Republicans Hold Smithsonian American Women's History Museum Hostage Over Anti-Trans Demands

House Republicans added a poison pill to a previously bipartisan bill with demands that all trans women be barred from the American Women's History Museum.

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On Wednesday, the House Administration Committee met to mark up HR 1329, a bipartisan bill with more than 200 cosponsors intended to authorize the site of the new Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall—a project Congress first authorized in 2020 that has stalled for years waiting on lawmakers to clear the way for construction. Previous related legislation had moved through Congress with broad bipartisan support. This time, something was different. Rep. Mary Miller, a Republican from Illinois, introduced a substitute amendment that gutted the original text, adding a provision banning transgender women, many of whom played significant roles in American history, from any museum exhibit. The amendment also handed Trump unilateral authority to override the Smithsonian’s recommended site and pick his own location for the museum. Democrats, who had cosponsored the original bill, pulled their support, and the amended bill passed on a party-line vote.

“The museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women,” says the amendment. “The Museum may not identify, present, describe, or otherwise depict any biological male as female.” The bill also states that the president “may designate an alternative site for the Museum within 180 days of the date of the enactment of this subsection.”

The bill would instantaneously erase dozens of transgender women who played influential roles in American history from finding a place in the museum. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two women heavily responsible for igniting the modern Pride movement at Stonewall, would not be allowed in the museum. Lynn Conway, a computer science pioneer who revolutionized microchip design at Xerox through her groundbreaking work on very-large-scale integration—technology that made modern smartphones possible—and who was fired from IBM in 1968 simply for being transgender, would likewise be banned. The same would be true for contemporary history that the Smithsonian institutions include in their mission: modern transgender figures making history, such as Congresswoman Sarah McBride, would be barred from depiction.

As a result, Democrats immediately pulled their support for the bill, which is now in danger of becoming embroiled in a partisan fight that could further delay a museum that has stalled for years. "Rather than moving forward with a simple, bipartisan bill to authorize a location for the American Women's History Museum, Republicans on the Committee on House Administration couldn't resist poisoning the bill with an anti-trans rider and a provision giving Trump unilateral control over the building's location," said Rep. Mark Takano, chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus. "Let me be clear: the Museum should highlight the experiences of all women, including transgender women. The original bill, however, had nothing to do with the content of the museum until Republicans added this partisan rider. It's beyond disappointing to see years of hard, bipartisan work be flushed down the toilet by Republicans on this committee in order to stage a show vote. If Republicans truly cared about celebrating women's history and ensuring a site for this museum, they would have moved forward with the original bipartisan text—which I and more than 100 of my Democratic colleagues cosponsored—rather than this poisoned, partisan pony show."

This is not the first time the museum has come under attack. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," which directed Vice President Vance to eliminate "divisive, race-centered ideology" from the Smithsonian and explicitly demanded that future appropriations ensure the Women's History Museum and other Smithsonian museums "not recognize men as women in any respect." The order more broadly characterized transgender exhibits as "improper ideology" and called for Congress to block funding for any Smithsonian programming "inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” The Miller amendment now before the House is the legislative codification of that executive demand.

Trump has also targeted transgender people for erasure across virtually every other area of government. Federal agencies have scrubbed references to transgender people from thousands of government web pages and removed gender identity data from federal health surveys and CDC datasets. The DOJ ordered the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to remove all references to transgender people from its public materials and to deadname missing transgender children in its reports—or lose its federal funding. Even nonprofits like RAINN and the Boys and Girls Club of America quietly erased transgender people from their websites in preemptive compliance. And Trump has reached into LGBTQ+ history itself: the National Park Service removed transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument's website, changing "LGBTQ+" to "LGB" and erasing the trans women who helped lead the uprising that ignited the modern LGBTQ+ Rights movement.

The amended bill now heads to the full House floor, where its path is uncertain. The original bipartisan version had more than 200 cosponsors; the Miller substitute has turned it into a party-line fight. If it passes the House in its current form, it would still need to clear the Senate, where the anti-trans provision could face a steeper hurdle. In the meantime, the museum itself remains in limbo—authorized by Congress six years ago but still without a home on the Mall, its future now hostage to a fight over transgender women’s history and existence.