S2E5: Nico Amador on fighting gender discrimination on public transit and pivoting gracefully when the campaign got stuck

In this episode, we’ll hear about how a few Philly activists came together in 2009 to take on a policy that was causing harassment and discrimination against transgender public transit riders. This all-volunteer collective used creative tactics, including a drag show and a larger-than-life riders bill of rights to take on one of the largest public transit systems in the country and win. Along the way, they set up a flexible campaign structure and successfully pivoted their strategy when their target was unresponsive.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge. And check out our new Campaign Strategy Workbook for more about some of the tools used in this campaign.

Nico Amador has spent over twenty years in social change movements as a community organizer, facilitator and coach for grassroots leaders working for queer liberation, racial justice and trans rights.

His prior work has included participation in efforts to fight mass incarceration, secure protections for undocumented immigrants, and campaigns for a living wage. As the former Executive Director and lead trainer with Training for Change, he founded a fellowship program for BIPOC organizers and led hundreds of workshops to promote skills and analysis among people working for social change. He's supported several major LGBTQ+ and gender justice organizations, including the National LGBT Task Force, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Third Wave Fund and the Transgender Law Center, and many local projects across the U.S. He is currently the Director of the Leadership Institute at CenterLink, an international member network of LGBT Centers.

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns. I'm your host, Andrew Willis Garcés. In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: We’re big fans of this story, about how a small group in Philadelphia ended a discriminatory policy affecting transgender public transit riders, and not only because you’ll get to hear from former Training for Change director Nico Amador. Four elements stand out that set this one apart from most of the campaigns we’ve featured so far. First, the vast majority of the stories we’ve told on this podcast have been from the perspective of paid staff, sometimes of organizations with only one or two staff organizers, but staff nonetheless. But this one shows the possibilities of a completely volunteer-led campaign, and the importance of designing an action arc conducive to engaging volunteer members, which Nico describes as the “three-in-a-row” principle of action sequencing. 

Second, most of the campaigns we’ve featured have been designed by organizations with long-term goals to build a base and develop their power to reshape society. But our final two episodes of this season are examples of campaigns designed by activists focused exclusively on winning the campaign’s immediate demands. 

Third, many of the campaigns we’ve highlighted, that were centered around a demand related to identity, were led by campaigners who were some of the most impacted by the problem the campaign was designed to transform. But in this campaign, conscious of the difficulties many of the people most impacted by the problem would have to fully participate in organizing meetings and planning campaign actions, the group’s leaders created an advisory council and a less formal system for checking in with directly impacted people as advisors. Side note: There’s at least one other largely volunteer-led campaign we know about, that coincidentally took place during the same time period, in Washington, DC, that created a similar advisory board. And it’s part of a new resource Training for Change launched last week, a campaign strategy workbook, that you can access right now, for free, at trainingforchange.org/workbook, or on our socials @TFCTrains. 

And our fourth-favorite element of this campaign is its unexpected, sudden victory. As listeners who have made it through all eighteen campaigns we’ve unpacked on this show know, very few campaigns unfold as planned. Maybe the best-known campaign of all time, the desegregation effort at the heart of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is a true exception in its steady escalation over twelve months that led to a win. 

It’s much more common for our campaigns to stall out on the way to a win, requiring strategy shifts or a long fallow period, as was the case for many of our stories from the past two seasons: the Penn for PILOTs campaign, KC Tenants’ pandemic pivot to shutting down court hearings, and undocumented organizers moving away from a longtime goal to win a US Senate vote. 

In today’s story the campaign also went through a “stuck period,” before eventually ending a policy that had made Philadelphia’s transgender transit riders less safe. And it was the organizers’ willingness to embrace flexibility around conceptualizing their “North Star” that allowed them to win their original campaign demands. 

So what was this excellent campaign I’ve spent several minutes hyping up? 

Back in 2009, in Philadelphia, the transit agency, SEPTA, offered riders the opportunity to buy cheaper, monthly transit passes that could be used across the area’s buses, trolleys and subways. But the passes were marked with a large “M” or “F” – male or female. 

This created situations where local trans and gender non-conforming riders, particularly Black trans women, had been interrogated and harassed when boarding. A few prominent local trans leaders had spoken out about the problem over the years, but the issue received little mainstream attention. Finally, after another such incident in 2009, a queer teacher who had been involved in other local issue campaigns, Talia Young, invited a few local activists to her

home, convinced they could do something about SEPTA’s policy.

After a few weeks of researching the issue, the group was in agreement: a public campaign could force the agency’s general manager to agree to phase out the M/F gender markers. They named their new formation Riders Against Gender Exclusion, or RAGE.

The group started raising the issue with influential queer community members in the summer of 2009, hosting a happy hour to set the stage for the public campaign to come and invite passive support. And they began quietly circulating a petition asking SEPTA to end gender markers, emphasizing in-person conversations with queer and trans people at public gathering spaces and dance parties. 

Building on the petition, the all-volunteer group carried out an arc of escalating tactics, including creative flyering, sit-down meetings with SEPTA management, and public drag shows. When their public pressure strategy seemed to stall, the group pivoted toward tactics aimed directly at increasing trans rider safety despite the continued use of gender stickers. They collected testimonies of trans riders who had felt unsafe, and drafted a Riders Bill of Rights, as part of an effort to increase rider safety – which they called Ride with Respect – by enlisting bystanders to take action if they witnessed discrimination. They also created their own rider complaint system and hotline after SEPTA failed to follow through on a pledge to collect rider complaints. 

It was this pivot moment that made room for decentralized actions that ultimately led to their campaign’s success. 

Nico Amador has spent over twenty years in social change movements as a community organizer, facilitator and coach for grassroots leaders working for queer liberation, racial justice and trans rights.  His prior work has included participation in efforts to fight mass incarceration, secure protections for undocumented immigrants, and campaigns for a living wage. As the former Executive Director and lead trainer with Training for Change, he founded a fellowship program for BIPOC organizers and led hundreds of workshops to promote skills and analysis among people working for social change. 

He's supported several major LGBTQ+ and gender justice organizations, including the National LGBT Task Force, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Third Wave Fund and the Transgender Law Center, and many local projects across the U.S. He is currently the Director of the Leadership Institute at CenterLink, an international member network of LGBT Centers.

Andrew Willis Garcés: Nico Amador, welcome to the Craft of Campaigns. Thanks for being with us. If this story of this campaign were a movie, what would be the trailer? Can you give us a preview of what we're about to hear? 

Nico Amador: The trailer would be a scrappy group of trans activists run a shoestring campaign to take on Philadelphia's public transportation system and change a policy that was causing

some discrimination and harassment of trans and gender non-conforming riders.

AWG: Can you tell us more about who you are and how you came to this story of discrimination on the subway in Philadelphia and got involved? 

NA: Yeah, so I'm a community organizer and was, before getting involved in this campaign. I grew up in California, but moved to Philadelphia when I was around 24. I really came to Philly, I think, because of the organizing community there, because of the opportunity to be around other mentors and elders. And also because Philly has for a long time had a very thriving queer and trans community. 

AWG: So you moved to Philly and you get to be part of activism and organizing communities there, trans communities there. And I'm curious if you could set the stage for us more about, especially since, since we're gonna hear about a campaign to change public accommodations basically in Philly, but what was that like? What was it like to be a trans person in Philly back then? Riding the trolley, the subway, the bus. What got y'all fighting one of the largest transit systems in the country?

NA: Thanks for the question. One thing that's important for people to know is that we're talking about 2009. A few years before what I think in the mainstream has been referred to as the trans tipping point, the point at which it seemed like more trans visibility really broke through into a more national consciousness, became more of a national issue. And also where we started seeing more representation of trans people in the media.

I think that label of tipping point, I think could be problematic. But just as a marker I guess, about where we are in time. This was a few years before that, and so for me, I was still regularly having experiences where among leftists, among other people I was in community with, I would out myself as trans and would still get a kind of, what, yeah, what is that?

And so there was a lot of regular interactions with people where that kind of 101 level education was needed just for people to make sense of your identity and how you were presenting. So very different from where we are today where there's a lot of discussion about trans identity, a lot more representation in the media, a lot more visible activism and also a lot more polarization. I think one benefit of the organizing we got to do during this particular moment in time was we didn't have a lot of strong opposition, or we weren't working in an environment where there was a lot of polarization already happening just ambiently in the political environment.

It was something that people were largely ignoring and maybe felt uncomfortable with. And certainly in instances, obviously there's still violence and discrimination happening against trans people, but just on the day-to-day was not a thing that you would necessarily hear a lot about in conversation. So I think that that afforded us some degree of protection as organizers, but it also meant that we had to do a lot of education as we were trying to push this issue and get people to kind of take seriously why it might be important. 

The issue itself was a situation where the public transportation system in Philly called SEPTA, which ran the trolleys, it ran the commuter trains, the subway metro system, a few different systems. Also the buses had a policy where people could buy a weekly or monthly commuter pass. If they bought one of those commuter passes, there was a big M sticker or an F sticker that got placed on the pass as a form of identification and to somewhat limit the amount of sharing that people could do with their passes. There was no other form of identification on the pass. So your picture was not on it. Your name was not on it, no other identifying information. It was just a little paper card with an M or an F on it. 

What was happening at the time for people who were trans or androgynous or gender nonconforming was that people were having the experience of buying a pass, maybe they got their preferred gender marker on there, maybe they didn't. But regardless, like whatever sticker ended up on their pass when they would go to use it in some situations, they would get questioned about whether they were stealing somebody else's pass or borrowing someone else's pass.

In a lot of situations it was just the driver or the conductor trying to do their job and questioning people out of ignorance. But we were also hearing some stories of I think especially trans women. And there was one story in particular that became more public.

A local leader, Charlene Arcila, had been trying to use her past and would try to use the F sticker. She'd go try to use the pass, the driver would harass her and say, you can't get on, you're a man. She had to figure out how to get to and from work. So she kind of was like, all right, fine. Just put the M sticker on my pass. I'll use that even though that's uncomfortable and that's not how I wanna be identified. And then she'd go to use the M pass. Well, no, you can't use that, you're a woman. It was just clearly a situation of harassment, bigotry, a way to really just limit this trans person's access and right to use public transportation. 

It was an issue of access, it was an issue of safety. It was an issue of dignity and respect. And also something that seemed very fixable, like pretty easy to resolve this kind of absurd policy that didn't really seem to be serving much of a purpose to begin with.

AWG: So it seemed fixable, it had been around, sounds like a while as a problem. So who got the ball rolling? How did you all decide to start doing something about it? 

NA: Like I mentioned Charlene had already taken a more public stance on this issue. In 2007 she filed a complaint with the Philadelphia Human Rights Commission and got some press around the issue. I think there had been maybe a little bit of follow up or more advocacy that had happened around that through another like social service agency. But I think that was about the extent of what had happened. And then in 2009, Talia Young, who was a local teacher and queer activist and community member had taken notice of this issue and was like, let me just get a few people I know together.

We met at her house, so it was myself Rachel Fitchenbaum, Max Ray, David Connors. Some of us

identified as trans, some of us didn't. I think everyone identified as queer. And it was just like a small group of friends sitting down at a kitchen table to be like, what's going on with this issue and what can we do about it?

And we decided to just spend a few weeks researching, looking into it a little further and trying to understand who had the power to change this policy, what could be some possible ways to get started on advocating for a change, and have some preliminary conversations with other people. At the end of that few weeks of research and conversation, we had determined that the general manager of SEPTA, Joe Casey, was someone who had the power and authority to make a change like that. 

AWG: Literally all they had to do was stop putting stickers on these passes, or what was the change you all thought they needed to make? 

NA: It was really just to discontinue the use of the stickers. Looking back at it, it seems like such a ridiculous and stupid thing to have to actually build a whole campaign around. But I think the combination of ignorance about trans identity and the ability to dismiss those concerns as so marginal meant that it took a real organizing effort to get SEPTA and others to take it seriously enough.

AWG: Part of the way I understand this campaign now is it was one of many that were about forcing the rest of us cis people to accept trans people living lives in public and having access to the same kind of dignity that the rest of us do or should have. But at the time, there's also a movement in 2009-2010 in California and other places around gay marriage and eventually around the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would've banned discrimination of trans people in their jobs.

So that's all happening at this time as you all are thinking about, all right, let's figure out how to change this policy. It sounds like you all had this sense of, well, it's just a sticker. I mean, come on. It's not gonna cost them anything.

And the theory was, if we can get Joe, the director, to just kind of feel some heat publicly as the person most responsible for this policy, he will back down. He will say, we should end this. Was that kind of your assessment of the pillars of support for the status quo? 

NA: Yeah, that's right. And that, that felt like a very winnable goal. Like you're saying, I think there was some significance to the cultural work that's happening through the existence of the campaign by people standing up and being more public and forcing this issue. We also have an assessment that this target seems like one that we can have access to and influence enough or figure out how to pressure enough that this change is possible.

Winning the change will actually be meaningful to people who are in their daily lives just trying to get to their job. Just trying to get home. It's also. Making a statement about yeah, we wanna take care of our own. We wanna make sure that our people are safe in their daily lives, and

maybe minimize one place where people could experience violence or harassment. One motivation that I felt and getting involved in this campaign was not just about pushing people who are not trans but also about organizing people who do identify as trans or non-binary into a campaign that we could own, that we could lead, and that we could be visible on, and where we were impacting power directly. At the time, what I was witnessing in Philly at least, is  that there was a lot of trans-led work happening. But a lot of that was happening in these quiet corners. 

In terms of where we were really trying to influence or affect power, it felt like all of that was being mediated through this other professional class who were mostly cis people. We're relying on lawyers to be our advocates. We're relying on doctors who are not trans in a lot of cases to be our access points and, and our advocates inside the medical system. We're relying on therapists. There was something for me about being part of a movement where we could say, we can actually take these conditions into our own hands. We can set the agenda, we can decide what a win looks like, and we can affect power through our own efforts. We don't have to wait and beg someone else to do that work for us. And so I think that was a personal stake in it for me. 

AWG: Let's talk about that, about your previous campaign experience, I'm curious how it compares or influenced you as you're thinking about SEPTA’s general manager Joe Casey and coming after him. You had been involved in the Casino-Free Philadelphia campaign a couple years before that we featured in our last season, which featured a lot of different kinds of strategies to influence people in power. There was an inside game, there were lawsuits, there were disruptive protests, people getting arrested. 

So is your thought - look, all we have to do is go to Joe Casey in some SEPTA board meeting and just kind of say, do the right thing. Or is it we have to have some other leverage, or we have to get really loud? Or what did you think it was gonna take to get him to say, yeah, let's get rid of these stickers.

NA: We didn't know, because it was such a small and kind of obscure thing. We didn't really know how invested SEPTA was gonna be in maintaining this policy. But I think my experience as an organizer taught me that usually you go into a meeting, you make your ask. They don't give you what you want the first time around. And I think what the Casino Free Philadelphia campaign also taught me is that you don't necessarily approach your first set of tactics expecting to get a win out of that. But what you are doing through that is you are starting to lay the foundation of whatever your next escalation might be. And part of that can be going through some official channels first, so that you've done the reasonable thing, you've approached someone with a respectful ask.

And at the same time started to build some, some buy-in or and support around this campaign. After our first few meetings, as we started to think about how to approach this issue, we created the first set of tactics that we wanted to use. We did a happy hour at a local gay bar. We made sure we reached out to elected officials, other people who we had identified as leaders in

the trans community - not necessarily people with formal positions, but people who were acknowledged or seen as leaders or mentors or supports. We brought them together for a happy hour to say, hey, we're here, we're working on this. We're going to launch this petition effort and we're gonna start asking people in the community to share testimonials if they have them. We're gonna spend a few weeks doing that. 

We had a really nice, energizing happy hour that a lot of people came out to and express support. Following that, we did this petition signature gathering. We didn't think necessarily that the signatures themselves were gonna be the thing that created a lot of influence in the situation, but what it did do is it got us out talking to people about this problem and helped us really start to build the base around the campaign. We broke out into teams. We visited various support groups that were happening in the city. We had some fun flyers. One of our flyers said “What's in your pants? SEPTA wants to know.”

It was great in the sense that it got us out of our own little silos or out of our own friend groups and really got us out talking to people. I actually went to Love Park at some point with a clipboard and just started talking to whoever was in the park just to see what reaction I would get. That really built some momentum for the campaign. We tried to go hard for a few weeks on that and then asked for a meeting with SEPTA to deliver our petitions, share the testimonials that we had gathered and make a formal ask for them to change the policy.

AWG: So as far as the timeline, I wanna make sure I got this right. This is 2009 and essentially one of y'all convened the rest of you to say, Hey, we can do something about this. You got together, spent a few weeks researching and came back and said, yeah, I think we can get them to do this. Joe Casey's gonna do what we want. We're gonna get rid of these stickers. 

And then you spent a few weeks, if it's a three act play or movie, act one is, and now we're going out and talking to people and finding out also, wait, does this issue resonate? Can we get people to care about this who don't already think it's a problem? What was the sense of that couple weeks of testing? And then deciding, okay, I think we're ready for the next round here. 

NA: I think it did feel like the next right step is gonna be to have this request, this meeting and see what happens. Around that same time Miss Jackie, who is a member of the community and really known among especially Black trans women in the community as a leader and had done a lot of advocacy like with the police department and other kind of like official institutions in the city as well as, as just like supporting a lot of other trans women in, in informal ways and through just kind of like community networks. She got involved at the time and, and it felt like it was important to have her support and the support of a few other trans women who either had been impacted by the issue themselves or felt very close to what was happening. 

So SEPTA did respond to us. We were invited to meet them at their offices. We really tried to plan that out as well as we could and make our ask. And I think, not surprisingly, it was a very polite meeting. They nodded, they accepted the packet of testimonials and the petition signatures that we delivered. 

It felt like a very kind of typical delay tactic. Like, “oh, we hear you, we understand your concerns. We're probably gonna be switching to a new fare system in the near future anyway. These passes are gonna become irrelevant, so don't worry about it like this, this is gonna go away.” So respectful meeting with no real commitments made.

For some members of our group, it felt like a win. Iit felt like, oh, I think they hurt us, and they were respectful. And I think that was a positive outcome. I think for some people it was disappointing to not have a more solid commitment. And I think for me it was just a thing I had come to expect as an organizer.

Like that's just what happens in the first meeting. Like you just, you get put off or you get told no or you get told to be patient. And that's actually just a sign for us that we're ready for the next stage of our campaign. We shouldn't be placated, nor should we be let down about not not having any commitment made at this stage.

AWG: So what was the next stage? 

NA: Well, the next stage I think was my favorite stage of the campaign. Or where things really got fun and, and more creative. At this point in time, it was like we had built a small group and we had built some allies in the community and not everyone who was part of that initial group at the kitchen table could continue being as active in terms of staging out the next parts of the campaign.

But myself and Max Ray had some energy for it and so we more or less became what we ended up calling like the co-chairs of the campaign. This continued to be an all volunteer effort. No one was getting paid. But we kind of took the leadership role in terms of determining strategy and we waited for a period of time.

Nothing happened with SEPTA. That gave us a little space to just kind of like think about things and strategize. We ended up designing a new arc of tactics that were meant to be a little bit more visible, a little bit more on the direct action style of organizing and would operate outside the official channels to be able to put more pressure and bring more attention to this issue.

So within the sequence that we designed, the first step was we hosted a community gathering and used this meeting to help people generate what we called a Riders’ Bill of Rights. So it was using the sport that we had gathered, the contacts that we had made through the petition, and said we're gonna have this community meeting. We really want trans and non-binary or gender non-conforming folks to show up and really help us articulate the respect and safety that you think we deserve as a community when we're using the public transportation system. We had a really nice gathering around that. Facilitated that process, got our list of bullet points and then had that printed on like a large scale parchment paper. Something that could be a big spectacle. 

And then there was some sort of public hearing that SEPTA was hosting around that same time that was a really boring public budget meeting or something that they were required to do in

public, but wasn't something necessarily that a lot of people attend. But it was one point of contact that we could have with this bureaucracy to try to interrupt what was going on and, and get some attention for what we were doing. 

We invited the press, we took our giant bill of rights to this public meeting. We interrupted the proceedings and took the mic and did a kind of short intro to, here's who we are, here's why this issue matters to us. We read out our bill of rights and then exited the meeting and did some interviews with the press. But that was our first big public action and our first press hits that came because of the organizing that we were doing. And so I think that was like a nice small escalation that built some energy in our group. 

We were having weekly or biweekly meetings where we had maybe 20 or so people showing up. And then a lot more people who were paying attention to our listserv or were following us on some other channels,  I think we had a Facebook group at the time. We built up some momentum and then the crowning action in this particular sequence was we decided to do what we called a public drag show in City Hall Station in the center of Philadelphia during rush hour on a weekday. 

At the core of it, in terms of like the actual design of action, it was basically a rally. It was people showing up with signs to protest something. But we were really trying to give it a little bit more narrative weight and a little bit more kind of like playful spirit, something that would generate interest, something that people hadn't hurt. So I think that that was like a lesson that I had learned from other organizers, like, don't call something a rally even if it is kind of a rally. Make it new, make it different. And so we  leaned on the subculture that we were connected to through our queer and trans heritage. Not saying that every trans person identifies with drag culture, but it’s certainly within the tradition and lineage that we participate in.

And so we've framed this as a public drag show and designed it so people showed up. We had our banners, we had flyers to pass out, and so we could engage people who are coming and going out of the station in some short conversations about what we were doing. And then we had a few folks who I think had offered to do spoken word on the mic. And then myself and Max had kind of choreographed this drag performance where Max dressed up as the general manager of Joe Casey. I was in like a feather boa and a hat and a flowery shirt, and we did this whole thing. Two very awkward people. I will say me and Max are two of the most introverted, shy, not into public performance at all. But, we felt like the two of us as the co-chairs of this campaign could come up with something that would make the gimmick of it work. 

AWG: Literally putting yourselves out there. For the people listening to this who are not yet convinced of what you're saying about, well, let's at least not call it a rally. But can you imagine how much easier it would be to recruit for our rallies if we had even one drag performer at each rally and could call it a drag show, and get people there thinking it would actually not be a rally? So I thought that was brilliant. 

Backing up, because this is another thing I thought that was really interesting is I think often

with all volunteer campaigning crews, I've been part of those, that we often put just so much pressure on ourselves to win and to do as much as we can that it's kind of like we are just gonna have an endless series of actions and the timeline might shift.  But you all said, no, we're gonna do three, one a month for three months, and we're gonna try to hopefully have shifted - whether it's the public or this guy or whatever other target or our community into more active posture.

And so I'm curious about standing back after those three, where did you all think you would be versus where you were, and then, so what's next?

NA: I think that strategy of planning a sequence of three that we knew we could sustain enough energy to carry out within our fairly short timeframe felt really important to our success in the end. Even just in terms of participation of the people who we had engaged because it was a volunteer, because we were organizing people, some of who are very impacted by oppression. People who certainly felt a lot of vulnerability being public as trans. And so I think there was something about the structure of how we created these sequences that could, as people were feeling motivated and feeling energy, they could come into what we were doing.

And then there was kind of these release points where it was like, oh, you're, you're not committed past this action, or these two actions that we're really gonna try to recruit you hard to show up for. If now you need to kind of step back and do other things that allow you to take care of yourself or attend to other parts of your life, you can do that.

And then we'll figure out the next step. I think that at the point where we had done that last action in City Hall Station, I don't think that we anticipated at that point in time that we would win, like right then and there. It was a great public spectacle. We got a lot of press attention from that. There was some other smaller tactics or other things that we did to follow up shortly after that didn't require a lot of energy or a lot of support from the people who were our members or who had helped with the campaign.

In that interim period that followed, I think we thought we might win because it did feel like, okay, we've built a lot of visibility around this campaign. A lot of people agree with us now. There have been a lot of articles written that are quite friendly to our cause and rightly pointing out that this policy doesn't really seem to serve much of a purpose.

We thought maybe at that point that the public transportation officials would give at that point and say like, all right, fine we'll figure out how to get rid of it. And they didn't. That did feel a little demoralizing. By the time we had done that drag show action and then done some lower level follow up, we might have been about two years into the campaign - if you start it from the point where we had that meeting at Talia’s kitchen table so that kind of felt like, ugh, this is a lot of energy that we're putting into this.

It's a lot of legwork to kind of keep the momentum going and keep people engaged. And so I think at that moment in time, Max and I were a little stuck in terms of what to do next and how

to keep things going when we had lost some energy and the involvement from other people had kind of fallen off around that time.

AWG: So this is within a month or two of that three action sequence, you say, basically it felt like some of the momentum is, is you're starting to lose steam as opposed to maintain or pick up steam. And so the question is, well, I mean, we shot our shot. We got really public and really visible, and we showed the public is kind of moving in our direction on this. More people seem to be in favor of this. How do we follow up that? Were you just gonna do another three action sequence or what did you all end up finding in that stuck place? 

NA: Yeah, so at that point we talked about it ourselves. We also had a meeting at some point with our friend Daniel Hunter, who was someone I worked with on the Casino Free Philadelphia campaign, just to be like, can you facilitate us a little bit through a strategy conversation to just help our thinking? And one of the questions we started to ask at that time was, what would a win look like here, even if SEPTA doesn't respond to our demands and change the policy? Is there some other way of framing a win or something else that's available here that we haven't really seen and haven't thought of? And what we came to through those strategy conversations is we realized another win could be that even if the policy doesn't change, people have to keep having to use a sticker. It's stupid. It makes people uncomfortable. But what if through our organizing efforts, we can ensure that trans and non-binary people are safer when they're using public transportation. And that there are more people who previously would've just been passive bystanders who are ready to intervene and step in to help ensure people's safety if they're confronted as they're using their pass.

So that felt like kind of an important breakthrough moment and strategy pivot. At the end of the day, what we want is we want safety and dignity and a better experience for our communities when they're using public transportation.

Following that idea and just kind of reentering in that goal helped us come up with the next stage of our campaign where we became a little bit less focused on pressuring SEPTA directly and instead had a more kind of expansive campaign. We developed these little pledge cards and did a lot of different kinds of activities and outreach to get anyone really - we were happy however people identified to sign it -  but we were definitely engaging more cis people to, to say, sign this pledge card that says you understand this issue and how it's impacting people. You will agree to intervene if you see someone that's trying to use their commuter pass and are getting harassed by the driver or getting questioned or then becoming unsafe because other passengers are harassing them.

That just felt really liberating for us to get to take some of the pressure off trying to really create the win or to have to stay so focused on the target at that moment. The other thing that I really started to take notice of during that time was I personally was really motivated by a direct action strategy because I was coming into this campaign with training as an organizer with a curiosity and interest in non-violent direct action. I wanted a chance to, you know, get to practice some of that and strategize using those kinds of tactics.

And I realized as we got further into it, like that little arc that we designed, it was great. I'm super proud of it. It made such a big difference in the campaign. And, most of the people that we were engaging as our base were not really that excited about having to do a lot of direct action; were not really going to keep sticking with us to do a lot of big public spectacle like that. For really good reasons. It's very vulnerable to do. It can be very anxiety-inducing to have to plan for it and anticipate all the unknowns that can happen around that.

I think the other thing about just the observation of who was coming to us and who was joining the campaign: people were motivated by what we're doing and the goal, but there was a lot of people who I think were showing up because they just had a desire for more community. They were isolated as queer and trans folks. They wanted to be around other people. As we really started to kind of like listen to what people wanted and what they're excited to do, a lot of it was about social connection and creativity and just a kind of opportunity to be together in ways that people could get excited about and look forward to and maybe didn't carry the same stress as planning for direct action. 

For me it was also really important to just be able to kind of step back from some of my own motivations, or the things that I was fired up about in the moment, to really be more responsive to the people I was organizing with. So we chose a strategy that I think was right for our base at that time, and in some ways I think it was an important corrective to the campaign. so we designed what ended up being kind of like the last major arc of the campaign, what we called Ride With Respect. 

AWG: Just to say how unique that is too, that you all as the visionary leadership with campaign chops and hunger for conflict and direct action and could still have enough self-awareness that there's not the appetite from our base. Like, our active supporters who we need to also be wanting to throw down in that way, they're just not there with us. We're outpacing. So let's come back and figure out how to pace with our community, our team, our people who do want this to change. And also that you were able to dial back from, well we wanna change our material conditions. Like that's the goal here. And one way to do that is to get rid of these gender markers on the passes. And another way is to just make people safer because we got more of us looking out for each other. And it's less likely that anyone's gonna get harassed. 

Another thing that I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about that I thought was really interesting, Ali who produces this podcast, has done research on this campaign, and they pointed out to me also that you all had a way of consulting the especially trans women who were most likely to get harassed and maybe less likely to have time to come to meetings, but to figure out how do we make sure that the people most impacted by the problem, we're keeping them tightly to us and consulting them in some way. That was also part of this phase.

NA:  I think it's really fair to say that in Philly, and I think in a lot of other places, the trans community could feel fairly siloed or fairly divided.

I was part of the West Philly queer scene, which involved a lot of trans-masculine folks who were younger, a lot of white folks people who were kind of punky and living in cooperative houses and had kind of built a subculture around that.

We also had a lot of Black trans women in Philly who were organizing through their own kinds of social networks and own gathering places. There wasn't always a lot of places where those communities were overlapping in really clear ways or trying to figure out how to coordinate together around any kind of shared sense of vision or goal for trans justice in the community.

People were kind of doing their own thing. And it wasn't an expectation that we had, being more of the kind of like West Philly types, that we could create something that was gonna immediately feeling welcoming to a lot of the trans women in the community,  or have a lot of buy-in at the level of, I'm gonna show up to your weekly meetings. That's not how a lot of those people were organizing themselves. Just because we reached out or invited people to a weekly meeting did not necessarily mean they were gonna show up.

So what we did instead was we tried to organize what we called an advisory council to the campaign. We did a lot of the legwork to go to them and check in about what we were doing and, and get their thoughts and opinions. It didn't really require them showing up to the spaces that we were organizing or being part of weekly meetings, but we would really like, have some clear places where we were checking our thinking against whatever their perspective was on it.

So a lot of times that looked like we might have a meeting, discuss an idea. I would figure out sometime later in that week, okay, I'm gonna bike down to where Sheila works. I know where to find Sheila. I'm going to pull her aside and be like, Sheila, can I have five minutes? Here's what we're thinking. We'd have a chat on the corner about it. She would give us her input and we'd figure out how to do the same kind of thing with the other members of that advisory council. And that usually looked like just kind of showing up to where we knew they would be in the middle of the day or something.

I do really feel proud of that level of commitment that we made. And I think the kind of trust and relationship that built between us and these other parts of the community that I think could have very easily gotten lost in the excitement of planning these creative tactics and not really thinking about who is most central to this fight that we're taking on, who's impacted by it, who really has needs to have a voice in directing the strategy.  We were not satisfied with, oh, we invited them. They don't, they're not interested or whatev, Like, no, we're gonna, we're gonna make a really explicit commitment to checking in with them in multiple stages. I think what that meant was, It did really feel like a community effort. It really did feel like we had buy-in and support from a lot of different corners, and that we were really trying to move in a way that felt respectful. 

AWG: Thanks for sharing all that. There's so many ways to include the people who are most impacted by the problem, to make sure that when we're fighting, I think to change our material conditions, that's the center. There's not one way to do that, and it unlocks some kind of creativity in me to hear how different groups of people have done that or wrestle with those tensions. 

So you all have that structure. You all have rethought what a win looks like and are also trying to match the “we just kind of wanna be together energy” of a lot of the base that the campaign has built. We wanna solve this problem, but not through direct actions in the street. A new sequence comes out, Operation Ride with Respect, and this is the last act. What happens? 

NA: So what happens is we kind of liberate ourselves from having to produce a more official win. We start to just try to introduce things that would be fun for people; would allow people to engage a little bit more creatively through the kind of container, the vehicle of the campaign that we had created, but also still have some strategy behind it. So to not give up our organizing around the issue but even just having the pledge cards as something to do - we're gonna get as many of these signed as we can. We're gonna do a lot of outreach using these pledges. And so we had dance parties that we hosted to bring more people in and get them to sign the cards.

AWG: And, what was I pledging to do if I was a random person at a dance party. You were trying to get me to pledge to do what?

NA: We were asking people to pledge to interrupt or intervene if they saw someone being harassed on SEPTA when trying to use their commuter pass. Dance parties, art making sessions. Philly had the very first trans march during that period of time. And so our group had a little contingent that joined the trans march.

We spent a couple sessions making this big cardboard bus that we could march with that said Ride With Respect across the front of it. We had a member, Wren Warner, who made a really beautiful documentary that interviewed several people, some of whom hadn't even necessarily been directly a part of our campaign.

It was really great to have these different projects happening that were accessing different parts of the community, and bringing people in in different ways. That decentralized model gave more people a sense of ownership around this effort, and so I think we became a little less controlling around the strategy. We just created enough framework to keep some things moving and keep seeding some ideas. 

The core of our group was focused on this Ride with Respect campaign, but because we had opened up an opportunity for more leadership or just encouraged people to do the things that they wanted to do, one person who had showed up to some of our meetings. They had a little bit of experience doing advocacy work and lobbying officials, not someone that was at all a member of the professional class but just someone who their activism was to engage local representatives.

And she, on her own, I believe, decided to just initiate these meetings with a few city council members and just start talking to them about the issue. That time that was just enough to push

the issue from something that had gained enough public visibility in the city, bringing that to officials and for them to actually have enough understanding about it to respond to it. This member was actually successful in getting the city council to pass a resolution in support of a policy change.

There was nothing binding about it. It was just a symbolic gesture. But that gesture and something that was coming through a more official body maybe signaled that if something doesn't change here, there could be other consequences for SEPTA attached to it, or it's just gonna not be in their best interest to keep insisting on maintaining this policy.

Shortly after that resolution was passed by the city council, SEPTA caved and decided to eliminate the policy of gender stickers. So after a three year effort, we were successful in winning our campaign. 

AWG: Wow. And from the way you've been describing it, it sounds like you had kind of said, well, that's not gonna happen, or at least not any time soon. So what was it like to watch that play out?

NA: There was something humbling about it because I think we could claim so much of the effort that had brought this into public consciousness, and made it a real issue that people were aware of in the city. And it was also kind of funny and humbling that one person taking the initiative to have these meetings and do something that maybe was a fairly obvious move - but we had disregarded or just had somehow decided that it was not the tactic we were gonna use at that time - that actually seemed to be the final thing that produced the win. 

There was something humbling and also a little delightful about that. We actually did what we wanted to do. We wanted people to feel empowered. We wanted people to feel like they could take circumstances into their own hands and that they could produce the changes that they wanted to see through the actions that made sense to them.

And and in the end, even though Max and I had been the leaders and strategists behind a lot of the specific tactics used, I really don't think we could have been successful without the kind of collective effort that it took and all the different ways that people ended up pitching in to keep moving things forward.

AWG: I don't think I've been part of a campaign that won something as tangible and ubiquitous as a transit pass. Like a thing maybe hundreds of thousands of people have touched since then. I'm curious about what that's like for you or what that's been like for those people. Is there a sense among any of those people that, yeah, look, it's gone now. I did that. We did that. 

NA: I definitely think we made an explicit effort to claim it as a win for us; and something we did and a change that we were able to affect.

I think a lot of organizers experience this at the point where you actually win. Sometimes it's not actually the peak of your campaign or the most energetic moment. So I had actually done some stepping back from the leadership at that point because I was tired. I had other work that I had gotten busier with.

It would've been great to be able to have that win moment happen right after the action at City Hall where we really were at the peak of the number of people involved and the consistent group that was showing up to the meetings. By the time the win actually happened, things were a little spread out and a little inconsistent in terms of what the participation looked like. So I'm not sure that we ever got to really gather people in person around that win. But I think it definitely meant something to the people who had been a part of it to see that we'd been successful.

AWG: I think that feeling of something that a lot of people listening can relate to of, it doesn't always feel like a win, or some part of me moved on, or was tired at that point.

I mean, this campaign was 13, 14 years ago. And so many other parts of this feel relevant to today for those of us organizing campaigning today. Even just like how it started with the sense of, oh, we can do something about this. And getting in the mirror image of whoa, we are stuck.

Now how do we get to our vision? I don't know. And many of us actually don't get to the next part that you all did, which is, we found a way forward anyway and even for a year or two years and then got the win. But now reflecting on it now you know, there's so many lessons I think that you could lift up, but what are one or two that feel most relevant for us today?

NA: I think one of the things that's really stood out in hindsight is, how helpful it was not to be married to a specific structure and how we were organizing at different times. When we started, it was for people around the kitchen table. Then it was those four people, plus two important allies that could help us speak to officials.

Then we really needed a base of people to like help us through that direct action phase. So we were meeting weekly, or at least fairly regularly, with at least like 15, 20 people showing up to those meetings and helping us strategize and and develop some of the visuals for the tactics and things like that.

And then the energy fell off and there was a couple points in time where it was really just me and Max sitting down and being like, all right, what are we gonna do next? What's the next move here? I think that porousness was actually really useful because it allowed us to stay agile. And I think it allowed us to just accept the kind of ebb and flow of energy in the campaign and not interpret that as like, oh, just because it's hard to have weekly meetings right now that means we've lost or we can't continue. The fact that we never kind of formalized a specific structure, but it was just like, whatever the moment requires, we'll take that shape. We'll just use that to get us through the next stage of the campaign and then we'll reassess where we're at. 

One of the things that also allowed us to do that is we weren't trying to build something that

was a long-term vehicle for organizing or an organization. We were an all volunteer grassroots effort that had a very specific goal that we're trying to win. That was a challenge at times because everyone was contributing to it alongside whatever else they had going on in their life. No one was getting paid to do that work. But it also meant we didn't have to contend with a lot of the things that organizations or nonprofits have to deal with.

Like we weren't trying to stick around that long, and so we could just be a lot more fluid and feel a lot more room to pivot. That is something that's particularly relevant today, I think because there are so many pressures and different types of crisis that people are trying to weather in their daily lives or in the political landscape. I think there's something that could be really valuable of being able to gather people around short-term fights that still are politically significant or culturally significant. nd say like, if we can hold ourselves together, you know, for this period of time, you know, have enough agreement about how we're moving you know, within a, a fairly loose structure, that might also allow us to move faster or more easily, allow people to come in and out and contribute where they can without the assumption that it has to become something bigger or more formal than that.

AWG: Yeah, those do seem pretty relevant. Is there anything in our movements today, even if we look at more broadly, whether it's the left generally right now, or as we try to do campaigns, that you think, I really wish we would learn this lesson a little more.

NA: I would lift up that piece where we had to kind of acknowledge that the strategy we were using wasn't the thing that was gonna produce the win right then. And also kind of like let go of some of our own influence as leaders. We were, I think, thinking very strategically and bringing good ideas to the table. I think we were driven by the right intentions and motivations and I think there was a release that had to happen. To, say I have to just actually stop and listen and respond to what people actually need and want from their involvement. Rather than expecting them to keep fitting into a strategy that I've defined and not take into account what their needs are in that agenda or what it is they're really seeking from that space.

I think good organizing at its core really is something that needs to be a process of co-creation and a process of responding to the big vision goal that's been identified, and then, what actually keeps people motivated and moving around that goal. This often connects in a lot more deeply with a kind of personal longing or other kinds of desires to be seen or to be connected or to feel a sense of belonging.

I would love to see more organizing right now that I think was doing that around some of the big national things that are being responded to. Elections, democracy, voting rights, reproductive rights. Especially any of the organizing campaigns that are defined by big national organizations that are expecting local chapters to form around an agenda that they have laid out and kind of keep prompting people into.

And I've contributed to campaigns like that or been part of organizations that were using those strategies as someone that was kind of the organizer representative on the ground working with

the chapter and trying to support that work. I really noticed how much that that disconnection could be present: people have a real need to be involved and a real stake and personal motivations around that. Those things are not necessarily being spoken to or like welcomed in or designed into the process of how they're being asked to participate. It can be very formulaic, like, okay, your next action is you're going to use this template email to send this message to a handful of elected representatives and then we're gonna move on.

It can feel very factory-like in terms of how people are being asked to participate rather than really trying to ground and root into what is it that you are really longing for or wanting or connecting from your own life into the thing that's happening? How can that actually inform the way that you're organizing with other people and in your community?

AWG: Well, and to start to close this out, you're also revisiting this campaign 13, 14 years later. These campaigns often shape us. And, you know, this campaign was only a couple years long and the real active period might have been months. And it's clearly shaped you, I've told you I think about “What's in your pants? SEPTA wants to know!” probably twice a year as one of the guiding lights for how to have a catchy campaign slogan or invite surprise.

We are often on this podcast inviting sharp thinking and creativity. And it sounds like there is some heaviness in there. And you mentioned even before we started recording that not everyone involved in that campaign is even still alive. And so I'm curious if you could just share as we start to wrap up here,what is that like, to go back in time and also to think about who made it and who didn't and what's changed and what hasn't. If we can drop to the heart from our head for a minute. I’d really love to hear your thoughts about that. 

NA: Yeah, I think this is a good moment to just acknowledge and really honor Miss Jackie who contributed to the campaign in those early stages, but in a really critical way at that time. And then Charlene who was really the catalyst for the campaign in so many ways, and one of our advisors and real supports throughout, have since passed. And I do feel the heaviness of having been part of that organizing effort with two trans women of color who are no longer with us. And that means I'm telling the story. They're not telling the story. They might have a different take on any of the points I'm talking about right now or their own perspective on what happened or critique of how we organized. I sit with that, the kind of loss of their voices in this particular archive.

And I really wanna celebrate and make sure that I'm bringing their contributions into the story that's being told. And also know that, that my story is not their story. I think the other thing that I've gained a lot more perspective on in hindsight is that I think when you are organizing as a member of your own community or like marginalized identity group, I think there for a lot of people can be a really different level of personal work that's required to keep showing up for that. The pressure of being of the community and part of the community can create a lot of different kinds of anxieties or self-consciousness or ways that we have to claim who we are as a member of a group that's being oppressed. 

And I think working on this campaign made it clear to me how much previously I had been rewarded for being a trans person who could kind of tolerate the ignorance of others in order to participate in movements that were not focused on trans issues.So in order to be part of racial justice movements in order to be part of other kinds of issue-based campaigns that were not centered around queer or trans identities, I internalized that in the sense of, I'm someone that can be palatable, who can hang with other organizers, who doesn't have to bring my own identity forward all the time.

Those are certainly useful skills of being able to navigate and organize with people who are different than you. But I think it meant something to choose this fight where I was standing next to other trans people and like claiming them in a very public way and claiming myself as part of a group and to not let myself feel shame for how that might be perceived or the ways that that might be kind of dismissed or disregarded as a fringe issue or not something that had real significance to the city of Philadelphia or even to the left. 

I felt myself working through that in the course of this campaign to really be proud of our effort and, and to really be able to stand in it full. A lot of the people who really showed up for this campaign were people that were taking big risks to be vulnerable and who were a lot more isolated in their personal lives.

And I think in hindsight that made me more able going forward to choose the political fight, choose the organizing efforts and the spaces that I wanted to contribute to because it meant something to me, or it meant something to show up for the survival of other trans people.

And so I appreciate everything that this campaign taught me in terms of unlearning my own internalized oppression about that. And being like a lot more embracing of trans justice work as work that needed to happen, had legitimacy, was important to the left and needed to be taken seriously.

AWG: I think that's a great place for us to close with a reminder of just one more thing that we can take more seriously. Also ways of being generous with ourselves. So just wanna appreciate you for sharing all of those insights with us and going back down memory lane. 

NA: Thank you, Andrew.

AWG: Thank you, Nico, for being with us.

AWG: The Craft of Campaigns podcast is a project of the Organizing Skills Institute at Training for Change, and made possible by grassroots donors. Visit Training for Change for workshops, training tools, and other resources. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier. I’m Andrew Willis Garces. See you next time.