For transgender Americans looking for help or protection from the Biden administration in its dying days, Raquel Willis has a stark assessment.
“Unfortunately, the signals coming from our government right now, under a Democratic president, are telling us that we’re essentially on our own,” the 33-year-old activist tells The Independent.
That is nothing new for the woman behind last week’s headline-grabbing Congressional bathroom sit-in, protesting Republicans’ attempt to ban trans people from using the correct bathrooms for their gender on any federal property.
Alongside former US Army whistleblower and trans rights advocate Chelsea Manning, Willis was among 15 people arrested by Capitol police for occupying the women’s bathroom and the hallway outside House speaker Mike Johnson’s office.
But that protest wasn’t only aimed at Republicans. It was also meant to push Democrats to abandon what Willis describes as “a pattern of ignoring and sidelining the trans community” in the face of escalating conservative attacks.
Just hours after Willis’s interview with The Independent, House and Senate negotiators revealed a bipartisan compromise spending bill that would ban military health insurance from covering transition care for children. On Wednesday, 50 House Democrats who previously denounced that provision voted in favor, and key Senate Democrats said they would reluctantly back it too.
Now, with Republicans taking control of all three branches of government and both houses of Congress in January, Willis is gearing up for a fight – and she does not believe trans people can afford to take their cues from Democrats.
“We have to be prepared to take care of ourselves, and speak for ourselves, and fight for ourselves, because there are not enough political leaders who are sticking up for us,” she says.
“Folks need to find political homes that actually speak to their values… I don’t think that the Democratic Party is serving that right now for most marginalized folks.”
Fighting back against ‘eradication’
For many Americans, their introduction to Willis came one sunny day in Brooklyn in June 2020, three weeks after the murder of George Floyd sparked racial justice protests across the US.
“I believe in Black trans power,” Willis said into her microphone. Nearly 15,000 people chanted it back at her – an electric moment, given that the city’s usual LGBT+ Pride parade had been cancelled due to Covid-19.
It was, she said afterwards, “the complete opposite” of what happened when she spoke at the first Women’s March in Washington DC three years earlier. As she called on feminists not to treat trans women as an “afterthought”, her mic was allegedly cut off.
Originally from Augusta, Georgia, Willis got her start in Black social justice activism and anti-violence advocacy, later working at the Transgender Law Center and serving as executive editor of Out magazine.
In spring 2023 she co-founded a new protest collective called the Gender Liberation Movement, which organised last week’s action. (Manning, Willis says, has been involved since earlier this year.)
According to Willis, the protest was modelled on the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, organised by four Black students against racial segregation in North Carolina, as well as the barroom “sip-in” staged by gay rights activists in New York City in 1966.
This time, the issue was Republicans’ attempt to ban incoming Delaware representative Sarah McBride, the first openly trans woman ever to be elected to the US Congress, from women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill – along with any staffers, tourists, journalists, and lobbyists who happen to also be trans.
One group, consisting of trans women, cisgender (ie, non-trans) women, and non-binary people, occupied the women’s bathroom itself, holding banners and chanting slogans, while another group of largely trans and cis men made noise in the corridor outside.
That was important, says Willis, because bathroom bans also affect cis people by subjecting them to hostile scrutiny and policing based on their gender presentation and bodily appearance. She also argues that people of colour are especially targeted for such scrutiny.
“For years and decades and possibly even longer, trans folks have been using public accommodations like anyone else and it has not been an issue,” she says.
To Willis, these types of bans are part of a campaign of “eradication” intended to “erase trans folks from public life” in the USA, in concert with attempts to purge trans people from the US military and scour pro-LGBT+ and anti-racist books from schools.
“The Republican Party [is] banking on the general public not caring enough about less than 1 per cent of the population,” she says. “We’ve seen this throughout history, where authoritarian regimes will go after a small part of the population, make them public enemy number one, and then use that as permission to slowly go after other groups that they deem undesirable.”
‘We are beyond the point of calling this a distraction’
With a few outspoken exceptions, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and John Fetterman, the party largely did not hit back directly against Republican Nancy Mace, who led the ban against McBride, reportedly at McBride’s own request.
Willis says that McBride herself “deserves all the grace to handle her career as she sees fit”. But she goes on: “The discrimination and disrespect that she experiences… has ramifications for how trans folks will be treated at every stage of existence within the United States. It’s so important to make it clear that we will not allow the continued disrespect and infringing on our civil rights.”
What does Willis think of the standard Democrat line that the GOP’s war on trans is only a “distraction” from the “real issues”? Willis pauses and considers her words carefully before answering.
“In this moment, it is not enough to simply call anti-trans attacks from Republicans a distraction,” she says. “Perhaps if this was 2015, 2016… there might be an argument.
“But lives have already been targeted and changed by these efforts. So we are beyond that point, and we can’t confront discrimination with inaction.”
The Harris campaign, she adds, set a “horrible example” by declining to respond to the GOP’s late-election blitz of anti-trans TV ads, on which the party is estimated to have spent at least $215m.
“That was a loss before the election even happened,” says Willis.
“If the Democratic Party wants to claim to be representative of progress and of the Left, it cannot leave communities on the chopping block, because it will continue to lose if it does so.”
For now, Willis believes it is a good time for trans people and their allies to step back, connect with each other, and “recharge their batteries” for the coming era of “radical defiance”.
In future, she suspects they’ll need to practice mutual aid of the kind that was widespread during the pandemic, and study movements in other countries that have “faced authoritarian takeovers”.
And after that? “We definitely can’t share more about our plans publicly at this time,” says Willis.
