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Headshot of Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic, the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (published by Verso), and the co-director of They Won’t Call It Murder (executive produced by Field of Vision). She was a senior reporter at The Appeal, and a contributing writer at The Village Voice and Pacific Standard.


All Articles
January 11, 2024
Melissa Gira Grant
Mike DeWine Is Following the Right’s Vicious Abortion Playbook on Trans Health Care
The Ohio governor’s not going to ban gender-affirming care for minors—he’s just going to make it impossible.
January 4, 2024
Melissa Gira Grant
Kellyanne Conway Thinks Americans Will Believe Almost Anything
To help the GOP avoid voter backlash over abortion, she wants to rebrand the party as pro-contraception.
January 4, 2024
MagazineMelissa Gira Grant
The Right Is Winning Its War on Schools
Using bogus scandals and funding crunches, Republicans across the country are decimating public education.
December 20, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
Mike Johnson Is the Christian Nationalist We Should Have Seen Coming
Those who track the Christian right told people to worry about this guy. Why didn’t we listen?
November 30, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The Christian Right Wants to Force Teachers to Out Trans Kids
Under the guise of “parental rights,” figures like Sonja Shaw want to draft educators into their war against trans students.
November 21, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The Pitfalls of Outrage-Fueled Abortion Reporting
A criminal case heralded as Idaho’s first “abortion trafficking” arrest turns out to be more complicated.
November 8, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
How to Keep Wingnuts Off the School Board
In Tuesday’s elections, liberal and progressive parents banded together to push back against the right-wing takeover of local government.
November 7, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
Mike Johnson’s Favorite Anti-Porn App Has a Dark, Creepy History
Covenant Eyes, beloved by some Evangelicals, takes constant screenshots of the user’s activity. Unsurprisingly, the legal system has found a use for it too.
October 31, 2023
MagazineMelissa Gira Grant
Mike Johnson Has a Dangerous Victim Complex
What links his election denial and his anti-gay policies is his belief that he’s a member of a persecuted minority.
October 25, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The Absurd Lawsuit That Could Bankrupt Planned Parenthood
An anti-abortion activist and Texas’s attorney general have teamed up to try to force the organization out of the state—and now an anti-abortion judge has advanced their cause.
October 24, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
DeSantis’s War on “Woke” Colleges Gets Even More Absurd—and Dangerous
A proposed rule for Florida’s public campuses would muzzle advocacy of issues “that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs.”
September 28, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The Transphobia Hidden Inside the Latest Online Safety Bills
What looks to some like a rare form of bipartisan agreement to rein in Big Tech is also a method of scrambling actual accountability—with a broad, dangerous “save the children” crusade.
September 27, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The Judge Who Wants to Drag Us Back to the Victorian Era
Christian-right law projects have both laid the groundwork for Christian nationalist legal theories and paved one judge’s way to the federal bench.
September 20, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
How the Anti-Trafficking Movement Gave Cover to Opportunistic Men
What’s the future of the anti-trafficking charity-celebrity complex, with both Ashton Kutcher and Tim Ballard out of their respective groups?
September 15, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
Librarians Didn’t Sign Up to Be Queer Activists—but This Year, They Are
Anti-LGBTQ activists are increasingly targeting public reading spaces—and librarians are our best defenders.
September 7, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The 113-Year-Old Law Behind Anti-Abortion Activists’ Latest Scheme
The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”
August 30, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
The GOP’s Drag Bans Aren’t Meant to Be Good Laws. They’re Meant to Cause Chaos.
What if the point of state-level drag bans is not the legislation itself but rather the scapegoating of queer and trans people as enemies?
August 17, 2023
MagazineMelissa Gira Grant
Moms for Liberty Recruits a New Class of Aggrieved Mothers
The burgeoning group, which has scored hundreds of school board election victories, is busy drafting more “joyful warriors” to take control of the Republican agenda.
August 2, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
Republicans Are Fooling Democrats on Kids’ Online Safety
A bill before Congress would help the far right advance its ideological war—but Democrats apparently haven’t noticed or don’t care.
July 25, 2023
Melissa Gira Grant
A Real Wedding Website in a Fake Gay Wedding Website Case
An archive shows that the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case did once design a wedding website, contrary to what her lawyers presented during her legal challenge.

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