Art installation on National Mall shares trans voices of hope, defiance

One quilt read “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for trans Idahoans.” Another, adorned with floral patterns and the transgender flag, asked to not have to classify themselves as male or female on their South Dakota driver’s license. And a third, from Kansas, read: “I define my existence and I exist defiantly.”

These quilts – some sewn, some painted – were part of a 9,000-square-foot art installation that stretched across the National Mall on Saturday, its 258 panels stitching together a story of transgender pride and defiance less than a mile from the White House where President Donald Trump and his administration have sought to roll back transgender rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union, whose legal challenge against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors has escalated to the Supreme Court, planned the installation, called the “Freedom to Be Monument.” The organization began by sending quilting kits to hundreds of transgender people and allies around the country, asking them to answer the same question: “What does freedom mean to me?”

One panel by the ACLU of Kansas responded to the prompt with an image of a stick-figure family.

“We want the freedom to live here,” the plaque read. “Trans people often flee rural areas for great opportunity and safety. Freedom to be, to us, means the freedom to slay – to stay and still be able to keep ourselves and our family safe.”

The demonstration kicked off the first day of festivities for WorldPride, an international LGBTQ+ festival being hosted this year in D.C. Though up to 3 million people are expected to flock to Washington for the festivities, the 23-day festival comes at a tense moment for transgender rights.

In the first two months of his administration, Trump signed executive orders to restrict transgender care for youth and to officially recognize only two sexes (male and female). He has also ordered transgender people be banned from military service, and though a federal judge in Washington state blocked enforcement of that order in March, the Supreme Court ruled earlier this month to allow the ban as litigation proceeds.

Trump has also directed agencies to issue government documents showing people’s sex at conception, to stop using gender identity or preferred pronouns and to maintain women-only spaces in prisons and shelters. In February, after Trump issued his executive order recognizing only two sexes, the National Park Service removed references to transgender people from its website commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a landmark event in the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The art installation also comes a month before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether states can ban certain gender-transition medical treatments for young people.

At an event unveiling the quilt Saturday, Peppermint – the ACLU’s Artist Ambassador for Transgender Justice and drag performer of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” fame – offered some pointed critique of the Trump administration in her opening speech.

“From his very first day in office, the current president” she began, before being interrupted by boos from the crowd, “whose name I shall not mention, has made his goal very clear: to push transgender people out of public life by denying the freedoms to be ourselves.”

“It’s easy to get lost in the rhetoric of those frightened by our freedom – talk of bathrooms or sports or lies about our health care,” she continued. “But here’s the thing – what terrifies them the most is our joy. That’s what it is and that’s what this is. These quilts, this art, all of us here: this is a testament to our joy. Today is protest, but in true queer fashion, it is also a party, darling.”

The rally struck a joyful tone, trading the impassioned chanting often heard at protest for live music and DJ performances. Signs on the stage read “trans joy is protest.”

However, Peppermint also reminded the audience that the art installation took inspiration from a much more somber quilt that had occupied the Mall decades earlier.

“Let’s take a moment to remember that we are not the first to stitch resistance into fabric,” she said.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt consisted of 1,920 panels when it was unfolded on the Mall in 1987, at the height of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. Each panel represented someone whose life had been taken by the illness. Now, more than 30 years later, the quilt is in San Francisco and has grown to nearly 50,000 panels and weighs more than 50 tons, making it the largest community art project in the world.

Cleve Jones, the LGBTQ+ activist who conceived of the idea for the AIDS Memorial Quilt, appeared via video to speak at the demonstration. He said he was honored that his idea had inspired a more hopeful quilt – one that still advocated for the rights of LGBTQ+ people but differed because it was “a living quilt celebrating the lives of trans people today who are alive and kicking and fighting and building the bridges and creating the movements and leading.”

In the fall of 2023, as it become clear that U.S. v. Skrmetti would be heading to the Supreme Court, ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter began wracking her brain for the best way to spread a message of transgender resilience. It had been growing increasingly difficult to organize public demonstrations for transgender rights, Branstetter said, as growing numbers of people cited fear for their personal safety as a reason they hesitated to demonstrate.

But then she remembered the AIDS Memorial Quilt – the way it had spoken for people who voices had been taken from them by a disease, and the way it had united people from a plethora of backgrounds. By the spring of 2024, she was distributing quilting quits to organizations around the nation, asking them to create art that defined what freedom meant to them.

“In advocacy messaging and in political messaging, there’s a tendency to look at things from a top-down perspective where we have to run polls and focus groups to find exactly the right word,” Branstetter said. “I have a lot of faith in the people ourselves to find the right words to capture our experience.”

Hundreds of people milled around the quilt throughout the day, reading the panels, listening to speakers and dancing to music.

Night Harrison and Vinny Lockhart, both 19-year-olds from West Virginia, left their homes at 1 a.m. and traveled nine hours to see their artwork on the Mall. The two met at the ACLU’s Appalachian Queer Youth Summit, where they collaborated on one of the panels. They depicted the outline of their home state and filled it with their state bird, tree and flower, plus symbols like pitchforks and a coal-miner’s hat, to show that LGBTQ+ people exist in rural spaces.

“All of us worked together to make the quilt piece for this and put our own lived experiences into it, all the emotions of living as queer and trans youth in a state where it’s not very accepted,” Harrison said. “It definitely has a lot of meaning behind it.”

One of their camp counselors, 22-year-old Jaye Hicks, also attended the rally and grew emotional when talking about how her campers, like Harrison and Lockhart, have come out of their shells and found community by participating in projects like the Freedom to Be Memorial. She said she had traveled to Washington to protest before, but Saturday felt special because it felt like a celebration as much as a protest.

“We’re not screaming at legislators, we’re not rattling signs at the steps of the courthouse,” Hicks said. “This is queer joy. We’ve displayed so much anger and rage and hurt and now we get to actually just display joy and pride in its purest form.”