I have been reading Ms. Magazine's latest War on Women Report, and I want to talk about what it actually shows, because the picture it paints is not of two separate fights happening in parallel. It is one fight, being waged by the same people, using the same logic, against anyone who refuses to fit the shape they have been assigned.

Start with Juniper Blessing. Nineteen years old, a student at the University of Washington, fatally stabbed while doing her laundry. Her attacker is in custody. The bare facts of that sentence are devastating enough, but the report is right to refuse to let them stand alone. Juniper's death did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a country where the House of Representatives has just passed a bill, H.R. 2616, that would legally erase the existence of trans students from public school life, mandate that teachers report children who identify as trans to their parents, and do so with eight Democrats voting in favour. When a legislature votes to make a group of children officially invisible, it sends a message that travels. It reaches dorm rooms. It reaches car parks. It reaches laundry rooms.

Murray Foust was 22, a trans man and student at Northern Kentucky University, reported missing in late April. His body was found a month later. Two young trans people, two deaths, reported in the same week's news cycle, treated by most outlets as separate tragedies rather than a pattern.

Then read the abortion stories. Jane, whose teenage daughter Dana was removed from her home by CPS because someone tipped off authorities that they were planning to travel to access abortion care. By the time Jane got legal help and got Dana back, the appointment had lapsed and the travel funds were gone. Dana was forced to carry the pregnancy. And Farrah, who brought her daughter to an emergency room for a high fever following a medication abortion, and found herself confronted by a social worker demanding to know where the medication came from, then a police call, then CPS, all in a state where abortion is constitutionally protected.

These are not administrative failures. They are the same mechanism at work: the state deciding that certain bodies are subject to surveillance and control, that certain choices disqualify you from safety, that compliance with a rigid version of gender and family is the price of being left alone.

Texas Tech University has now adopted a policy that effectively bans teaching and research on LGBTQ+ topics across its academic programmes. Academic freedom, for a university, is not a perk. It is the thing that makes it a university rather than a finishing school. Banning the scholarly study of gender and sexuality does not make those subjects disappear. It just means the people who most need good information will have fewer places to find it.

And then there is the Moms.Gov website, launched on Mother's Day, with its headless pregnant torso in a yellow dress, animated baby footprints, links to pregnancy centres, and a conspicuous absence of Planned Parenthood or any honest resource about reproductive options. The imagery is not accidental. It is a statement about what a woman is for.

The E. Jean Carroll situation tells the same story from a different angle. Two juries found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. He lost his appeal on the $83.3 million judgment. The response from his Justice Department has been to open a criminal investigation into Carroll herself for alleged perjury. The message is not subtle: come forward, and we will come for you.

I hear, sometimes, that trans rights and women's rights are in tension, that one group's gains come at another's expense, that feminism needs to choose. The War on Women Report makes that argument very hard to sustain. The same administration is erasing trans students, criminalising mothers who help their daughters access abortion, building a government website that portrays women as fertile vessels, and retaliating against a woman who successfully sued for sexual abuse. These are not separate agendas. They share a single underlying conviction: that women and gender-nonconforming people need to be brought back into line.

Solidarity between these movements is not a strategic choice or a nice idea. It is accurate analysis. You cannot defend bodily autonomy for some people while accepting that others have none. You cannot oppose the criminalisation of reproductive care while tolerating the legislative erasure of trans children. The logic that says the state owns Dana's body is the same logic that says Juniper should not have existed in public life at all.

Juniper Blessing deserved to do her laundry in safety. Dana deserved to make her own decision about her own body. Farrah deserved to take her daughter to the emergency room without being investigated. Murray Foust deserved to come home.