The secret meanings behind Taylor Swift’s engagement

Breaking news alerts were pinged to phones around the world; Swifties screamed in the street; the Prince and Princess of Wales delivered their royal approval; Donald Trump wished them luck. By now it will not have escaped your attention that Taylor Swift, the reigning queen of pop, is engaged to Travis Kelce, a podcaster who also plays football.

What does this engagement mean? It’s possible you naively think it simply means an extremely famous woman and a somewhat famous man enjoy each other’s company and want to settle down together to start a big, beautiful brand partnership. Wrong! When it comes to Swift, Occam’s razor rarely applies. The megastar is known for hiding Easter eggs and hidden meaning in her musical output; she has driven a lot of otherwise normal people on quixotic missions into the deep, dark depths of her lyrics to validate their left-field theories about their idol.

Who can forget, for example, the 5,000-word essay published in the New York Times last year arguing that Swift is secretly part of the LGBTQ+ community and communicating that fact via coded lyrics? A surprisingly large number of “Gaylors” seem invested in this theory: a Gaylor subreddit has more than 50,000 members. Following news of the proposal, it went private to avoid trolling from outsiders.

While the engagement has sent some Gaylors into mourning, various conservatives are celebrating the idea that Swift might be on her way from being an independent career woman to a tradwife. On his podcast, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk mused that getting married and having kids changes a person, and he hopes that it will “deradicalize” the billionaire – who is, it must be said, not widely known for having any radical ideas.

“Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter,” Kirk said. “I think that if she ends up having children, she’ll stop this kind of liberal endorsing Joe Biden nonsense.” (Well, I mean, she’s not going to be endorsing Biden any more, that’s for sure.) Kirk added: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” Oh, I think she is.

While Vance himself hasn’t weighed in on whether he thinks the Kelce effect will mean Swift suddenly has a Mar-a-Lago makeover and starts fangirling over Maga politics, he has aired his thoughts on the news. More specifically, he used the Swift-Kelce engagement to float the conspiracy theory that NFL games could be rigged for Kelce’s team, the Chiefs. “I hope that the NFL does not put a thumb on the scale for the Kansas City Chiefs just because Travis Kelce is now getting married to maybe the most famous woman in the world,” Vance told USA Today in an interview on Wednesday.

It’s not just the right projecting their hopes, dreams and weird Super Bowl fantasies on to Kelce-Swift. Some Swifties have been gushing over what a great guy Kelce is because “he has no issue with Swift being successful”. While Kelce may well be supportive of his megastar fiancee, let’s not get carried away and frame him as some sort of feminist. The football star has called women “breeders” in the past and defended his Kansas City Chiefs teammate Harrison Butker after Butker delivered a bigoted commencement speech last year, calling Pride month a “deadly sin” and telling women they should be more excited about getting married and having kids than having a successful career. Kelce made clear that he doesn’t agree with the majority of Butker’s views, but said it wasn’t his place to criticize them. Kind of a slap in the face to all of Swift’s queer fans for her husband-to-be to let the Pride comments slide, just because Butker has always been nice to him.

Various other hot takes about the engagement abound. The business press have been talking about how the engagement might boost stocks and marketing trade journals have been looking at brand reactions. No doubt even defence industry publications (which have previously put out bangers like What Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift Can Teach Veterans About Federal Resumes) will find an angle.

If you can’t beat them, join them: since it’s the Swift Hot Take Super Bowl, I’ll quickly get mine in. I think the singer is very talented, and I’m glad she makes a lot of people very happy, but I do wish she would do a Ms Rachel and use her unmatched influence to shame politicians into action on Gaza. Or at least follow the lead of the YouTuber Lindsay Ellis and raise money for suffering kids. Parents are having to watch their children wither away amid a man-made famine facilitated (and denied) by the US. Doctors are coming back from Gaza with harrowing stories about Israeli soldiers targeting kids with shots to the head and deliberately shooting teenage boys in the testicles. You can argue all day about whether celebrities have an obligation to speak out about injustice or not but, ultimately, having so much influence and choosing not to use it in the face of a genocide your government is helping to perpetuate, and your engagement knocks from the front page, is not “neutrality”. It is a deliberate choice.

Amnesty calls for end of investigation into Polish doctor who performed abortion

Last year, Dr Gizela Jagielska was targeted by anti-abortion extremists after she provided a legal late-term abortion to a woman in a hospital in southern Poland after her unborn baby was diagnosed with a fatal foetal anomaly. Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. Jagielska is being investigated by authorities and faces possible imprisonment of up to eight years. “Instead of investigating Dr Jagielska’s conduct, the Polish authorities must look into the attacks she has faced since the investigation was announced,” Amnesty International said in a statement this week.

Now I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger … but she is trademarking the term

What first attracted the 24-year-old former cheerleader Jordon Hudson to the 73-year-old multimillionaire Bill Belichick, I wonder? We may never know. But do we know that Hudson’s company has filed a trademark application for the term “gold digger”, to be used on jewellery or keychains. Instead of getting huffy about the jokes about her being attracted to Belichick’s big bank account, she’s monetizing them.

Italian police investigating porn site with doctored pictures of prominent women

If you are a woman in the public eye, it’s almost inevitable that insecure men will use technology to humiliate you online. And the tech bros who keep telling us AI will revolutionize the world seem helpless (or just not interested) when it comes to stopping it.

Snoop Dogg is ‘scared to go to the movies’ because of animated lesbians

The musician has called himself a “gangsta” but he’s apparently terrified of two fictional women parenting a child together. Snoop told a podcast he was horrified when he took his grandson to see Pixar’s Lightyear and the child asked about the two gay mums in the movie. Instead of just answering his grandson’s question like a normal person, Snoop clutched his pearls.

Denmark apologises for forced contraception of Greenlandic women

It’s estimated that 4,500 women and girls were fitted with contraceptive coils without their permission or knowledge in the 1960s in an attempt to reduce the population of Greenland.

UK gender pay gap underestimated for two decades, report says

The faulty methodology, which gave undue weight to large companies, resulted in an underestimate of a “small but noteworthy” margin of one percentage point, new research says.

Fertility rate hits record low in England, Scotland and Wales

And we will continue to see headlines like this until the cost of living goes down (or wages rise in response) and having children becomes more affordable.

Grammy-award winning singer Tems is helping African women navigate music industry

The Nigerian singer-songwriter and producer, born Temilade Openiyi, has launched the Leading Vibe Initiative to try to help more young women in Africa overcome the hurdles of breaking into the music industry.

How an oil spill in Mauritius led to a female revolution in farming

After a wrecked ship polluted the water and sank the local economy, a group of women formed the South-East Ladies Agro collective and started “bringing home the bok choi”.

The week in pawtriarchy

In the Guardian, Frances Ryan considers the impaw-tant question: is it wrong to throw a birthday party for my dog? The short answer is: absolutely not, your pooch would be barking mad if you didn’t.

Tulane coach Jon Sumrall said that Northwestern denied his team’s request to wear white jerseys on Saturday to honor the 2005 Green Wave team.

Friday was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in the city of New Orleans. The hurricane is one of the worst natural disasters in United States history; a majority of New Orleans was flooded and over 1,000 people died as the city dealt with long-term effects from the storm.

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The damage from Katrina forced Tulane to cancel the entire fall semester and the 2005 team ended up playing all 12 of its games on the road because of the damage to the Louisiana Superdome. As stadiums across the state of Louisiana and the surrounding areas were booked for football games, Tulane’s home games ended up being played at six different stadiums.

Tulane players didn’t have the Green Wave logo decals on their helmets on Saturday, like the 2005 team did in its first game of the season against Mississippi State. And after the team’s 23-3 win over Northwestern on Saturday, Sumrall said the team wanted to go further and wear their white road jerseys, but Northwestern didn’t agree to the idea.

Northwestern wore its white road jerseys for the game while Tulane wore its traditional green home uniforms. Per NCAA rules, the road team cannot dictate which color jersey a home team wears.

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Tulane scored 20 points in the first half as Northwestern QB Preston Stone threw four interceptions and averaged fewer than 5 yards a pass attempt. Meanwhile, Tulane QB Jake Retzlaff had two total touchdowns and threw for 152 yards and rushed for 113 more on 10 carries in his first game with the Green Wave.

Saturday was Retzlaff’s first game with Tulane. He arrived on campus over the summer after he transferred from BYU. Retzlaff, the Cougars’ starting QB in 2024, left BYU after a woman filed a civil lawsuit against him accusing him of sexual assault in the fall of 2023.

Retzlaff denied the allegations and the suit was eventually dismissed. However, he admitted to having sex with the woman and, as a result, was facing a seven-game suspension from BYU for an honor code violation. Instead of missing over half the 2025 season, Retzlaff opted to find a new school.

An art teacher who had the Annunciation Catholic Church shooter in her class in 2017 said she saw signs of self-harm on her then-student.

The teacher, Sarah Reely, said Robin Westman was in her class for a year at an all-boys prep school in Minnesota, where she noticed evidence of self-harm on the student’s arm and reported it.

“Self harm is either a cry for help, an indication of self hate, or both. But it’s always sign something is wrong,” Reely wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.

Westman, 23, opened fire at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis during morning Mass on Wednesday, killing two children and injuring 18 other worshippers.

Reely said in her post that she saw a photo of Westman, a transgender woman, and immediately recognized her. The teacher said she knew at the time Westman was “a kid who needed help.”

“She was definitely odd, was really into furries and odd artwork and said some odd things, but wasn’t violent towards others to my knowledge,” Reely wrote. “Being odd isn’t a red flag — I was an odd kid myself and have always had a heart for the odd kids.”

Reely said Westman did not fit in at the school, “as one might imagine would happen to a queer kid in a conservative environment,” and that she “intentionally made a point to build a relationship,” with her.

Westman eventually transferred schools, Reely said, but she always hoped that her former student was OK.

“I am NOT posting this to build sympathy for a murderer or place blame on any one person or entity for failing to stop this,” Reely wrote. “I am posting this to remind people that it’s a snowball effect of multiple system failures at a national level, that every murderer was once a kid in someones classroom who needed help, and that this issue is so much deeper and more complicated than we want to admit.”

Reely declined to speak to NBC News about Westman.

On Wednesday, Westman fired a rifle through the side windows of Annunciation Catholic School’s church, aiming at children sitting in the pews, just before 8:30 a.m.

Westman was a student at Annunciation, and her mother, Mary Grace Westman, had once worked at the school.

The shooter was found dead at the rear of the church with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, according to search warrants. She was found dressed in black “tactical” gear with at least two firearms nearby, police said.

Officials found approximately 120 shell casings from three different guns the shooter used, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. O’Hara said Westman had a “fascination” with mass shootings, and acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joseph Thompson said she “wanted to watch children suffer.”

O’Hara said Thursday that authorities do not have information indicating that Westman suffered from mental illness and that, other than a traffic ticket, she did not have a police record. But a heavily redacted police report from 2018 shows that police were called to a townhouse where Westman lived with her mother. Mental health was noted as the reason for the call.

Minnesota has a red flag law that went into effect in January 2024, allowing family members and others to petition the courts to have guns removed from a person they believe poses a threat to themselves or the community. But it does not appear any alarms were sounded as Westman amassed an arsenal that included a rifle, a pistol and a shotgun used in the attack on the church.

The investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.