March for Gender Liberation
By Selena Lopez and Emily Sayre
Disclaimer: Transgender will be a term used to describe people whose gender identity does not match their assigned gender at birth. Throughout this article, the term “transgender” will be used as an umbrella term, encompassing transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people.
March is Women’s History Month, created as a direct result of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. While this is a time to celebrate the women whose contributions and achievements have shaped our society today, we also need to address how cisgender women’s rights are a direct reflection of trans rights. With the ever-growing 330+ anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the U.S. today, and Trump’s legislation to create a legal definition of “woman”; transgender people are unable to live openly and fearlessly at their work, school, grocery store, movie theater, or anywhere else they choose to exist.
Transgender History Recap
Many college courses today focus on transgender history; luckily, a few of them have written books on the subject matter, two of whom are editors for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the first non-medical journal about transgender studies. Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution by Susan Stryker (Professor Emerita of gender and women's studies at the University of Arizona) and A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson (tenured associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University) both highlight and discuss transgender history.
The former covers American transgender history from the mid-1900s until today, and the latter discusses the transphobic ideology that is a direct result of colonial and military districts across time, ranging from Latin America to Europe to America.
The late 20th century was a major turning point in transgender history at the hands of Marsha P. Johnson. As with many transgender people leading up to this time, Johnson constantly struggled to find employment, instead turning to sex work and finding joy as a drag queen. It was not determined until 2020 that transgender people were protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a title that prevents employment discrimination against race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
Johnson found herself at The Stonewall Inn in New York City on June 28, 1969, and the brutality she witnessed from police towards the bar patrons fueled her desire to fight for liberation. Marsha P. Johnson and fellow transgender activist Sylvia Rivera led a series of protests, actively spoke out against transphobia, and eventually became prominent members of the gay rights movement. Over time, Johnson and Rivera saw a decline in support of trans people of color from the rest of the LBGTQIA+ community, who chose to focus their activism on queer cisgender people, so they sought to form Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an advocacy group for transgender rights and resources.
The Fight for Trans Freedom Over the Last Decade
Even with the work that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera started in the 1960s through what the new leaders are doing today, transgender people experience prejudice and discrimination far more than cisgender people, and they are forced to continue to fight for their rights. It was not until 2015 that the Supreme Court ruled that the right to marry is a fundamental liberty, and a union between same-sex couples, opposite-sex couples, regardless of their sex or their gender assigned at birth, is a constitutional right. Even with this ruling, transgender people still have to fight for the validity of their marriages, which results in barriers of recognition for parent-child relationships. Some states only include same-sex couple terminology on their marriage licenses, which could force a person to be listed according to their current ID documents, even if that is not how they identify.
Since Trump took office this past January, he has attacked the transgender community with full force. Anti-transgender politicians spent over $215 million promoting Project 2025, which threatens to roll back reproductive health and freedom and discriminate against those who do not conform to obsolete gender roles. Within his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order stating that the US would only recognize two sexes: male and female, and that government-issued IDs, such as passports, social security cards, visas, etc., would reflect a person’s sex “at conception”. The most immediate impact of this executive order will be felt by the transgender women who are incarcerated, as they will be forced into men’s prisons and detention centers. This change heightens the risk of sexual assault from other incarcerated people and prison staff, which is a direct contradiction to the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). This executive order also forced the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to withdraw health care from transgender persons in federal prisons.
Who is Fighting for Trans AND Women’s Rights?
Since 1972, the ACLU has fought to dismantle women’s gender stereotypes and oppression, for both cisgender and transgender people, through the Women’s Rights Project (WRP). March officially became “Women’s History Month” just 15 years after this project was established. WRP, co-founded by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recognizes that laws that enforce gender-based stereotypes affect everyone and that the fight for women’s rights should have a broad gender focus. They aim to address the barriers that Black women and other women of color face, as well as the barriers transgender men and nonbinary people face, such as gender-affirming care or access to abortion and reproductive health care.
The ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project continues to fight for gender justice and freedom. Their work has expanded to take an intersectional approach, most recently in the following ways:
Challenging discriminatory dress codes, which reinforce sexist and racist standards, and primarily affect girls, people of color, and those in the LGBTQIA+ community.
Fighting for housing justice and specifically fighting against policies that blacklist Black and Brown women. The ACLU has fought a “No-Eviction” policy that blocks potential renters from housing simply from being connected to a previous eviction case, even if the motion was found unlawful.
Advocating for Pregnant and Lactating Workers have been a key advocate of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the PUMP Act, both of which would ensure that reasonable accommodations are available for millions of pregnant and lactating workers.
The ACLU is planning to fight the Trump administration to protect the rights and freedoms of all people through legal challenges. So far, they have filed lawsuits against this administration for trying to end birthright citizenship, fast-track mass deportation, close down the American asylum system, restrict gender-affirming care, and more. The ACLU filed over 400 lawsuits against Trump in his first term, and I’m sure we will see similar action from them during his second.
Women’s Rights: Beyond Borders
Advocating and protecting women’s and human rights internationally becomes more nuanced when considering the plethora of variables at play. From different government systems to distinct cultural contexts, it’s work that requires an intersectional understanding of feminism and what it means to fight for women’s rights and gender liberation.
The first step is de-centering whiteness and colonialism. Ruby Hamad writes in her book White Tears/Brown Scars, “Over the course of centuries, as the proponents and beneficiaries of colonialism, whites have set the standards both for humanity as a whole, embodied in the white man, and for femininity that is designed to complement the white male and so is embodied in the white woman.” The foundation of western feminism makes it difficult to actively protect and fight for the rights of women who fit outside of the traditional definition of feminism that is rooted in colonialism. On top of this, the individualistic nature of western feminism often overlooks the greater systems of power that enable the violation of women’s rights, and how women’s rights are intricately weaved into other issues, like climate change, the exploitation of natural resources, modern-day colonization, and many more.
For example, take the increased demand for clean energy technologies to transition from fossil fuels to “clean energy.” This transition is one that requires precious raw materials, like cobalt, copper, nickel, and lithium. The extraction of such raw materials, however, is increasingly coming at the expense of human and women’s rights of people who both lose their livelihoods and are forced into poor working conditions. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, entire communities and neighborhoods are being bulldozed as forced evictions force families off their lands. Those who try to resist are met with violence: Kabibi, a woman who was two months pregnant when she tried to harvest her crops before soldiers bulldozed her farm, was violently sexually assaulted by soldiers and required medical attention. Kabibi is only one of 6.1 million people who have been displaced as a result of human rights violations and gender-based violence.
Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard paints the nuance of progress in a way that captures the importance of intersectional approaches to any kind of movement: “The Democratic Republic of the Congo can play a pivotal role in the world’s transition from fossil fuels, but the rights of communities must not be trampled in the rush to mine minerals critical to decarbonizing the global economy.” In the march for gender liberation, it is equally important that any progress does not come at the cost of transgender people and women of color both within and beyond our borders.
One organization that is committed to an intersectional approach to gender liberation is the Women in Migration Network (WIMN), a global organization that works to “build alliances with feminist, anti-racist, Black and Indigenous, LGBTQI+, Youth, Disability Rights, and Migrant organizations.” Rooted in promoting intersectional organizing, WIMN understands that so many voices are left out of the agendas of many feminist movements, including migrant and LGBTQI+ women, further exasperated by limited resources and capacities. As the world continues to face humanitarian crises, the mission of WIMN illustrates the salience of cross-community and intersectional organizing for women’s rights.
Turning to Community
As the Community section, it’s only natural that it all comes back to how we can engage with each other to not only uplift and protect women’s rights where we live, but also promote conversations about broader understandings of feminism to include transgender people, migrant people, women of color, and everyone in between.
We’ll admit, with everything going on in the world at any possible moment, it can feel intimidating to broach these conversations, especially when it feels like so much is out of our control. How can we possibly help [insert group of people here] when we’re struggling to stay afloat? There’s no perfect answer – it’s by design that we feel this way. But here are three things you can do to push yourself to action in the community:
Equip yourself with fuel for conversations by reading books about intersectional feminism, transgender rights, and women’s rights, like the books we mentioned in this article. Next time your friends ask what you’ve been up to, you can engage in a thoughtful conversation about your takeaways.
Participate in boycotts happening right now, and when the voice in your head says, “But what difference will my consumption make?”, reflect on the harm of individualistic feminism and how the liberation of all genders is tied to the human rights of people across the world. Boycotts are just one tool in the arsenal of social change tactics, and if you need extra affirmation that your action contributes to something bigger, read about multiple recent boycotts that have proven to be successful – like how the boycott of Twitter/X led to over 500 advertising companies stopping their ads on the platform.
Start small by getting to know your neighbors and community members. Being in a community is a form of resistance – where you can have conversations about what’s going on in the world, build class and social consciousness and push away from the individualism that capitalism feeds into. Create safe spaces where you can not only talk about women’s and transgender people’s rights, but fight for them, too.
We want to emphasize – your involvement does not need to be perfect. Any action is better than no action, and every movement, every change, and moment of progress starts with one person. Let’s be in this march together.
Mentioned Books
