Our Vision
Every person deserves to live, learn, and work with safety, dignity, and equality . Our vision for gender justice cuts across the many issues that are central to peoples’ lives and futures. We are working toward a world where every person has access to health care at low or no cost, including abortion care, birth control, fertility care, trans-inclusive health care in their communities, when they need it, and without shame, stigma, surveillance, or barriers. A world where every birthing person is safe and dignified in childbirth and every person has access to high quality and affordable housing, child care and early learning, and is economically secure. In our vision for gender justice, every worker is paid a dignified, fair wage, works free from discrimination and harassment, and has paid leave and fair work schedules so they and their families can thrive. And women and girls, LGBTQI+ students, students of color, pregnant and parenting students–every student–can learn in environments where they feel safe, valued, and respected, with access to inclusive, culturally responsive, historically and medically accurate curriculum.
Our Values
As we pursue a vision for gender justice where every person of every gender can thrive, the following values guide our work:
- We believe that gender justice is deeply interwoven with the pursuit of all forms of justice, including racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice.
- We decry the ways in which gender oppression harms not only cisgender women and girls, but also nonbinary, gender nonconforming, gender expansive, transgender, and intersex people, and people who identify as queer, lesbian, gay, and bisexual. We recognize that policies specifically intended to harm any of these communities harms all of us and we will fight to stop them.
- We know that gender oppression does not operate in isolation—it intersects with and is magnified by other forms of oppression, including racism, ableism, xenophobia, classism, and poverty. We center in our work people who face gender discrimination alongside other forms of discrimination and oppression – women of color, immigrant women, LGBTQI+ people of color, transgender girls, and disabled women, to name a few.
- We recognize that people do not live single-issue lives. We hold that to achieve true gender justice, we need to deeply understand the interconnectedness of issues and work together across issues and movements; for example, reproductive freedom to economic justice; environmental justice to maternal health; sex-based harassment in schools to workplace discrimination; housing discrimination to gender-based violence.
- We value collaborative governance: policymakers collaborating with grassroots movements and directly impacted people to govern, enact policies, and build power. And we value collaborating, learning, and building relationships across state lines and movements.
Our Commitment
- We share a long-term commitment to not only defend gender justice, but to build and drive a proactive, intersectional vision of gender justice and the future we seek to achieve. We believe that states offer the most immediate opportunities for improving the lives of women, girls, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, gender expansive, transgender, intersex people, and LGBTQI+ people. Although our states and fights may look different, we recognize they are interconnected.
- We strive to strengthen our gender justice leadership and are open to learning from different movements, different issue areas, and different states about how our work is connected.
- We promise, as policymakers and/or advocates, to govern and advocate in close collaboration with each other in and across states and use the knowledge, tools, and relationships from the Collective to advance these values and this vision.
