The Inaugural Gender Liberation March Features Elliot Page, Miss Major, and More Trans Icons

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Elliot Page, Miss Major, Peppermint, and other trans icons will be taking to the streets of Washington, D.C. this weekend to march for access to gender-affirming care and abortion.

The inaugural Gender Liberation March will take place this Saturday, September 14, convening at Columbus Circle in D.C., located a block away from the headquarters of the influential right-wing organization the Heritage Foundation, which has been credited as one of the primary architects of Project 2025.

According to a press release on the Gender Liberation Movement’s website, this weekend’s action “seeks to unite the fights for abortion access and gender-affirming care under the shared principles of bodily autonomy and self-determination.” The march and rally will draw special attention to the Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, scheduled to be heard this winter, which will determine the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming procedures for trans youth. The press release notes that the case could also have “severe ramifications” for trans adults’ access to care and non-discrimination protections.

In an August interview with Them, Gender Liberation Movement organizer Eliel Cruz defined “gender liberation” as “a framework to address both those immediate issues around medical access to abortion and gender-affirming care, but also as a larger lens to look at our democracy, understanding that there’s a throughline around gender.”

In addition to Page and Miss Major, confirmed speakers include model and author Geena Rocero, activist and author Raquel Willis, and actor and director Julio Torres, with performances by Peppermint, the ballroom House of Miyake-Mugler, and more. Spearheaded by a team of LGBTQ+ organizers and activists, the March has been co-signed by a range of local and national advocacy organizations spanning a wide variety of areas of focus, such as the reproductive justice collective SisterSong and Jewish Voice for Peace. (Them executive editor Fran Tirado is a co-organizer of the Gender Liberation March.)

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In addition to being one of the primary forces behind this decade’s wave of state-level anti-trans legislation, the Heritage Project also published the much-discussed Project 2025, a Christian nationalist blueprint for reshaping the federal government and U.S. public policy if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November.

Among other alarming anti-LGBTQ+ proposals, Project 2025 include the outlawing of “transgender ideology,” which would include the stripping of federal funding for gender-affirming care for children and adults. The 900-page document also calls for collecting invasive data on people who seek abortion care, the removal of emergency contraception from the birth control mandate of the Affordable Care Act, and the reversal of FDA approval for the medication abortion drug mifepristone.

As trans people have long observed, reproductive rights and trans rights are closely linked, especially since the right-wing uses the same tactics and rhetoric to condemn both. In the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, the longstanding landmark case that established a constitutional right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion stating that the court should also reconsider the landmark cases that struck down state-level “sodomy” bans and legalized same-sex marriage.

Beyond sharing common enemies, access to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare also rely on the same principle of the fundamental right to bodily autonomy — not to mention the fact that queer and trans people also get abortions and face greater barriers to access in the process.

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