Feminist Philanthropy Needs a New Vision of Gender Liberation
Dear Co-conspirators and Accomplices,
Today is the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. It arrives within a two-week span during which Juniper Blessing, a 19-year-old transgender student at the University of Washington whom her family said was “courageously living their life as who they were,” was stabbed to death, and the Trump administration named trans people on its domestic terrorism watchlist. The latter is the political weather that made the student’s death possible.
Despite the storms of hate, I am holding on to the moments that have shown me there are more of us who believe in collective liberation than those who believe in collective restriction. Five years ago, I organized more than 450 feminist leaders to sign an open letter naming gender liberation as the connective tissue between trans liberation and feminist movements. We named what was already true: the attacks on abortion access and gender-affirming care were the same attack, organized by the same forces.
What has become more urgent to me since then is that we will only grow stronger when we intertwine our threads of struggle. The nonbinary person living in a state that wants to strip them of their driver’s license, the Black migrant woman dying in childbirth, the intersex child realizing they faced nonconsensual procedures before they had words for it, and the trans girl denied gender-affirming counseling are in the same fight. It is a lifelong war against patriarchy and its sibling systems of oppression. The opposition understands this and so must we.
At the Gender Liberation Movement, we are building the infrastructure this framework requires. Affirming families of trans and nonbinary youth, gender-affirming care providers, queer and trans organizers, and believers in liberatory masculinities are training together, mobilizing together, and refusing to be siloed. The constituency exists. It simply needs to be resourced at the scale of the moment—and at the promise of our future.
For feminist philanthropy, inclusion of trans people is necessary and insufficient. Inclusion still imagines us as guests in feminism’s house. What this moment requires is a feminism organized around shared stakes and shared precarity—one that treats every life patriarchy has marked as expendable as the architects of what collective liberation looks like. Resource this work and this vision because you, I, and the generations coming deserve it.
Raquel Willis
Gender Liberation Movement
Co-Founder