Raquel Willis isn’t afraid to take risks. She has organized large-scale marches to protest violence against Black trans lives and rallied outside the Supreme Court to support the trans youth at the center of the ongoing case U.S. v. Skrmetti, which will decide whether gender-affirming health care bans for minors are constitutional. Last December, Willis was arrested at the Capitol for staging a bathroom sit-in in defiance of a proposal to ban trans women from women’s restrooms on federal property. The title of her 2023 memoir, The Risk It Takes to Bloom, underlines her fearlessness.
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But to Willis, “a proud Southern, Black, trans, queer woman” from Augusta, Ga., the riskiest thing she’s done so far is choose to live authentically. “Our society is not primed to honor queerness or transness,” she says.
Willis, 33, is the co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement (GLM), the grassroots collective responsible for the Brooklyn Liberation Marches that drew thousands of people in 2020 and 2021. In 2024, GLM organized an inaugural Gender Liberation March in Washington, D.C., in an effort to highlight the ways in which the fights for abortion and trans rights are connected. “For us, gender liberation is about bodily autonomy, self-determination, the pursuit of fulfillment, and collectivism,” she explains. “We want to be the glue between these different fights and get people talking about how restrictive ideas around gender impact us all.” The way Willis sees it, restrictions on choices surrounding our bodies pose a danger to everyone, no matter how you identify.
“Many institutions have failed us and will continue to do so,” she says. Since President Trump’s Inauguration, a number of Executive Orders targeting trans and gender-nonconforming people have already been signed—one states that the U.S. will only recognize “two sexes, male and female.” But thinking of the long road ahead, Willis is trying to maintain a sense of calm. “We have to remember that communities on the margins have experienced struggles and hardships in every era. We’ll figure out solutions that serve us.” And, perhaps unsurprisingly, she adds, “I’m going to find ways to take risks to move us closer to collective liberation.”
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