The recent revelations about Cesar Chavez have forced many of us to confront a hard truth: the harm women, trans people, girls, and gender-expansive people experience in movement spaces is not incidental; it is patterned, protected, and too often ignored. This is not about one man. This is about a pervasive culture that permeates our communities, our homes, and our movements towards collective liberation and freedom.
For years, women, trans people, girls, and gender-expansive people of all ages have carried movements forward, often without recognition, safety, or shared power. Many of us have confronted the misogyny we experience directly; others have chosen silence to protect their safety, reputation, or the fear of being accused of fracturing movements. We have worked twice as hard for half, if any, of the recognition. We have been underpaid, overlooked in hiring, funding, and media coverage, and are often written out of history. We have been told that not taking credit for our own work is in the best interest of the movement, which has resulted in the extraction of our labor, experience, and expertise. We have tolerated working in “justice spaces” that have not been just to us, including those of us who are survivors.
At the same time, we are living in a moment of escalating state violence and coordinated attacks on our communities. And yet, too many of our movement spaces continue to replicate the very dynamics we claim to fight. If we do not confront patriarchy within our organizations, relationships, and leadership with urgency and discipline, we are actively undermining our ability to build power. This is not a side issue; it is a strategic failure. When we fail to intentionally confront patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia, and anti-Blackness, they do not disappear; they embed themselves into our culture, shaping how we lead, relate, and organize, without interruption or consequence, then our movements are not liberatory; they are simply reproducing the conditions we claim to fight.
And let’s be honest: too many of you already know this. There is no shortage of language, analysis, or access to political education about patriarchy and misogyny. The issue is not awareness. The issue is action and the consistent failure of men to take responsibility for changing behavior, shifting power, and holding each other accountable.
Let us be clear: a movement that requires our silence to survive is not a movement that will win. We will not continue to carry movements that harm us, and we will not continue doing the work of fixing what men refuse to change. We are already losing some of the most powerful and strategic voices in our movement. Across the board, women and gender-expansive folks are leaving, not because they lack commitment, but because they are being pushed out by harm, burnout, lack of safety, and the consistent failure to address misogyny and abuse inside our own spaces.
What is required now is not performative allyship or surface-level agreements with statements. What is required is a fundamental shift in how power operates in our movements.
We are not interested in more statements of solidarity.
We are not interested in more agreement without action.
We are not interested in being asked, again, to teach or guide.
We will not hold another healing circle or create another task force just to see no change and continue to absorb the consequences.
Because the truth is this: movements do not fail only because of external opposition. They fail because of what we continue to tolerate internally.
Our movement matters.
We write to you as women, trans, and gender-expansive leaders across California who have come together, shaped by our shared experiences across movement spaces, to name what we have lived and what must change with clarity, urgency, and expectation for men who seek to organize, lead, and be in movement with us.
- Practice Shared Power – Not Ego-Driven Leadership and Public Status
Movement leadership is not a platform for ego, visibility, or validation. Men must interrogate motivations rooted in recognition and control, and instead focus on strengthening collective outcomes and creating conditions for others to lead.
Men in the movement must actively make space for women, trans people, girls, and gender-expansive people to lead, for our voices to be heard, for our opinions and experiences to be taken seriously, and for us to be respected as decision-makers. It looks like men stepping back so others can step forward, not symbolically, but materially. Leadership is not measured by who speaks the most or takes up the most space; it is measured by who builds collective strength and creates opportunities for others to exercise their leadership. Men in movement must not simply ‘make space’ for women, trans people, girls, and gender-expansive people. It looks like no longer taking credit for work that is not yours, no longer benefiting from the invisibility of others, and no longer treating women and gender-expansive people as support rather than leadership. They must share power, shift resources, cede decision-making authority, and help build structures in which our leadership is expected, supported, and durable.
- Respect Women’s Labor, Our Ideas, and Other Contributions to the Movement
The ancestral and matriarchal values we carry, rooted in care, accountability, interdependence, and collective leadership, are not weaknesses. There is deep wisdom in how we show up for one another, in our commitment to transformation, and in our belief that people can change. They are the foundation of our strength. We make significant contributions to organizing, strategy, and relationship-building.
However, we are not just here to shoulder the emotional labor of the work, nor are we just space holders for your emotional offloading. Our work deserves to be acknowledged. We deserve credit for our contributions. And we should be compensated, funded, and credited equitably to our brothers. Taking credit for our ideas, shrinking our visibility, or blocking our opportunities, whether intentionally or passively, undermines the movement and will not be tolerated. Our leadership must be reflected not only in words, but in budget decisions, media visibility, succession planning, staffing, authorship, strategic decision-making, and access to institutional power.
- Commit to Non-Violence and Safety in All Forms
We recognize that all of us, across our communities, are living under conditions of violence, and that many of our men have also experienced harm. We are not naive to the realities of the world we are fighting to change. We know we cannot guarantee absolute safety. But what we build inside our movement spaces is a choice, and safety within our spaces is no longer optional
This means freedom from sexual, emotional, psychological, economic, and physical harm. This means freedom from having our personal and organizational reputations destroyed. Safety must include freedom from the weaponization of relationships or institutional power against those who name harm. Movement spaces must be free from harassment, intimidation, manipulation, retaliation, oppression, and abuse of power.
We deserve self-determination, choice, and consent in making decisions about who we partner with in our work to maintain healthy, safe movement relationships between individuals and organizations, grounded in trust and integrity. We expect to have working relationships based on mutuality and respect, rather than dominance.
Men must take responsibility for building and maintaining cultures of safety, not only for us as your comrades, but also for our families and communities, who also deserve safe spaces and our protection.
- Be Accountable When Harm Occurs
When harm is named, comrades of all genders, particularly men and young men, and our other comrades of all genders must listen without defensiveness, retaliation, or minimizing the situation to “not a big deal,” and encourage other men and boys in movement spaces to do the same.
We should not have to prove we deserve safety and protection. Accountability means acknowledgment, repair, changed behavior, and willingness to step back when necessary. It requires actively taking steps to mend the damage and moving to create “accountable spaces,” to ensure the same oppressive and toxic behaviors that are so deeply harmful to our communities are not replicated and accepted in our movement spaces. Accountability must be structured, not improvised. Movement organizations should have clear reporting pathways, transparent processes, protections against retaliation, and expectations for repair, changed behavior, and stepping back from leadership when necessary.
- Zero-tolerance for Anti-Blackness Against Black Women, including Black Trans Women, Girls, and Gender-Expansive People
True solidarity requires us all to protect Black women and girls, Black trans women and girls, and gender-expansive people in our community and especially in movement spaces that are meant to be safe for individuals of all backgrounds. We will not tolerate conditional inclusion. We will not accept, ignore, or excuse behaviors from men or comrades of any gender that target, belittle, ignore, harm, or undermine Black women, their experiences, their leadership, or their work. Black women’s leadership has long been foundational to movement work and too often subjected to heightened scrutiny, extraction, isolation, and attack. When we are vocal about our abuse, we are held to different standards of behavior. We reject these patterns and expect active solidarity against them.
- Do the Work of Unlearning Misogyny
We recognize that many of us in movement spaces are navigating multiple, intersecting forms of oppression. For Black and Brown women, trans people, and gender-expansive people in particular, the burden of that intersection is not theoretical; it is lived. Too often, we are made to feel as though we must choose between confronting racism and confronting patriarchy, as if these struggles are separate. They are not. When intersectionality is not explicitly named and practiced, it is defaulted out of our movements, and we are left carrying the consequences.
Men are responsible for examining how patriarchy shows up in your behavior, your organizing, your approach to conflict, and your relationships, and doing the ongoing work to change it. This work cannot happen in isolation from race.
This means learning from the leadership and experiences of women, trans, and gender-expansive people and taking feedback seriously, listening with humility, and committing to both personal and political transformation as an ongoing practice. It also means taking responsibility for your own growth. Women, girls, and trans and gender-expansive people should not be expected to carry the emotional or political labor of men unlearning misogyny. It is not our role to teach you, manage your responses, or absorb the impact of your resistance.
We are all responsible for our own unlearning and learning, but men are responsible for ensuring that work is done without causing further harm, but rather in how you lead, how you share power, how you respond to harm, and how you hold other men accountable
Again, we write this because we know our movement matters and requires the collective.
We are not asking for permission to lead. We are setting the conditions required for movements to be sustainable, ethical, and just, and for diverse types of leadership to be exhibited and celebrated.
Men who wish to be in movement with us must align with these principles, in practice, not only in language. As a collective, we name this not only to end harm, but because we know that a different world is possible. We have organized under a patriarchy since the founding of this country. It has cost us everything and delivered justice and freedom to very few. We are not asking for permission to lead, and we are not negotiating our humanity, safety, or power. We are naming the conditions required for movements to be sustainable, principled, and capable of winning. We are inviting you to join us as partners, allies, strategists, and members of a collective community that is actively building a new way forward, one grounded not in dominance but in the wisdom, strength, and leadership of women, trans, and gender-expansive people. That world will require all of us. But it must be built differently.
For women-, trans-, and gender-expansive-led organizations that share these values and are ready to stand in alignment, we invite you to join us and sign on below.
Your Comrades,
Women and Gender Expansive People in the Movement
Young Women’s Freedom Center
Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition
Alliance for Girls
Initiate Justice Action
Youth Law Center
La Defensa
Justice and Joy National Collaborative
Women’s Foundation California
Anti Police Terror Project
California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP)
Falilah “Aisha” Bilal, Founder of WaterFlowLife
Essie Justice Group
Californians for Safety and Justice
Starting Over Inc
