Reflection on SEAT Advocacy Day at the Texas Capitol and Work Ahead

 Friends:

I had the honor and privilege of attending Students Engaged for Advancing Texas—or simply, SEAT Advocacy Day a week ago on Monday,  April 21, 2025. At least 500 students and a few elders like myself had the privilege of being there. It was a daylong conference that had a plenary session together with breakout sessions on a range of issues for youth, including school funding, protecting immigrant students, DEI & LGBTQ erasure, religious freedom, book bans, mental health, and menstrual equity.

By far, the most popular one was on protecting immigrant students, indicating the gravity of the situation, together with the number of students impacted by animus towards immigrants that is, in great part, mirrored this legislative session in SB 1798, as previously posted. Still, there were so many people present that all the other sessions were also well attended.

As you can see from the photo below, they were also able to squeeze in a press conference. Check out this photo below with Texas State Representative Donna Howard.

Photo by Nora Dayton

At the current moment, SEAT is preparing for:

• Monday's Senate hearing, testifying against SB 2101 public library censorship.
• Monday's expected floor vote on HB 267, criminalizing educators.
• Tuesday's House PubEd hearing
• Tuesday's expected floor vote adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
• TBD floor vote on SB 13 – SEAT will co-host a read-in at the main rotunda with TFN.
• TBD floor vote on HB 1773 (student trustee), which passed committee! Hoping Calendars gets it on the floor soon.

Photo by Nora Dayton

Here is a photo of SEAT co-founder who I am so proud to know. Both Cameron Samuels and SEAT have been featured in The Texas Monthly, Teen Vogue, and The Texas Tribune on several occasions.

I had the experience and honor of testifying with Cameron on Senate Bill 3, Texas’ anti-CRT bill that passed during the 2021 Session of the Texas State Legislature. Cameron's succinct testimony that day resulted in a round of applause from the Senate gallery, despite norms of decorum. 

In the years since we met that day, Cameron has mobilized hundreds of youth to take a stand against book bans, anti-transgender bills, and turning school libraries, as they've done in Houston, into detention centers.

Photo by Nora Dayton

I could not be more pleased to see that Cameron is pursuing a career in policy and will soon be joining us at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin.

I like this photo taken of me here by photographer Nora Dayton because it reminds me of the conversation I was having at that very moment with a parent who had attended the summit with her daughter. She felt concerned about any animus people might hold toward advocates and wanted to make sure that this space was safe for her daughter.

I told her that the only animus these youth have experienced at the Capitol has been by legislators with bills that they see and feel as hateful towards them. For example, I shared, there is animus against immigrant students and trans youth in the hundreds of policies filed against them. She seemed relieved and thanked me for sharing.

All in all, it was not only a momentous but a historic occasion. Super inspiring. I have never seen so many youth at the Texas Capitol. Whatever happens this legislative session, all Texans must know that our youth are organized and on fire. Our future is in great hands!

-Angela Valenzuela

Oaxaca's Third Gender—"Las Muxes: El Tercer Género de Oaxaca" [YouTube Video]

As we think in our own country of trans and LGBTQ rights, "Las Muxes" [pronounced 'MOO-ches'] from the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico—and specifically from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—remind us that gender is not only fluid but an unquestioned, accepted part of life in different parts of the world. Moreover, this is hardly a phenomenon that derives from our ostensibly "woke" moment, but is Indigenous and centuries old, predating Columbus' invasion of the Americas. 

I am readily reminded of Two-Spirit peoples and ways of knowing and being in Native North America about which there is a growing scholarly literature (e.g., Robinson, 2020). In short, what is today considered by some to be divergent is actually native to this continent. How cool is that?

If you listen below to the YouTube video (in Spanish), you learn that las Muxes are born into male bodies, but do not identify as men. Nor do they identify as women. Nor are they transexuals, transvestites, or homosexuals. Instead, they are considered a "tercer género," or "third gender." Their dream is to marry heterosexual men which is not easily achieved.

They live dignified lives in the context of their own community and society. As expressed by one of them, their primary problem occurs with respect to Mexican government policies that disallow them to attend secondary schools and to otherwise get formally educated. 

This becomes salient at the secondary level because it is by the age of 12 or 13 when they come into an awareness of their gender and schools don't allow them to dress like girls or women. Consequently, they are forced to take up roles associated with the care of the home and assisting with community festivities. They get relegated to gendered occupational roles like seamstresses, weavers, cooks, hair stylists, and so on. Moreover, the state's reinforcement of rigid gender identities constructs a specific kind of gender identity that alienates and excludes them from educational opportunities and that further lead to discrimination. sexual violence, and exploitation.

A text I've not read about the Muxe but quickly found is this one, researched by a former professor of mine, Dr. Alfredo Mirandé, titled, Behind the Mask: Gender Hybridity in a Zapotec Community (2019). There is also this wonderful movie on Netflix that embraces the complexities of Muxe identity titled. The Secret of the River (El Secreto del Rio) that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Scholars like Maria Lugones urge us in the modern era to consider gender from the perspective of how people that have been colonized, struggled historically not solely with the rigidity of gender categories introduced by Western European colonizers, but also how the introduction of race in the 1500s erased not solely the complex, situated understandings of gender throughout the Americas, but women themselves. 

With echoes of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?," Indigenous notions of gender were subjected to a system of racial classification that justified slavery, conquest, and all manner or racial and sexual violence. We live today the vestiges of that horrible history to which patriarchy is obsessively invested.

Before we construe this as a battle between the sexes, let's understand that patriarchal violence is as harmful to men as it is to women, if not more so. Personally, I find this liberating and fully compatible with our most powerful religious and spiritual traditions that center notions of love and acceptance, particularly, of those deemed "other," in a shared quest for a world where all diversity is embraced simultaneously with the notion that all human beings—by virtue of being human—are intrinsically worthy of dignity and respect.

Do view the video. Thanks to Dr. Martha Lengeling for sharing.

Happy pride month!

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186-219.

Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742-759.

Mirandé, A. (2017). Behind the mask: Gender hybridity in a Zapotec community. University of Arizona Press.

Robinson, M. (2020) Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity, Journal of Homosexuality, 67:12, 1675-1690.

Truth, S. (1851). Speech at women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric (s), 144-146. [pdf]