When activist and organizer Raquel Willis spoke at the inaugural Women’s March on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, the organization was very different.
At that time, Willis was a burgeoning leader in social justice and activism, and she says the conversation around trans experiences was limited. “It was a time where there was more visibility than ever before, more trans folks engaged in social justice movement than ever before,” Willis says. “And yet there was a tension between, particularly cis women and trans women, but also women of other experiences too.”
The first Women’s March was enormous, bringing an estimated 500,000 marchers to Washington, DC and over 4 million throughout the United States. At the time, the protest was the largest single-day protest in the country’s history, and it created indelible protest images of women in pink hats that would define a certain type of opposition to Trump’s presidency. But during the following years,the …