Like last year, the event started with a prayer by L.A.’s first human inhabitants, the Tongva. Gloria Arellanes urged people to respect all life in the area, even bugs.

Many representatives of the trans community appeared during the rally, including an advocate for LBGTQ youth in juvenile hall and Michaé Pulido of the TransLatin@ Coalition, who works to get California laws changed vis-a-vis LGBTQ. Pullido noted that the trans community faces a lot of violence in society because “they’re afraid of our magic, afraid of our ability to reject and transcend gender, afraid of our own unique femininity. Because what is femininity? It is what you try to strip us of? It is why we fail; we fail these standards, we fail at your gender, we fail at your binary because our trancestors did. They did it and existed. So we claim our femininity because we know our femme is sacred, but it can also get us killed—especially if my femme does not look like every other woman here today. But what does womanhood and femininity really look like? There is no standard. We could all embrace femme and be embraced for doing it.” Next the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles (https://www.facebook.com/TransChorusLA) sang a beautiful version of Over the Rainbow.

Gloria Allred (pictured above), recently the subject of the Netflix documentary Seeing Allred, spoke passionately about the right’s attack on women’s choice, heightened racism and homophobia under trump and numerous other issues. “There will be a reckoning,” she said, “because women are empowered in a way that we have never been empowered before! And the brave men who stand up in support of us, let’s give them a round of applause. . . . We are the change we wish to see in the world. In the words of Susan B. Anthony, ‘Failure is impossible.’ Fight on!”

Other speakers included Margaret Prescod of Pacifica Radio and Women of Color in Global Women’s Strike, Laura Jimenez of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and Marwa Rifahie of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA). (Many of the speakers are listed here: https://womensmarchla.org/speakers/.)

Neither this nor last year’s March were as well-attended as the original 2017 March (said to be 750,000), but turnout was still impressive. During the rally, 250,000 was announced, but it seemed like quite a few more arrived as the march progressed.