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2026-04-01 03:41:37

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and other parents who are not permanent residents. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over the order’s legality. If Trump prevails, the case will fundamentally change American society.

“This is not an academic exercise,” says Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey, who led a coalition of states in challenging the executive order last year. “The consequences for the people in this country, for our government, both at the federal and state and local levels, and just for the fabric of this nation, would be extraordinary.”

When Platkin challenged the order the day after Trump signed it, practical concerns were top of mind. There is no workable way that the states could implement this order. Starting from the very first question—Who would be a citizen?—and cascading on down to what benefits states and local governments could provide to which people, the order threatened unmitigated chaos.

“States, I can just tell you, are not in a position to parse through someone’s citizenship status,” explains Platkin. “The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?” He added: “There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.”

The legal question in the case, Trump v. Barbara, is whether the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship applies to the children of undocumented immigrants and people without green cards. And on that legal and historical question, the near universal consensus is that it clearly does. But much less attention has been paid to the harms that a Trump victory would unleash, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.

Amicus briefs submitted to the court highlight how the order would fundamentally alter American society. As states pointed out in their litigation against the order last year, newborns around the country would be denied access to food security and health care. During Trump’s winter crackdown, immigrants in Minnesota had babies at home rather than risk being detained while giving birth in a hospital; it’s not hard to imagine ICE sweeps on maternity wards if the order is upheld. Newborns who are hungry, or suffer from untreated health conditions, or who miss their vaccinations, bear the immediate brunt of this cruelty. But the effects would ripple out.

A brief filed by municipal governments and local elected officials warned of a loss of social cohesion, and an increase in bullying and alienation for a new caste of children who know no other home. Barred from federal public assistance, they will be much less likely to have health insurance and ready access to vaccinations, and more likely to suffer preventable diseases. This will ultimately compromise public health more broadly.

The brief also warns of disaster to local economies if Trump implements the order. City and county governments will pay the price of communities unable to get federal food and health benefits, and their tax base will shrink. Businesses and universities may struggle to attract immigrant employees and students, who may fear that if they have children in the US they will end up second-class citizens in their own country. State coffers would be strained. A brief filed by multiple states points out that “states and their subdivisions would also lose millions in federal funding (often for services they must provide regardless of federal reimbursement) and would incur onerous administrative burdens.”

Citizens and those who should become citizens under the order are also vulnerable. A birth certificate would no longer suffice to prove citizenship, and the children of citizens might never obtain that status if their parents lacked the documents necessary to prove theirs. It’s not clear what documentation would suffice, or how far back the ancestry rabbit hole one would have to journey to prove that they are indeed birthright citizens. Citizens might find it difficult to obtain passports, enroll in school, or obtain food and health care assistance when needed.

The American dream is the idea that in the United States, people’s fate is determined by their own merit, not the status of their parents. But the executive order would create a caste of people who inherit a lesser status from which there could be no escape. “The Order would create a permanent underclass of unauthorized and potentially stateless individuals, perpetuating inequality, legal disabilities, and social and economic disadvantages across successive generations,” reads an amicus brief filed by 19 labor unions that warns of economic risk. Around 255,000 children born in the United States every year will be denied citizenship, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute. By 2045, the undocumented population would have swollen by 2.7 million, and by 5.4 million by 2075.

“Immigrants and their U.S.-born children—first-generation U.S. citizens—have been the driver of growth in the American labor force over the past 20 years,” the unions’ brief continues. Rather than contributing to the economy and providing critical services like health care, childcare, and education, “successive generations of children born in the United States will be stripped of U.S. citizenship and be excluded from public life, the formal economy, and the ability to live fully independent, productive lives.”  

Trump’s executive order purported to restrict birthright citizenship going forward, to all those born 30 days after the date of the order. But multiple briefs warn that this is not binding. After all, it’s just one president’s order. If the court agrees Trump’s 2025 order is constitutional, there would be nothing to stop him or any subsequent president from applying it retroactively, potentially stripping millions of people of citizenship based on their family histories. In this way, the rights and livelihoods of millions of people are at risk. “If, as the Administration argues, the Fourteenth Amendment does not make citizens of certain people, neither this Court nor the Administration has the power to create citizens of children of ineligible foreign nationals simply because they were born before issuance of the Executive Order,” a brief by three constitutional and immigration scholars warns. “In other words, a prospective-only application is not possible.”

The idea might seem far-fetched, but the United States has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship. As a brief from dozens of nonprofits dedicated to racial justice warned, the government specifically has a “long history of revoking the citizenship of racial minorities and women.” In just one example, after the Supreme Court held in 1923 that South Asians did not qualify as white and were thus incapable of becoming citizens because, at the time, naturalization was limited to Caucasians, the government began stripping citizenship from naturalized South Asian citizens.

The brief also warned that even if the federal government didn’t target anyone for citizenship-stripping, local governments and officials might embark on their own attempts to effectively denaturalize people by removing them from voting rolls and juries. The Trump administration is already encouraging voter roll purges on the false premise that noncitizens are skewing US elections. It’s entirely predictable that state and local officials would attempt to remove voters whom they deem non-citizens according to Trump’s order. This might be encouraged by the practical effect of striking Latinos and other racial minorities who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Jury pools could likewise grow whiter, reinforcing the white supremacy that the 14th Amendment and civil rights laws tried to end.

Supreme Court decisions change the country, but few are remembered for reordering American society. Dred Scott v. Sandford helped precipitate the Civil War by denying citizenship to all Black people; Plessy v. Ferguson blessed Jim Crow, which shaped American society for nearly 100 years; Brown v. Board of Education undid Plessy and transformed the country again. Trump v. Barbara threatens to be the next in this tradition of cases that determine whether or not we live in a multiracial democracy. As former University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps warned this week, “reinstating a hereditary, lifelong, inferior status” without political rights or welfare benefits “recreates the conditions for the growth of a racialized slave economy.”

America has been down that road before. No one will escape the consequences if the Supreme Court takes us there again.

2026-04-01 03:05:00

Imagine you’re doing market research to advise a soda company on which flavor to emphasize in its next advertising campaign: regular cola or cherry? You might aim to find and survey a wide variety of potential customers online. But now there’s a quicker, cheaper alternative: Polling mainstays like Qualtrics and newer firms like Synthetic Users are proffering “silicon” respondents—large language models (LLMs) that will pretend to be lots of different people and answer questions based on how the models predict they would respond. How does a 50-year-old white man from Oregon feel about cherry cola? A 25-year-old Black woman from Texas? The AIs can be them and hundreds more!

The consequences of picking the wrong flavor may be trivial, but suppose you’re asking whether a city should mandate police body cameras or Congress should offer tax breaks for private school tuition—or, as some are experimenting with, gauging preferences for an upcoming election.

Public polls are “enormously important,” says James Bisbee, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. “Our political elites, our politicians, our leaders rely on them deeply to understand the public mood and to modify their own actions in office and their own policies.” And synthetic respondents may soon be a regular part of polling. “Today, humans fill out the surveys and computers fill in the gaps,” a Harvard political science panel wrote in 2024. “In the future, it will be the opposite.”

Academics, too, are experimenting with using AI survey respondents. It’s impossible to say how many, says Jamie Cummins, a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford who studies the impact of AI on research quality, but “the number of researchers ­exploring their use is growing across different scientific fields.” Studies from a few years ago suggested LLMs could pretty accurately reflect the diversity of human viewpoints, but more recent results are less bullish—and raise concerns that swapping AI for humans could have unintended consequences.

As Bisbee showed in a 2023 paper, AI survey data can accurately depict the average opinions of Democrats and Republicans, but not the full range of their views or how they vary by demographic. For example, it will show that Black respondents are more likely than white ones to be Democrats, but it can’t capture the views of outliers.

Silicon respondents yield more polarized results, too, Bisbee says, because the ­models are typically trained on data scraped from the internet, which is “dominated by partisanship.” America is polarized, he says, but LLMs “paint such an extreme version.”

And there are bias issues. Cornell AI ­researcher Angelina Wang found that bot respondents not only portray marginalized groups inaccurately, but represent them as viewed by outsiders: “It’s like if a bunch of white people got together and made a movie about Black people and only had white writers and even white actors.”

None of the abovementioned firms responded to my requests for comment, but in a 2023 interview with Science, the ­co-founder of Synthetic Users boasted that the firm’s data was “infinitely richer” than “bland” feedback usually received. Ordinary survey data is hardly perfect, to be sure. With each year, it gets harder and more expensive to accurately poll human subjects, Bisbee notes—especially online, where researchers must filter out bots and account for hard-to-reach groups. But “synthetic data is weird in ways that we don’t understand,” he says. Bisbee also has ethical concerns. “It is just impossible for me to feel comfortable studying humans using a simulated human,” he adds. “There is something first-order wrong about that.”

It gets worse. Last year, Sean Westwood, a professor of government at Dartmouth, published a startling paper, “The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research.” He was able to design autonomous AI bots that eluded the tools researchers use to flag nonhuman respondents. Political operatives and foreign governments, Westwood concluded, could viably do the same to alter polling results and shape public opinion.

In January, Westwood told me the threat is no longer “potential.” In a recent experiment on a major survey platform, he found that at least 4 percent of survey responses were nonhuman. That “may sound really small,” he says, “but in a world where things that you’re measuring are very, very close, when the public is incredibly divided, that is enough to flip the result.”

Surveys from respected platforms like YouGov, Pew Research Center, and major news outlets are likely still AI-free, he says. That’s because they “recruit people in real life,” explains Courtney Kennedy, the data methods expert who oversees Pew’s survey design team—which builds national samples using randomized home addresses.

None of the researchers I interviewed are anti-AI. Several use it daily for tasks such as coding or annotating social media posts. But Bisbee draws the line at polling. He and his co-authors wrote that their findings “raise serious concerns about the quality, reliability, and reproducibility of synthetic survey data generated by LLMs.”

Indeed, the journal Psychological Science now requires researchers to disclose AI usage in data and surveys. “Public opinion,” Westwood emphasizes, “is a core component of democratic accountability.” This is why it needs to be measured with integrity. It’s also why, he says, people might want to take that extra minute to read the fine print and see whether the survey they’re reading, or reading about, reflects real humans—or subpar facsimiles.

2026-04-01 01:14:00

In an 8-1 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled against a Colorado law forbidding licensed therapists from trying to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity—a practice known as conversion therapy that the medical profession has long since discredited and condemned.

Decades of research show not only that conversion therapy doesn’t work, it puts individuals at higher risk of depression and suicidality. In response to those findings, and a rising tide of acceptance for LGBTQ people since 2012, 23 states have forbidden licensed mental health practitioners from attempting conversion therapy on minors. The decision in the case, known as Chiles v. Salazar, now threatens to overturn those laws nationwide.

The case was brought by a Christian counselor named Kaley Chiles, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom—the religious-right legal group behind many of the Supreme Court’s recent anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion rulings. Chiles argued that because she practices talk therapy, not the painful aversion therapy widely used in the past, the Colorado law censors her speech and violates the First Amendment. 

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor agreed, joining the court’s conservatives in a majority opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Gorsuch wrote.  “Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

“As applied to Ms. Chiles, the State seeks neither to regulate her speech incident to any conduct, nor does it seek to compel disclosure of factual and uncontroversial information,” Gorsuch wrote. “Instead, it seeks to silence a viewpoint she wishes to express.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Kagan wrote that Colorado’s law could have potentially survived if it regulated the content of a therapist’s speech, but did not draw lines based on the therapist’s viewpoint on matters of sex and gender.

“A law drawing a line based on the ‘ideology’ of the speaker—disadvantaging one view and advantaging another—skews the marketplace of ideas our society depends on to discover truth,” Kagan wrote. The Colorado law, she added, “prevents a therapist from saying she can help a minor change his same-sex orientation, but permits her to say that such a goal is impossible and so she will help him accept his gay identity.” A law banning therapists from affirming trans kids’ gender identity, she added, would also run afoul of the First Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissenting judge, wrote that Chiles “does not dispute that conversion therapy can be harmful to minors in certain circumstances” and “does she contest that Colorado has a significant interest in protecting minors from harm.” But, she continued, “Chiles complains nevertheless” because “the particular form of conversion therapy she wants to offer clients utilizes only speech.”

Jackson added that the Colorado law as written did not prohibit Chiles from sharing any views on sexuality, gender identity, or conversion therapy outside of individual talk therapy sessions—like in discussions with patients and their families. The “aim of the statute is not suppressing speech,” she wrote in her dissent. “Talk therapy is a medical treatment. So, why wouldn’t such speech based medical treatments be subject to reasonable state regulation like any other kind of medical care?”

As we’ve reported before, the science on conversion therapy has been considered settled for over a decade:

The science on conversion therapy is unambiguous: it’s both ineffective and dangerous. All the way back in 2009, an American Psychological Association task force issued a landmark report documenting the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation “change efforts,” as scientists refer to them. Since then, APA has only strengthened its stance against both anti-gay and anti-trans conversion efforts. In October 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published a report concluding that sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts were “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.” 

Nonetheless, conversion therapists have continued to practice on the fringes of the profession, typically working with conservative religious clients. In recent years they’ve turned their attention on transgender youth, capitalizing on politicized controversy over medical treatments for trans kids, a Mother Jones investigation found in 2024. And they’ve embraced so-called “gender exploratory therapy”—a treatment posed an alternative to gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors in a Health and Human Services report last year. 

The justices’ decision on Tuesday fell on Transgender Day of Visibility, created by Rachel Crandall-Crocker over 15 years ago. It’s a day to celebrate transgender people and draw attention to the ongoing challenges the community faces. Being a visible, civically-active trans person in the United States is becoming increasingly more volatile as Republican legislators—local to federal—seek to codify discrimination against trans and gender nonconforming people. 

In 2025, according to the independent research organization Trans Legislation Tracker, 1,022 bills that would negatively impact the transgender and gender nonconforming community were considered; 126 passed. In 2026, so far, 747 such bills are under consideration—a number that is expected to grow. These laws target people’s ability to seek out gender affirming healthcare, use the bathroom in public and private buildings, dictate what their personal identification says, serve in the military, and celebrate Pride Month, among other things. 

This push is buoyed by President Donald Trump and his administration, who supported the therapist’s position in Tuesday’s Supreme Court case. On day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order declaring that it would be “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” requiring agencies to base decisions on an outdated and scientifically inaccurate gender binary and providing a runway for anti-trans attacks across the nation.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, who helped lead the effort to pass state laws banning conversion therapy, said in a statement on Tuesday that legal avenues remain to fight back against conversion therapy. “Survivors can still bring malpractice and consumer fraud claims,” he said. “Licensing boards can still discipline providers who engage in unethical or harmful conduct” 

“Though today’s ruling is not the outcome we sought, our commitment remains unwavering—as does that of the families, survivors, and advocates who have stood beside us for thirty years,” he added.

The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit for queer young people, is one of the groups that filed an amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar in support of upholding nationwide statutes that ward against conversion therapy. It’s CEO, Jaymes Black, called Tuesday’s ruling “a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk.”

“The Court’s decision today is painful,” Black said in a statement, adding, “but our community has dealt with difficult outcomes time and time again throughout our history. And we will deal with this, too.”

2026-03-31 23:38:43

On March 26, the International Olympic Committee announced that all athletes competing in women’s sports will be required to undergo genetic eligibility testing. Claiming to be concerned with “fairness” and “the protection of the female category,” the IOC aims to ban transgender women from future Olympic games by screening for the SRY gene, which is usually found on the Y chromosome. The 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles will be the first games with this policy in effect. 

For queer historian and writer Michael Waters, the IOC’s announcement elicited a feeling of déjà vu: The institution has employed similar gender verification rules before—only to abandon them amid public backlash. In his 2024 book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, Waters traces the history of trans athletes in the early 20th century, showing how a World War II–era moral panic around gender expression directly informs today’s anti-trans attacks.

I spoke with Waters about his book, the history of sex testing in international sports, and how the IOC’s latest policy marks a return to a discriminatory model of gender surveillance that draws from a dark eugenic past.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited. 

Let’s start with the basics: What is the IOC’s new policy on sex testing, and how does it differ from previous approaches?

The IOC’s new policy is resurrecting a policy of genetic testing that actually had been active for a few decades in the 20th century. In the 1960s, when the IOC first introduced genetic testing, it used these things called Barr body tests, which essentially were measuring the presence of XX chromosomes. Anyone without two X chromosomes would have been kicked out of women’s sports. 

There actually were some high-profile cases of cis women athletes who had a multiplicity of chromosomes—who did not just have XX—who were pushed out of sports because they failed this gene test. There’s this Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967 who had played in elite track and field competition before, and then when the Track and Field Federation implemented the first version of chromosome testing, she failed for vaguely explained reasons. An official said that she had “one chromosome too many,” and then she was banned from sports entirely. After that moment, the IOC stopped releasing and trying to publicize the banning of certain women from sports, but many more probably were kicked out because of failed tests that we just don’t know about. 

The version of genetic testing that the IOC implemented in the late 1960s, and that continued on until the end of the 1990s, accrued so much backlash and criticism—from scientists, from athletes, from politicians, and actually the whole government of Norway banned this sort of genetic testing for sports practice—that around 2000 the IOC just got rid of genetic testing policies wholesale. 

In the early 2000s, the IOC started to move toward creating some path to participation for trans women athletes. There were a lot of restrictions around how trans women could compete; the earliest rules required people to have gone through some sort of surgery-based medical care. And eventually, in 2021, the IOC kind of just stopped implementing any requirements overall and created this framework that would allow individual sports federations to make their own policies around which women can compete in women’s sports. 

So what’s happening here is after this brief period of the IOC saying, “We’re going to leave it up to the individual athletic federations,” now they’re stepping back in and saying, “Okay, here is our policy.” While they’re framing it as this new thing that has risen out of discussion with stakeholders, really this is a direct resurrection of the policy that they had in the ’90s that was widely derided and abandoned.

Did anything in particular happen socially or culturally in the late 1990s that caused the IOC to abandon universal sex testing?

In the early decades, it was the Barr body test that measured XX chromosomes, and eventually, the IOC did actually switch to SRY tests around the mid-’90s. In 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, there were eight women who originally failed the SRY test, who after further review were all reinstated. So these tests that the IOC and a lot of sports federations are now presenting as new, non-invasive, cutting-edge technology—they have literally used these before and found that they were, on one hand, inaccurate in creating these false positives, and on the other hand, just in violation of people’s human rights.

There are a lot of people assigned female at birth who might have a Y chromosome, or some traces of Y chromosomal DNA, and could actually test positive during the SRY test. Instead of dealing with the complexities of the human body—not to mention gender itself—this is just resurrecting an old-school approach. I think it’s notable that even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has vocally been talking about why the application of this test in sports doesn’t make sense and is discriminatory.

So we’ve talked about the 1960s to our present day, but your book looks at the history of trans athletes going all the way back to the 1930s. Your research shows how the 1936 Berlin Olympics was a turning point, when the Track and Field Federation—now called World Athletics—implemented the first sex testing policy for women athletes. What happened in 1936, and what was going on in the years leading up to that moment?

It’s important to realize that in the early 20th century, women’s sports were a source of moral and gender panic. The founder of the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, hated women’s sports—he didn’t think women should compete at all—and the early Olympics had very few sports available to women because of this. 

Actually, the only sports available to women were those like tennis—which at the time were very closely associated with a white, rich, European elite—because so much fearmongering around gender was so racialized. There was a belief that competitions like track and field would be both detrimental to women’s health, and in some cases even a masculinizing force on them. Butch women were looked upon as suspicious and cast as having an unfair advantage over more “petite” feminine women. And so before we’re even talking about gender diverse athletes and intersex athletes and trans women, there’s just this whole panic around cis women athletes and which kinds of cis women are winning in sports competitions. 

In late 1935/early 1936, there are a few different things going on. The Nazis are hosting the Berlin Olympics and are applying really significant pressure on the IOC to limit which kinds of athletes can compete. This is mostly racialized—there’s all this discussion around whether or not the Germans would allow Jewish athletes to compete. In the German case, they were banning athletes of color and exacting their eugenics logic onto sports. The Nazis also were really skeptical of butch women and queer women. 

Then, two athletes—both of whom had retired but had played in women’s sports—kind of one after another announced that they were transitioning gender and would begin living as men. Their names were Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston. Koubek is Czech; Weston is British. Sports officials saw the idea that an athlete could transition gender as a threat to the binary categories they had built. And so there was this high-profile Nazi sports doctor [Wilhelm Knoll] who pushed for sex testing policies after reading about the cases of these athletes transitioning. And again, neither of these two were trying to compete in women’s sports. They were living as men. 

But the news of these transitions became wrapped up in the historical panic around butch women in sports and became a reason for the global right, the Nazis in particular, to push forward the first sex-testing policies, which ultimately only the Track and Field Federation passed in August 1936 at the Berlin Olympics. 

The other important moment is that in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, there’s an American sprinter named Helen Stephens who wins a gold medal for the US. And almost immediately after she wins, there are newspaper stories that come out that essentially accuse her of being a man in disguise. And so Helen Stephens is stereotyped as being pretty butch—she has kind of a deep voice, big arms, big legs. And the fact of her being this butch woman who had won this track and field event was treated by certain sports commentators as proof that she was unfairly masculine. So there was a whole news cycle in August 1936 about whether or not Helen Stephens was actually a man. It’s really reminiscent of what happened in 2024 with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. There was a storyline circulating that this woman who had won gold was not feminine enough, and was therefore a threat to sports. Her story and success became proof of the need for these medical exams in women’s sports.

Why did this Nazi-era approach to sex testing expand from the Track and Field Federation to become broader IOC policy in the 1960s?

The IOC sex testing stuff in the ’60s was really influenced by Cold War tensions. USSR women kept beating American women in sports, and there was all this fearmongering about the perceived butchness of the Soviet athletes and the possibility that the Soviets were sending men in disguise. Those underlying Cold War tensions really expedited the adoption of sex testing across the whole IOC in 1968.

It’s interesting to me that right now the focus is on trans women, but the early cases that your book looks at are trans men, yet the fear that’s undergirding both is the same: This idea of an invasion in the field of women’s sports. Why do you think that’s a consistent throughline? Are the Olympics sex testing men’s sports at all?

No, they’ve never sex-tested men’s sports.

And why do you think that is? 

From the early days of the Olympics there is this deep-seated paranoia about women’s sports and what sports mean for the place of women in society. There have been so many junctures of discomfort with women’s athletics, and specifically what a successful woman athlete means for gender politics and for women’s economic role and physical role and sexual reproductive role. It’s not surprising then that often the actors pushing sex testing policies—kind of at every juncture of the 20th century, up until today—are right-wing actors who themselves also are deeply concerned with pushing forward a conservative idea of gender. I think women’s sports always really activated the global right because of what sports success says about women’s independence.

In the case of the US, we see women’s sports as the starting point of a much larger push to disenfranchise and strip rights away from trans women. A lot of states start by banning trans women and girls from sports, and then go further and take away basic health care rights. The Nazis also focused a lot on women’s sports because of the historical fact that women’s sports had been a site of deep gender anxieties since the Olympics started.

I think what’s interesting about the history of sex testing in the Olympics—and the history of gender medicine more broadly—is that we see people at different points trying to take scientific discoveries and graft them onto a social understanding of sex and gender.  Do you have thoughts on how these different scientific frameworks—from hormone testing to chromosome testing—have been used at different points to perform gender surveillance? What do these shifting methods reveal about the broader project of enforcing the gender binary?

I think the history of sex testing is a story of sports officials constantly coming up against the reality that sex is not a binary, and that you actually just can’t neatly cleave people into two categories, even against their will. And what you see throughout the 20th century up until today is that there are all these different scientific levers that officials try to pull. 

The first sex tests were just a strip test, where women athletes would have to present doctor’s notes affirming that a doctor had looked at their genitalia and decided that they were in fact women, which was quickly proven to be both not a way to measure sex and also deeply humiliating and discriminatory. So then they embrace chromosome tests, which, similarly, not everyone neatly falls into an XX-XY structure. And so in the early 2000s, you see this shift towards hormones instead as a proxy for sex. But there’s no neat cut off between hormones associated with different genders. 

Through all of these efforts, what you see is the fact that sports officials—and really we as a people—just have no clear way of measuring sex in a binary way, because it is simply just not binary. I think maybe there was a moment in the early 2000s when the Olympics was willing to grapple with the fact that people are complicated and the body is complicated, and maybe reconcile with the fact that being inclusive is going to be a process. What we’re seeing is the IOC completely abandoning that potential.

Fundamentally, the issue of trans women and intersex women’s access to sports is a human rights issue. Sports officials historically have used the guise of science as a way to justify often vehemently anti-trans policies. I think that we can and should respond by mentioning some science—and also mentioning the fact that there really is very little evidence around a lot of these scientific claims that the IOC is making—but I think more importantly we should be framing this as a human rights issue. Science does not absolve this issue either way. Really this is about whether states have a right to determine people’s gender for them.

What do you think happens next? And is there anything we can learn from history that could inform resistance to these policies moving forward? 

These policies are an outgrowth of a global anti-trans panic, and I think they are becoming part of a right-wing feedback loop where what is happening in certain countries, like the US, is then informing global Olympic policies. You actually see this with the Supreme Court case that bans trans women and girls from sports in America. You saw the Olympics being cited as justification for banning trans women; the Supreme Court justices on the right noted that the Olympics has been moving in this direction and therefore are kind of using what happens on a global level as evidence for their own crackdowns on trans people, particularly trans women. 

In the same way, the IOC, I’m sure, is passing this policy in part because the next host of the Olympics is the US, which has banned trans women from competing in its borders. What is happening in the US and the global right is directly impacting what’s happening with the IOC. All of this ignoring the fact that there’s no reason that we’re doing any of this in the first place. This is all a manufactured moral panic, and institutions are just kind of slowly giving into it. 

That is the dark read of the situation. On the flip side, these policies are fundamentally arising out of culture and politics, and there’s no reason that they should exist on their own. I think that’s why we saw in the ’90s the IOC abandoned chromosome testing: because there was a groundswell of people who pointed out, rightfully, that it’s a really discriminatory policy that violates women’s human rights in a lot of cases. 

I do think ultimately it’s going to take something similar. We have to push for a cultural shift that takes into account bodily diversity and champions trans women’s rights. I also think we’re going to see plenty of different lawsuits being filed by intersex women athletes who are denied the chance to play in the Olympics now. National governments like France also have privacy laws that would really restrict and perhaps just not allow a body like the IOC to require genetic testing. So if more countries pass legislation like that, that would conflict with the IOC policy, and perhaps they would roll it back. But I think fundamentally what we need is cultural change. 

2026-03-31 19:30:00

On February 15, 2025, two law professors dropped a legal bombshell. Just three weeks before, President Donald Trump had signed an executive order attempting to unilaterally deny birthright citizenship to the children of visa holders and undocumented immigrants despite the Constitution’s clear mandate that virtually everyone born on US soil is an American citizen. In quick succession, four federal district court judges blocked the order, with one deeming it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Into this righteous consensus rode Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, arguing in the pages of the New York Times that, actually, Trump might have a point.

Legal scholars and historians reacted with horror, not because the article, co-written with Randy Barnett of the Georgetown University Law Center, had uncovered some secret truth that would crack the traditional view of universal birthright citizenship, but because their argument against this cornerstone of American democracy was deceptive. Critics decried Wurman and Barnett’s case as “wrong and dangerous,” pointing to their misreading of historical sources and reliance on evidence that contradicts their thesis. One constitutional law professor went so far as to call their op-ed “hackery by amateur historians who misstate the legal history and twist their own argument.” He and others warned that the article’s revisionist arguments and prominent platform risked leading the public to falsely believe that there was a serious debate at play.

Despite its glaring flaws, the Times opinion piece was the opening round in what would be a year-long campaign to upend conventional wisdom, muddy the truth, and ultimately help the Trump administration’s radical anti-immigrant agenda across the finish line at the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, when the justices hear oral arguments over the president’s effort to rewrite the Constitution and limit birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, the position advanced by Wurman and a handful of controversial legal scholars will get its day in court.

It’s no exaggeration to say that American society is on the line. Before the Civil War, enslaved people represented a permanent underclass. The Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which had relegated free Black people to inferior status by ruling they couldn’t be citizens, meant that the rights of more than four million Black people were at the mercy of the political branches. After the war, the Radical Republicans attempted to eradicate that race-based caste system. By engraving birthright citizenship into the Constitution, they proclaimed that never again would politicians be able to strip an unpopular group of citizenship and declare it beneath everyone else. 

If Trump prevails, the United States will revert back to a tiered society where some newborns enjoy the full benefits and protections of citizenship, while others, lacking them, are denied necessities like food assistance, health care, security from detention and deportation, or even education. As the civil rights groups challenging the executive order charged in a brief in the case, Trump’s policy would plunge the country into an “unclear, contingent, and chaotic experiment in exclusion from our national community.” 

There is a mountain of evidence supporting the long-held and widely accepted interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship by birth. This broad understanding is shared by nearly every historian and legal authority on the subject, on both sides of the political aisle. The few who have established the camp to narrow birthright citizenship make for a revealing band of misfits.

Among the legal minds who submitted friend of the court briefs supporting Trump’s executive order are Wurman, an ambitious young Trumpian law professor; Richard Epstein, a prolific libertarian torts expert who distinguished himself with woefully inaccurate predictions about Covid-19; and John Eastman, who has long argued for restricting birthright citizenship but earned national notoriety as the legal architect of Trump’s failed 2020 insurrection. Together, they have put forward both novel and recycled already-rejected arguments that are not only morally reprehensible but historically implausible. 

Few lines in the Constitution are as plain as the first sentence of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Known as the Citizenship Clause, it establishes citizenship for anyone born in the United States, except for the children of invading soldiers and diplomats. Americans also recognized an exception for Indian tribes, acknowledging their unique sovereign status. The project of the Trump administration and its allies was to find a way to pry open that closed set of exceptions. 

In their Times op-ed, Wurman and Barnett set out to prove that the words “subject to the jurisdiction” mean more than they appear to. The agreed-upon reading is simply a child who at birth is bound by the laws of the United States, which explains why the babies of ambassadors, invaders, and tribes, who are exempt from some US law, were exceptions. But Wurman and Barnett argued the phrase actually implies an allegiance to the government on the part of the parents in exchange for protection. Citizenship at birth, they said, cannot extend to the children of immigrants who entered the country without permission and, therefore, didn’t join the mutual compact. (They don’t address the question of children born to people here temporarily.)

To back up their claims, Wurman and Barnett presented as key evidence a line in an 1862 opinion by Edward Bates, Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general, in which he defined a citizen as one bound to the country “by the reciprocal obligation of allegiance on the one side and protection on the other.” Likewise, they argue, the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship is predicated on an exchange of allegiance for protection.

Embarrassingly, however, multiple scholars promptly pointed out that Bates’ full opinion actually offers an unequivocal endorsement of citizenship as created by the “accident of birth” in the United States. Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman noted that Bates had cited the same English common law sources as Wurman and Barnett to argue the opposite point, a sign that the amendment’s framers recognized a historical rule of birthright citizenship. Wurman went on to publish a 135-page paper in support of the allegiance-for-protection theory in which he moves other historical artifacts to the fore and Bates’ opinion conveniently plays a smaller role.

After a few weeks of withering criticism of the Times op-ed, Barnett mostly withdrew from the birthright citizenship debate. In an email to Mother Jones, he said that, following the “vetting” work from both sides of the issue, he was now “more confident than I was when Ilan Wurman and I offered our tentative thoughts in an op-ed, that the executive orders are consistent with the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause.”

In this legal arena, Wurman stands out as the loudest and most prominent academic to defend Trump’s position, pushing the cause in testimony before Congress and on his podcast. He has described his recent interest in the subject as the result of an alignment of stars, a convergence of his previous work on the 14th Amendment, his “somewhat different political predispositions,” and the timing of the Trump administration’s executive order.

Wurman’s approach to the question is purportedly originalist—a method of judicial interpretation that’s the house theory of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, framed as making rulings in alignment with the original public meaning of the Constitution. In his longer paper and his amicus brief to the Supreme Court in this case, Wurman travels as far back as King Henry I in the twelfth century in an attempt to show that by the time Congress formally adopted birthright citizenship in the 1860s, it was affirming a common law rule that would have actually excluded many US-born children.

But most originalists, including prominent conservatives, disagree with Wurman. His methods, reasoning, and scholarship has drawn criticism from several adherents of the approach, who accuse him of being sloppy at best and dishonest at worst. “He misstates what the rule [imported from England] is,” says Keith Whittington, an originalist law professor at Yale University. “He mistakes what the legal history of that rule is. He misstates the logic and implications of the rule. He misstates the justification for the rule.” 

“Wurman should never be trusted with historical work again,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law and fierce Wurman critic, posted recently on Bluesky. “In any respectable academic field, we’d be talking about article retractions. It is simply that bad.” In an email, Kreis, whose scholarship focuses on the historical development of American law, further condemned the efforts by proponents of restricting birthright citizenship. “I have never seen so much methodologically bankrupt, motivated faux scholarship,” he wrote. “The level of hackery is astounding… If people wanted to be fiction writers, they should’ve pursued another career.”

Wurman’s allegiance-for-protection argument falls apart first and foremost because it makes no sense. Everyone—including Wurman—agrees the whole point of the Citizenship Clause was to overturn Dred Scott and make both the formerly enslaved and free Black people citizens. But enslaved people trafficked here never chose to be in this country let alone offered it allegiance, nor did they benefit from any protection of the laws. A birthright citizenship rule that followed Wurman’s theory would have defeated the 14th Amendment’s purpose. It’s also unlikely that this conundrum wouldn’t have been raised during the congressional debates. “That should just be fatal” to his argument, says Shugerman, who co-authored an amicus brief contesting Wurman’s scholarship. 

Confederates fighting the federal government would also have fallen outside of Wurman’s theorized allegiance-for-protection compact, but no one in Congress wondered if rebels’ children born during the war were citizens. On the contrary, in 1867, Sen. John Bingham convinced his colleagues that the former confederates remained “subject to” US “jurisdiction” and thus their citizenship couldn’t be stripped under the 14th Amendment. Since the confederates were considered guilty of treason for waging a war of secession, the meaning of the word “jurisdiction” clearly did not imply allegiance of the parent at birth as a prerequisite for the child’s citizenship. 

In an email, Wurman disagreed, defending his theory’s compatibility with these facts. “The freed people, as the Republicans stated over and over again, were under the protection of the United States and had no allegiance to any foreign power,” he wrote. “As for the international slave trade, illegally transporting someone into slavery is hardly the same thing as an alien voluntarily coming in violation of the law.” Confederates, he continued, “could be tried for treason precisely because they were under the protection and therefore within the allegiance of the sovereign. It is actually the conventional view of practical control over territory that cannot account for the children born of confederates.”

“One of the challenges, I think, of grappling with [Wurman’s] work over time is he keeps changing what he claims to be the argument, and what he claims is the main contribution of his argument,” says Whittington, who submitted an amicus brief opposing the Trump administration. “It has very much been a moving target.” Whittington has engaged with Wurman’s theories and debated the issue with him, but finds it a frustrating exercise of being sent on “wild goose chases.” He adds: “If you start looking at the sources he’s citing, they often just don’t say what he says they say, and the underlying logic and principles that he’s trying to convey don’t work.”

One example is Wurman’s framing in his testimony to a Senate panel of the opinion of a 19th century legal scholar, expressed in a 1836 treatise, that the children of temporary visitors born on US soil should not be citizens, as having been a statement of fact. “I’m afraid I can’t just sit here and say nothing when another law professor gives false testimony to Congress,” posted Evan Bernick, a 14th Amendment expert at Northern Illinois University’s College of Law who co-authored a book with Barnett on the amendment’s original meaning. Bernick described Wurman’s approach as “worse than looking through history for your friends—it’s pretending that they’re your friends.”

To advance his case beyond the allegiance-for-protection framework, Wurman suggests that the parent must be completely bound by the nation’s laws—what he refers to as “complete jurisdiction.” A key condition to meeting this threshold is being domiciled in the United States, having a permanent home, and intending to stay.

The parental domicile condition, if accepted by the court, would open a Pandora’s Box as to who could qualify as domiciled in the United States for the purposes of citizenship. The meaning of “domicile” could be adjusted by Congress, allowing it to, as the civil rights groups opposing Trump warn in their own brief, “decide who is entitled to birthright citizenship, by enacting statutes to manipulate domicile rules.” The president might also claim the power to decide which visa holders could or could not have citizen children. “This argument would blow up the 14th Amendment,” says Shugerman, which was at heart designed to keep politicians from consigning disfavored groups to an inferior status. 

Wurman disputes this. “I think domicile has a well-established legal meaning: permanent abode and intent to remain,” he emailed. “The real question is whether unlawfully present aliens could unilaterally establish a domicile contrary to the sovereign’s consent. There aren’t many legal sources touching on that question, although the Roman jurists thought the sovereign’s prohibition defeated domicile.”

Rome aside, there is virtually no historical evidence establishing a domicile requirement in the United States. Wurman and the government cite a single private letter from Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull to President Andrew Johnson saying that precursor legislation to the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to “all persons born of parents domiciled in the United States”—but that sheds little light on public understanding of the meaning of the amendment. Otherwise, the domicile thesis largely rests on sources from after the amendment was ratified, when immigration restrictionists fruitlessly attempted to exclude the descendants of Chinese immigrants from birthright citizenship by constructing a permanent residency condition. Wurman and the Trump administration’s domicile argument follows this ugly tradition.   

“The process of watching this argument evolve has been, I think, a demonstration of the dangers of cherry picking with an ideological agenda,” says Shugerman. “I call it Control F-around and find out.”

Perhaps the best refutation of Wurman’s position is the ultimate timidity of his own amicus brief before the Supreme Court. In public and on social media, Wurman is uncompromising in his views. But in the final analysis, synthesizing his best arguments for the nine justices, Wurman’s brief oozes with self-doubt. His conclusions are tempered by words like “likely,” and questions on which he is strident in public are described as “difficult.” His key claim that undocumented parents are not subject to the United States’ complete jurisdiction is reduced to a suggestion: “Whether unlawfully present aliens are subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States is less clear, but three reasons suggest they are not.” His contention that temporary visitors were excluded from birthright citizenship becomes “at best unsettled.” “The Wurman brief,” as one amicus brief against the government noted, “deserves plaudits for the candid way that it highlights the weaknesses of its own argument.” 

In response to a question about whether he harbored doubts, Wurman wrote that he is “100 percent certain that the answer to the constitutional question is not obvious and that the conventional wisdom is not compelled.” He added that he is “sufficiently confident in my research and argument that if I were a judge, I would leave the question of temporary visitors and unlawfully present aliens to the political branches. But as with many constitutional questions, there is plenty of evidence on both sides.”

Wurman’s originalist offering isn’t the only intellectual defense of Trump’s executive order. In their own amicus briefs, Richard Epstein and John Eastman suggest a different path to a reading of the Constitution where citizenship derives from parentage, not birth on US soil alone. They both agree that common law is irrelevant because Americans broke the shackles of the English ways when they declared independence and, with it, threw away the idea that citizenship is determined by place of birth. In this new country where “all men are created equal,” they argue, citizenship was inherited.

Epstein, an often-cited law professor affiliated with NYU and the University of Chicago Law School, entered the fray shortly after the president signed his January 2025 executive order instructing federal agencies to prospectively stop issuing documents recognizing citizenship to the children of certain immigrants. In an article against universal birthright citizenship, Epstein questions it “as a matter of principle” and criticizes the “dominant view,” endorsed even by conservative jurists, because it glosses over the “obvious perverse incentives of encouraging illegal immigration by allowing the parents to have their newborn children profit from these parental wrongs.” 

Epstein, a libertarian, has resisted reparations for Black Americans and called for the repeal of employment discrimination laws. While he describes himself as generally “pro-immigration,” he expressed skepticism of birthright citizenship as far back as 2015, when Trump first assailed the constitutional guarantee as a magnet for illegal immigration and birth tourism. In an episode of his podcast from that year, Epstein said that a constitutional amendment to change the rule, however unlikely, risked creating “major social dislocations” and making the issue more intractable. He also predicted the question would find its way to the Supreme Court, where the status quo would likely prevail. In 2018, as Trump considered issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship, Epstein said that he thought that couldn’t be done: “The president is not a great constitutional lawyer,” he explained. 

Other Epstein predictions haven’t aged well. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, he published an article that reportedly circulated among Trump administration officials suggesting the “full state of panic” over the virus was overblown and some experts’ “doomsday scenario” was not supported by evidence. Despite not being an epidemiologist, the article borrowed from his previous writing on AIDS in the 1980s to project that just 500 people would die of Covid-19 in the United States.

As criticism mounted, Epstein issued a correction, blaming the absurdly low number on bad math and describing it as an “unforced intellectual error” and the “single worst public-relations gaff I’ve made in my entire life.” But his revised essay still decried state mandates as “one-man gubernatorial dictatorship[s],” defended the notion that “allowing the virus to run its course” would benefit the economy, and estimated US deaths would peak at just 5,000; according to the CDC, there were over one million Covid-19 deaths in the country by 2023.

Today, Epstein, who has an upcoming book on the “myth” of birthright citizenship, claims the conventional view on the issue is wrong and ignores or misinterprets the “entire weight of the historical evidence.” He says the British rule of citizenship by place of birth did not carry over to the United States, minimizing the relevance of writings by English common law authorities embracing that doctrine. The citizenship clause, he writes, “is best understood as excluding individuals born in the country to aliens, legal or otherwise,” a broad assertion that sidesteps all arguments about the parents’ domicile or allegiance.

He claims that early US naturalization laws govern the status of children born in the United States to noncitizen parents. Because these statutes required the parents to renounce ties to foreign governments to become naturalized and excluded several groups from the prospect of citizenship, Epstein argues automatic citizenship shouldn’t be granted to children born on US soil to immigrants. In other words, he argues children’s fate should be determined by the legal status of their parents.

In an email, Epstein dismissed his critics as “sloppy” and refuted the view that Trump’s executive order would recreate a caste system in the United States. The case to restrict birthright citizenship, he wrote, “rests solely on constitutional” principles. He also reinforced his belief, presented in his Supreme Court brief and shared by some opponents of the prevailing view of birthright citizenship, that the Supreme Court wrongfully decided the issue in the landmark 19th century Wong Kim Ark case. Faced with the question of whether Ark, the San Francisco-born son of Chinese parents, could re-enter the United States as a recognized native-born citizen, a majority held that the 14th Amendment followed common law and “affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country.” If Wong Kim Ark “cannot be overruled,” Epstein puts to the justices, “it must at least be cabined.”

Epstein and others go further to say that, even if the decision in Wong Kim Ark had been correct, it still didn’t settle the question of citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants because Ark’s parents, although barred from naturalization due to anti-Chinese exclusion laws, were lawful residents. To that point, they single out mentions of domicile in the court’s ruling.

That line of reasoning isn’t entirely new. Instead, it borrows from a playbook Eastman, who Epstein taught, has been promoting for 20 years to claim the 14th Amendment has been misinterpreted. Eastman, the intellectual godfather of the anti-birthright citizenship movement, submitted his own amicus brief in this case. Like Wurman, he stresses a domicile requirement, and also argues that the Citizenship Clause requires a parent be under the country’s complete jurisdiction, which he says can only be achieved through “mutual consent and allegiance.” 

But Eastman’s arguments differ somewhat from Wurman’s—and may give the justices an easier path to side with Trump. Whereas Wurman offers an alternative history to rewrite English common law away from citizenship by place of birth, Eastman, like Epstein, argues the American revolution rejected the English rule of birthplace to adopt one based on parentage. While Epstein urges the court to limit or overturn Wong Kim Ark, Eastman now says the court can just leave that precedent alone—the case was about a child of domiciled parents and poses no actual barrier to Trump’s executive order.

Unlike Wurman, the tone of Eastman’s amicus brief is unapologetic. Currently battling disbarment in California for using his legal skills to try to overturn the 2020 election, Eastman does not shy away from bold stances, and the Trump administration’s own brief tracks more closely to his theories—though it declines to cite him. While the government does reference Wurman, it does not bear hug his arguments—likely a testament that he has not, in their view, invented a smarter route to victory after all.

Indeed, the new wave of scholarship that emerged on the heels of the Trump administration’s January executive order to rehabilitate the originalist historical case against birthright citizenship, Whittington says, stands on no firmer ground than the predecessor arguments advanced by Eastman. “The problem is that Eastman had already constructed about as good of an argument as could have been constructed,” he said. “It just wasn’t very good.” (Eastman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

When the Trump administration argues before the justices on Wednesday that the entire country has gotten the Citizenship Clause wrong for 150 years, this is some of the scholarship upon which they will rest their case. The government weaves together threads from Wurman, Eastman, and Epstein: that jurisdiction means allegiance, that domicile is required, and that granting citizenship to the children of undocumented people rewards bad behavior. “If the Roberts Court is serious about originalism as a method, then there are right and wrong answers,” says Shugerman. “In this case, the arguments about domicile and allegiance are wrong answers.” 

There is no good reason for the court to accept the government’s arguments—or Wurman’s, or Eastman’s, or Epstein’s. There is no there there: Just an administration trying to undo the 14th Amendment and create a nation of inherited status, where one’s place in society depends on your parents’ background rather than your own abilities. At least on paper, that idea was rejected a long time ago.

2026-03-31 19:30:00

In the summer of 1952, 23-year-old Sarah Keys (later Sarah Keys Evans) was making her first trip home from the Army hospital where she worked in Trenton, New Jersey, to North Carolina since joining the Women’s Army Corps the year before. Awoken around midnight, the private first class was ordered to give up her seat to a white Marine. When she refused, Evans was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She spent the night pacing around a dirty jail cell in her uniform and high-heeled shoes before paying $25 (around $300 in today’s dollars) for her release in the morning. Evans had never even participated in a civil rights protest, but she would spend the next three years—with the support of her father and the trailblazing Black attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree—fighting for transportation equality. 

Evans and Roundtree brought her case to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the regulatory agency that oversaw interstate travel at the time. After an initial defeat, Evans’ legal team appealed, using the momentum from the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A year later, in 1955—days before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Alabama—the ICC ruled in Evans’ favor, marking the first time that an executive branch institution outside the military rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine of 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. But it would take several more years of direct action for the federal government to finally enforce the ICC’s decision. 

In the early aughts, while researching a book on American women in the military, author Amy Nathan stumbled upon this now little-known piece of civil rights history. Nathan interviewed Evans, self-publishing a children’s book about her two years later. They remained friends and collaborators until Evans passed away in 2023. In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.

“That’s why we decided to write this book, to really place her story within the whole context of the struggle—from the early 1800s onward—to end segregation on public transportation,” Nathan told me about Riding Into History, an account of Evans’ story published by Duke University Press. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the experience of trying to get Sarah Keys’ story out there. I know you first wrote a book about her for younger readers in 2006: what was the process like? What obstacles did you encounter?

Oh, plenty of obstacles. I just thought this was an original story, and it was a really important story. So I naively thought, of course I’d find somebody who wanted to do it. But I have subsequently learned, and I was told this a couple of times by people in publishing, that they only do books for children on people who are household names, and she wasn’t a household name. How do you become a household name if somebody [isn’t] going to write books about you? I had spent two years interviewing her and her family, and they were all excited about the idea [that] this story would finally become better known.

Of course, the reason her story wasn’t as well known as others is that shortly after she won her victory at the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1955, one week after it was announced publicly, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Montgomery bus boycott started, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his first effort at being a Civil Rights leader. So everything got much more exciting after Sarah Keys Evans’ victory, [which] also was not enforced by the federal government until the Freedom Rides in 1961 caused such a disturbance, such bad publicity for the United States, that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the federal government to finally enforce the Sarah Keys rule. 

What have you heard from people in this process of uplifting the often overlooked stories of women in the Civil Rights movement like Evans and Roundtree?

People seem to be very, very supportive of it, and they all seem very surprised when they hear about it. In the back of the book, in the appendix, I include a list of other people whose stories have been overlooked for a long time. They’re very, very short, just [to] show that it was a lot of people—because, I think, maybe some people think that people of color just sort of submitted to this and [then] the Civil Rights Movement happened, but no. People were protesting about this all along, from the very beginning. More and more books are being written now that tell about these overlooked heroes. It took many foot soldiers, as we say in the book, to win this victory. 

What sparked your interest in women’s military history?

When I was in college, that was the start of the women’s movement and the women’s magazines that started coming up. I remember one summer I read a book on women’s history, and I was astonished. I began to become aware that there was this thing called women’s history, and that women really were overlooked. I went to an all-girls’ college, the branch of Harvard that was called Radcliffe, and we actually were pretty badly treated for a while. During the time that I was there, there were no bathrooms in Harvard Yard that we could use. There was no place where we could have lunch, that kind of thing, and so I had a personal experience of being discriminated against as a woman.  

Also I, just by chance, came across a book [with] articles about the [American] women pilots of World War II, the WASP pilots. My local public library got me many of the original interviews that these women had done, and put me in touch with some of the WASP women who were still alive, and I began interviewing them. I got really excited about trying to bring history to life in this way, by interviewing people and sharing their personal stories, more than just the bare facts of it.

That book was very well received, so I thought, well, why not write about all the women in the military? Because they’ve been serving ever since the Revolutionary War. I did a lot of research, trying to track down these women, and interviewing many of them, and interviewing many women who were currently serving. This was before this book came out in 2004 and that was before women were really much more integrated into the military. These women also saw themselves as being groundbreakers, and they were really eager to share their stories. 

The first chapter of Riding Into History is a deep dive into the legal history behind segregation on public transportation. Something that struck me was how differently the 14th Amendment has been interpreted by different people and government institutions, and how it’s been used to both empower and disenfranchise communities of color.

Yes, indeed. I learned more about that when I was doing [a] book on the Plessy & Ferguson [Initiative]. I learned about this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the back and forth on that when learning the legal history of that case. It didn’t give Congress specific permission to regulate individual people’s activities. So that’s how the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 saying, well, the federal government didn’t have any right to regulate individual activities. Only states could do that. 

Decades later, in 1946’s Morgan v. Virginia, the NAACP successfully argued that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause extended to regulate, and ban segregation on, interstate travel.

There had to be a uniform rule for all of travel. But because Morgan v. Virginia [only] said that no legislation could do that, bus companies just went and made their own segregation seating rules. The victory that [Evans] scored at the Interstate Commerce Commission, [after] Brown, ruled that neither state laws nor bus company rules could be applied in interstate bus rides or train rides that went from one state to another. From [1841], when Frederick Douglass was first thrown off of a train shortly after he escaped from enslavement in the north, ever since, it’s been back and forth, a seesaw of making a little progress and then slipping backwards. I hope we’re not slipping backwards again.

To that point, what would you say to young readers, and especially young women, who are fighting injustice in a moment where it feels as though our civil rights and liberties are under attack?

It does seem like they are under attack. I would just say that Sarah Keys Evans didn’t give many talks. [What] happened to her on that bus really impacted her for the rest of her life, made her a very cautious person, cautious about what she said in public. But she did give a talk to a high school [around 2019], and in that she said, “You must never stop fighting for your rights, because once you lose them, it’s very hard to get them back.” She said, “Each time you challenge a wrong, that news travels.” That’s what she told the students—and she told them, “I’m glad I didn’t give up. I’m glad I was able to help unlock another door of freedom.” That’s the message that she gave. So I think this is a story that can give people courage to think, well, yes, you can stand up for what’s right and what’s fair. 

The middle section of the book focuses a lot on the history of education in the area and Sarah Keys Evans’ father’s efforts to build a school in her hometown. How did you make the decision to emphasize education in the book?

I think because there was such an up and down with education, too, after the Civil War. [Evans’] father went to a vocational school [made popular by Booker T. Washington after the Civil War], but then he heard from a friend of his, who had left Washington, North Carolina, earlier, that there [were] more opportunities [elsewhere, so] he went and lived in Washington, DC for a while, and had a chance to experience a different kind of education at Dunbar High School there, which was one of the first high schools for Black students in the United States. When he came back from having served in the Navy, he had become a Catholic.

[But] there was no Catholic church for Black people or for anybody in Washington, North Carolina. It had been destroyed during the Civil War and had never been rebuilt. A priest from [the] nearby town of New Bern would come periodically and hold mass at a rented room. This book called Washington and the Pamlico reported that [during] one such service in the early 1920s Sarah Keys Evans’ father said, “What can be done for my people?”

That started a whole conversation among the priests in New Bern who were thinking about starting a Black school. He helped find the land that they could use for that, and they started this school there, called the Mother of Mercy School, which taught the strict academic curriculum that was being taught up north and that was being taught in other parochial schools. It provided a sense of insulation from some of the affronts of the Jim Crow environment in that town. And so in a way, I think that gave [Evans] a sense of self confidence and that then carried on when she went into the military. 

When desegregation happened and the schools were combined and Black students could go to the regular white high school in Washington, North Carolina, fewer people wanted to enroll in the Mother of Mercy School, and so it closed. A lot of the Black teachers and Black administrators lost their jobs so it’s a complicated story, but I thought it was a good story, because it shows the complexity of this whole topic. It wasn’t just yay, the Civil War ended, now everything was going to be all right. No, that was not what happened. [Or] yay, Brown v. Board of Education happened. [But] that didn’t solve every problem either. And so I think it’s good for people to understand the complexity of these issues and that people have to keep fighting for rights all the way through it, every step of the way.