ones who want to kill me, even the ones who see me as less than. And I would go to the grave defending their right to believe those things. They might not do that for me, but that’s on them, not on me.
Republican lawmakers Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson have called for trans people to be treated as “terrorists” and institutionalized. You decided to start a blog called “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist.” Why?
Well, I didn’t know how else to address what they were trying to say. I know that I cannot persuade people to come along with anything that I’m trying to tell them. I can give them numbers. They don’t care. I can give them a mountain of evidence. They don’t care. The only thing left is trying to find some humor in all of this, at least, satirically.
You’re calling me a terrorist and here I am, getting up at 7 a.m., making sure my mom gets her shots and her medicine and breakfast, making sure my brother’s all right, sister’s all right. And then mom pees in the bed.
Look, there’s a lot of humor in what I’m doing here. I mean, there’s a lot that can be used to show people we can laugh even though you want to traumatize us. I can let this thing beat me up. But I decided that somebody’s got to be the example that says there is a way through this, and here it is.
Tell me what’s going on with your family.
Mom is almost 87 years old. She’s been losing the battle with her cognitive abilities. She can’t see real well. She can’t hear real well. And her mobility is extremely limited. Brother has COPD, very severe. He worked in the coal mines for all of his life. And it’s difficult for him to breathe. And he has to keep oxygen around. He’s very weak. My sister has some physical mobility issues, as well as educational deficiencies. She doesn’t have the ability to talk in any way that you can understand her. You really have to listen closely to the sounds that she makes to kind of interpret what she wants to eat.
You have posted some pictures of them wearing Trump hats.
This whole area is Trump country. This whole region of Pike County, eastern Kentucky, it is Trump country, period. And when I came here, the first thing I noticed is that Fox News was on all the time in every room and loud.
I had to go to my granddaughter’s graduation in Texas this past year. So I stopped at this place down in Tennessee on the way back. It’s called the Trump Superstore. I go in and buy [my sister] Irma a pair of short pants that says Trump. And I got my brother a shirt that says Trump, and I got my sister one of those gold-plated $50 bills for five bucks. And it has Trump on it. They’re entitled to believe what they want, and it does not hurt me or offend me in any way, even though I know that what they are supporting is harmful to me and those like me. I can’t demand that they treat me another way from how they’ve always done things. So I don’t worry about all of that. If I did, I would be one sour person. I wouldn’t be able to exist here. So you have to find a way to survive.
Do you all talk about transgender issues?
My brother and I had a good conversation just a couple days ago. He had seen what was going on with Jackson and Mace and the Heritage Foundation wanting to institutionalize all of us. And he knows that it doesn’t apply to me. Right now, I am the one who represents all transgender people. And he noticed that I’m not like any of those things that he hears. He puts more faith in what they’re saying about it in a broader perspective. And I’m not gonna change his mind on a lot of that. We can have those conversations, but it’s a very slow process. The more they get to interact with me as just being a normal person, like anyone else here in this community, the more they see that we’re just as real as they are.
You came out in 2016. You were in your mid-50s. How did you decide it was time?
I was living with this girl. She had this tube of Premarin in her bathroom. The warning label said men should not touch this thing because it can cause breast development. I think I passed out. I saw that and I went, “Oh, my God, there’s a way.” That was in 2004. It took me another five years to study and think through all these things. And then in 2009, I decided I’m going to order this stuff from overseas. I would get that stuff in. I’d get scared. I’d flush it down the toilet. I’d go buy more.
I have known who I am for a long, long, long, long, long time. But that little box with that warning label was the key that said, “There is a way.”
I ended up taking a picture with family, and I’m in a big, baggy shirt, trying to scrunch. I’d been hiding completely. I decided then that I couldn’t hide anymore. I went to my therapist and they said, “You’re gonna have to help me write a letter.” I took the letter, gave it to all my kids, my ex-wife. I posted it on Facebook. The kids came to me within like four hours and said, “What do you want us to call you?” And I said, “Whatever you want. I’m good with it.” My ex-wife, it took her about 12 hours.
So, I’d sent that letter to my brothers and sisters. I’m the oldest of six. And they let me know that they didn’t want mom to know. They thought it would probably kill her. And so, I waited, but then on a Monday, I called mom, and I said, “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you, but, but I’m not going to tell you today. I want you to go into your prayer closet and pray. And then I’m going to call you back in a couple of days.” So I called back Wednesday and said, “Mom, have you prayed? You ready?” She’s Southern Baptist. And she said, “I think I’m ready.” And I said, “So I’m one of those transgender people you’ve heard of, Mom.” She said, “Oh, I thought it was worse than that.” And we just carried on a conversation after that. And she didn’t die, thank goodness.
Did she accept you?
No, she did not accept me. Her faith wouldn’t allow for that. And even today, she gets confused sometimes because I’ll come through in a really low-cut dress. And she’s asked me, “So, who are you?” And I said, “I’m Cassandra, your oldest child.”
But I’m good with that. I am really thrilled to be able to spend time with my mom, brother and sister here. That’s important to me, regardless of how they feel.
How do things feel for you now compared to when you first came out?
If I take a global perspective, we’ve come a long way. But we’ve also experienced a lot more difficulties since then, too. When [former defense secretary] Ash Carter announced [in 2016] that he was lifting the trans ban for service in the military, it was like a whole new world was in front of us. It was exciting. Little did we know, in just a few months, Trump would take office and send out his infamoustweets on trans people serving in the military. It was really devastating when he started trying to strip trans military people of their rights.
This year has been horrendous on a global scale for rights for every minority in the country and the world, really. This is a conservative reset. And through history, you can actually see that in the 50s, they got tired of all of the LGB people in federal government. They kicked 20,000 people out of the federal government in the 50s for security reasons. Same argument they used today for the military.
You have sent your blog to many prominent right-wing pundits and officials. Have you heard back from any of the politicians like Nancy Mace or anyone else that you’ve tweeted at?
No, and I’m not going to. You know why? They don’t want to be Loomered. Laura Loomer, she’s the one who will go, “You talked to a trans person. We want you fired now.” Or LibsofTikTok: “We want you fired because you had a picture of a trans person standing beside you. We don’t want that.” I know people in the military have been chased out. People will send it to Pete Hegseth for their removal. They’re not going to talk to me because they don’t want the ire of their base raised up against them.
Do you think Charlie Kirk would have talked to you?
Charlie probably would have. That’s the thing that he actually believed in. But I do think that he would have tried to bully me with his vast knowledge. He was a very smart person. I will talk to anyone, whether you agree with me or not.
And that makes me the biggest “terrorist” in the world to people like Trump and Jackson and Mace and the Heritage Foundation. Because I’m changing minds here at the local level. I’m affecting their base in a way they don’t want their base to move. It’s one person at a time, one greeter at Walmart at a time.
The leaders of Arkansas–such as Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders–oppose abortion. They also oppose birth control. They apparently don’t teach sex education. They rely on “abstinence education,” or just say no.
But it’s not working the state has the second highest rate of births to unwed teen mothers.
The Arkansas Timesreviewed a movie that explains the human consequences of this policy.
Watching “Baby/Girls,” a documentary about teen mothers in Arkansas that screened Wednesday at the Bentonville Film Festival, might be an impossible task if it weren’t for the youthful optimism of its subjects. The seriousness of what’s happened to them hasn’t sunk in, at least not in the opening scenes. They still speak in soft, girlish tones. They wear fake eyelashes, dye their hair teal. One giggles while trying to recall the word for “uterus,” the organ her baby will be emerging from in just a matter of weeks. By the end of the film, the light has gone out of their eyes.
One girl has taken off with her baby and run away from home. Another is pregnant again, on an 18-month waiting list for childcare, and desperately poor. The third, living in a dingy flop house with her boyfriend, chooses to give her baby up for adoption after leaving the infant alone on at least one occasion so she can hang out with her sisters.
“Baby/Girls” is cinematic, but it’s a hard watch, and I don’t think the people who really need to see it — the politicians that enforce abstinence education and work to outlaw abortion, and the religious fanatics who treat sex like we’re living in Victorian England — will even bother.
But the movie isn’t just for pro-lifers; it’s for the rest of us who need to be reminded that unplanned pregnancy is, for many women, especially teenagers, one of the absolute worst things that could ever happen, leading to a cycle of poverty, family dysfunction and more teen pregnancy.
According to Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, “Arkansas is still 49th in the country for teen births with a rate that is almost double the national teen birth rate of 13.” (That is: On average, 22 of every 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 give birth annually in Arkansas.)
“Baby/Girls” traces three girls — Grace, 15; Olivia, 16; and Ariana, 17 — from pregnant-and-near-bursting until their kids are infants or toddlers. They’re all living in Compassion House, a home for teen moms in Springdale, at the documentary’s start.
The filmmakers are given incredibly intimate access to their births, family dynamics, home life, court dates and the like. We quickly learn all three grew up in terrible, neglectful situations — and their pregnancies are a continuation of a terrible, unending cycle. Grace was molested at age 3 by a man she thought to be her biological dad. Her mother was a drug addict. Olivia’s mom committed suicide when Olivia was 8 years old, and when we meet Olivia, a judge has ordered her to Compassion House because she’s decided that her grandmother’s house is not a safe place for her to be. Finally, Ariana, somehow the most well-adjusted, is the product of rape. Her mother — wire-thin and missing her teeth — is emotionally abusive and absent.
It’s disturbing to watch the girls explain why they ever thought this would go differently. Grace watched the lives of glamorous teen moms on TikTok. They looked happy. “I wanted to feel that,” she says. Olivia simply didn’t realize that sex made babies — ”I didn’t even realize I had three holes down there,” she says, chortling.
But none of them got pregnant on purpose. Grace forgot to take her birth control consistently. Ariana was too embarrassed to ask her mom for condoms. For Olivia, “it just kind of happened.” On the subject of abortion, Ariana is the only one who speaks about it directly. She’s religious. It was never an option.
Crystal, the movie’s wise sage who works at Compassion House, says that girls aren’t learning basic sex education in school anymore.
None of that matters now, as the girls’ lives come spectacularly undone once they leave the shelter and support of Compassion House and move out on their own after the birth of their kids. The girls’ lives go so horribly wrong that I almost wondered if parts of the film had been staged.
Grace, a beautiful, impossibly childish girl, runs away again to live the life of a degenerate teen, vaping and doing shots around a bonfire. She leaves her baby behind with her mother, who, with four other kids to raise, is buckling under the responsibility. Grace is mystified as to why she doesn’t want to be a mom. It’s not your fault. Society failed you, the filmmakers want us to scream. And I do, silently.
Olivia goes away to juvenile detention for a year, missing her baby’s first steps. The second she gets her ankle monitor off after returning home, she takes off with her kid.
Ariana’s story is the saddest because, for a moment, the filmmakers let us believe she might beat the odds. Early in the film, still at Compassion House, we see Ariana’s list of goals, written out in pencil. She wants to get her own apartment and a nursing degree, find childcare, get on food stamps. It’s an impossible list for a 17-year-old but she seems so determined and clear-eyed.
Even with a supportive partner and a tidy home, reality catches up to her. Without a GED and no time to finish it, she can’t get a better job and can’t afford childcare. The bills are piling up. And then she ends up pregnant again.
How did we get here? The movie is careful not to blame the obvious scapegoats — pro-lifers and right-wing politicians — and equally careful to not suggest abortion as the only or even the most immediate solution. Crystal, a woman who manages Compassion House and a former teen mom herself, says that she’s a Christian and she’s pro-choice, but “the pro-life movement won the war against abortion a long time ago.” Her role in all this is just to give these girls a chance to survive.
I want to be mad at the film for not advocating harder for abortion access but also have to agree that teen pregnancy is a multi-headed hydra that will be solved with a lot of different approaches. Helping girls know how to identify a uterus before they start having sex seems like an obvious place to start.
