Raquel Willis knows that her power lies in her voice. From her home state of Georgia to the streets of New York City and the steps of Congress, Willis has used her voice to uplift trans people’s stories, whether it be as a journalist or leader of the Gender Liberation Movement, a national organization officially formed in January of this year, but was born out of 2020 and 2021 protests against anti-transgender discrimination to advocate for abortion rights and gender-affirming care. Her work, she says, is rooted in a fundamental belief in bodily autonomy and the self-determination of all people—the idea that “we all deserve the right to be the drivers of our own destinies.”
In 2013, Willis was a local reporter in the small city of Monroe, Georgia, before she began to work on social justice projects, including an initiative to end police profiling of trans women of color. In 2019, while at Out magazine, Willis published the award-winning Trans Obituary Project, highlighting the lives of trans women of color who had died—mostly by homicide—that year. Two years later, she and trans civil rights attorney Chase Strangio started the Trans Week of Visibility and Action, a digital campaign to bring attention to the rising wave of anti-trans legislation across the US.
Last September, the Gender Liberation Movement organized its first Gender Liberation March in Washington, DC, attracting about 2,000 protesters to advocate for abortion rights and gender-affirming care ahead of the November election. I first spoke with Willis in December, hours after she and more than a dozen other activists were arrested on Capitol Hill for protesting the Congress-wide trans bathroom ban enacted by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “It was important to show up in a radically defiant way and let the world know, and let our electeds know, that we are not going to allow this disrespect and this disregard for our lives,” she told me at the time. “Trans folks deserve access to the restrooms like anyone else.”
Since then, she’s been busy organizing protests, taking interviews, and issuing calls to action online as the Trump administration and its Republican allies continue to target trans people in executive orders, policy changes by federal agencies, and proposed legislation.
Willis felt compelled to organize against anti-trans discrimination because of the disproportionate violence that trans people of color face. She pointed to Sam Nordquist—a 24-year-old trans man from Minnesota who was held captive and tortured for over a month in upstate New York before police found his body in February. Then there is the story Tahiry Broom from Michigan, who was fatally shot one morning, also in February. According to police, that same morning the alleged killer made more than 30 calls to sex workers, many of whom were Black trans women.
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