The Gender Liberation Movement and the Call to Action to Our Community and Allies

ARTICLE: “THE GENDER LIBERATION MOVEMENT AND THE CALL TO ACTION TO OUR COMMUNITY AND ALLIES.”

INTAGRAM @GENDERLIB

TRAN MAG: Most of our audience knows about Gender Liberation Movement (GLM) through protests, but you’re more than just news headlines. What is GLM’s origin story?

GENDER LIB: Gender Liberation Movement officially launched in January 2025 as an organization, but its roots date back to the Brooklyn Liberation marches in New York in 2020 and 2021, mobilizations for Black trans folks and trans youth respectively. We (Raquel Willis and Eliel Cruz) were two of the core organizers for those marches and dreamed of elevating that energy on a national level. So, we organized the first-ever Gender Liberation March in Washington, D.C. in September 2024. Just before that horrible election. We focused on bringing together the fights for gender-affirming care and abortion access as the same fights for bodily autonomy, self-determination, and healthcare. We realized we were building an organization during the planning for this march. We then staged our first civil disobedience, a bathroom sit-in on Capitol Hill, in response to then Rep. Nancy Mace’s bathroom bigotry, and announced our org a month later.

TRAN MAG: To an audience outside of the LGBTQIA community, the central message is that trans healthcare saves lives, both children and adults. The rate of unalives and violence towards trans and gender nonconfirming people grows each year. How do we form the most persuasive argument in a way that disarms deeply held beliefs by those who believe gender is strictly binary?

GENDER LIB: The central idea we’re putting forward is that gender liberation is for every/body and we all –– cis and trans people alike –– are limited by the restrictive gender norms. Although our praxis is to center trans and nonbinary people, particularly youth

and their families, GLM is not solely a trans advocacy organization. We’re interested in helping people connect the dots about our shared stakes in releasing ourselves from the false idea of a gender and sex binary, to one that allows everyone to define their lives, bodies, and futures on their own terms.

TRAN MAG: We know that the Trump administration’s goal is not just an attack on care for trans youth, but for all trans people. We’ve seen it through its ban on trans military service members, we’ve seen it through Congress’s attempt to strip Medicaid funding for trans health for adults. Trans people because we are the most marginalized historically are the first on the attack against LGBTQ rights and also women’s reproductive rights as well. What is the direct impact or consequence to the LGBTQ community as a whole for allowing this Administration to deny life-saving care to trans youth?

GENDER LIB: Healthcare for trans youth is a hard line and one we must hold and defend. We cannot abandon anyone in our fight and we cannot allow the government to restrict healthcare