The Bodily Autonomy Institute: A Disabled and Trans Perspective

Facilitated by the Disability Project

October 8-9, 2024 |12:00pm - 2:30pm ET

This will be an online zoom event

This 2-part institute will use small group breakouts and political education conversations to engage participants on the following themes:

Examine the history and current impacts of eugenics in influencing anti-trans policies and reproductive rights rollbacks
Understanding the realities of bodily autonomy as experienced within disability community and how systemic ableism fuels all attacks on people’s right to self determination
Expand philanthropy’s capacity to identify ableism and eugenics as potent in the rise of attacks on bodily autonomy to develop the capacity for a nuanced assessment of funding needs that best support critical organizing to meet this specifically ableist informed onslaught of attacks.

*As each of these sessions is connected to the other, we strongly encourage participants to attend both.

Cost: $300 per participant. Sliding scale registration fees are available. Please indicate a request to discuss a sliding scale amount in your registration form.

This training is designed for staff, board members, grants panelists, and donors of grant-making institutions, donor networks, and funder affinity groups. Folks who are new to the issue of disability justice are very welcome to attend.

Please share with your networks through email, word of mouth, social media and website!

Meet the Presenters

Ericka Ayodele DixonDisability Project Senior National Organizer at the Transgender Law Center

Ericka Ayodele Dixon is a Black, queer, disabled, nonbinary femme currently serving as the Disability Project Senior National Organizer at the Transgender Law Center. Ericka is first and foremost an educator, writer and facilitator, and has extensive experience developing curriculum and training based on the intersections of disability justice, racial justice and gender justice. Ericka has extensive experience in the anti-violence field, working with survivors of sexual violence, intimate partner violence and state violence, using an abolitionist lens throughout. Most recently, Ericka works to illuminate in abolitionist and other movement spaces the need to recognize and dismantle the disability carceral state, which in part can be found in the areas of guardianship, group homes and sheltered work spaces.

As a survivor of sexual violence themself, Ericka believes this work is both deeply personal and political and grounds everything they do using a queer, Black feminist lens. Ericka believes that the only way to win is to tackle the eugenic state head on, utilizing the wisdom and strategies that BIPOC queer and trans disabled community have been cultivating since time immemorial.

Sebastian MargaretCo-Senior National Organiser of the Disability Project

Sebastian Margaret is an anti – ableism and disability community educator,capacity builder and strategist. They are the Co-Senior National Organiser of theDisability Project at the Transgender Law Center, launched through a 2019 Soros Justice fellowship which seeks to magnify the leadership, collective power, and visibility of LGBTQ disabled/Deaf/ill communities.

A disabled TGNC queer, Sebastian was raised in Yorkshire and are informed richly by white working-class racial justice values and by coming of age in the pushback to Thatcher’s Britain. Arriving in the US fleeing organised right-wing violence, Sebastian is passionate about the validity and inherent glory of imperfect body and minds, our right to body sovereignty and the critical need for disabled leadership in any justice-oriented movement work that plans to win. Sebastian works to highlight the exclusion, criminalization, exploitation, and oppression experienced by disabled communities; particularly those living at the forefront of disposable
and the cross-hairs of eugenics and population control. They have been working to insert and reveal disability justice values, politics and strategies in multiple justice movements, while supporting multi – issue capacity and vibrancy in disability communities for decades.

You can often find Sebastian inventing fictitious names for their service dog as an act of quiet resistance to everyday ableism, while clutching tight to a good cup ‘o tea. Sebastian can be reached at : accesschange7@gmail.com

About Us

About the Disability Project

The Disability Project breaks isolation, grows connection, builds leadership and infrastructure for trans and queer disability, Deaf, ill and Mad communities, while increasing Disability Justice capacity in the movements that seek to serve them. The Disability Project is staffed by a multi-racial, cross-class, cross-disability and multi-generational disabled, trans & NBY team. Ericka A. Dixon and Sebastin Margaret together co-lead the project’s work and strategy. We believe that work about ableism is work about Eugenics, state control, and supremacy and because of that is inherently abolitionist.

About Funders for Justice

FFJ is a national funder organizing platform for grantmakers, donor networks, and funder affinity groups to mobilize resources to grassroots grantmaking led by and for people of color, at the intersections of racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, ending criminalization, and building models for community safety & justice.