Bodily Autonomy for All
Interview With Eliel Cruz, Cofounder of the Gender Liberation Movement
July 8, 2025
Trump’s second term in office has been characterized by a blitzkrieg of right-wing assaults on all fronts against the working class and oppressed people: eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives; reinstituting Trump’s antitrans military ban; targeting trans women’s participation in sports; criminalizing gender affirming care for trans youth; and increasing restrictions on abortions access. Trans and gender-nonconforming people have been the centerpiece of an effort to undermine fundamental rights of bodily autonomy and gender self determination. Scapegoating trans people is a key component in the Trump Administration’s efforts to restore the American empire, accelerate the privatization of social reproduction, and deflect growing class anger and resentment away from the consolidation of corporate power. In recent months, a new movement for trans liberation has emerged. Keegan O’Brien interviewed Eliel Cruz, cofounder of the Gender Liberation Movement (GLM), a new grassroots organization that has come together and organized a number of high profile marches and direct actions challenging the Trump administration’s assaults on trans people and the Democratic Party’s capitulation.1“Introducing Gender Liberation Movement,” Gender Liberation Movement, accessed June 27, 2025, https://genderlib.org/; “Our Bodies. Our Genders. Our Choices. Our Futures.” Gender Liberation Movement, accessed June 27, 2025, https://genderlib.org/march; Jo Yurcaba, “Transgender activists stage a sit-in protest at a U.S Capitol bathroom,” NBC News, December 5, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/transgender-advocates-stage-sit-protest-us-capitol-bathroom-rcna183077.
Eliel Cruz is a founding member of the Gender Liberation Movement and previous organizer with the New York City Anti-Violence project.
EC: Raquel Willis and I cofounded the Gender Liberation Movement. We were birthed out of the mobilizations for Trans Lives in 2020 and 2021. We had this loose collective of organizers, creatives, and folks who were in and out of movement spaces. Before that, Raquel and I had known each other for over a decade. We met right out of college doing drag at a lesbian bar in Atlanta.
KO’B: That’s iconic. I love that storyline.
EC: Yeah, it’s cute! We moved in similar backgrounds. She and I reconnected when she moved back to New York. She was an executive editor at Out, I was the communications director at the New York City Anti-Violence Project. I was working with the family of Laylen Palanco, who died in Rikers custody. I was an organizer behind that campaign, I connected with Raquel who spoke at one of our rallies and we began working together more. Raquel got Layleen’s family on the cover of Out to talk about her case. Layleen’s sister ended up speaking at the Brooklyn Liberation March in 2020. Ever since then, we’ve been working together on a variety of different campaigns and we were eager to focus on merging the fights for reproductive justice, abortion access, and gender affirming care.
Last year, as the antitrans attacks started accelerating, we began putting together the Gender Liberation March, which happened last September. Our goal was to broaden the conversations our movements are having and get folks to understand how our issues and struggles are interconnected. We had several speakers, for example, who work in abortion access, trans and nonbinary activism, abortion storytellers, families of trans young people, and so on. But, we also had folks speaking on climate justice, economic inequality, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation and colonialism, and making connections on how these struggles fit within the lens of gender liberation. And it was in the planning process for the Gender Liberation March in DC that we realized we were becoming an organization. It wasn’t necessarily something that we had planned on, but we saw ourselves creating a very unique space for our movements to come together.
We see ourselves as the glue between a lot of oftentimes siloed movements. We are trying to do something unique while emphasizing the importance of protest and grassroots direct action. For example, during the Gender Liberation March, we had a rally and march by the Supreme Court, but we also booked a DJ and organized a dance party in front of the Heritage Foundation headquarters. It was a really beautiful moment to see all these drag queens dancing with thousands of protesters and security guards just absolutely freaking out. We’re trying to do something different and create this unique space that moves beyond electoralism and focuses on direct action and building at the intersection of these different movements.
EC: It’s important to make sense of that question, and in other ways, it can feel pretty obvious. Generally, queer organizations have had an overreliance on electoral politics. Movement spaces have not been set up to allow us to focus on other ways outside of those systems that we can build power.
Judith Butler published a really good book recently making sense of this moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender?2Judith Butler, Whose Afraid of Gender? (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2024). They describe this increasing moral panic that uses trans people and issues facing the trans community as a way to scapegoat and distract from the destructive actions that they’re taking—billionaires, politicians, and so on—but also as a way to obscurely blame trans people for the effects of their agenda. It’s like all of a sudden, trans people are the reason why so much of the country can’t afford housing. So, they’re using trans people in this way, to obscure what’s going on.
After marriage equality in 2015, that is when the right understood they lost the argument that gay people are perverts and shouldn’t have the right to adopt kids and get married. So, they pivoted to trans people, and very expectedly. It’s not a coincidence that we saw the first bathroom bills in 2015 and 2016 and then for the next ten years, a slew of legislation attacking trans people very explicitly. Now we’re seeing messaging from the Trump administration that says LGB people and removing trans people entirely. There’s also a way sometimes that we in the movement can talk about these issues, using the term LGBT. I never know if that’s a way of us being like, “Hey, we’re in this together,” or a way to avoid explicitly saying that it is trans people who are at the center of these attacks and doing the work of prioritizing and listening to the needs of trans people and community.
So, the right made their turn from attacking gay people to targeting the trans community in 2015, and the movement was caught kind of flat-footed and off guard. I mean, there are several organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), who have at different times very explicitly thrown trans people under the bus. Eventually, the HRC apologized for the way they sidelined and ignored trans people, but there was no actual investment and resources redirected. If you look back and compare these past ten years to the timeline it took to win gay marriage, the same energy, money, strategy, and resources are just not present. So, the organizations that were most in a place financially and organizationally to pivot resources after securing marriage equality haven’t responded in the way that’s needed, either on a reactive basis to all these attacks or by being proactive and developing a long term strategy in the way that was done for marriage equality.
All of these different pieces have contributed to the current political landscape where trans people are at the center point of not just the so-called “culture wars,” but electoral politics, with little pushback from Democrats or even the movement organizations that we would expect.
KO’B: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. In 2009 when I was in college, I was involved in organizing the National Equality MarchOne of the main demands we put forward was full equality for trans people and it was seen as so controversial and outside the norms of what mainstream gay rights groups were willing to talk about in the 2000’s. It puts into context why the massive trans liberation marches in 2020 and 2021 and the work GLM and others are doing right now is so important.
EC: What’s been so frustrating is that after that fight was won, so many of those foundations stopped giving money on other issues affecting LGBT people. I don’t want to say they thought everything was fully done, but they were like, all right, our main job is done. So, now we’re having to rebuild those movement infrastructures from the ground up, and it’s frustrating because, why should trans people have to do this on their own? We kept being told, after marriage equality you’ll come next, and those big organizations have just not invested those resources.
EC: What we’re trying to do as the Gender Liberation Movement is show people that gender liberation is not just for trans and queer people, it’s for everyone. One goal is to get people to think about gender in more critical and expansive ways. The gender anxieties manifesting throughout the country in our politics is not coming from trans people, it’s coming from conservative cis and straight people, and it’s an expression of people’s anxieties about their own gender. This is a big part of what’s radicalizing people into the right-wing manosphere. The right is blaming trans people for a lack of safety and security in public spaces, like bathrooms, when actually the majority of people who are causing violence or harming other people are not trans. We have to understand that this entire conversation around trans people is not stemming from trans people and their experiences.
I actually think it’s a lot more simple than Democratic strategists and communicators like to say it is. Trans issues, or issues that are affecting the trans community, are more universal, kitchen table politics than people assume. Of course, there are nuanced cultural differences and disparities, like particularly around violence and homicide, but the same economic anxieties a working class family in middle America struggles with are the same things trans people are facing. When I was at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, every time there was a homicide, people would ask, how do we keep trans people safe? And I’m like, it’s actually a lot simpler than people realize. Trans people need housing, employment, healthcare, and all of the same material resources that everyone needs to live long, full, comfortable and secure lives.
That the Democratic Party cannot say that plainly is concerning and is exactly why we’re in the position we’re in now. It also shows just how much the Democratic Party is failing to take in the guidance and messaging from our movement. The Democratic Party has become so fixated with the medicalization of transness, that they’ve completely ignored how much commonality there is around trans people’s needs and that of most working class Americans.
Right now, a billionaire class is using transphobia to pit us against one another to prevent people from recognizing our commonalities. But the truth is we’re all in this together, not in an assimilationist way that ignores differences completely, but that if we actually get organized, build coalitions, and fight—regardless of what personal differences people may have—we could actually win real change that benefits everyone.
EC: That’s a big question with multiple parts. To start, for the past eight years people have been showing up to the streets rallying and marching in huge numbers without the majority of our demands ever being met. In New York, we had millions of people on the streets every day for months during the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. We had an encampment with thousands of people at City Hall. But, the city’s budget did not change. And there has been no accountability for that. So, these mass mobilizations, while they have had a positive impact—absorbing people into organizing spaces for the first time, changing the political conversation in the country, allowing people to understand that they’re not alone, opening people’s eyes to what’s really happening in the world—the reality is that most of the movements various demands have not been met at all. So there’s understandably some real cynicism around mobilizations, what they actually do, and what purpose they serve.
I think we have to assess and adjust our tactics, find new ways to escalate and apply pressure. I really loved the Tesla protest because they were happening every week, they were scaling up, so more people were coming into the movement. It’s working too because now more people see Teslas as socially toxic and it’s clearly causing economic hurt to the company. We have to find more creative ways to respond, escalate and diversify our tactics.
There is definitely also an absorption into Democratic Party politics and the confines of the two party system, which also adds to the dissolution by folks who might not feel compelled to come into the streets. But, I think even outside the electoral piece of it, we’ve seen some of the largest mobilizations in our lifetimes and perhaps in the history of the world, but in the United States the vast majority of our demands were not heard or won because the people in power have not adequately felt the pressure. So I think it’s just about diversifying our tactics and thinking through what are the ways that we can actually apply pressure, how can we hit them where it hurts? Because at the end of the day, they’re billionaires, they’re capitalists, they care about money. We need to learn how we can organize people to boycott, go on strike, you know, really hit them where it hurts—in their pockets.
EC: We really need to invest outside the political system. We need to remind people that while voting is important, we have to organize a much larger response outside of those systems. I also think that we need to make it socially toxic for billionaires to exist in public spaces. Everything from pressuring your favorite celebrity to never hang out or be seen with someone like Mark Zuckerberg or date Elon Musk. And we need more disruption. For example, the Climate Justice Movement, that’s like the bread and butter of what they do: they’re making sure big oil companies, banks, whatever institution needs to be targeted, especially those that aren’t as typically well known. We know the faces of some of these billionaires, but we don’t know a lot of the faces and names of the CEOs who are really behind these companies. Like, they’re destroying the world, they shouldn’t be able to go out in a restaurant or cultural spaces without being engaged or confronted by people. We have to make it uncomfortable for them. We’re gonna have to make it culturally and socially toxic for these people.
We also have to strategically mobilize against the products and services that will hit them economically. I think it’s trickier to do that with social media platforms because we live in a digital world outside of how folks can organize on social media.
We need to be able to broaden the scope of all of our organizations and see the necessity in building cross movement solidarity. I think there’s this idea that when people join any kind of movement space that they have to commit themselves to one issue. It’s, like, an island capacity. But if all of our movement organizations understand the need to respond holistically across different issues, across movements, I think it’ll energize people more and it’ll actually have people be more engaged. Because that’s how we actually experience life. So, we have to think of a big tent, we have to become a broader, bigger coalition.
EC: Yeah, so a couple of things. One of the GLM’s four values that guide all of our work is bodily autonomy, self determination, collectivism, and the pursuit of fulfillment. We’re a very new organization, so we’re still in the process of figuring things out. But, when you look at Project 2025, even though we know how bad and evil it is, it shows that the right is getting organized and developing a well thought out roadmap to changing society and taking power. One of the problems is that the left doesn’t have that. We have different sprinklings of legislation that people want passed, but we don’t have anything that’s like a full package or something that functions as our North Star. So, one thing that we’re very interested in doing is bringing together the various groups to create our own North Star and to really think about not just what we think can get passed in this or the next election or legislative session, but what is it that we actually need and how do we build towards that in ten, twenty, thirty years down the road? We’re really interested in helping anchor that project and bring together groups to help develop a new policy platform for our movements. We want to think about, decades down the road, what it looks like to fight for guaranteed housing, universal health care, proworker, queer and trans inclusive policies. We don’t want to live in a world where everybody just goes to work for fifty, sixty hours a week and that’s considered our lives.
Instead, we need to be thinking about how we actually build a world that values people’s lives, so that everyone can create a life they actually enjoy. I want every person to have universal basic income and access to housing, if they’re working or not. I want a world where people actually have the time and space to explore the creative things they love. I want us to get out of the box that has become the Democratic Party.
KO’B: I totally agree I was just reading an article in Spectre from DK Renton evaluating the rise of Trump and the far right in the United States and he made this important point that one of the components required to embrace the Trumpian project is you have to accept a baseline of human degradation and violence and just outright cruelty.3DK Renton, “Trump, Fascism, and the Authoritarian Turn,” Spectre, May 1, 2025, https://spectrejournal.com/trump-fascism-and-the-authoritarian-turn/. Whereas the Democrats do a really good job at putting on the facade, slapping a rainbow diversity flag and a nice little bow on their cruelty. Meanwhile, they’re bombing children and funding a genocide in Gaza. Trump just says, nope—we want to deport people, we need to displace Palestinians, and that’s who we are.
EC: These connections between capitalism and war mongering and dehumanization are so clear, like when one of Trump’s immigration officials literally said he wants to build a system of deportations that operates like Amazon Prime. That is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. They’re literally making the connections apparent for us. And I think part of the reason the Democrats get so mad is that Republicans are saying out loud what they’ve just been doing in silence for so long. It was the Obama Administration that deported more people than any president in the twentieth century. Jennicet Gutiérrez, who’s part of the Gender Liberation Movement, is a trans woman that confronted the President at a White House event during Pride Month in 2015, yelling “President Obama, I am a trans woman. I’m tired of the abuse. I’m tired of the violence! Stop deporting us!” She got smeared and ignored by the media and most of the big queer organizations. Now, ten years later, one of the things the Palestine movement has helped normalize is challenging and confronting these politicians and CEOs everywhere they go. Like I said earlier, we have to think of ways to diversify our tactics and how we can hit these politicians and billionaires in their pockets and their image where it really hurts them.