Leading The Fight For Trans Liberation

By Sarah Milner

On March 28th and March 31st YDSA and DSA held their respective days of action as part of the nationwide campaign for Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy (TRBA). Around 100 chapters participated and thousands of people across the country joined DSA-led events. The initiative was successful, with DSA chapters engaging in a coordinated message on an issue previously dominated by a more liberal approach. 

Bodily autonomy is a critical issue for Marxists to organize on. As we move closer to the election, Democrats are claiming to be the greatest defenders of trans and abortion rights. Certainly Biden’s Democratic Party is better than the right wing, with its reactionary assault on trans rights and anything else which challenges their patriarchal, Christian nationalist worldview. But Democrat’s “defense” of trans rights is pointed mostly towards fundraising rather than attacking the power of right wing media which smears and attacks trans people, right wing governors who ban our rights, business and insurance agencies which deny our healthcare, and the power of concentrated wealth and the unelected Supreme Court which make all that possible.

The socialist approach is different. We fight for bodily autonomy as a class issue. We recognize that trans people are systematically oppressed by way of social exploitation, the systemic denial of our basic rights and freedom, economic deprivation that leaves us with dramatically lower wages, worse jobs and worse living conditions, and the exploitation of all women and queer people plays out as an expression of the systemic oppression of capitalist society. We have to propose an approach for winning bodily autonomy that points towards ending capitalism. For women and the trans community, healthcare is especially central. The right to transition or get an abortion is the right to control your own body, often with life threatening stakes. But under the capitalist system, there is a price put on this right. There is no way to free people while their healthcare is linked to a for profit system. 

These are a major point for socialists to organize around. DSA took a good step towards doing just that with the TRBA campaign. 

The “Mass Campaigning” Approach

R&R put forward the proposals for this campaign in the summer DSA and YDSA conventions, on the basis of our caucus’ understanding of the “mass campaigning” approach to organizing. We believe that DSA can directly intervene in existing mass movements and win real, tangible gains for workers. We want to prove that we are able to materially impact people’s lives. As we do this we must carry our socialist message and fight for leadership of those movements in a way which grows DSA and the socialist movement. To connect these two things–the struggle for immediate reforms as a part of the project of building socialism–we need demands and strategies which connect existing consciousness to the necessity of socialism. We should be aiming to build a bridge from where we are now to where we want to go. To make this successful at the scale required, we also need an approach which empowers our members to actively advance that message in every chapter. 

This is different from many previous DSA pressure, support, and advocacy campaigns, which have either taken the approach either of narrow mobilizations to phonebank and lobby for a specific policy, or uncoordinated local actions not unified around a specific timeline and set of demands. The importance of the demands is that, through our work, our movement should seek to become a viable, genuine alternative to the capitalist system. We are trying to demonstrate a consistent, distinct approach, not just a series of discreet reforms, but an effort to outline the things we are aiming to achieve with power. This is why it is so important our campaign demands are fundamentally linked with socialism in the minds of the public. 

Over more than a century, revolutionary socialists have relied on and refined the “mass campaigning” approach in order to turn fightbacks on concrete issues into larger challenges to the rule of the capitalist class. The mass campaigning approach has been central to powerful socialist-led revolts over the last century, from the left-Labour caucus, Militant, campaigns against the poll tax which helped bring down Margaret Thatcher, to the $15 NOW! campaign in Seattle which launched a nationwide fight for an increased minimum wage. Most successfully,the Bolshevik-led street demonstrations in St Petersburg and Moscow for “peace, land, and bread” make clear the impact of the mass campaigning approach as the struggle  for three concrete demands transformed into a direct challenge to the Tsar. In all three examples, concrete demands for reform engage wider layers of the masses to struggle for their material interests, while also strengthening the socialist leaders of the efforts and striking a damaging blow to the capitalist regimes.

Ultimately, the TRBA day of action showed we still have a lot of work to do to unleash the full potential of the “mass campaigning” approach. While we won some impressive local victories, DSA is not noticeably more in a position of leadership in the trans or reproductive rights movements than we were when the campaign began. While we had a set of demands, we have a long way to go to see that they are mainstreamed as talking points readily associated with DSA. And while we drew on the resources of DSA’s social media, email list, connections with some local politicians, and hundreds of our members, we left many more untapped—from our federal and most local elected officials to large parts of the left media and our own comms infrastructure. 

But this is also reason for optimism. Whilethe day of action was not everything it could have been, I believe it still deserves to be considered a success, and proof of concept. R&R’s model of a nationwide campaign proved viable, efficient, positive and popular. TRBA represents a formula which can be improved on, and used repeatedly to help DSA consistently intervene in current events. 

How we got here: 

At the start of the year, the TRBA campaign was behind schedule and struggling for capacity. How did we go from there to here? 

Step 1: Opening up the committee 

The first, and most important step towards a successful day of action was expanding participation in the committee from our TRBA steering committee to the rank and file of DSA. When we passed MSR-21, the campaign we created was supposed to take the form of a mass membership initiative, eliciting participation at every level of DSA. As adopted by the national convention, the NPC and campaign must “make efforts to engage all DSA members in the campaign, and build capacity from across the organization.” That meant running a mass campaign with broader participation and a Steering Committee which could delegate responsibility to membership. 

After meeting with members of the Queer Socialist Working Group to report on the campaign, we found many of them shared this vision for wider member-led participation. This time a QSWG comrade took the initiative of drafting a proposal called for creating a TRBA Discord server, and opening up subcommittee meetings for rank and role DSA members to join. These changes, together, represent a fundamental shift in the organizational structure of this campaign.. 

The reason R&R has pushed so zealously for a more robust, mass campaigning approach to trans and reproductive rights is because it’s not possible to make a nationwide effort campaign effective with only a handful of  people. What is needed is an action committee mobilizing rank and file participation and drawing on the membership to accomplish the committee mandate. 

If the lesson of the first months of TRBA is how difficult it is to run a campaign with just a steering committee, the lesson of the last four months is how relatively straightforward it can be to organize an action committee: A Steering Committee overseeing wide participation from members, close cooperation between different working groups, and a definite timeline – established by the Convention – which the committee is held to by the NPC. 

Step 2: A successful and energizing kickoff 

With our expanded TRBA team in place and eager to fight, the first task of the new action committee was to host our national kickoff call. Attended by nearly 400 members from more than 100 chapters, the call received extensive attention because of  our guests, Erin Reed, and Zooey Zephyr. This is a good example of what it means to engage fully in the wider movement. While neither of our guest speakers Reed and Zephyr are socialists, both of them are key figures with a wide following in the trans community. By bringing them to our kickoff, we got more attention and a greater opportunity to share our message than if we had only had cadre DSA members as speakers. 

If your lead speakers are not socialists, a key question becomes how one seeks to represent a distinct DSA message in a movement with many different approaches. I, and my R&R comrade Judith, did our best to present the R&R’s vision for a Marxist approach to trans liberation in this kickoff. 

More than just providing excitement for the campaign, this kickoff call was essential for gathering the initial membership base, and contact list to make the rest of our work possible. Dozens of DSA members, who became the core of TRBA’s active membership, were brought into the campaign through the kickoff. 

While some things, like a clearer set of DSA demands, could have strengthened the kickoff, the event was nonetheless a big success for the campaign. This shows the appetite in DSA, and in the wider left, for these kinds of forward facing events. It also shows that DSA has the communications capacity and messaging reach to bring in a wide audience with our tweets, emails, and graphics. Just like the day of action, we achieved this turnout without a major push in left media, or comms support from our socialists in federal office. For future events, turnout could probably be doubled with these two things alone. 

Beyond showing broad interest in the campaign, this kickoff shows that DSA has a big audience who want to hear what we have to say about major issues. One premise behind the original resolution was that DSA has been consistently underestimating the impact we can have, and the audience we can reach. If we can turn out 409 people for a kickoff call on trans rights with a state legislator as our main guest, imagine how many people would attend a call on Palestine, or, as we get closer to November, the presidential election, with one of The Squad as a star attendee. 

This model of personal networks worked very well, ensuring that our calls and messages were actually answered. The role of a leadership committee is to proactively organize widespread participation in, and excitement about the campaign. 

Stage 3: TRBA All Member Meetings

With the public discord up and running, and the kickoff accomplished, the day of action became our major focus. A key step in making this successful was our decision to hold biweekly All Members Meetings (AMM) open to anyone in the TRBA discord. We quickly discovered that the rank and file membership of the committee was incredibly enthusiastic about taking on work. 

Once this larger layer of members were invited to participate, and given a clear direction to hold an event on a certain date, chapters began to organically take initiative to participate in the campaign. This was another premise behind R&R’s proposals—that DSA members want to join in a national campaign. In the past, there has been debate over whether convention votes really reflect a willingness to join campaigns. This initiative from chapters shows that, on the right issues, the question is not whether willingness exists, but whether our national structures can convert that willingness into action. 

What we also discovered, in the discord and in AMM, was that rank and file members wanted to take on national work. As we prepared to contact chapters for the day of action, over a dozen rank and file members volunteered to do recurring coordination with a list of chapters. At the same time, non-SC members produced draft press releases, scripts, model toolkits, and template graphics to help with the campaign. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the initiative of rank and file members, the day of action could not have succeeded. The role of leadership in campaigns is to facilitate, guide, and maximize member participation towards a common goal, and to help develop the campaign’s political strategy. The open committee is how we translate a successful kickoff into a successful campaign. 

Stage 4: Focus on the chapters 

While national leadership is where a campaign gets its form and message, chapters are where that message is converted into action. The policies we pass, the people we talk to and the flyers we distribute will mostly be down at the chapter level. The people who join, even from our national events, will join our campaigns at the chapter level. 

Our turnout for the day of action was aimed at getting as many chapters to participate, and visibly represent DSA. We focused our energy on preparing toolkits and graphics for chapters, and working one on one with chapter leaders them to get them to turn out for the day of action.

A focus on engaging chapters doesn’t mean abandoning the role of national leadership. In fact, it’s the opposite. A strong national campaign is premised on a proactive effort to engage our chapters with our national campaign. One major step forward in this campaign was how we had dozens of chapters share a graphic of our demands. But going further, we should aim to start ongoing work on this issue in as many chapters as possible to ensure we build up DSA’s capacity from this campaign. 

The TRBA Model for national DSA campaigns 

In my opinion, the TRBA campaign structure is a replicable model which can be used to run campaigns on the vast majority of major events, and does not always require a convention resolution. The model, broadly speaking, looks like this: 

1. A set of demands and general outline for the campaign developed by the highest applicable leadership, whether that be convention or the NPC. 
2. A specific timeline for the committee to meet, beginning with a kickoff and featuring at least one coordinated public event which we mobilize all DSA chapters to. 
3. An action committee structure composed of a leadership team, selected by the NPC, and a rank and file membership open to all DSA members. The leadership team should be tasked with implementing the demands and outline, on the timeline they are assigned, and mobilizing the membership to do the necessary work tasks 
4. A three phase approach.
   1. The first phase focused on driving up interest in the kickoff, coordinating the day of action, preparing materials, and organizing demands, and starting up campaign work in “model chapters” that are ready to begin.
   2. The second phase, taking interest from the kickoff and coordinating it into a mass action committee, with regular All Member Meetings, a public discord, and widespread rank and file participation to prepare for coordinated public events. 
   3. The third phase, seeking to codify participation from our day of action through establishing self sustainable, longer term structures and supporting ongoing chapter campaigns. 

Not only can this model be utilized for convention resolutions, it also can employed in between conventions by the NPC. For example, after October 7th, or the overturning of Roe v Wade, a committee structure following this model, or a variation of it, could have been created by the NPC. 

The key to this approach is understanding that rank-and-file members want to and can be mobilized to do this work and when they do, our message has a real audience we can reach. While chairing the national TRBA committee and organizing the day of action took a lot of work, it was not an endless uphill battle. Chapters constantly took the initiative to organize their own actions, members felt a genuine excitement, and there was a positive energy throughout the work. Events got high turnout, and the public was positive and enthusiastic about our ideas. This is a model for tapping into existing capacity that DSA already has, and unleashing our membership to organize on the issues they care about. 

Going forward 

While the TRBA model clearly demonstrates the capacity of DSA, it only begins to show how we could use that capacity. We spent half a year developing a working model for our committee. Other campaigns don’t have to do that! We learned, through trial and error, how to make a workable campaigning approach that engages DSA members. Next time, that approach should be written into the proposal so campaigns can start their work immediately. Imagine if TRBA had started preparing for the kickoff call in September, instead of December. 

That said, there are plenty of unresolved questions and remaining issues which DSA needs to sort through. 

1. What we say and how we say it

As I mentioned above, one of the major strengths of this campaign was a single set of demands which unified chapters. But these demands only came to the fore on the day of action itself. In the lead up to the event, and during our kickoff, they were a lot less prominent. 

The demands we put forward for this campaign formed a strong economic, class based message and pointed towards transformative policies. But our framing could have been stronger. Demands like the ones we used for our public facing materials for TRBA should be introduced by a section which explains clearly that we are fighting for socialism, and political independence—that we are building the power of workers’ building DSA, and working towards a working class party in order to achieve them.  

In other words, demands have to be linked to our vision for how to change society and why we are changing society. For future campaigns, this is an important lesson: if we want to grow DSA, we need to frame our demands so as to express very clearly that socialism is necessary to achieve our demands, and building DSA is the best way to fight for them. 

2. Leadership Structure 

The biggest lingering question for future campaigns, in my opinion, is over our leadership structure. TRBA was structured with a 13 person steering committee, appointed by the NPC. This structure did not work as well as it could have. As the day of action drew nearer, attendance at SC meetings dropped, and responsibilities increasingly became centralized in the hands of the two co-chairs. Organizational tasks were often taken on by rank and file members, leaving a process which wasn’t very transparently democratic. For future campaigns, the structure I outlined above, and a quicker start time will hopefully reduce some of these problems. However, one lesson from the campaign is that we need a different leadership structure. 

Appointing 5 members of the NPC to our steering committee was an ineffective use of resources. As internal debates around the budget heated up, NPC members struggled to attend meetings regularly. 

An interesting contrast to this model is YDSA’s Campaign Organizing Committee. The COC, which ran the YDSA wing of the campaign, meets weekly. It is a standing body which exists outside of any specific campaign. R&R comrades have historically been skeptical of the COC model, and many COC leaders were dubious about the mass campaigning approach. In 2022, the two did not function well together, and the result was bad for the campaign and the COC. 

This time around, however, the COC proved effective at implementing the YDSA wing of the TRBA campaign. YDSA consistently ran ahead of DSA’s schedule, producing tweets, toolkits, a kickoff plan, and chapter mobilization scripts before the TRBA campaign. I remain hesitant about the COC structure—I worry it tends towards the creation of an unelected, unaccountable tendency. But the fact remains that, in YDSA, it worked exceedingly well and the comrades deserve significant credit. 

Regardless of the exact structure, there are clearly things DSA should learn from the COC. Campaigns need to be run by a team of dedicated organizers, meeting weekly, tasked with mobilizing the membership to implement the decisions of convention or NPC. The NPC, or the convention itself should be tasked with deliberating and deciding our baseline political message and our campaign timeline.  

3. Striking while the iron is hot 

It took an enormous effort to create this campaign. R&R members first proposed a similar campaign in YDSA in 2022. We started writing this amendment almost a year ago, and began collecting signatures in June 2023. To get here, we had to fight to even put the campaign on the convention floor, changing the entire agenda in the process. Then, we had to pass the resolution. Without any seats on the NPC, R&R had to lobby individual members to start the committee, and to not fold us and the For Our Rights campaign (a committee developed to respond to the 2024 election) into a single committee. With only one R&R member on the committee itself, it took until January to reach agreement with the other members on a strategy to open the committee and start organizing. This means that 11 months passed between the initial formulation of the plan, and the actual day of action. 

This is an obviously unsustainable dynamic. While Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy turned out to be an issue in national focus, as we argued it would be, it was overshadowed by events we couldn’t have predicted in Palestine. It is very challenging to predict, a year in advance, what the most important organizing issues will be. 

This is why we need an NPC willing to propose and implement these kinds of ambitious actions in a timely fashion. The ability to respond rapidly to developments in the class struggle is a crucial quality of any genuinely effective revolutionary approach. In a moment when revolutionary forces are far weaker than the scale of the crises we need to overcome, we need to be focused on building up our movement on the basis foc commitment to our politics. No matter how strong our ideas, if we are not seizing the best opportunities to advance our message in a timely fashion, we are not doing what we need to to build a revolutionary party. 

Like every step in party-building, this is not an immediate process. It requires patient, deliberate work and honest reflection. But that is precisely why it is essential to be ambitious. Some comrades criticized TRBA as trying to will DSA into action with a resolution. But, not only did it prove possible, the lessons we learned in the campaign are invaluable to trying again, and doing better. 

If the current left majority on the NPC is to succeed, they need to be more ambitious and effective than their more reformist NPC opposition. That means taking the initiative to create campaigns like TRBA for other major events. By 2025, our goal should be to build a DSA capable of consistently creating campaigns far more impactful than this one to respond to major political upheavals, without a convention needing to force it through. 

4. Building our alliance with labor  

So what comes next for TRBA? One thing, which was included in our national proposal, but only came to the fore in the last weeks of our organizing was the idea of forming wider coalitions for our work. In Portland, our day of action brought together our local Starbucks Workers United, New Seasons Labor Union, Jobs With Justice, and other labor speakers. In fact, every speaker at our rally was affiliated with a local union. By connecting trans and reproductive rights to labor organizing, we brought out more members of the public, strengthened our own organizing, and had a chance to talk about socialist politics with rank and file workers while showing, concretely, how we would fight for them. 

This principle can be applied nationally. Millions of Americans are worried about trans and abortion rights, and many of them are part of unions, progressive organizations, queer rights groups, and other formations. At a local level and, strategically, at a national level, we can find agreement on specific goals and demands, and bring together coalitions around them, allowing us to talk to a far wider audience. Just as mobilizing our own resources, or moving faster could have made TRBA even more successful, getting other groups like unions to endorse our demands, kickoff and day of action could have expanded our reach, audinave and participation.

Of course, such coalition work runs the risk of leaving DSA and our own politics less prominent. This is why the framing of our demands in an anti-capitalist context is so important. When DSA takes on projects like the day of action, we should do it with the goal of building support for socialism over time. 

Strengthening our ties with labor unions and other groups, especially pro choice ones as abortion comes to the fore in the election will present TRBA a good pathway to continue our work and advance on our class struggle platform. But it raises the urgency of our, and other campaigns charting a clear, independent message for DSA. 

This shows the weakness of liberal organizations which are not fighting on this issue. 

Reform & Revolution and the TRBA campaign

Since we formed, R&R has argued for a fighting, campaigning approach in DSA. TRBA is not a final model, but it demonstrates the potential of our approach in action,. When R&R talks about DSA fighting to provide Marxist leadership for the working class, what we mean is that when there is a major political upsurge, we need to swing into action to try to win people to our ideas and grow the whole socialist movement. A Marxist party will not be naturally summoned through the best ideas or the cleverest practical approach. It is something we have to earn by relentlessly dedicating ourselves to the hard work of fighting against the current of American capitalism in every social movement. We cannot manufacture moments like the massive growth of DSa which followed  Bernie’s first run. But with an organizing model that runs campaigns, aimed at the public, in the pressing issues of the day, we can grow, and we can grow the power of socialism without depending on luck. 

But this means devoting the bulk of our organizing and resources to winning over the public, especially the labor movement through concentrated political efforts. It means prioritizing organizational structures which coordinate our message, and maximize the political clarity of our publications and elected officials. And it means a political leadership which uses this approach to advance our message. But it also heightens the urgency of clarifying a coherent Marxist message for DSA to put forward. 

TRBA, ultimately, shows that we have a very powerful tool with which to work in DSA. But it is only a tool, and it is only as strong as the principles it is used to advance.