“We’re not starting from zero.” The fight for trans rights continues—and so does the resistance.
Within the first three weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, he has signed a devastating and chaotic wave of executive orders that undo a wide variety of laws and protections impacting women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups. Under immediate threat is the trans community—already incredibly vulnerable in recent years to discrimination and attacks—and now further exacerbated by an administration that made clear at the outset that trans people would be targeted.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to erase trans people from federal policy, calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female. He has also signed executive orders paving the way to ban trans people from military service, directing the federal government to restrict access to gender-affirming care for youth, instructing federal agencies to “end indoctrination” in K-12 education and threatening funding for schools that accommodate transgender children. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order banning trans women from participating in women’s sports. Already, advocates for trans rights are expressing concern over both the short- and long-term effects of these orders on transgender people nationwide.
With so many rights and freedoms at stake, I reached out to trailblazing transgender activist Raquel Willis to get her perspective on what we are facing under this administration and how we can support the trans community.
Willis is a fierce advocate “dedicated to collective liberation,” especially for Black trans people. A journalist, author and media strategist, she is also a co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, an executive producer with iHeartMedia’s first-ever LGBTQ+ podcast network, Outspoken, and the host of Afterlives and Queer Chronicles.
In her powerful speech at the People’s March in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, she urged the crowd to “take up space,” saying, “If you feel disempowered, angry and afraid, it’s time to take up space… If you believe we need to protect all kids, especially trans and nonbinary kids, take up space.” And in her recent op-ed, “Dear Trans Kids, You Don’t Need the Government’s Permission to Exist,” she wrote, “Regardless of how impossible the obstacles feel right now, I am committed to building the freer, brighter future that you deserve.”
In the following conversation, which took place on the day of Trump’s inauguration, Willis offers her insights and calls to action for how we can protect the rights that are under threat in this moment and what new strategies we may need to adopt. She also shares her thoughts on the roots of transphobia, her message to trans people who are scared, where she finds her strength, and what we can learn from the trans community on organizing, courage, self-preservation and more.
This interview has been excerpted and adapted for length and clarity.
Marianne Schnall: For those of us working to advance gender equality and other intersecting issues, where do we collectively go from here? What do we need to focus on?
Raquel Willis: For a lot of us, it is about continuing and deepening the work that we have been doing around gender justice. We’re not starting from zero, as I think a lot of people are being made to feel like we are. It’s about continuing to build spaces where we can learn from each other.
There still needs to be a tremendous amount of political education around the experiences of people marginalized by the patriarchy and by gender. Folks have to understand that attacks on trans and nonbinary people are attacks on everyone because none of us fit these perfect scripts and boxes around gender—we all defy norms in some way.
When I think about the attacks on access to gender-affirming care or the attacks on access to public accommodations and restrooms or the attacks on trans folks’ access to accurate identification documents, I think about how that’s connected to attacks on everyone’s bodily autonomy from access to abortion to access to IVF. The attacks on people’s ability to fully show up in a democracy when you are denied identification documents, that inhibits your ability to vote and everything else.
For me personally, I liken the attacks on trans people’s access to restrooms, to the attacks on Black folks accessing public accommodations during the segregation era and the Jim Crow era. I come from the South, from Georgia. And so for me, I’m constantly thinking about the overlap of my fights now as a Black trans woman and the fights of my ancestors as Black folks who may not have been trans, but were blocked from living their lives with dignity and respect.
Schnall: How do we make progress during this time? Do you think we’re going to need new strategies to adopt in terms of organizing, coalition building? How can we continue to make progress and prevent regression in terms of these rights?
Willis: Unfortunately, we’re already regressing in terms of our rights, and we have been for quite a while—whether we’re thinking about the fall of Roe v. Wade, or the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or state bans on abortion or gender-affirming care for trans people. The regression is already happening, and we have to grapple with that.
We also have to grapple with the fact that we simply cannot rely on so many of the institutions that we have been conditioned to rely on. From the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, we know that the Trump administration has a project of dismantling the way that these departments have aided our lives for decades. So that means that we have to lean more on the institutions that we, as the people, can build.
Schnall: What is your call to action?
Willis: I urge folks to find a political home, preferably near them, somewhere local, and get involved with the community around you or that you have access to. That means looking for groups and local organizations that speak to their values. We’re going to have to be a part of institutions or build institutions to fill the gap that so many of the institutions that are crumbling right now cannot fill anymore. So if you care about access to healthcare and honoring bodily autonomy, then get involved with the local clinic. It’s about building with the communities around you.
I urge folks to find a political home, preferably near them, somewhere local, and get involved with the community around you or that you have access to.
Raquel Willis
People need to be leaning on their community and their neighbors. This is a time where we are going to have to figure out how to break down the divisions within our society, because we know that we do not have political leaders, in the White House in particular, who are invested in doing that.
People [also] need to organize their media diet. Unfortunately, a lot of mainstream media right now is on the Trump train and normalizing fascism, and so that means that we have to really pour resources into independent media. Finding the media that speaks to your values is key. I’m not really a fan of completely blocking out what’s happening because you have to know what’s going on in the world so that you can combat it.
Schnall: What gives you hope? For anyone who’s feeling disheartened by where we are and overwhelmed by the work ahead, what words of encouragement would you offer?
Willis: What gives me strength when I feel disillusioned by what’s happening in the world is leaning on and meditating about my ancestors and transcestors. I think history gives us a bit of a roadmap, but a lot of inspiration to continue the journey toward collective liberation. Yes, things feel difficult right now, but things have always been difficult for someone or some group. And more often than not, people have found a way through those difficulties.
I’m also encouraged by the youth. I think that truly what our lives work should be about is leaving the soil richer for the next folks to come and bloom on their own accord. So remembering the youth and my duty to the youth and future generations keeps me steady and keeps me grounded.
The truth is that I actually think we all are more alike than we are different, as cheesy and cliché as it sounds. As a Black trans woman, I know that I’m not the only one who’s been made to feel invalid or insignificant or powerless at points in my life. I know that there are cisgender women and girls who have been told that they aren’t the drivers of their own destinies and somehow are tapping into their own power. I know that there are men and boys who are told that they are small and insignificant and don’t know their roles within today’s society. And I believe there’s a path for them to figure out how to be powerful without leaning into domination and exploitation.
For trans and nonbinary folks, there is a brilliance to what makes us different. We are able to see the world from so many different lenses because we’ve lived [through] so many different lenses and settled on our truths.
We all have a path to finding power that isn’t about one upping the next person or brutalizing the next person or diminishing the next person, but that is really rooted in empathy and vulnerability and real authenticity.
Schnall: You referred a little bit to this earlier, and I have interviewed Kimberlé Crenshaw about the term she coined “intersectionality,” which I feel is such a necessary missing ingredient to a lot of the ways that we work on issues. What can others learn from the trans experience, the trans movement, and also why is it important that we start to work in an intersectional way?
Willis: What people can learn from the trans and nonbinary experience is that we are all kind of given boxes when we’re born. And sometimes a lot of what’s in that box works for the average person.
But just having lived so many different experiences and having been perceived in so many different ways, I know that everything doesn’t work in those boxes for everyone. I know that the boys and the men who are told that they have to be a slate of stone, that they can’t have certain emotions, that they can’t feel sadness and mourning and grieving, that they can’t fully experience joy unless it’s at somebody else’s expense, that they can’t like the color pink or be a dancer or an artist or all of these different things—that is a gender problem. And when I think about women and girls who are told that their existence is only as relevant if it’s in service to the man, that is a gender problem.
We often get hung up on identity, but intersectionality isn’t so much about taking off the different aspects of your identity as it is interrogating the systems that impact our lives. Yes, I am a Black woman, but it’s probably more important for folks to understand that white supremacy is a system that impacts all of us.
Raquel Willis
So, yes, I think a lot of people feel like the trans or the nonbinary experience is drastic, but all of these experiences lie on the spectrum, and it’s all about everyone being less restricted and having the freedom to chart their own path without discrimination and the threat of violence and othering. No one wants to feel that way. So I think people can get a little bit of their power back and become a bit more of an architect of their lives by learning from trans and nonbinary people’s experiences. It’s nonsensical to think that we have the social, political or economic power to steal anything away from the cisgender masses. It just does not logically work to think that way about 1 percent of the population that continues to face so many barriers in society.
When I think about intersectionality, we often get hung up on identity, but intersectionality isn’t so much about taking off the different aspects of your identity as it is interrogating the systems that impact our lives. Yes, I am a Black woman, but it’s probably more important for folks to understand that white supremacy is a system that impacts all of us. Or that the patriarchy is a system that impacts all of us, that gives these expectations that we just simply are failed by.
I like to hone in on the values of empathy and humility. When we talk about experiences, we know that every person is different, and we should be able to understand that everyone deserves to live their lives on their own terms as long as they are not harming other folks. And we have to be clear about when that harm actually exists versus when it is made up and weaponized to divide the masses.
Schnall: So many of us are really concerned particularly about the threat to the trans community. What really is at the root of transphobia or just intolerance? And for anyone who is trans that is feeling that fear right now, what would you want to say to them?
Willis: I think at the root of transphobia is ignorance.
All of us are born and raised in a society that pushes the inaccurate idea that there are finite ways of being in the world. We are indoctrinated with the idea that if you are assigned male or female at birth, that there’s a particular trajectory that you’re supposed to be on—otherwise you threaten the fabric of society. And trans people confront that because we take control of our own destinies in a particular way, in a way that requires an immense amount of bravery. It often requires an immense amount of sacrifice, and it requires an immense amount of imagination and faith in our truth. Most people are not primed to think about their lives in that way.
When I think about embracing my queerness or transness at a young age, I can see the judgment I have experienced at various points around those aspects of my identity as part and parcel with the judgments that someone who isn’t trans, who maybe had a child at an age that wasn’t considered appropriate or maybe found a religious home that wasn’t the same as the one that they were brought up in or learned that they can’t have biological children for whatever reason and can’t deliver on some of these things that society tells us are just a normal part of life—that doesn’t make them any less than, and that doesn’t make them wrong, it just makes them different.
I think also at the heart of transphobia is fear.
When people are confronted with the fact that maybe they didn’t have to follow all of these rules to live a fulfilling life, that is startling to them because it causes them to question a lot of aspects of their lives. A lot of people find comfort in just following the status quo, even if it doesn’t necessarily work for them.
Trans people have always been on the soil since before the United States of America existed. We pre-date literally this country.
Raquel Willis
Most trans people have walked through fire and ice and over water to find our truth and find a path to living our truth, so we’re no strangers to struggle … to being misunderstood, and we’re no strangers to finding strength at unlikely times and from unlikely sources. So we’ll hold onto that.
Trans people have always been on the soil since before the United States of America existed. We pre-date literally this country, and we have ancestors and transcestors to look to who lived their lives on their own terms, with far less resources and protections than we have today, so we are more than equipped to do the same.
For trans folks and for everyone, don’t give into the alarmist energy and completely lose the sense of peace that you can cultivate for yourself. Because there may not be peace externally all the time, but there are ways to carve out internal spaces for peace and internal methods for a sense of peace. So invest in those, find community and find your purpose in life beyond your identity.
We’re definitely going to hear a lot of negative and scary things coming down from the Trump administration, but we can all make a commitment to being the antidote to that negativity. So I would charge people to figure out how to do that every day of these next four years.
