The Free Press

Between 2017 and 2021, the number of American children with gender dysphoria who started taking puberty blockers doubled. In the vast majority of cases, their parents sought medical help because their kids were distressed about their gender—and they were told the drugs’ effects were safe, reversible, and necessary. But now those children are adults, and some are finding that the treatment has long-term consequences that they weren’t prepared for—in some cases permanent and devastating ones. A growing number are speaking out and pursuing legal action, determined to save another generation from their fate.

The legal system is still catching up. In February, we exclusively reported on the first malpractice suit brought by a de-transitioner to go before a jury—a case that ended with a $2 million verdict for Fox Varian, a 22-year-old who sued the providers who oversaw her gender transition as a minor. Legal experts say the verdict could open the floodgates. Then the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that conversion therapy bans—which can penalize therapists who encourage kids to see gender dysphoria as a treatable disorder rather than an identity—violate the First Amendment. California has proposed a civil loophole through SB 934, a bill that would give patients whose therapists had questioned their gender identity more latitude to sue their providers for malpractice.

Jonni Skinner, 23, is a critic of the bill. He spent almost a decade on puberty blockers and hormones, because when he was 13, he says, a therapist told him he was in the wrong body. He’s now de-transitioned, but after this treatment, he says, his body will never be the same again. That’s why Jonni traveled to California to testify against the bill, and why he told The Free Press his story—so the next vulnerable child who walks into a gender clinic looking for answers doesn’t have to endure what he did.

—The Editors

I’m a gay man who testified last month against what has been called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-rights bill. I was there because I believe the proposed law could silence the one kind of help that could have saved me from years of anguish and a future permanently marked by what was done to me as a child.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian town in rural Michigan with 2,500 people, one red light, and a pervasive drug problem. My parents split when I was a baby: My biological father was a deadbeat I’ve met only a handful of times; my mom worked constantly as the primary breadwinner for our family, building multiple small businesses in the car world.

From my earliest awareness, I knew I was not like other kids—and certainly not like other boys. I moved and spoke in ways others called “girly.” I loved dress‑up games, butterflies, and anything pink. I was obsessed with The Princess and the Frog and looked up to Disney princesses more than any male character. I also knew, from a very young age, that I liked boys. I didn’t have words for it then, and in the world I grew up in, it was considered sinful and shameful. But the feeling existed long before I had any name for it.

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” as legendary California politician Jesse Unruh put it. It’s hard to get ahead in politics without money, and the more of it, the better.

It used to be that the road to dollars in Democratic politics went straight through the party establishment and the big donor networks that were linked to it. Lots of people didn’t like it, but that was the game you had to play, with the endless rounds of calls to big donors, begging political action committees, unions, and party committees for money and attending big-dollar events. While those are still important, another model has started to emerge that circumvents the establishment and relies on small donations and nationalized politics.

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

It’s Tuesday, May 5, and yesterday, shortly after news broke that the United Arab Emirates was attacked by Iran, Jerusalem shook with a massive sonic boom as a squadron of Israeli Air Force fighter jets tore overhead. Naturally, the exact same thought popped into every Israeli head at once: Looks like the war is back on. After 20 minutes of mentally inventorying the supplies needed for a return to the bomb shelters, the IAF finally issued a clarification. This wasn’t a combat sortie heading east; it was just a rehearsal for the farewell flyover honoring outgoing IAF chief Major General Tomer Bar. Apparently, the IAF takes going out with a bang quite literally.

But the Jerusalemites’ fear of regional escalation is well-founded, especially after yesterday’s events. As part of Project Freedom, U.S. destroyers successfully guided commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz—sinking six Iranian fast-attack craft that attempted to interfere in the process.

This left the regime in an incredibly awkward position: The threats of a blockade had just been exposed as empty. Unable to pierce the defenses of the U.S. convoy, Iran immediately pivoted to softer targets. They struck the UAE’s oil infrastructure in Fujairah, a South Korean cargo vessel, and impacted Oman.

So, is the war back on? Not exactly.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Alberta’s separatist movement landed itself in a hot mess, our prime minister tells European leaders how to deal with the increasingly unpredictable U.S., and more. Let’s jump in!

This was supposed to be the year that Alberta’s separatist movement graduates from a political fever dream to something resembling a credible mainstream project. There have been meetings with Trump administration officials and rhetorical support from MAGA believers eager to cheer on Canadians who say their oil-rich province should join forces with the United States. A secession vote might even happen in October.

But the push suddenly faces a credibility crisis because of a voter-data scandal. The trouble began when Jen Gerson, co-founder of independent Canadian media outlet The Line, reported that the Centurion Project, an ambitious pro-secession political machine, appeared to have access to sensitive voter data through a volunteer app connected to Alberta’s sovereignty movement. The database included the names and addresses of nearly three million Albertans, according to The Globe and Mail.

David Parker, who runs the Centurion Project, has said that the group did nothing wrong and that its volunteers used the database only to find people they already know—and did not have access to phone numbers or emails. He likened the data collection to the basic information found in phone books. That might be a comforting defense if your childhood memory of the White Pages includes voter identification numbers, private contact data, and sophisticated political profiling tools.

The Centurion App was pitched by its backers as a potentially revolutionary political organizing platform that was designed to modernize grassroots campaigning through sophisticated voter targeting, real-time volunteer coordination, and large-scale supporter identification. Emmott Kelsey, a prominent separatist, claimed that the app is “so groundbreaking that it was presented to the White House,” adding that it would “revolutionize how campaigns are run, and we’re the guinea pigs.”

After a source told Gerson that Alberta voter information was easily accessible through the app, she found her own personal data there, and then alerted Elections Alberta, the province’s election administrator. It declined to investigate, citing insufficient legal grounds under stricter rules introduced by Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s government last year that raised the evidentiary threshold for launching probes.

It’s Tuesday, May 5. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Suzy Weiss and Elliot Ackerman debrief the best and worst dressed at last night’s Met Gala. Mene Ukueberuwa on the political virtue-signaling that killed Spirit Airlines. Josh Code has the exclusive report on a new class-action lawsuit taking on three of America’s biggest marijuana companies. And much more.

But first: Madeleine Kearns meets the free speech warrior of the Trump administration.

Does it matter to America if Europe backslides into soft authoritarianism?

I’ve reported extensively for The Free Press on censorship in Europe; for example, how anti-abortion volunteers in Scotland have been arrested and convicted for silently praying outside abortion clinics. Stories like these have provoked an unusually aggressive stance from the Trump administration, which has fiercely criticized democratic allies whose free speech standards appear to be slipping.

On the front lines of that fight is Sarah Rogers. Her official title is under secretary of state for public diplomacy, but she’s been nicknamed “America’s free-speech czar” for her viral criticism of European censorship. Today, she exclusively shared the State Department’s new Public Diplomacy Strategic Plan with The Free Press, which identifies “digital freedom”—encompassing online free speech—as a strategic goal for the very first time.

I sat down with Rogers to find out what this all means—and why she thinks it’s so important that Americans care about speech crackdowns an ocean away.

And threats to free speech aren’t only occurring abroad. Last September, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. Months later, that same school canceled a planned commencement speech by best-selling author Sharon McMahon, after her posts condemning Kirk’s murder and criticizing some of his views provoked backlash and threats.

It’s an episode that captures some of the greatest tensions in the free speech debate, which is why we invited Sharon to share her story.

—Madeleine Kearns

• The Supreme Court temporarily restored nationwide access yesterday to mifepristone—a pill that accounts for the majority of abortions in the United States. The original case was brought by anti-abortion doctors and medical groups who argued the FDA had cut corners when it expanded access to the pill.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio will sit down with Pope Leo XIV in Rome this week—the first high-level meeting between the Trump administration and the newly elected pontiff. (For more on the tensions between Rome and D.C., read Mattia Ferraresi’s piece, “Why the Vatican and the White House Are on the Outs.”)

• Three passengers have died and several more are ill following an apparent hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa. Hantavirus is rare, highly fatal, and typically spread through contact with infected rodents—making a shipboard outbreak unusual and alarming to health officials, who are investigating the source.

• Ryan Cohen’s GameStop wants to buy eBay, a company roughly four times its size. GameStop accumulated a large cash reserve during the 2021 meme-stock frenzy, when retail investors on Reddit’s WallStreetBets drove the stock price up more than 1,000 percent in a matter of days.

• San Francisco has a new celebrity: a colossal sea lion nicknamed Chonkers, who has taken up residence at Pier 39 and tips the scales somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds—roughly two to three times the size of his neighbors.

• Britney Spears has resolved her DUI case by pleading guilty to a “wet reckless”—a reduced charge of reckless driving involving alcohol—and is avoiding jail time. The plea is common in cases where defendants have no DUI history and demonstrate genuine motivation to seek treatment.

• A 33-year-old German citizen drove into a crowd in the city of Leipzig on Monday, killing two people and wounding two others. The driver was arrested at the scene. German authorities are investigating the attack; no motive has been publicly confirmed.

• Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have reached a settlement in their high-profile legal dispute, which stemmed from the promotion of their 2024 movie It Ends with Us, and included accusations of sexual harassment and a coordinated smear campaign. (For more on the spat, read Kat Rosenfield’s essay “Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Art of the Smear.”)

NEW YORK CITY — It’s the first Monday in May, which means one thing for us clothes-minded people: the Met Gala. The annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is, in short, fashion’s biggest night. Celebrities enlist small battalions of stylists, hairdressers, manicurists, makeup artists, jewelers, creative directors, tailors, and of course, high-end fashion designers to create a memorable outfit. Or at least one that won’t be roasted online. (A word to the wise, or maybe just Jared Leto: a replica of your own head is not a trending accessory. Especially since this year’s Met is coming at a moment rife with “off with their heads” energy.)

In addition to the usual decadence on display, the third richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, will serve as honorary co-chairs after coughing up $10 million to the Costume Institute, according to Page Six. Their sponsorship has provoked some calls to boycott the Gala—which I guess is what we’re calling it when we aren’t invited to a party, and so don’t go.

The Middle East remains in turmoil. Trump is waging “Project Freedom” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; the war with Iran continues; the United Arab Emirates just dramatically departed from OPEC; Israel is still fighting on its northern border with Hezbollah; and Hamas’s grip on Gaza persists.

It can be hard to keep track of this—much less make sense of it…

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting on April 25 was only the latest in a series of politically motivated attacks in recent years, a story we have covered extensively because we believe it is among the most important in America today. For a sense of where this could lead, we turn to Gary Saul Morson, one of the foremost scholars of Fyodor Dostoevsky—the 19th-century Russian novelist who watched a society normalize political violence and then wrote the definitive account of where it leads. Morson identifies in America today what Dostoevsky saw in 1870s Russia: a culture in which political violence has become not just tolerated but fashionable. —The Editors

The Russian terrorist movement, which began in the 1870s, had reached prodigious dimensions by the beginning of the 20th century. Between October 1905 and the end of 1907, some 4,500 government officials, and about the same number of private individuals, were killed or injured in terrorist attacks. Newspapers included supplements entirely devoted to assassinations and “expropriations.” People wearing a uniform risked having sulfuric acid thrown in their faces. In the town of Belostok (now Bialystok), one terrorist group consisted entirely of schoolchildren. The most evocative story about the routinely violent climate of the time concerns a newspaper reporter, who asked his editor whether to run the new governor’s biography and was told to save it for the obituary.

Who were these terrorists? Except in rare circumstances, they came not from the oppressed working class or peasantry, but from the ranks of the highly educated or prominent. Resorting to terror, in this time and place, had become almost mundane and unexceptional. Many were the offspring of the very people who supplied targets.

Freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas underpin everything we do here at The Free Press. These values are the lifeblood of democracy—and essential to the pursuit of truth.

Last September, that principle came under violent assault when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at Utah Valley University. As we wrote then, Kirk “was at that college campus in Utah—the very institution meant to be a bastion of freedom of conscience and speech—because he wanted to promote debate. This is the very act that gave birth to this nation, and the only thing that will ensure its survival.”

In the months since, questions about how to protect free expression have only intensified. They surfaced again recently, when Utah Valley University announced that best-selling author Sharon McMahon would deliver its commencement address, provoking swift backlash. Legislators and online commentators denounced McMahon for posts she made after Kirk’s death—posts that condemned his murder while also criticizing some of his views. Last month, the university canceled her speech, citing “increased safety concerns.”

It’s an episode that captures the tensions in the free speech debate today. That’s why we invited Sharon to share her story. —The Editors

Last December, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at Utah Valley University’s commencement ceremony, scheduled for Wednesday, April 29.

It’s the same campus where Charlie Kirk was murdered last year, in a horrifying act of political violence. It’s also a school I’ve spoken at twice before.

I was looking forward to speaking to graduates. I am a former government teacher and author who has spent years writing and speaking about history, citizenship, democracy, and the obligations of ordinary people in difficult times. My commencement speech was not going to be about partisan politics, to which I do not subscribe. It was going to be about hope, and the long American tradition of ordinary people doing consequential things.

But within weeks of the official public announcement in March of my speaking event, a pressure campaign, led by state and federal Utah legislators and Turning Point USA, caused my invitation to be rescinded.

There are a lot of ways to kill a business. You can mismanage it. You can drown it in debt. Or, in a more modern Washington twist, you can force it to compete on the government’s terms and leave it without a chance of survival.

That last option was favored by President Joe Biden and his antitrust brain trust, and it just led to the demise of Spirit Airlines. The ultra–low-cost carrier had carried on for 34 years before it finally folded on Saturday, stranding passengers and putting roughly 17,000 employees out of work. The Trump administration had floated a $500 million bailout in return for a 90 percent government stake in the company, but most bondholders preferred to liquidate instead of dragging out the pain.

Policy wasn’t the only factor behind Spirit’s collapse. The cost of fuel has spiked several times since 2022, including during the ongoing Iran war, and inflation has squeezed the budgets of its price-sensitive customers. But Spirit was blocked from its final chance to turn around in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department blocked its proposed merger with JetBlue on antitrust grounds.

At the time, progressives cheered. Senator Elizabeth Warren declared, “This is a Biden win for fliers!” while warning the merger would mean “fewer flights and higher fares.”