Non-negotiable guiding principles:
These principles are the values that unify our work. They are a work in progress. We know we will make mistakes, but we are committed to taking responsibility, holding ourselves accountable, and continuing to show up with integrity and repair.  

  • Affirming decolonial solidarity with the Ohlone peoples in the Bay Area and indigenous communities across Turtle Island. Liberation on stolen land must center Indigenous sovereignty, land return, and the dismantling of settler colonial structures. We do this work knowing we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone, the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original stewards of this land, the Ramaytush Ohlone never ceded, lost nor forgot their responsibilities to the land  and for all peoples who reside in their territory. As Guests, we recognize that we benefit from living and organizing on their traditional homeland, and affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples.

  • Centering the Trans Experience
    We center the trans experience meaningfully, ensuring that trans representation is authentic and not harmful, exploitative, symbolic, or superficial but beneficial in a tangible way. In the spirit of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, we recognize that trans liberation has always been carried forward by Black, brown, Indigenous, disabled, undocumented, low-income, and formerly incarcerated trans women and femmes. We hold a deep responsibility to confront and dismantle transmisogyny, not just in the world but in ourselves and our formations. Centering trans experience means centering the lives and experiences of those most impacted by violence.

  • Committing to anti-carceral, abolitionist work following the legacy of Compton’s Cafeteria riot, an uprising against police violence, racialized discrimination, and the policing of gender nonconformity. We do not cooperate with law enforcement or state agencies that uphold incarceration and surveillance. Instead, we invest in community safety and transformative justice models. Abolition means not only removing GEO Group, but building a city where punishment is not the default response to harm.

  • Opposing gentrification and capitalist real estate development models that displace the most vulnerable and prioritize profit over people and collective liberation. We reject corporate funding, real estate speculation, and philanthropic handouts that compromise our values or depoliticize our struggle.

  • Acknowledging the housing crisis and the overlapping structural barriers faced by trans, immigrant, disabled, and low-income communities, especially those unhoused. We believe housing is a right, and that the buildings where our transcestors resisted should be used for healing, not harm. We support harm reduction models and safe injection sites.

  • Advocating for reparations caused by slavery and white supremacy and acknowledging the intergenerational harm caused. We organize is shaped by a commitment to Black liberation, Indigenous resurgence, and economic justice. We decenter whiteness and white spokespersons, and strive to raise and center BIPOC voices.

  • Standing in anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist solidarity with the Palestinian people, recognizing that the struggle for trans liberation is inseparable from the global struggle against apartheid, occupation, and colonial violence. We uplift the principle that none of us are free until all of us are free. We support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and any other anti-Zionist boycotts (including, for example, any association with Manny’s and the Civic Joy Fund).

  • Not platforming elected officials, or those who seek to represent us without accountability to our communities. This work is for people at the margins, informed by lived experience, not tokenized by institutions. We work with government officials only when it materially advances the community's needs on our terms.

  • Practicing Disability Justice and Opposing Ableism
    We are committed to dismantling ableism in all its forms. We recognize that disabled people, especially Black, brown, Indigenous, trans, immigrant, and neurodivergent people, are disproportionately targeted by carceral systems, excluded from public processes, and denied access to healing, housing, and safety. We also recognize that colonialism, racial capitalism, and the prison-industrial complex are not only extractive and violent systems, they are engines of mass disablement. From forced labor to medical neglect, environmental violence to incarceration, these systems systematically destroy the health and well-being of our communities.

We honor the enduring wisdom, resistance, and interdependence of disabled communities and commit to centering accessibility in every part of our organizing. Access is not an afterthought, it is foundational to liberation.

We name the mass death and disablement caused by the ongoing HIV epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, both of which have been shaped by the negligence and profiteering of government policymakers and the medical-industrial complex. Long COVID, a severely debilitating condition affecting every organ system, continues to rise even as public health officials abandon prevention and care. Trans people experience the highest rates of Long COVID of any population. These overlapping plagues are not over, and our movement refuses to look away.

  • Honoring Sex Work as Work and Resisting Criminalization: We affirm the rights, safety, and dignity of sex workers, many of whom have been historically targeted, arrested, and pushed into reentry systems like the one at 111 Taylor. We reject the framing of reentry and transitional housing programs that criminalize survival economies and reproduce the carceral state under a rehabilitative guise.

  • Addressing ecological interconnectedness and our obligations to the more-than-human world in the face of climate catastrophe and environmental extraction. We reject frameworks that treat the earth and its resources as disposable or commodifiable.

  • Uplifting Mutual Aid and Community-Based Care Models: We believe our survival is rooted in mutual aid, resource redistribution, and non-hierarchical solidarity. We prioritize collective care strategies over charity, case management, or saviorism.

  • Rejecting Nonprofit Industrial Complex Co-optation: We recognize how the nonprofit system often absorbs radical movements, sanitizes resistance, and gatekeeps funding. We move in alignment with our community, not compliance. We will not trade our values for institutional legitimacy or political favors.

  • Fighting for Intergenerational and Cultural Continuity: Our resistance is rooted in history and futurity. We fight for those who came before us, like the Queens of the Valley who stood up at Compton’s and those who will come after. We refuse to let carceral institutions erase our elders or deny trans youth a future. Our spaces will hold trans culture, joy, and grief alike.