Open Letter to Vice President Kamala Harris
🚨 We are delivering this letter in-person to leaders of the Youth Council, Women's Caucus, and LGBTQ+ Caucus at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Sign on by August 19th to make sure your voice is represented. 🚨
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Vice President Harris,
After months of cross-movement advocacy from progressive youth groups, we appreciate President Biden’s decision to step down from the candidacy and pass the torch to a new generation of Democratic leadership. With your nomination as the 2024 Democratic candidate for President and your selection of Governor Tim Walz as your running mate, the work for a bold and progressive agenda that resonates with the lived experiences of young people can begin.
The Young Feminist Party is a youth-led and people-powered movement for constitutional sex equality in the form of the Equal Rights Amendment. Our movement — which brings together over 14,000 young organizers from all 50 states — is unapologetic in our vision of reproductive justice, which encompasses the right to abortion, gender self-determination, and freedom from gender-based violence and is rooted in racial and queer justice. Our commitment to this vision extends beyond our borders. We acknowledge the ongoing genocide and femicide in Palestine as part of the conversation about constitutional sex equality; as a movement, we are committed to a transnational vision of gender justice that includes an end to apartheid and illegal occupation of Palestine. We call on our country to end our complicity in all colonial and imperialist violence abroad, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sudan, to Haiti, and beyond.
Our movement has built historic momentum for the Equal Rights Amendment during the Biden-Harris administration. We launched the first-ever Congressional Caucus for the Equal Rights Amendment led by Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Cori Bush. We organized dozens of direct actions, from school walkouts to shutting down Constitution Avenue, that mobilized tens of thousands of young people. We passed multiple state-level measures in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, and contacted over 1 million voters to support gender justice at the ballot box. Just a few weeks ago, we convened dozens of young feminists from across the country in Washington D.C. for a weekend of visioning ahead of our mobilization this fall. Our movement is prepared to reach hundreds of thousands of voter contacts this election season to advance our feminist cause.
During your 2020 presidential campaign, you committed to publishing the ERA in your first 100 days to finally deliver on the promise of equal legal personhood for women in the United States. You’ve explicitly campaigned on the promise of restoring Roe. As Vice President, it was, and is, within your power to push President Biden to do just that; however, your presidency presents an undeniable opportunity to carry out the promise you made in 2020 and are reiterating on the campaign trail ahead of November. The symbolism of the first Black and Asian woman president concluding the century-long fight for the ERA is not lost on us. We appreciate your dedication to finalizing the ERA, and look forward to working with you to carry out your vision. This work begins with your campaign adopting an unapologetic, public stance of immediate publication of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Young people demand the Equal Rights Amendment as the only comprehensive response to a nationwide epidemic of abortion restrictions, attacks on gender-affirming care, and inadequate Title IX protections. Young people demand the Equal Rights Amendment as a response to the culture of misogyny perpetuated by former President Trump and Senator J.D. Vance. Young people demand the Equal Rights Amendment now, once and for all, to remedy the political violence engendered by women and queer people’s exclusion from our country’s foundational document.
We write to you following yet another Supreme Court term in which challenges to extremist state-level abortion restrictions have put everyone’s abortion rights in limbo. We are relieved that mifepristone is safe — for now. We are angry that the Supreme Court shirked its decision-making burden in Moyle v. Idaho and refused to affirm abortion as a form of healthcare. We are still reeling from recent decisions out of Arizona, Texas, and Florida that have implemented near-total abortion bans and robbed pregnant people of their access to emergency abortion care. Young people demand executive action to provide a strong, comprehensive legal tool to defend against these attacks on abortion and guarantee access to abortion regardless of zip code, income, race, ability or any other facet of one’s identity.
Young queer people are also bearing the brunt of anti-LGBTQ legislation and rhetoric in states across the country. 638 bills have been introduced in 43 states to limit access to gender-affirming care and trans participation in youth sports; 42 bills in 24 states have been introduced to ban or severely limit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. We know that young queer people, especially young queer people of color, are especially vulnerable to domestic violence, housing insecurity, and other forms of marginalization. Young people demand executive action to enhance federal protections for queer youth and prevent state legislatures from trying to legislate away our existence.
Donald Trump’s vision for his term—contained within the Heritage Foundation’s so-called Mandate for Leadership, or Project 2025—includes stripping protections from LGBTQ+ people, banning abortion nationwide and limiting contraception access, and stacking the federal bureaucracy with his similarly bigoted acolytes. The ERA would not just act as a defense against these devastating policies; it would expand the scope of gender justice and ensure that no administration could carry out what is proposed in Project 2025. But the ERA isn’t just about defense. It’s about going on the offense to create a bold, progressive vision of a future where gender justice is realized. A future that energizes young people. Vice President Harris, you can champion this vision and not just be known as the first-woman President but the President that put women and LGBTQ+ people in the Constitution.
Our movement of young feminists calls on you to boldly affirm the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment on the campaign trail and deliver on your promise within the first 100 days for your presidency. To this end, we call on you to explicitly adopt the publication of the ERA—not “ratification” or nonspecific, aspirational alternatives—as part of your platform. Leading constitutional scholars and legal bodies, including Laurence Tribe and the American Bar Association, agree: the ERA has fulfilled all requirements of Article V of the Constitution for publication. This position is also endorsed by the 121 cosponsors of Representative Bush and Senator Gillibrand’s ERA Now resolution (HJ Res 82/SJ Res 29). Vice President, it is time for your platform to reflect the legal truth, and the will of your party.
Upon invitation from the DNC Youth Coalition Director, representatives of the Young Feminist Party will attend the Democratic National Convention to build support for a presidential and party platform that includes the immediate publication of the Equal Rights Amendment and an end to U.S. support for Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people. But our advocacy won’t stop here. Our movement will continue organizing until our demands are realized. We will not let the fear of Project 2025–a playbook already unfolding for our communities in the South and Midwest–quell our advocacy this election season.
Our fight for constitutional gender justice has spanned across communities, across generations, and from coast to coast. We are closer than we have ever been to realizing our movement’s goal. Be the leader to see it through.
Signed,
The Young Feminist Party