2nd TRBACC Report: Urgent Time to Move the Campaign Forward! 

Sarah’s Report from the Second Meeting of the Steering Committee of DSA’s  Campaign for Trans and Reproductive Rights on October 23

By Sarah Milner

The second meeting of the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign Committee (TRBACC) took place on Monday, October 23rd. 

As it stands, our campaign will have spent its first month and the time since the decision to launch it in early August without conducting formal outreach to chapters, coalition partners, or other committees in DSA outside of the Queer Socialist Working Group. 

While we formally created structures at this meeting, the next month will test whether our campaign can quickly use those structures to win chapters over to participation. 

I believe that a successful campaign will need to challenge DSA to unify chapters, committees and national leadership in a way that we never have before. That’s a daunting task, but it’s also imminently possible. If we begin taking bold steps now, we’ll be better prepared to organize working class people and challenge capitalism everywhere. The next few weeks will be crucial to proving that in action.

While we formally created structures at this meeting, the next month will test whether our campaign can quickly use those structures to win chapters over to participation. 

We urgently need to communicate proposals, targets and an initial set of demands to our chapters, working groups and discussions with potential coalition partners. 

I believe we need to focus on setting clear targets and immediately start the outreach internally (to chapters and working groups) and externally (to coalition partners), to 

• Organize a successful public facing launch in January with prominent speakers to show what we are already doing and win more chapters, members and supporters for the next step
• Make the campaign visible on March 31, the international day of trans visibility in as many chapters as possible

To achieve that, we need an offer for coalition partners and others to start discussion about what we want achieve together through a united front. While DSA can and should link demands to our socialist vision of a society based on gender, racial and economic justice and the abolishing of capitalism, we can aim to fight together with others for:

• Medicare for All, including
  • free abortion
  • free transition care
  • every union contract should include these until we have M4A
• Overturn all trans bans and abortion bans
• Union protections and housing justice for all: workplace rights and housing rights are two issues of essential importance for queer people and people who need abortions.

DSA can and should link the struggle for these demands to the need to build independently from the Democratic Party, toward a democratic socialist force that can actually organize the fight for these demands. 

While the committee discussed important next steps to move forward with our campaign, it is now vital to step up our discussions and lay the basis for a much more proactive, energetic leadership of our campaign. After a first meeting spent mostly finding our footing, and with a biweekly schedule set, it was important that our October 23rd meeting established some clear structures in place and a plan to start coordinating. 

I had hoped to leave the meeting with a full plan for the next two months: subcommittees, a timeline, clear responsibilities and a mandate to contact chapters and elected officials. We got part of the way there in this meeting, though we left with a major open question about the nature of the campaign. 

In order to use the energy and support for this campaign in DSA and include more comrades, I also hope to have these meetings of the Steering Committee of TRBACC as open meetings where all DSA members can call in and listen to our discussions, an idea which seems to have wide buy-in on the committee.  

Setting up structures 

The October 23 meeting opened by overviewing our respective goals and visions for the campaign. There seems to be broad agreement that this campaign needs to be different from previous DSA campaigns like the PRO act. In the past, there has been a problem with campaigns that mostly exist “at the top” with chapters only receiving a few emails at most. In contrast, I hope this campaign will be run through chapters first, with a robust national infrastructure facilitating the local implementation of nationwide demands. 

We then moved to a debate over the formal nature of those structures. Comrades from Marxist Unity Group (MUG) and Communist Caucus had proposed a structure which created three subcommittees:

The admin subcommittee:

Tasked with keeping SC notes and communicating with other parts of DSA. 

The inquiry/outreach subcommittee:

Tasked with outreach to coalition partners, unions and DSA chapters, as well as helping to develop our programs and platforms.

The mass action subcommittee: 

Tasked with organizing the January kickoff, and coordinating with chapters for the day of action. 

After some discussion, the resolution passed. Though it was not quite what I would have liked, I think this structure sets us up well enough for the next period. I would have preferred greater clarity and emphasis on developing literature and public facing materials for the campaign, and a specific committee dedicated to coalition outreach. I worry our campaign may end up not putting enough emphasis on building a coalition. I think we should pursue the development of a wide movement, much larger than what DSA can create on its own, by winning the endorsements of other large groups organizing around this issue, including unions. At the same time, we should try to clearly position ourselves as the socialist pole within the wider coalition. In this way, we can more fully tap into the organizing energy around this issue, while also reaching the largest possible audience for our ideas. An example of this is the Free FIU campaign. But the most important thing was creating structures and specifically assigning people to prepare for our January kickoff and chapter outreach. I motivated for the proposal to be passed and finalized in this meeting, and for subcommittees to meet next week—my reasoning being that, nearly three months after the resolution was passed, we still haven’t put together our plans for what I hope will be a very big kickoff.

Clarifying roles

Having wrapped up the creation of subcommittees, the scheduled time for the meeting was nearly over. I appreciate comrades staying late to discuss my proposals. In my last update I listed some goals for this meeting. I brought forward five proposals to try and achieve these goals.

My first proposal aimed to clarify the roles of the various subcommittees. R&R had done our best to outline what each committee would be tasked with. Connected to this was a proposed timeline for our work. My goal with these proposals was to fully move  us from the planning phase to the action phase. If fully passed, these proposals would have committed us to:

• Selecting a date for the kickoff
• Making a script for one-on-one chapter communication
• Creating a graphic
• Creating a chapter interest form 

While this might seem like a lot to handle, in effect, it would simply catch DSA up to YDSA, where the campaign already has all of these things.

This might seem like a lot to handle, in effect, it would simply catch DSA up to YDSA, where the campaign already has all of these things. 

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to arrive at an agreement for a full proposal before the meeting. This left us with the arduous task of editing-in-meeting. Not all of this was due to political disagreements, some comrades’ concerns included questions about apportionment of responsibilities and division of labor. With time spent incorporating these suggestions, we boiled things down to areas where disagreements existed. After some debate, there was a motion to accept the parts of my proposal on which there was agreement, and to delay a vote on the other sections. I opposed this. I think, given existing delays, we needed to accept the full plan at our meeting. However, the amendment passed, and so, while we clarified roles, we didn’t do so to the extent I would have liked. 

Probably the most substantial disagreement was over which committee should be tasked with outreach to get chapters to run campaigns. The meeting was a complicated one, and I don’t want to misrepresent comrades’ opinions—I think we will clarify at the next meeting what alternative ideas might exist. But from my perspective, the most logical action would have been to immediately task the Mass Action Committee with chapter outreach both for starting campaigns and for the day of action. I think we should immediately contact the biggest chapters directly and send out a form to all chapters gauging their interest in participating in this campaign. I think the outreach for the day of action and for campaigns should be done at the same time, with chapters strongly encouraged to start local campaigns in addition to participating in the day of action. I had hoped we would be able to reach agreement on that plan and start working on it right away. 

With the responsibilities for subcommittees still somewhat up-in-the-air, it wasn’t possible to pass a timeline proposal. We did pass another proposal I wrote to quickly move forward with outreach to chapters, and one tasking the research subcommittee with writing a plan for gaining endorsements from our elected officials. But the most important work still lies ahead of us.

State of the campaign

I wrote about the state of the campaign at the start of this report. In my view, this leaves our emphasis and prioritization of coordinating chapter-level campaigns as the single biggest open question. At the next TRBACC SC meeting, I hope we can clarify our plans for outreach, and decide on a strategy of working with chapters to immediately set up campaigns, which can start before, or in coordination with the January day of action. 

We also need to take steps towards organizing that day of action. Our comrades in Marxist Unity Group have put together a proposal for the NPC to create a federal Socialists In Office Committee. This would be extremely helpful for TRBACC, and could be used to coordinate endorsements and support for the campaign from our federal electeds, starting with the January kickoff rally. 

Finally, there is still the question of coalition work. I hope that this month, we can finalize a list of baseline demands and begin connecting to other organizations, particularly unions, to try and build a national coalition.