Trans Liberation is Collective Liberation

CÉLINE SEMAAN: You wrote a memoir recently, The Risk It Takes to Bloom. What do you think is the biggest risk you’ve taken, and how did that risk become a portal for transformation?

RAQUEL WILLIS: The biggest risk I’ve taken in life is naming my truth at the risk of being misunderstood. I think we’re all called to take risks at various points throughout our lives. I don’t think it’s just a trans thing, or a queer thing, or even just a Black thing. I had a lot of different awakenings as a kid around gender norms and rules that never fit me. They never made sense to me, and it almost felt like everyone was following this script that I just could not get right. Eventually, as I got older, it got to a point where I had to decide if I was going to continue to fail at trying to follow society’s scripts, or if I was just going to shred that shit up and do my own thing and see what might happen.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: That’s so beautifully said. We’re currently experiencing a terrifying rollback of rights for trans communities. The UK Supreme Court’s ruling against trans women happened just today. How do you see your work as both personal testimony and political resistance?

RAQUEL WILLIS: My work blends storytelling and social justice at its core. I started out as a journalist in a traditional sense, and what I was primed to do in my storytelling was to uphold a status quo. There are these ideas about objectivity or being unbiased that ignore what your lens or your positionality is. In an imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society, if you’re not able to articulate what you actually believe in and are willing to do that to the people your work impacts or who consume your work, then you’re probably cosigning a lot of dangerous things. There’s a piece of agency I gained from embracing community organizing and activism. Those experiences are inherently tied to my journalism and storytelling work.

I started my career as a newspaper reporter in small town, Georgia, a very conservative environment. I was essentially in the closet, not out as trans or queer. That was a choice made out of survival and sometimes fear. It was the deaths by suicide of two young trans teens, Leelah Alcorn and Blake Brockington in 2014 and 2015 that really pulled me out of this idea that I could truly do something meaningful or that lived up to my values while being silent. They were trans teens who didn’t see a future for themselves being who they were, who experienced deep issues around mental health and were facing environments that were not primed to fully accept them as who they were.

My work wasn’t doing what it needed to do to keep young trans people like them alive. I needed to speak up. I didn’t want to be a foot soldier for oppression. I started to speak out more. It was as simple as sharing more about my life, my story, my perspective on social media. It was being curious about what other people in the trans community were doing to transform the fabric of society. I started working with community organizers in Atlanta, queer and trans community organizers who were working on everything from ending the profiling of sex workers, to ending police brutality, to direct action, HIV AIDS advocacy and so much more. The personal became political because I knew in my work in journalism that stories are a universal organizing tool. We all have a story and we can figure out how to craft and shape it so that it can be used in service to getting people closer to collective liberation. There’s a place for stats and data, but the thing that I think often pulls people to be transformed is authenticity, vulnerability, and empathy,

CÉLINE SEMAAN: You’ve been named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people. What does influence mean to you when visibility can be also dangerous?

RAQUEL WILLIS: It’s an honor… and I know that influence and visibility aren’t inherently benevolent. We see every day the increasing influence of the worst actors in society, and the worst inclinations around masculinity and power and domination.

The influence and visibility piece is necessary. It’s a tool, and I think we have to be strategic about what we amplify. It never really has been enough for us to simply focus on a person’s identity or this kind of nebulous idea of representation without giving equal weight to the values attached to that representation.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: In your memoir you weave your story with collective struggle. How do you navigate the tension between individual success and collective liberation, especially within a system that wants to tokenize us?

RAQUEL WILLIS: On an individual level, we have to consistently do the work around our ego and what we are chasing in terms of validation. It’s human to want to be acknowledged, to be cherished, to be appreciated. And I think you have to figure out how to keep those things in check. As someone who believes in the power of community organizing and activism, I’m always hyper aware that my wins aren’t just solely about me or from me. I’ve received this recognition on the shoulders of people from previous eras who experienced the brunt of systems of oppression… who did not receive their flowers in their lifetimes.

I struggle often with what it means to be elevated when I know that there are so many other people doing the work, but are not seen, are not amplified, are not resourced. Whenever I can, I try to deliver on favors that can support people in getting the access they need to continue to do the work they’re doing. I like to remind people that I’m not the only Black trans person who has a voice and who is doing important, powerful work. There’s a whole constellation of us out here.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: With over 500 anti-trans bills introduced in the last few years, what do you want the next generation of movement builders to understand about organizing and fighting legislative violence?

RAQUEL WILLIS: Organizing is a creative endeavor, and the best organizing comes from identifying your lane and making change within that lane. There is often a dangerous overprioritizing in trying to track the legislation, in amplifying the legislation at the expense of amplifying the options that people can take right now to support the people most under attack. There’s not enough discussion around how we can support grassroots organizers and groups who are feeding, clothing, getting aid to, housing, folks on the margins. If people put as much energy into supporting those efforts on the ground as they do in calling out anti-trans laws, we would be in a better place. I also think we need to be urging our political leaders who claim to be on our side to stop operating simply from a place of defense… I want you to be on offense.

It’s not enough for you to call out the bad legislation. What legislation are you presenting or sponsoring to combat that restriction or that hate that is targeting people on the margins? I need you to be proactive, not just responding to the moment. What we’re seeing right now in the United States is that Democrats have conceded so much ground legislatively, but also rhetorically, to Republicans, and now they’re in a fix, because even the Liberals have to acknowledge that the Dems are not doing enough for us. We have not done enough to demand and hold accountable leaders who claim to be on the side of the people, but have not actually had a track record fully showing that.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: It seems that whenever the Democrats are in power, there is a general apathy toward organizing. It becomes a lot harder to motivate people, to hold people accountable, to get things done. Under Trump, there’s a general sense of hysteria. People are in the streets every day. Everyone is beginning to understand the consequences… How have you experienced misinformation being used as a weapon against trans people? And what’s the antidote?

RAQUEL WILLIS: There’s always been a level of misinformation and disinformation in our society. We haven’t fully acknowledged that this is not just an element of the Trump era. I grew up in the Southern US, where it was not uncommon to hear that the Civil War was about states’ rights rather than about chattel slavery, when we know it was overwhelmingly about states being able to decide whether Black people could be owned and exploited within a larger capitalistic endeavor. I use that as an example, because that is just one idea that permeates the US that has never fully been shipped away as well as the idea that the US is inherently good and pure. There’s no way this country can be all of those things with all the lives that have been taken in the name of it and continue to be taken in the name of it.

I think we’ve been consistently fed US propaganda throughout the history of this country, and so we have to understand that that’s misinformation. Misinformation is not a new phenomenon.

We will continue to struggle as long as we have to rely on big corporate media. There will continue to be a focus on what’s most profitable. We have to be investing in community led media, independent media, media that is devoted to our values. We have to continue to empower more and more people to tell their own stories on their own terms, and we have to understand that there are few outlets for people to get politically educated.

Our educational system is under attack right now by the Trump administration, but it already was a very flawed…

CÉLINE SEMAAN: What is going on now is nothing new. A lot of people are waking up today wondering what happened to trans rights, to our bodily autonomy? What happened to our reproductive rights? But these rights have been jeopardized for years, and they have not been protected even when we have a democratic administration in power.

RAQUEL WILLIS: I think if protections can be so swiftly stripped away, you can’t claim that they’re an inherent part of the society or this country. We have to acknowledge that this country was made for wealthy, privileged, cisgender, able bodied, Christian white men. You can tell a lot of about a society from the monuments that it builds… Trump and Musk floated into power because they were cosigned by Democratic leaders for decades. We see the memes. We see the photos of the Clintons with Trump. We see conversations that Obama was having with Musk about what he was supposedly building some 10-15, years ago, we have a Democratic party that’s supposed to represent the left that cannot come out against capitalism, and how damaging CEOs and millionaires and billionaires are to our society because they depend on the exact same power.

You can’t talk about a “broligarchy” or the intense militarism or territorial nature of a Trump agenda when Democratic leaders are on the exact same trip. I want to cry about him talking about taking over Greenland or cry over Putin trying to take over the Ukraine, but you have no problem with Netanyahu stealing more land from Gaza. You have no problem with territorial divides around the world, from the Congo to Sudan to Haiti, a country that is constantly being dissected despite its rich history of resistance. If you’re not going to be invested in toppling exploitation and domination across the board, you can’t actually be a healthy, worthy representative of the collective.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: So, yes, we fight, but we also dance, and we also rejoice. I know you talked in your book about joy and softness alongside rage and resistance. How do you weave the two together.

RAQUEL WILLIS: I will admit I have my cycles when I’m great at it and when I’m not so great at it. Weirdly, during the pandemic, when everything slowed down, I had so much solitude amidst the fear and everything else, but I think that there was an opening in that time for us to imagine different versions of ourselves and different versions of what our life could be. Capitalism had to slow down, probably for the first time since its inception. I yearn for that stillness. Most people know about me through my work, my politics, my activism. I tend to keep other things close to the vest, because I deserve to do that. My heart hurts for folks who have built careers out of and followings out of chipping off this piece and that of their personal lives and giving it away. I think that is what capitalism and social media primes us to do. They want to take more and more of our thoughts and our interests and feed them into their algorithms and machines and make more money off of us than we ever could imagine. We have to be aware of that.

I take breaks from social media. I’m selective about what I share, because I want my values to always be as clear as possible. Those boundaries come from carving out time to do CrossFit, to bike, to visit family, and to just enjoy being around my mom and my siblings and my niblings (*gender neutral niece/nephew) and just be a daughter and a sister and an auntie and not have to be Raquel, the activist or writer or icon, as some people want to say. The narrative around queer and trans people continues to be focused on tragedy or the attacks, and honestly, queer and trans people are some of the most creative and joyful people I know. You don’t get ballroom culture or drag culture or dance music or the best of plays and theater and musicals and fashion without queer and trans people having to consistently imagine a different way of living.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: What can we do to create more solidarity? I believe in solidarity as the antidote to corruption. How can we build solidarity when our needs are not met all the time, when we are running in survival mode? How do we build solidarity that is stronger. How do we offer unwavering support for one another?

RAQUEL WILLIS: I think we already do some of the work of solidarity, we just don’t think of it that way. And I think if we lean into ideas of mutual aid, collective support, our power will only be stronger. When I think about poor folks, Black and Brown folks, migrant folks, queer and trans folks… we’ve always been creative about how we live out of a sense of survival, whether it’s sending funds to a family member, or the queer and trans parents who take in the street kids, or even the grandma who says, “I’m going to live with you and help you take care of your kids, because who can afford a nanny.” I think those kinds of things are an element of what we need to beef up in terms of how we support each other and seeing our lives as more interconnected. It’s not just biological, it’s not just identity. It’s about really seeing each other as a thread in a larger tapestry.

I also think nobody needs to be donating to most of these politicians. There are politicians who may represent your values, who are grassroots, who are not funded by the PACS who do need your support. But there are plenty of folks out there who are sending funds to the National Democratic Party who could be funding grassroots efforts that could be funding the organizers on the ground in their local communities. We need more of that when we’re talking about civic duty, that should be a part of it.

We’re getting a lot of signals right now that the government is not inherently on our side. If they demolish the Department of Education, what are our alternatives to that? What schools are we building, what platforms are we building so we can educate not just the kids, but everyone, about how to be more critically minded. How are we investing in platforms like Slow Factory to do the work that our educational system isn’t and wasn’t doing? How are we transforming the institutions we’re a part of—whether they are our places of worship or our Greek organizations or our workplaces—to live up to our collective values? Are you just laying people off willy nilly, or are you figuring out how to lessen the harm of that?

I’ve been building a gender liberation movement, a new organization with my co-founder, Elliot Cruz, focused on how we can create a broader understanding of gender and how it impacts everyone in the world. We’re focusing on making the connections around bodily autonomy, particularly the attacks on access to gender affirming care, and the attacks on abortion access and reproductive justice. But in general, we’re building media, holding existing media accountable, creating cultural events and direct actions and developing policy that speaks to the wholeness of our lives.