I am an unapologetic newspaper clipper. Now when my husband and I are involved in a process of cleaning out our long-time home, I am finding numerous clippings going back to the 1990s. Some of them are gems. They are generally painful to read, though because they illuminate the many threads of recent history that have brought us to the point we are at now.
M. Gessen (once writing under Masha Gessen they/them) is a fairly new columnist at the NY Times. When they write, though, I sit up and take notice. I have saved several of their editorials because Gessen has a unique perspective not only from an intellectual point of view but also personal. They were born in Russia, moved to the US when they were a teen-ager through the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program. Gessen is trans and in a gay marriage. They had returned to Russia pursuing work in journalism but had to leave when the government began talking about removing children from gay parents. With their partner, they have 3 children.
Gessen’s stories are at once harrowing and illuminating. As Gessen writes in an opinion piece for the NY Times dated March 23, 2025,“I became stateless when I was 14 and my family left the Soviet Union.” This is of particular pertinence now in the US where the administration is trying to challenge birthright citizenship as well as deporting an unknown number of immigrants to countries to which they have no connection. There are accounts that the deported immigrants have their papers taken away. In other words, they are forced into statelessness. By design. As Gessen notes about the classification of people that creates, “Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.”
In other words, it is a way to dehumanize people making them appear as “the other.”
In the same editorial, Gessen writes about the State Department rule that was put into place to reflect their birth gender. This means that passports must now reflect a person’s gender at birth. This has the effect of de-nationalizing the transgender population. Describing the situation of immigrants Gessen writes, “Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a load, obtaining a driver’s license and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders.”
These are the wages of patriarchy, and they have been honed over thousands of years. This is the action of creating a hierarchy where the “other” is vilified and pushed to the edges of society with no rights or recourse. It too easily becomes a rallying cry of fascism that “those” people, always the most vulnerable, are hurting you in some way. As Gessen concludes “The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others.”
Gessen quoted a statistic that chilled my blood because it means that politics too often trump human rights. When Trump spoke to Congress in his 2025 State of the Union address he spent about five min. attacking trans people and ten min. attacking immigrants. When Democrats gave their rebuttal, immigrants were mentioned once and trans people not at all.
Among my other articles is a biographical piece in the NY Times on George Takei from May 12, 2024.
He is perhaps best known as Lt. Sulu on the original Star Trek series. He was born of Japanese ancestry in 1937, a few years before Pearl Harbor. When he was 5 years old his family was interred in a Japanese internment camp. As he told Guy Trebay for this article, “ . . . Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 decreeing that all Japanese Americans – 125,000 of us by the last count – on the West Coast were to be imprisoned with no charges, no trial and no due process, only because of how we looked.” He describes how harrowing it was when soldiers carrying rifles corralled the young family and forced them to leave behind their lives and everything they owned in Los Angeles.
He wrote a play about the events, focusing not only on his own family’s situation but about how families were set at odds with each other amid the stresses of the barracks and imprisonment. The play was Allegiance and it debuted on Broadway in Nov. 2015. Critics didn’t love it and it didn’t last all the long. I went to see it as it felt like an important story to witness (besides I was a huge fan of the original Star Trek). I felt that complex issues were handled with grace and clarity. Among other themes, the play dealt with how some young sons enlisted in the armed forces to “prove” their loyalty. Others were angry that they would risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them for racist reasons. I wonder if it was panned because of the painful subject and how complicit the US was in traumatizing a whole population. I still feel it is important to witness and to share the stories as modern variations are continuing. As Takei concludes, “It’s the people that make a democracy work, and sadly, most people are not equipped anymore to take on the responsibility of being American citizens.” When he and his family were released they were given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the US and $25 to start over.
I think of these stories now as the Supreme Court has taken up Trump’s issue of birthright citizenship. By all accounts, the Court will not rule in his favor but there is still significant damage. A fringe belief is now part of public discourse and is being discussed as a serious possibility. And along the way, this case wrought other damage to the courts on the issue of national injunctions, making it harder for federal judges to stop Trump’s abuse by limiting their jurisdictions. Stephen I. Viadeck lays it all out in his April 3rd editorial in the NY Times, “A Supreme Court Loss Is Still a Win for the President.”
I will end this heavy post with a hopeful note from my local newspaper, Newsday. Alvaro Castro Velasquez was detained by ICE agents just before his high school graduation. He was deported to Guatemala. The superintendent of the high school in Roosevelt NY, Shawn Wrightman recently flew to Guatemala to present Alvaro with his diploma in a ceremony that Alvaro described as “just for me.” Wrightman said, “Though it comes by a different road than the one originally planned, it arrives with no less dignity, no less truth and no less authority. What he accomplished remains his.”
I include this story not only for the hopeful and uplifting aspects but also to point us in a direction of what we can do. Yes to protests, yes to speaking up, yes to writing our politicians, yes to educating those in our community. And here is another tool: PEOPLE POWER. One to one, individual support. Not everyone can fly to Guatemala but we can all look for agencies that reach individual people, in our own communities. We can reach out ourselves. Minneapolis, under the guns of ICE, brilliantly showed us its possibilities. It is people to people power and I am beginning to think it might just be the most powerful tool we all have.
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