A Museum for Some Women
The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, Political Obstruction, and the Erasure of Transgender Lives
Abstract
The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum was authorized by Congress in 2020 with broad bipartisan support. Yet, more than five years later, the museum still has no building, no confirmed location, and no opening date. In March 2026, a committee vote that should have advanced routine land-transfer legislation (H.R. 1329) became a partisan confrontation when Representative Mary Miller introduced a substitute amendment requiring the museum to exclude transgender women from all exhibits and granting President Trump unilateral authority over the museum’s location. This article examines the museum’s decades-long legislative history, the political dynamics that have repeatedly stalled its construction, the executive and legislative mechanisms now being used to erase transgender people from public institutions, and the peer-reviewed research linking family and societal rejection to higher suicide risk among LGBTQ youth. Additional context is drawn from the Trump administration’s executive order targeting Smithsonian museums, the removal of transgender references from the Stonewall National Monument website, the Department of Justice’s order directing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to deadname transgender youth, and the cancellation of artist Amy Sherald’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery over censorship concerns related to a painting depicting a transgender woman. Taken together, these events represent a coordinated campaign to remove transgender people from American public life and public memory, with measurable consequences for the mental health and safety of LGBTQ young people.
Keywords: Smithsonian, women’s history museum, transgender rights, H.R. 1329, Miller amendment, LGBTQ youth mental health, family rejection, suicide prevention, gender policy, Executive Order 14253, Stonewall National Monument, NCMEC, Amy Sherald
Author Note
Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is based in the Upper Midwest of the United States. She writes on gender policy, civil rights, and the politics of historical memory. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen, grace@graceannhansen.com.
A Museum for Some Women
The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, Political Obstruction, and the Erasure of Transgender Lives
I have read through online comment sections more times than I can count. The pattern never changes. Someone posts a news story about transgender people, and within minutes, strangers are calling us delusional, evil, confused, subhuman. One person in a recent thread called transgender people” pure evil” who should be kept” out of society.” Another referred to a trans woman as ”it.” A third admitted, openly and with laughter, that they were deliberately provoking a transgender person for their own entertainment.
I am a transgender woman. I am a researcher. I am someone’s wife, someone’s sister, someone’s friend. I read those comments, sit with them, and then write. Writing back is the only responsible thing I know how to do.
This article is about a museum. But it is really about what happens when a country decides that certain people do not count, and then enshrines that decision in law, in budgets, in the architecture of memory itself.
A Museum That Has Been Waiting for Decades
The idea of a national museum dedicated to women’s history is not new. A bill to create a congressional commission to study the concept was introduced in 1998 (Maloney, n.d.). That commission was not established until 2014, when Congress authorized it through the Military Construction Authorization Act (Public Law 113–291). The commission studied the feasibility of such a museum and unanimously recommended its creation, concluding that women’s achievements are underrepresented in historical accounts, monuments, and museums across the United States (GovTrack, 2020). A 2019 study cited in the museum’s founding legislation found that only 10% of the material in 18 American history textbooks documented women’s contributions, and only 9 of the 91 statues in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall depicted women (H.R. 1980, 2019).
In 2019, the House passed the Smithsonian Women’s History Museum Act with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 374 to 37 (Maloney, n.d.). The bill then stalled in the Senate, where Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah blocked a floor vote, calling the museum part of” an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups” (Caldwell, 2026). Women, who make up more than half the U.S. population, are not a hyphenated identity group. They are the majority. But the language was telling: it reframed a museum of women’s history as an exercise in identity politics, itself a political act.
Supporters found another path. Senators Susan Collins and Dianne Feinstein folded the authorization language into the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and President Trump signed it into law on December 27, 2020 (GovTrack, 2020). The museum was real, at least on paper. Congress had authorized its creation, established an advisory council, and set the framework for a public-private partnership modeled on the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Mitchell, 2021). The legislation called for a 50/50 split between government funds and private donations.
Six years have passed since that signing. The museum still has no building. It has no confirmed location. It has no opening date. The Smithsonian has told reporters there is currently no planned opening date and has declined to comment on pending legislation (Ramos, 2026). The project has raised $70 million in private donations and needs congressional authorization to transfer a plot of land on the National Mall so construction can begin (Caldwell, 2026).
Five Years of Stalling
The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act (H.R. 1329) was introduced in February 2025 by Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican from New York. The bill would authorize the transfer of a plot of land on the National Mall, the so-called South Monument site across from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, to the Smithsonian Institution (Roll Call, 2026). This is seen as the final legislative step in the decades-long process to create the museum. The land transfer itself would cost nothing (Caldwell, 2026).
The bill attracted more than 200 bipartisan cosponsors (Congressional Equality Caucus, 2026). Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, the lead Democratic co-sponsor, told NBC News that all options were on the table, including a discharge petition to bypass leadership (Caldwell, 2026). By every measure, this was a bill with broad support and minimal controversy.
Yet it went nowhere. Malliotakis told NBC News that she and other supporters met with Speaker Mike Johnson at the beginning of 2025, during which she says they received private assurances that the speaker would help move the bill along (Caldwell, 2026). One year later, the legislation had not received a committee hearing, let alone a floor vote. In July 2025, members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus and the Republican Women’s Caucus sent a joint letter to the House Appropriations Committee pressing for full funding (Feminist Majority Foundation, 2025). The bipartisan request was ignored. Some Republicans privately fretted about the cost of operating another Smithsonian museum. Others questioned the necessity of a museum” just for women” (Caldwell, 2026). The disconnect between the bill’s 200-plus cosponsors and leadership’s refusal to schedule a vote was never satisfactorily explained.
The Executive Order
Before the Miller Amendment, before the committee vote, there was the executive order. On March 27, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14253, titled” Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” (White House, 2025). The order directed Vice President Vance, in his role as a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to eliminate” divisive, race-centered ideology” from the Smithsonian’s museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo (NPR, 2025a).
The order singled out three Smithsonian institutions by name: the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum (White House, 2025). It stated that future appropriations to the Smithsonian would be informed by guidelines prohibiting expenditure on exhibits or programs that” degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy” (White House, 2025). The order stated that the Women’s History Museum must” not recognize men as women in any respect” (White House, 2025). The executive order characterized transgender exhibits as” improper ideology” and called for Congress to block funding for any Smithsonian programming inconsistent with federal law and policy (CBC Foundation, 2025).
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch sent an email to staff stating that the institution would continue its internal review processes and that its work would be” shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship” (NPR, 2025a). Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, responded that the order” misrepresents the work of the Smithsonian, which is one of the great research institutions in the world” (NPR, 2025b).
The executive order directed the Secretary of the Interior to restore monuments, memorials, and statues that had been” improperly removed or changed” since January 1, 2020 (White House, 2025). Many of those removals followed the 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd, when more than 200 Confederate symbols were taken down, relocated, or renamed across the country (NPR, 2025c). The order’s framing was clear: removing Confederate monuments was” revisionist history,” but removing transgender people from the historical record was” restoring truth.”
