Thanks for subscribing to WELLREAD. For the last six years we’ve been providing folks with the need to know (NTK) news, calls to actions and resources for how to stay engaged and resourced along the way. But now, we’ve added an option to “upgrade to paid” to help sustain our work. While we will never put our content behind a pay wall, we depend on the support of our community to keep us going. 💛

Upgrade to paid

It is not a good year for women’s rights. This week alone Florida introduced legislation to ban abortion at 6-weeks, Tennessee passed a bill gutting marriage equality and banning drag shows, Iowa followed other states in depriving gender affirming care for minors and conservatives at CPAC call for “the eradication of transness”. Unless we are fighting for all women, we are fighting for no women. Feminism must account for all the unique and specific ways women are marginalized. This includes race, gender, sexuality and more. Racism informs transphobia, which then informs sexism and so on and so forth.

Laverne Cox reminds us of whats possible “I think trans women, and trans people in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you’re supposed to be to live a more authentic life.”

International Women’s Day is a call to action to embody the intersectional credo of Black Feminists from the Combahee River Collective who said “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

Kerri (she/her)

Art by Black Women Radicals

NTK (need to know)

• Women are disproportionately diagnosed with mental problems. But what if the crisis is one not of chemical imbalances, but power imbalances? Are women really more mentally ill than men?

• Even if we beat every anti-trans bill in the nation tomorrow, too many trans young people would still be fighting to survive. Anti-Trans Laws Aren’t Symbolic. They Seek to Erase Us From Public Life

• In much of the world, International Women’s Day has become a bland and largely apolitical event. But it has its origins in working women’s struggles — International Women’s Day is a socialist holiday.

• There is much that the global feminist movement can learn from the current women’s struggle in Iran and their vision. Iranian Feminists Are at the Front Lines of the feminist movement.

• That stakeholders in traditionally oppressive positions of power are adopting the aesthetics and slogans developed by social justice advocates to fortify the status quo is neither a coincidence nor a mistake. The co-optation of liberatory language.

Upgrade to paid

SOLIDARITY

Despite the white washed and watered down campaigns of capitalist America, International Women’s Day has socialist roots. It emerged out of a hotbed of labor activism when 15,000 garment workers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side staged a strike to protest poor working conditions and pay. The event inspired the Socialist Party to host the first ever National Women’s Day in 1909.

It was not a celebration of #girlpower but a reminder of the ongoing and intersectional struggle for the conditions where everyone can be free and thrive. Corporate events and social media campaigns are wholly insufficient in addressing the historical and systemic inequities that got us here and continue to reinforce unequal and unjust conditions. But when we reclaim the radical roots of this holiday, we can learn from those who came before and embody the organizing strategies that are needed for real transformative change. Check out this Women’s Strike Syllabus by the Red Papers.

Art by @WorkingFamiliesParty

WHAT WE ❤️

Here are some of the books that are moving us right now:

Liberated To The Bone: Histories, Bodies, Futures, by Susan Raffo

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing and Complex Trauma, by Stephani Woo

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity, by Dr Nadine Burke Harris

Oppression And The Body: Roots, Resistance, Resolution, by Christine Caldwell

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Adreotti

Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, by Cara Page and Erica Woodward

On the 🗓️

EMBODIED SOCIAL JUSTICE CERTIFICATE: A one-of-a-kind, 3-month certificate program led by Rev angel Kyodo williams and faculty who are committed to collective liberation, increasing awareness and unlearning of oppressive social structures, and repairing belonging. 

INSTITUTE FOR RADICAL PERMISSION: Led by Sonya Renee Taylor and adrienne maree brown, the Institute offers a wealth of collected wisdom from Sonya, adrienne, and over a dozen different integration practitioners that shows you how you, too, can begin a liberatory journey into your own divine power. Ongoing enrollment.

EMBODYING EQUITY AT KRIPALU: Throughout this weekend training with Michelle C Johnson and Kerri Kelly, we will examine how we’ve been shaped by systems of domination and what it’s going to take to heal, repair, reimagine and rebuild a world that takes care of everyone.

WE-NESS

We are volcanoes.

Thanks for subscribing to WELLREAD. For the last six years we’ve been providing folks with the need to know (NTK) news, calls to actions and resources for how to stay engaged and resourced along the way. But now, we’ve added an option to “upgrade to paid” to help sustain our work. While we will never put our content behind a pay wall, we depend on the support of our community to keep us going. 💛