Before You Travel to Ocean Beach

Because this is an outdoor recurring protest, we recommend checking Matriarchy Rising’s newest public update before leaving. A special event, severe weather, or another condition at the waterfront can affect an individual week even when the regular schedule remains in place.

What the Sunday Protest Is About

Matriarchy Rising has described its work through the ideas of female power and collective liberation. Its public protest materials have emphasized believing women, opposing violence, supporting survivors, and challenging systems that protect powerful people from accountability.

The gathering creates space for women to meet in person, share information, build relationships, and organize around concerns affecting their lives. A recurring event offers continuity that a single large demonstration cannot provide. People know there is another opportunity to attend, bring someone with them, or return after learning more.

The protest’s central focus is women, survivors, gender-based violence, bodily autonomy, collective organizing, and accountability. The broader sections below examine the institutions and policies that shape those experiences while keeping Matriarchy Rising’s stated purpose distinct from our analysis.

Why Women Are Gathering Every Sunday

Women are gathering in response to abuse, sexual violence, exploitation, trafficking, gender-based violence, and the treatment of survivors. The harm does not end when the immediate act is over. Survivors may continue dealing with physical injuries, trauma, financial loss, housing instability, damaged relationships, fear of retaliation, and the burden of proving that what happened to them matters.

Many women who report abuse encounter disbelief, blame, pressure to remain quiet, or warnings that speaking publicly could affect their employment, reputation, family relationships, or personal safety. The call to believe women responds to that pattern. Survivors deserve serious attention, and accountability should not depend on whether the person accused has money, authority, political influence, professional standing, or institutional protection.

The weekly gathering also addresses isolation. People do not need an existing organizational connection before attending. They can arrive, listen, speak, meet others, exchange information, and decide whether they want to return. Public visibility matters because widespread harms are often treated as isolated private experiences.

A recurring protest gives survivors and supporters a reliable place to make those experiences visible and to organize around the systems that allow violence, exploitation, coercion, and exclusion to continue.

Violence, Abuse, Exploitation, and the Treatment of Survivors

Violence against women can take many forms, including sexual assault, intimate-partner violence, stalking, trafficking, workplace harassment, reproductive coercion, financial control, and threats used to keep someone silent. These harms often overlap. A survivor may be dealing with physical danger while also trying to protect her housing, income, children, healthcare, immigration status, or reputation.

Reporting abuse can create another layer of risk. Survivors may be doubted, blamed, pressured to reconcile, warned against damaging someone’s future, or asked to provide proof that is difficult or impossible to obtain. Institutions may focus on whether a report creates inconvenience or liability rather than whether the person who came forward is safe.

Believing women does not mean abandoning evidence or fair process. It means taking reports seriously, protecting people from retaliation, preserving evidence, investigating competently, and refusing to treat disbelief as the automatic starting point.

Accountability becomes harder when the person accused has money, authority, professional standing, political influence, organizational loyalty, or control over the survivor’s job, housing, education, medical care, or legal status. The survivor may be expected to risk everything while the institution protects its reputation and the accused person keeps access to power.

Institutions can avoid responsibility by treating repeated conduct as isolated misunderstandings, moving the person who complained, requiring burdensome internal procedures, delaying action, or waiting for behavior to become more severe. These responses may reduce visible conflict without correcting the conditions that allowed the harm to continue.

A weekly public gathering gives women and survivors a place to compare experiences, recognize institutional patterns, share resources, and demand standards that apply even when the person responsible is protected by status or influence.

Reproductive freedom belongs in a movement concerned with violence, coercion, bodily autonomy, and female liberation. Pregnancy is a biological condition that affects health, work, housing, education, medication, finances, disability, existing children, and personal safety. Forcing someone to remain pregnant imposes those physical and social consequences without their consent.

People may hold moral or religious beliefs about abortion. Science can describe pregnancy, embryonic and fetal development, medical risk, treatment, and health outcomes. Science does not establish a theological moment of ensoulment or a universal moral definition of personhood.

Anti-abortion policy becomes anti-scientific when it presents religious claims as medical facts, misrepresents development, denies the risks of pregnancy, forces doctors to delay evidence-based care, or treats abortion as something outside healthcare.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists identifies abortion as an essential component of comprehensive, evidence-based healthcare. ACOG also explains that using “heartbeat” for the electrical activity detected very early in pregnancy is clinically inaccurate because the heart’s chambers have not yet developed at the point targeted by many early bans.

Abortion bans can also create confusion and delay in the treatment of ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, severe pregnancy complications, and pregnancies that cannot result in a surviving child. ACOG warns that even laws containing nominal medical exceptions can impede ectopic-pregnancy care and lead to delayed or denied treatment.

Women are not the only people who can become pregnant. Transgender men, some nonbinary people, and some intersex people also require reproductive healthcare and bodily autonomy. No government should force pregnancy on any person because a religious movement believes that person’s body must be governed by its doctrine.

The Constitution of these un-united states protects religious exercise and secular government at the same time. The First Amendment prohibits government establishment of religion and protects free exercise. Article VI prohibits religious tests for public office. The constitutional boundary allows people to practice their faith without giving any faith authority over everyone else.

A person may believe abortion is sinful and refuse an abortion for themselves. A religious organization may teach its doctrine. A believer may advocate, worship, organize, and vote. Religious freedom does not include the power to impose pregnancy, deny another person’s medical care, restrict someone else’s marriage, erase transgender people, or reduce another person’s civil status.

Religious people often say their religious freedom is being denied because they cannot force other people to live under their rules. Those claimed liberties never belonged to them. Being prevented from controlling someone else is the constitutional boundary that allows Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, members of other faiths, atheists, agnostics, and people who leave or change religions to possess freedom of conscience.

Constitution Annotated explains that, at minimum, government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise. A secular government is not hostile to religion. It prevents religious doctrine from becoming compulsory civil law for people who do not share it.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs have often provided training, complaint channels, employee groups, leadership responsibility, and clear standards against discriminatory treatment. The federal government ordered the termination of federal DEI and DEIA offices, positions, programs, and activities in January 2025.

We believe dismantling safeguards like these contributes to an atmosphere in which sex discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, retaliation, and hostility toward people who do not conform to gender expectations become easier to express and harder to challenge.

A worker may face harassment, reduced hours, denial of advancement, forced concealment, retaliation after reporting misconduct, or termination. Legal protections may exist, but a right written into law does not automatically preserve someone’s paycheck, housing, or safety while a complaint is documented, investigated, or litigated.

The path from workplace exclusion to homelessness can move quickly. Income disappears while rent, food, transportation, healthcare, childcare, and ordinary bills continue. Discrimination can also make the next job harder to obtain, especially when a former employer controls references or the worker has already lost reliable transportation, professional clothing, identification, or internet access.

Once savings and temporary support are exhausted, an employment problem becomes a housing crisis. Homelessness should not be treated as evidence that the person failed. It can be the downstream result of discrimination, abuse, medical costs, family rejection, unaffordable housing, and systems that respond too slowly to prevent displacement.

An available shelter bed does not prove that the placement is safe. A woman escaping abuse, a person recovering from assault, someone with a disability, or anyone already targeted because of identity may be placed in a crowded environment where privacy, control, and reliable protection are limited.

Leaving may mean sleeping outside, where survival can bring repeated police contact, displacement, citations, fines, and arrest. San Diego’s Unsafe Camping Ordinance uses a progressive enforcement model that can move from education to a misdemeanor citation and potential arrest. In specified locations, enforcement is allowed regardless of whether shelter is available.

The false choice: remain where harassment or unsafe placement continues, accept transfer and lose whatever stability has been built, or leave and risk punishment for existing outdoors.

A resident may report slurs, sexual comments, threats, deliberate intimidation, physical posturing, stalking, or fear that another person’s conduct is moving toward assault. Some shelter responses place the burden on the person who reported the danger. That person may be told to move beds, change dormitories, transfer to another facility, avoid common areas, alter a routine, or leave.

The person creating the danger may keep the same bed, routine, and access to the space. The person asking for protection loses stability and learns that reporting harassment can make their own placement less secure. Moving the target may separate people temporarily, but it does not address the conduct that created the threat.

California’s Civil Rights Department shelter guidance states that shelters have a duty to prevent sexual harassment between program participants and prohibits discrimination and harassment based on protected characteristics. A shelter should not make the person seeking protection carry the full cost of someone else’s conduct.

Shelters have legitimate reasons to prohibit fighting and weapons in crowded environments. The danger appears when an institution claims exclusive authority over safety, tells residents they cannot defend themselves, and then fails to intervene effectively while harassment or threatening physical behavior continues.

The resident is ordered to rely on staff, accept the staff decision, move when directed, and avoid any response that could be classified as aggression. Verbal harassment and physical posturing may be minimized until an assault occurs. A resident can then face punishment for reacting to danger while the behavior that created the fear is treated as a personality conflict or a rule-management problem.

A program cannot reasonably demand complete submission to its authority while offering only inconsistent protection from the people it requires residents to live beside. When staff tell a resident, “If you do not like it, leave,” the threat of street enforcement makes that statement coercive rather than voluntary.

Many shelters are operated by nonprofit organizations through public funding, city contracts, government referrals, or partnerships that help a city satisfy its shelter commitments. Their exact constitutional status can depend on whether a challenged action is legally attributable to government, which is a fact-specific legal question. Nonprofit status does not erase civil-rights duties.

The structure still creates a serious accountability problem. Shelter rules can be enforced immediately against residents, while discrimination and safety complaints may require written evidence, outside advocacy, an administrative complaint, or litigation. The person harmed may have no money, limited telephone access, no private transportation, nowhere secure for documents, and no safe place to stay while the complaint moves forward.

When a publicly supported shelter becomes part of the system used to remove people from public spaces, restricts their movement and behavior, and offers no safe alternative when rights are violated, its practices raise substantial civil-rights questions and can also raise constitutional questions depending on the relationship between the provider and government.

Large, overburdened shelters may be judged by the number of people brought indoors at night rather than by whether those people are protected, treated with dignity, and moved toward stable housing. Privacy can be nearly nonexistent. Residents may have little control over where they sleep or whom they sleep near. Rules can prioritize institutional convenience and visible public order over individual safety.

Some facilities have been associated with reports of poor sanitation, vermin, exposure to harassment, overcrowding, and conditions that would be unacceptable in other residential settings. A facility can use the word “safe” in its name while failing to provide meaningful safety to the people inside it. The surrounding community receives a cleaner visual landscape while the danger is moved behind walls and out of public view.

When a mass shelter concentrates vulnerable people in controlled spaces, restricts their autonomy, tolerates vermin or degrading sanitation, fails to protect them from violence, and measures success by removing them from public view, we believe it operates more like a concentration camp for poverty than a system designed to restore safety, stability, and human dignity. We use that as an institutional and moral comparison, not as a formal legal classification.

Many shelter employees are trying to help under severe staffing, funding, and capacity constraints. Their effort does not excuse a system that leaves residents unprotected. The conditions and institutional rules still have to be judged by their actual effect on the people required to live under them.

The same person can be moved through several institutions without any institution resolving the discrimination, violence, or instability that began the crisis.

1. Workplace, family, or relationship exclusion: Income, housing, and personal support begin to disappear.
2. Homelessness: Exposure to violence, exploitation, illness, weather, and public enforcement increases.
3. Shelter placement: A bed may come with harassment, rigid rules, unsafe placement, loss of privacy, and limited control over personal safety.
4. Displacement after reporting harm: The targeted resident is moved, transferred, or told to leave.
5. Street enforcement: Repeated orders to move can progress to citations and potential arrest.
6. Jail or prison: Another institution controls housing, searches, medication, medical access, communication, and physical safety.
7. ICE detention: Immigration custody can add language barriers, isolation, deportation risk, restricted contact, and institutional control over housing and healthcare.
8. Hospital treatment: The person may encounter disbelief, invasive questioning, delayed care, inadequate discharge planning, or staff who do not understand the patient’s circumstances.
9. Discharge back into instability: The person may return to the same shelter, another unsafe placement, the street, detention, or deportation into continued danger.

Each transfer can make the original problem harder to document and resolve. Records become scattered, relationships with advocates are interrupted, medication and identification may be lost, court obligations accumulate, and the person is expected to explain the same trauma again to another institution.

Being transgender is a real biological human characteristic. Gender identity has a durable biological underpinning. It is not an ideology, preference, social trend, political affiliation, or decision caused by outside pressure. Current science points to complex and interacting genetic, hormonal, neurological, and developmental factors.

Transgender identity is biological in its own right. A transgender person does not need an intersex variation to prove who they are. Intersex and transgender people are distinct populations, although one person can be both. No one should have to submit chromosomes, hormone results, anatomy records, or brain imaging to establish their identity. The Endocrine Society states that considerable scientific evidence demonstrates a durable biological element underlying gender identity.

Transgender women, nonbinary people, intersex people, and other gender-diverse people can experience the same violence, coercion, workplace exclusion, family rejection, housing discrimination, public harassment, religious control, and institutional retaliation discussed throughout this page. They can also face additional danger when a shelter, jail, hospital, or detention facility refuses to respect their identity or places them with people who may target them.

The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey reported that 18 percent of respondents were unemployed, 34 percent were experiencing poverty, and 11 percent of respondents who had ever held a job said they had been fired, forced to resign, lost a job, or been laid off because of their gender identity or expression. Thirty percent reported experiencing homelessness during their lifetime.

Healthcare and confinement can add further harm. Among survey respondents who had seen a healthcare provider during the preceding year, 48 percent reported at least one negative experience because they were transgender. Federal prison-safety regulations require individualized housing decisions for transgender and intersex inmates because placement can create severe safety risks.

A Government Accountability Office review found 423 segregated-housing placements involving detained people identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex from fiscal years 2017 through 2021. ICE’s segregation system identified 270 placements involving transgender detainees, and GAO found 22 additional transgender placements that the system had failed to identify correctly. These figures describe placement events rather than unique people.

Transgender females are welcome at this protest. Yes, we said females. Nonbinary and intersex people are also welcome. Their inclusion is one connected part of a broader struggle involving women, survivors, bodily autonomy, violence, homelessness, institutional control, and the right of every person to participate in public civic life.

Women, survivors, supporters, transgender women, nonbinary and intersex people, unhoused people, shelter residents, people living in vehicles, and people surviving outdoors are welcome. Immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, and people who have survived ICE camps, jails, hospitals, shelters, workplace discrimination, religious coercion, reproductive coercion, or family rejection are welcome.

A person does not need clean clothing, money, permanent identification, citizenship, transportation, medical documentation, permanent housing, or a polished explanation of their circumstances to deserve a place in public civic life.

People experiencing homelessness are workers, parents, caregivers, veterans, artists, advocates, organizers, witnesses, and survivors. Many have direct knowledge of systems that the rest of society discusses from a distance. They should be heard as participants with expertise about the institutions affecting their lives.

Homelessness does not place someone outside this movement. It can be one of the clearest downstream consequences of gender-based violence, disability discrimination, workplace exclusion, family rejection, housing costs, institutional failure, religious control, detention, and unsafe public policy.

We want to thank Chelsea Gods for bringing this recurring protest to our attention. Chelsea has continued to show up publicly, share information about local actions, and use her platform to help people learn where they can participate. We appreciate her tireless activism and the effort she puts into keeping civic action visible in San Diego.

Chelsea has participated in and promoted Matriarchy Rising, but the event is organized under the Matriarchy Rising name. We are careful about that distinction so the people doing the organizing receive accurate credit.

We also thank the organizers and volunteers behind Matriarchy Rising. A weekly gathering requires communication, planning, public outreach, and the willingness to keep returning. Their work gives people a consistent place to connect and makes this protest easier for the broader San Diego community to find.

• Review the organizer’s newest post before traveling to Ocean Beach.
• Bring water, sun protection, and clothing suitable for conditions near the coast.
• Use signs and messages that reflect your own views while respecting the stated purpose of the gathering.
• Ask permission before taking a close photograph or recording a personal conversation.
• Be especially considerate when someone is discussing abuse, sexual violence, homelessness, detention, incarceration, reproductive coercion, or another sensitive experience.
• Keep sidewalks, curb ramps, business entrances, and emergency access routes clear.
• Follow lawful safety directions given at the location.

Matriarchy Rising published a video that shows the organizers’ current message and Ocean Beach setting. We link directly to the original post rather than loading an embedded social-media player on this page.