Socialism 2025: Full Schedule

10:00am CDT

Reproductive Justice Strategy Session

Thursday July 3, 2025 10:00am - 1:00pm CDT

The anti-abortion movement is stepping up their attacks on abortion access, providers and people seeking care are being criminalized, and patients are dying from pregnancy complications, unable to access emergency care.

How can repro justice activists meet the moment and harness the enormous support for abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, and healthcare access and build a sustainable movement that wins power? How do we organize those outraged by Trump's agenda and extremist laws taking away our bodily autonomy? How do we support those seeking abortion care when abortion funds and clinics face financial distress? How has the rise of telehealth care and self-managed abortion changed the priorities for activists? How do we effectively oppose an extremist movement seeking to ban abortion nationwide, enshrine "fetal personhood" laws that would give legal protections to embryos and criminalize pregnant people, and eliminate protections for queer and trans people?

If you are a reproductive justice activist, a healthcare provider or abortion fund worker, or interested in getting involved in the fight to expand abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights, please join for this facilitated discussion. RSVP at this link REQUIRED. (If you get an error, please open the form in a new tab or window.)

Thursday July 3, 2025 10:00am - 1:00pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

2:30pm CDT

Country Queers: A Conversation About Community Care and Memory Work in End Times

Thursday July 3, 2025 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT

TBA

Join author Rae Garringer and editor Dao X. Tran for a conversation about lessons learned through the twelve-year journey of the Country Queers oral history project and podcast, culminating in the book Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket, 2024). We’ll talk about community-based oral history work, queer and trans resilience and resistance in rural communities, and the lessons that rural Appalachian and southern country queers have to teach us all about taking care of one another across political difference, in the end times of fascism and climate catastrophe.

Speakers

Rae Garringer

Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, audio producer, and goat farmer based in southeastern West Virginia where they were raised. They are the author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket 2024) and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer... Read More →

Dao X. Tran

DAO X. TRAN was born in Mỹ Tho—and made in the USA. She’s passionate about democratizing the stories being heard and finds curiosity about our world essential. She is the managing editor for and on the editorial board of Haymarket Books. When not wrangling manuscripts—or scouting... Read More →

Thursday July 3, 2025 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

4:30pm CDT

Abortion Bans as State Gender-Based Violence

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT

TBA

Three years since the Dobbs ruling, the horrors inflicted by abortion bans began immediately and haven’t stopped. Maternal and infant mortality have surged; gruesome stories of people experiencing pregnancy complications pushed to the brink of death are a near-daily occurrence; and abusers have greater power than ever over their victims. Too often, abortion is misunderstood as a policy debate in the abstract—in reality, the laws that govern our reproductive decision-making can be life-or-death, and are inextricable from a broader policy landscape of state gender-based violence.

Speakers

Kylie Cheung

Kylie Cheung is the author of four books on gender and politics, including Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans with Pluto Press. Cheung’s most recent book on gender-based violence, Survivor Injustice, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. She is... Read More →

Sponsors

Pluto

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation, Intro

4:30pm CDT

United Struggles: Intersectional Resistance to Bodily Autonomy Restrictions

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT

TBA

This panel connects the parallel attacks on reproductive and trans rights within a broader analysis of fascist control over marginalized bodies. Speakers examine effective coalition strategies that center the most vulnerable communities in our resistance movements.

Speakers

TBD

Lyra McMillan

Lyra McMillan is co-chair, and founder, of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America’s Bodily Autonomy Trans & Queer Liberation Campaign. Under her leadership, Alexandria City and Arlington County, Virginia have enacted sanctuary policies affirming and protecting the trans community’s... Read More →

Lyra Spencer

Lyra Spencer (she/her) is a labor organizer working for SEIU local 73, is a union member of the Chicago News Guild, and is the current cochair of Chicago DSA’s trans rights project campaign.

Sponsors

DSA

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

10:00am CDT

Gender and the Rising Right

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

The far-right in the US and abroad has placed gender at the center of fascist politics, obsessing over trans rights, abortion, and the birthrate and attacking the very presence of the word gender in federal administration and universities. How does the right build its power through a focus on gender, and what is the role of gender in a resurgent left?

Speakers

Rae Garringer

Andrea J. Ritchie

Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is an abolitionist Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades... Read More →

Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books, Enemy Feminisms, Full Surrogacy Now, and Abolish the Family, have been translated into nine languages. Sophie grew up in France, half-British, half-German, but now lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses on utopian theory at the Brooklyn... Read More →

Sarah Leonard

Sarah Leonard is the editor in chief of Lux.

TBD

Sponsors

Lux

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

10:00am CDT

Making Sense of the Anti-Trans Turn

Saturday July 5, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Trump and the MAGAtized Republican Party have taken advantage of voters’ anxieties and created a sense of panic surrounding transgender issues. However, what remains less clear are the reasons why these appeals resonate with certain voters, what drives this particular political reaction, and how the Left can effectively respond.

Speakers

Danielle Bullock

Danielle Bullock is a queer, Brooklyn-born artist, activist and public school educator. She is a union chapter leader and member of the MORE caucus of the UFT. She is also a member of the Tempest Collective.

Eric Maroney

Eric Maroney (he/him) teaches at Gateway Community College where he is active with his faculty union. His work has appeared in Tempest Magazine, New Politics, Spectre Journal, and the English Journal. He is a member of the Tempest Collective.

Saturday July 5, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

1:00pm CDT

Carceral Natalism: Technology and Surveillance in the Post-Dobbs Era

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT

TBA

The fall of Roe ushered in both new abortion restrictions and novel methods for their enforcement. This session will chart the anti-abortion movement’s adoption of surveillance techniques that have long been used in the policing of racialized populations in the United States and abroad, from location tracking to biometric security. As the carceral state tightens its grip on our bodies and futures, the mantra “we keep us safe” takes on renewed urgency.

Speakers

Emily Janakiram

Megan Lessard

Sponsors

NYC for Abortion Rights

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

7:00pm CDT

Enemy Feminisms: Reckoning with TERFs, Policewomen, and Zionist Feminists

Saturday July 5, 2025 7:00pm - 8:30pm CDT

TBA

Join Sophie Lewis for an unflinching tour of two hundred years of enemy feminisms—from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today's anti-abortion, TERF, and Zionist feminists. By way of a reckoning with these counterproductive, violent feminisms, this session will make the case for the bold, liberatory, antifascist feminist politics we need instead.

Speakers

Sophie Lewis

Saturday July 5, 2025 7:00pm - 8:30pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

7:00pm CDT

Sexual Democracy, Moral Panics, and Trans Politics

Saturday July 5, 2025 7:00pm - 8:30pm CDT

TBA

What are the consequences of state legislators voting on the definition of sex, or a president demanding every agency in the federal government construe sex as fixed at conception? How might trans communities respond to being the target of a manufactured moral panic? What alternate visions of "sexual democracy" might transgender activism and theorizing propose in response?

Speakers

Paisley Currah

Paisley Currah is a Professor of Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Currah’s prize-winning 2022 book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, revealed the hidden logics that... Read More →

Saturday July 5, 2025 7:00pm - 8:30pm CDT
TBA

Gender-Sexuality-Liberation

10:00am CDT

Reproductive Justice Means Palestinian Liberation and Abolition

Sunday July 6, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Reproductive justice is deeply intertwined with the struggle for a free Palestine and for a world free of colonial violence. How can the power of the reproductive justice framework help us build an intersectional movement that encompasses police and prison abolition, Palestinian liberation and abortion access and bodily autonomy for all? Speakers explore the coalitions being built between feminists in Chicago and internationally, organizing for reproductive justice in its most expansive form.

Speakers

TBD

Noor Hasan

Noor (she/her) is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Noor is a long time Chicagoan and community health researcher. Her last presentation at the Socialism Conference followed the 1936-1939 Revolution in Palestine through a feminist lens! To learn more about the Palestinian... Read More →

Erica Bentley

Erica Bentley (she/they) is a co-director of Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition & Solidarity, where she works primarily with mothers of incarcerated police torture survivors. Her ideologies are deeply rooted in collective liberation and informed by ongoing study and relationship-building... Read More →

Sponsors