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When Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said he would be taking time off from his cabinet position to spend time with his husband Chasten and his two new children, he was roundly mocked in both homophobic and misogynistic terms. The criticism came from people — mostly men — who falsely believe family leave and, by extension, child care are solely the province of women and inherently feminizing forms of labor.

But, as the secretary made clear in his response, raising a newborn is “joyful work. It’s wonderful work, but it’s definitely work.” Paternity leave helps fathers build a bond with their newborn and helps share the labor of child care more equally — all while, in households with parents of different genders, helping to reduce growing burnout and post-partum complications among new moms. Yet relatively few fathers take advantage of the guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid family leave required by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and those that do tend to take less time off than do mothers — just 5 percent of fathers have ever taken at least two weeks paid family leave. Universal paid family leave could help resolve this disparity.

The U.S. is the only country among its wealthy peers to fail to guarantee universal paid family leave. While a growing number of U.S. states have some form of paid leave program, the vast majority do not. And the small amount of unpaid leave guaranteed by the FMLA only covers a little more than half of all U.S. employees. Compare that to countries like Japan, Austria, Norway, or Poland, all of which all offer over a year of paid family leave. U.S. parents from low-income households — particularly Black and Latinx parents — are also much less likely to be able to afford to stop working for very long, as long as that leave is unpaid.

While some employers might offer paid family leave policies, they tend to be wealthier and larger employers: Overall, just 17 percent of workers in the U.S. have access to paid family leave. And even among those few companies that do offer paid leave, gender inequality persists. To be sure, workplace policies should offer time off for pregnancy complications or to recover from childbirth. But when it comes to parental or bonding leave, that must be available on an equal basis for men and women.

Yet, even while we’ve seen gains in this area in past years, some employers still have not gotten the memo. Some still officially offer more leave to mothers than to fathers. Others merely implement their policies in a biased way — which is what happened to our client, Derek Rotondo, whose employer told him he had to prove his wife was physically incapacitated in order to take primary caregiver leave for his newborn son. (We represented him in a class action lawsuit, which was later settled.)

Employers may think that offering more leave to moms supports women employees, but in the long run, it only feeds the presumption that it is women who will — or should — take responsibility for childcare, stymying their opportunities for workplace advancement. And it feeds stigma against dads who do want to take leave.

The consequences of these persistent inequalities in caregiving were all too apparent during the pandemic, which saw women — especially low-income women and women of color — disproportionately leaving the paid workforce to take on responsibility for remote schooling and fill other disruptions to childcare. In addition to the toll this has taken on families’ financial stability, the crisis has caused setbacks to workplace equality that it may take decades to overcome.

Universal paid family leave would help. Fathers who take paternity leave report stronger bonds and emotional connections with their children, performing not just the labor a newborn requires but sharing in the delight and promise of their early and formative months. But perhaps the biggest benefit shows up in mothers with partners who take paternity leave: reduced odds for serious health complications like postpartum depression and, according to one study, a 7 percent rise in their own income for each month of leave their child’s father takes.

Men report a fear of both social stigma and economic consequences as reasons they avoid paternity leave, but child care is a gender-neutral form of labor. Men are just as capable as women of providing the care required by a newborn and the benefits of doing so reach their entire household. Guaranteeing universal paid family leave could help reduce the sacrifices required of any parent, and fathers have a major role to play in making that dream a reality.

When my first born started kindergarten, I learned American enslavement was on the curriculum that year. Before he took that first step into the classroom, I made sure he knew the truth of his ancestors’ resistance to enslavement, including the specific ways we ultimately secured our own freedom. As we say in my house, “we freed ourselves.”

This week as we celebrate Juneteenth, recognized as a federal holiday just one year ago, we must reflect not only on when slavery ended, but how it ended. Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865 — two months after the end of the Civil War and more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued — when the Union army advanced in Texas and Oklahoma declaring the last enslaved people there free. But emancipation’s full history can scarcely be summed up by a single day or announcement.

The revolutionary role that the enslaved played in securing their own liberation is often overlooked. Yet as noted by W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction,” and subsequently by other historians including Steven Hahn and Thavolia Glymph before and during the Civil War, enslaved people engaged in a range of forms of resistance, both armed and subtle. As the Civil War progressed, this resistance catalyzed into what Du Bois famously termed “the general strike.” Enslaved people fled plantations, organized work stoppages and slow downs, nursed union soldiers, and directed them to provisions on plantations, engaged in violent resistance and joined the Union Army. This massive disruption of the wartime economy of the South represented what Du Bois calls a “withdrawal and bestowal of his labor [that] decided the war.” This strike changed the trajectory of the civil war from a war to save the union to a war to end slavery.

It wasn’t until I was a student of political history at Howard University that I learned these truths, and in this quest, became that much more liberated, that much more free. The story of slavery and emancipation I learned before college was more limited, and often obscured the power and agency of enslaved people. But in classrooms across our country today, the ability to teach and learn even the most basic truths about emancipation are vulnerable. Unprecedented attacks on our First Amendment rights to read, learn, and discuss race are widespread, and driven in part by an insistence that white children must not be made to feel the shame or discomfort that may naturally arise with learning our nation’s violent origin story.

Du Bois and his revelations, too, were dismissed by many leading historians precisely because of the discomfort that came with learning the more nuanced truth. His meticulous research challenged existing paradigms for understanding how history happened and who the actors were. Instead of the civil war being a battle between military commanders, he uncovered the central role enslaved people played in defeating the South and the fact that they possessed the knowledge of their actions, its purpose, and its effect. The many historians of the day who dismissed Du Bois were vested in portraying the enslaved as docile, inferior, and grateful to the great white emancipator. The erasure of the humanity, political genius, and fortitude of African Americans helped perpetuate the racial subjugation that we are fighting to this day.

Those historians have something in common with the legislators across the nation who are introducing and passing classroom censorship bills that restrict discussion about race in schools: fear. Fear not just of the exposure of the atrocities committed by white people during slavery, but fear of the ingenuity, strength and resilience of those who were enslaved and how they defeated an essential structure of oppression. Those who seek to silence the type of knowledge produced by Black people do so because they know knowledge is power. And power is dangerous.

Enslaved people’s knowledge of their own freedom, born of their own organized and multifaceted resistance, posed a particular threat to those who sought to silence and capture them. But on June 19, 1865, the rest of the country finally had to learn and acknowledge what many of our ancestors already knew: that they were free.

So as we celebrate Juneteenth, let’s remember exactly what we are celebrating, and why. Let’s reject attempts to thwart our right to discuss and learn about structural racism, let’s reject attempts to erase Black people from history and let’s reject censorship. Instead, let us follow the rigorous path led by Du Bois and Glymph. We celebrate our ancestors who secured their own freedom, who manifested their own destiny, and who gave us a clear path to do the same for ourselves. I teach this truth to my children so that they are not misled into thinking our freedom was secured by others and to quash the false impression that we were simply victims, rather than skillful political actors and survivors. Without knowing our true history, we cannot progress as a nation, and we cannot be truly free.

Like 4.5 million other TikTok users, I’ve recently become enamored with Dylan Mulvaney, a spritely Los Angeles-based performer who came out earlier this year as a transgender woman. In her “Days of Girlhood” video series, Dylan charts her own gender exploration with some typical milestones — getting her nails done, trying new makeup styles — and some less typical ones — talking hair with Jonathan Van Ness, appearing in ads for Kate Spade. What makes Dylan such a joy to watch, however, is her joy. With unbridled and endless optimism, she seems to have a permanent smile, an endless wardrobe of pastels, and a sense that anything is possible.

Switching from her videos to the latest headlines about trans rights can feel like switching between alternate universes. How, after all, can any trans person greet the world with so much energy and aplomb while lawmakers enact increasingly-cruel attacks on trans rights? From worsening rates of mental health crises among trans youth to violent attacks against trans women of color to the emboldened attitude of anti-trans extremists, Dylan’s bright demeanor can feel impossible for the rest of us to replicate.

But it’s precisely the joy she musters that each of us need to fight back. There is a stark difference between naive optimism and conscious, purposeful joy. A blind trust that everything will turn out fine is a deadening stance for any movement to take — particularly the fight for transgender equality, whose gains are recent, shallow, and fragile. But so, too, does cynicism and pessimism kill motivation to action. Neither progress nor defeat is inevitable, and buying into either myth can mute the motivation needed to fight for real, lasting change.

Trans joy, in particular, can be revolutionary in and of itself. Before and after leaving the closet, many trans people are surrounded by alarms about the dangers we may face — some real, some imagined, and some more telling about cisgender people’s anxieties than they are of actual risks we face. Countless headlines about violence, suicide, and discrimination combine with the false narratives of anti-trans activists to suggest our lives outside the closet will be little more than misery, subjugation, and regret.

Even when grounded in a desire to address the material harms transgender people face, however, these one-sided narratives about the trans experience can end up reinforcing a status quo which is hostile to our existence. By transgressing or breaking the gendered boxes so much of our society treats as sacrosanct, the misery of trans people can feel like a fable about the ills that befall people who question gender norms and expectations. This mythology is then weaponized against our progress, suggesting it is too costly, too difficult, or altogether impossible.

But the suffering of transgender people is a policy choice disguised as an inevitability. This is why our joy — your joy — is so indispensable as a fuel for action. Particularly when the news of the world only seems to grow dimmer and darker, it’s more critical than ever to prove transgender joy is a reality within our grasp. To prove that with the right material and social support, our lives can be as fulfilling and meaningful as anyone else’s. That even when forces larger than us try to break our spirit, we can respond as forcefully and effectively with joy as we can with anger, defiance, and protest.

This is hardly a lesson many transgender people need to learn. Even amid an unparalleled assault on our rights, the number of trans people comfortable enough to live openly continues to grow. The future of transgender rights is absolutely uncertain — we must be clear-eyed about the many growing threats we face to our safety, dignity, and liberty. But within uncertainty is also a chance for hope. Like Dylan’s vibrant appeal to optimism and celebration, darkness is an opportunity for your own light to shine brighter.