Rising Up For Justice: A People’s Movement for Bodily Autonomy

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FEATURING ELIEL CRUZ - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, my guest is Eliel Cruz. He is an award-winning organizer, speaker, and writer and co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, an organization working towards bodily autonomy and self-determination for all. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Eliel Cruz: Thank you for having me. I love the ‘bigots and billionaires’ line. They are few, we are many. I’m going to use that…

Sonali Kolhatkar: And that's the point I think for us to cast a focus on social justice organizations that I think a lot of people around the country, you know, think, ‘well, what can I do?’ And it turns out there's a lot of things people can do. There's a lot of organizations out there, but not everyone's aware that they're out there, or have heard of them. So, this is our way of profiling groups like yours. 

Let's talk about Gender Liberation Movement. How do you summarize the work that your organization does? I mean, the title is pretty revealing, but it is broad. What are the main issues that you work on? 

Cruz: Well, the title is broad, purposefully so. So, we are building a lens that's expansive, purposefully, where we can touch on a variety of different issues that gender is a through line for all these issues, whether it be economic justice, climate justice, Palestinian liberation, immigrant justice, reproductive care, gender affirming care, et cetera. 

We see our work as a glue between all these various movements. But our work in particular, we do three areas of work. We do direct action and cultural work, media work, and policy work, all responding to these escalating attacks on gender across the spectrum. 

Our praxis is trans-centered. we don't consider ourselves a trans advocacy organization. My co-founder, Raquel Willis, is a Black trans activist and writer and media strategist. I'm not trans myself but I have been in LGBTQ spaces doing work for a very long time as a queer person.