Daniel Trujillo’s first month of junior year has been a “cakewalk.”
He’s in two different jazz bands and is a member of his school’s chapter of March for Our Lives chapter, a student-led organization promoting gun control. He dreams of studying music in college.
But getting there has not been easy for Daniel and his family ― especially in Arizona, where a barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric has threatened their sense of safety.
In 2022, state Republicans banned gender-affirming surgeries for minors in Arizona, though those procedures were already rare, and barred trans girls from playing on girls sports teams in schools. (A federal appeals court decision this week stopped the latter law from going into effect.)
Lizette Trujillo, Daniel’s mom, has traveled from their home in Tucson to Phoenix each legislative session over the last six years, taking time off work to testify in opposition to such anti-LGBTQ+ bills. Daniel has joined her on those trips since 2020.
“My husband and I are small business owners, and it’s given me the flexibility to devote my life in this really distinct way to fighting the trans legislation in our state. If I clocked the hours of free volunteer time, it’s significant,” Lizette Trujillo told HuffPost.
And when they aren’t traveling to the state Capitol, the Trujillo family is focused on cultivating a safe, accepting community in their city.
Daniel jokes that his parents have gone to lengths to make sure a day doesn’t go by where he doesn’t see another trans person. He has attended a queer Latinx camp. The family goes to a progressive church where they are greeted by Rev. Louis Mitchell, a Black trans pastor.
Lizette Trujillo leads a group for parents of trans youth and runs a carpool for trans teens during the school year. Every other weekend, the family spends time with several other families of trans youth at a community space where the kids get to hang out and just be kids, while the adults discuss the consequences of Arizona’s efforts to target LGBTQ+ youth.
But the Trujillos are no stranger to the threats that exist just outside their blue bubble.
Daniel was 9 years old when Donald Trump took office, and he began to learn about what the former president’s threats of mass deportation could mean for his dad, who at the time was a U.S. resident born in Mexico, and for his multi-status family.
“I was imagining my dad, who immigrated to seek safety, now having to leave again to find safety somewhere else,” Daniel recalled.
“We live these intersections,” Lizette Trujillo said. “I think it’s so important for people to understand that Daniel is a continuation of the fight for our freedom, and our inclusion and equality as Mexican Americans, and that trans and queer people are part of all of our families. The GOP knows that and that’s why they’re always trying to misinform our own people with falsehoods and scare tactics.”
Organizers across the country are sounding the alarm about the high stakes of the November presidential election and the looming threat of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 equates being transgender with pornography, calls for federal government to enforce sex discrimination protections based on the “binary biological meaning of ‘sex,’” and argues that educators and librarians who share materials about trans identity should have to register as sex offenders.
In addition, Trump has vowed to roll back Title IX protections for transgender students and criminalize doctors who provide gender-affirming care if he’s reelected. The former president has spent the last few weeks repeating false claims that children are undergoing gender transition surgery at school and without parental consent. This week, he also refused to answer whether he’d veto a national abortion ban.
By contrast, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned on the promise of restoring access to abortion and the “woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.” Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has been a champion of trans rights in his home state.
A forthcoming Supreme Court case, L.W. v. Skrmetti, will decide the legality of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth. Justices will begin hearing oral arguments next month, and their decision, which is expected next summer, could have sweeping ramifications for the state of gender-affirming health care for trans youth nationwide.
Activists argue that the outcome of the election and the court’s decision on gender-affirming care, like its decision overturning the right to an abortion, will affect all kinds of people who are made vulnerable in society. That’s why organizers are working so hard to bring those fights together, under the umbrella of the broader struggle for bodily autonomy — and to do so while also celebrating the beauty of self-determination.
Daniel’s story is one of nine about trans and gender-nonconforming young people featured in the American Civil Liberties Union’s new “Freedom To Be” campaign, which launched this week and aims to spotlight two things that advocates say are largely missing from mainstream stories and coverage of transgender youth: joy and intersectional identities.
And on Saturday, the Gender Liberation Movement — a new group to help bridge the gap between the trans rights and reproductive rights movements — will hold its first march and festival at Columbus Circle in Washington D.C., one block away from the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters. Daniel and Lizette Trujillo are slated to take the stage at the event, along with trans rights advocate Miss Major and actors Elliot Page and Julio Torres.
“At the heart of this effort is looking at the connections between all of the attacks, particularly from the right, on communities on the margins,” said Raquel Willis, a Black trans activist and writer who co-founded the Gender Liberation Movement with Eliel Cruz, an organizer and communications worker, and others. “We know that restrictions around access to abortion and reproductive justice have been a galvanizing fight for a lot of people on the left, and in queer and trans circles a lot of us have been fighting against restrictions around access to gender-affirming care.”
Conservatives often use the same political playbook to target both abortion and trans rights, Willis said.
“The strongest connective tissue between our struggles is bodily autonomy,” she added.
Restrictions on reproductive rights go hand in hand with the rollback of LGBTQ+ rights, harsher immigration policy and restrictions on what parts of U.S. history can be taught in schools — and what should be censored, Willis said.
Everyone is harmed by anti-trans laws and rhetoric, she added, but especially cisgender women of color and gender-nonconforming women. For example, she pointed to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, whose recent Olympic win in women’s boxing was heavily criticized by Trump, author J.K. Rowling and billionaire Elon Musk. They falsely claimed Khelif is trans and helped drum up a barrage of online abuse against her.
“At the heart of this gender liberation work is getting folks to understand that there’s another way, that actually none of us fit these perfect scripts and these boxes,” Willis said. “What can we do when we blow up these boxes or expand these boxes?”
Trans people are also affected by other systemic issues along race, gender, and class lines, from reproductive health care access to immigration. That fact ― and also, that there is beauty in living with intersecting identities ― is part of what these advocates are trying to communicate.
Ash Orr, a trans activist from West Virginia, said that because of his state’s total ban on abortion, triggered by the fall of Roe v. Wade, he had to travel to a Pennsylvania clinic to receive abortion care. Orr said it was there, during that appointment at a Planned Parenthood, where he was first able to open up about his trans identity and how he had felt stuck in a toxic marriage.
Abortion was part of his gender-affirming care and instrumental in his transition, he said.
“It was during that time I felt like all of the guards that I had placed up go down and I was able to talk to my provider and finally share that I am a trans person,” Orr said. “It was just kind of like this moment where, not only was I obtaining abortion care, but I was able to step out of this closet that I had boarded myself up in.”
Willis is hoping the Gender Liberation Movement can build on momentum from past protest movements.
In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests, Willis and Cruz helped organize Brooklyn Liberation, a massive march and rally to raise awareness about the disproportionate violence that Black trans people, particularly Black trans women, face. “Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power,” Willis told the crowd.
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Some of the group’s organizers also helped dozens of trans youth, including Daniel Trujillo, pull off the first-ever Trans Youth Prom in 2023. Trans youth from across the country dressed in their best prom attire and gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the deluge of anti-trans legislation, and to protest those attacks with joy and celebration.
When Lizette Trujillo thinks about why she’s spent so much time testifying in front of Republican officials in Arizona, and why she and Daniel are headed to D.C. this weekend, she thinks about the next generation of transgender youth.
Recently, Lizette took trans kids in her community out to get their nails done. On the way home, the kids, unprompted, shared their anxieties about the upcoming election.
“They laid out their fears in a way that no 10-year-old should. No 10-year-old should have an understanding of how policy impacts their lives. They should feel safe at home and at school and in public spaces,” she said. “I think about that all the time and I made a promise to them that regardless of who won the election, we take care of each other. We’re there for each other.”