On Sept. 14, 2024, two months before the U.S. presidential election, I helped organize nearly 2,000 people in the streets of Washington, D.C. This was the birth of the Gender Liberation Movement (GLM), a collective demanding a cultural shift in how our society thinks about gender, our bodies, the choices we make regarding them, and the care that we deserve.

Building on the decades-long fights for reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ rights, we marched in the autumn sun and chanted about collective power outside the Capitol and Supreme Court buildings. Our route ended with a rally elevating intersectional themes and a defiant dance party outside the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, a key architect of Project 2025.

At the time, we were among a minority of Americans who took that agenda’s promise of societal regression seriously. We hoped our effort would serve as an antidote during an uncertain election cycle. By then, the course charted by leaders across the political spectrum had proven dismal.

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris championed a “reproductive freedom” that myopically focused on cisgender women and girls accessing abortion care with sparing mentions of access to in vitro fertilization. In contrast, Republican candidate Donald Trump danced around whether he would enact a federal abortion ban. At the same time, his vice presidential pick opined about “childless cat ladies,” insinuating that women who couldn’t or didn’t bear children were of lesser societal value than their counterparts.

Due to countless threads missing from the larger political discourse around care, things worsened for people on the margins by the time we made it to the ballot box. The chief conservative demonized Haitian immigrants, planned to “protect women whether they wanted it or not,” and orchestrated a rally that drew similarities to the historic Nazi regime. He also dealt a heavy blow to our burgeoning movement, spending more than $215 million on ads denouncing the idea that transgender people, especially migrants and those who are incarcerated, deserve holistic health care.

Now, less than four months after Trump’s inauguration, there are more profound threats toward the universal right to bodily autonomy—and it is essential to understand the connective tissue and how they impact everyone, trans and cis alike.

On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order claiming to collapse sex and gender into a single identity category defined by a binary. He asserts that people assigned male at birth must identify as a man, and people assigned female at birth must identify as a woman. But the deeper aim, as has been the goal of the Republican party for nearly a decade, was to eliminate the acknowledgement and discussion of trans people in all corners of society. 

While the presidential action wasn’t legally binding, it set a precedent for continued attacks against the community. Within days, trans and nonbinary people reported that requests to change gender markers on passports were being denied. The administration also struck down the option for an “X” marker for more nuanced gender identities. This order, however, goes far beyond attacking trans and nonbinary people. It also erases the experiences of intersex people, whose sex often isn’t adequately defined by binary ideas of male and female. 

Then came an executive order calling for an end to gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 19. The Trump administration elevated the conservative lie that affirming trans and nonbinary youth is detrimental, ignoring long-standing research that shows the opposite. Further, anti-trans advocates never discuss cis youth who may have to access similar care to have a more normative bodily experience. They also ignore that intersex youth regularly face nonconsensual genital mutilation to make their bodies conform to a sex binary. We must also understand the widespread practice of nonconsensual youth circumcision as incompatible with bodily autonomy, regardless of the cultural or religious implications.

Many, like the majority of New York Times opinion columnists, regard these attacks on trans and intersex people as inconsequential because each group is estimated to make up just over 1% of the total U.S. and global populations, respectively. But Trump’s directives also reveal a malicious desire to define personhood as beginning at conception and to reduce people to their reproductive capabilities.

This has far-ranging influence on the fight for abortion access and resurfaces an outdated notion of child-bearing as a defining factor, which has historically limited opportunities for those assigned female at birth, particularly in education and employment.

Conservatives are obsessed with telling people who they are and what they can and can’t do with their bodies. Their current platform blends Christian religious dogma, the goals of the science-fiction-inflected Neoreactionary movement, and the so-called Great Replacement Theory. All of these, in their own ways, urge conformity and uniformity at all costs. In essence, you and your body are for serving a particular version of god and an authoritarian executive while upholding a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Otherwise, those on the margins (including LGBTQIA+ people, women, migrants, people of color, and those who are poor) will fully wrest control and destroy society.

Over the last two months, it seems like those forces are winning, but there are historical sources of inspiration that believers in bodily autonomy can look toward. The concept of reproductive justice provides a sturdy foundation to expand how we think about access and the care that we deserve.

The framework was coined in a 1994 Washington Post advertisement placed by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice collective to demand that Congress center Black women’s barriers to the U.S. health care system and to comprehensively reform it. They specified their ideal outcomes, including universal coverage, physician choice, equal access to services, and protection from discrimination. 

The “reproductive justice” framework moved beyond the limited focus on abortion access that dominated mainstream feminist discourse and organizing and shifted toward overall reproductive care. But unfortunately, three decades later, many of the initial aims and subsequent wins of the abortion rights and reproductive justice movements are in peril. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a near half-century of constitutional protection of abortion rights. 

Since then, the conservative push for statewide abortion bans has accelerated, with access at risk of being severely limited or prohibited in 26 states and three territories, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. While the language, promise, and organizing power of reproductive justice endure, this restrictive political landscape is demanding a retrenched focus on abortion access to the detriment of other goals.

In the last few years, bans on gender-affirming care for trans people, particularly youth, have increased alongside abortion bans. A year before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors. That number has since increased to 27. Now, the trans rights movement has taken up the mantle to defend the right to gender-affirming care to varying degrees of success. 

Unfortunately, the movement has been plagued by widespread cis ignorance about what the care entails and whether youth deserve access to it. If people moved beyond salacious headlines and hateful rhetoric, they’d learn that gender-affirming care “encompasses a range of social, psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions.” They’d also realize that plenty of cis people access similar treatment for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately, this endless discourse often ignores that other health care decisions for minors are often trusted to be handled by physicians, parents, and the minors in question.

While conservatives regularly claim that banning gender-affirming care will defend and protect youth, the Trump administration’s order tries to ban gender-affirming care for people in the first year of legal adulthood as well. It reveals a larger conservative hope to block gender-affirming care for all adults, as was tried in Florida in 2023. This is all the more reason why we must build a broader movement that intertwines the fight for reproductive rights, gender-affirming care, intersex rights, and bodily autonomy writ large.

Every day in this Trumpian hell has been chaotic and demoralizing. These stressful times encourage us to turn inward and pull away from the collective. However, now is the time for us to expand and tap into collaboration and solidarity. We must begin to think beyond the silos of queer, trans, feminist, or reproductive justice movements, but as a broader fleet of gender liberationists. After a decade of discussions about trans visibility that have proved largely ineffectual, I’m invested in moving away from having my experiences simply being seen. They need to be understood as just one thread of a larger collective tapestry that includes everyone understanding their right to gender liberation.