{"id":474067,"date":"2021-02-21T22:13:58","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T06:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/?p=474067"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:19:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T01:19:17","slug":"qa-with-troy-cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2021\/02\/21\/qa-with-troy-cross\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Tory Cross"},"content":{"rendered":"

Social media can be trash but it\u2019s not *all* trash. I learn so much from people I follow on Twitter such as <\/span>Tory Cross<\/span><\/a>. Here is an interview with Tory on her work as a political organizer and the fight for vaccine equity in California.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Interview with Tory Cross<\/b><\/h3>\n

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Please tell me a little about yourself!\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n

Hi! I\u2019m Tory Cross (she\/her), and I\u2019m a 27 year old disabled queer survivor and a digital\/distributed organizer. I was diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome<\/a> when I was 7 years old, and I was really lucky to be diagnosed so young since it takes most people decades. I was only diagnosed so young because it overlapped with my mom being diagnosed when she was in her early 30s. I also have migraines and <\/span>POTS<\/span><\/a> and some mystery lung condition that we refer to as asthma and <\/span>c-PTSD<\/span><\/a> from childhood trauma. I personally consider my c-PTSD a disability because it\u2019s had an enormous impact on my life but I\u2019d never tell anyone else how to think about their own mental health.<\/span>
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\n<\/span>Growing up as a queer disabled survivor in a terrifyingly white supremacist homophobic Christian-supremacist area was horrifying in every possible way, and I learned extremely early that if I didn\u2019t figure out getting out of there, I wouldn\u2019t make it very long. Especially because my hometown approached every problem as you either handled it through prayer or silence and gritted teeth. Silence and gritted teeth doesn\u2019t work very well when you break your back! (Literally, I broke my T12 vertebrae at some point during my childhood and didn\u2019t find out until college because I was just so completely disconnected from my body).<\/span><\/p>\n

I live in California with my partner and my two cats!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I know you mostly from your work as a political organizer during the 2020 Presidential election. How did you get involved in organizing and what were your experiences like 2019-2020 including the run-off elections in Georgia?\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n

I think to some extent I\u2019d always been organizing, I just didn\u2019t know that there was a name for it. I started electoral organizing in April 2019 specifically when I happened to see a tweet from <\/span>Secretary Juli\u00e1n Castro<\/span><\/a>\u2019s organizing director about how to volunteer! I didn\u2019t really know that people could volunteer for candidates, and I loved how progressive Juli\u00e1n\u2019s platform was. I\u2019d been only sporadically working for two years before that because of overlapping health crises, and I was only working about 19 hours\/week when I started volunteering for Juli\u00e1n.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was amazing, to share space with progressive folks and to be able to contribute to a presidential campaign. I fell in love immediately! I had all these skills from being a disabled person online. I\u2019ve said before that everything I\u2019ve ever learned about organizing I learned from being a disabled queer survivor who was really isolated because of my health. Building community and communal power and strength in numbers online were all things I learned from Twitter and Facebook communities. Including <\/span>#CripTheVote<\/span><\/a> really changed my idea of community and political power. <\/span>
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\n<\/span>For Juli\u00e1n, I helped with debate prep, with social media outreach to supporters, with social media policy dissemination. I got to consult on a few of his policies, including his policy for people with disabilities, which was just incredible. After he suspended his campaign, I was a Text Leader for <\/span>Elizabeth Warren<\/span><\/a>\u2019s campaign, and then I took a break for a couple months before volunteering with Texas Democrats and then joining the staff there through the general election. I then joined <\/span>Jon Ossoff<\/span><\/a>\u2019s runoff campaign for Senate in Georgia!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was really lucky that the people I worked with saw me, my whole self, and my experiences, and didn\u2019t try to make me anything I wasn\u2019t. It shouldn\u2019t come down to luck though. Everything I\u2019ve ever learned about organizing I learned from being a disabled queer survivor who was highly physically isolated because of my health. There\u2019s this misconception that online connections aren\u2019t real life, but I\u2019m a real person, and you\u2019re a real person, and we\u2019re talking online. That\u2019s real life! Disabled people are so talented at eliminating that fake line between IRL and online <\/span>when it comes to community building<\/span><\/a>. I think people who are able bodied or have never been really isolated from their community sometimes find it stilted or difficult to build across digital space, but it\u2019s such a skillset to be able to quickly relate to someone and to connect to them emotionally. Disabled people make great organizers. We\u2019re really good at this!!<\/span><\/p>\n

What do you love about organizing and getting out the vote? Why does it matter?\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n

So, I grew up in extremely rural Illinois in a VERY Republican district, the most Republican in Illinois and one of the most Republican in the Midwest. I was the weird really political kid in school and even in college, because growing up how I grew up – in a really impoverished place, in a really dangerous household, as a queer disabled kid hiding in the closet both literally and figuratively –\u00a0 I knew that there had to be the possibility for things to be better somehow. I didn\u2019t know how but I knew it had to be possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

I fell in love with organizing because organizing is all about connecting with people and being part of them building the world they want to live in. I spent a lot of time talking to my therapist about if I was doing something wrong before I was on staff, by doing all that volunteer work instead of trying harder to get a job, and she looked at me and said \u201cYou\u2019re feeling fulfilled. That matters so much more.\u201d There\u2019s something enchanting about connecting with someone you don\u2019t know, hearing what their dreams are for themselves, for their children, for their communities, and then building community with them to build that world. I don\u2019t want to over glorify it — organizing is hard and brutal and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking. But every organizer has moments they return to, where a volunteer or a community member kind of sees the world open in front of them. Or at least that\u2019s how I experience it!<\/span>
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\n<\/span>It\u2019s hard to put into words how much getting out the vote matters, especially when it comes to making voting and organizing accessible for disabled people. There are so many of us, and when we band together, we grow political power. That\u2019s something I 100% learned from <\/span>Crip The Vote.<\/span><\/a> We can say, you know, we are here, we have power, we vote, you work for us. But it\u2019s also not enough for politicians or parties to just, like, point at disabled people and say \u201cgreat go vote!\u201d Even if it weren\u2019t the right thing to do for candidates and state parties and committees, it is politically advantageous for Democrats to dismantle barriers to voting for disabled people! Not all disabled people will vote for Democrats of course but this whole voting block is RIGHT THERE if candidates put in the effort to make it so we CAN vote. Politics is life and death for most people, and when most politicians talk about voting as a sacred duty, it doesn\u2019t make sense that so many barriers that could be removed stay in front of us.<\/span>
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\n<\/span>That said, electoral power certainly isn\u2019t the only thing that matters, and it makes me so angry when there are people who talk about voting as the only option. So many communities cannot wait for every 4 years, and nothing made that more evident than 2020.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How have you been coping so far in the past 11+ months into the pandemic in California?\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n

It\u2019s been excruciating. There is so much pain throughout all of this. I have a very small family – only 5 family members – and every single one of them caught COVID. It\u2019s incredibly lucky that none of their cases were super serious, but the terror has been unbelievable. In November 2019, I started having severe trouble breathing, which I\u2019d never had before, and my doctors were pretty sure that I caught a virus that impacted my lung functioning. It happened before COVID was recorded in the US, so it certainly means that if I caught COVID, my risk of death is incredibly high. My partner is healthy and able-bodied but of course there\u2019s also the terror that if he caught it, that he wouldn\u2019t be okay. So I have walked out my front door 3 times since March 12, 2020 – once because of a kidney infection, once because mold exploded in our apartment, and once to get my flu shot. Our apartment is 700 sq. ft, plus like a 10 sq. ft. patio, and we have not left this box in almost a year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Organizing really helped. The Trump administration left us to die. They left us to die. Which added to all the other atrocities in the past four years. So working to build power, to connect people, to find community, really helped with my mental health.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, therapy. So much therapy.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I have walked out my front door 3 times since March 11th.
Once for a kidney infection
Once because mold exploded in our apartment and I\u2019m very allergic
Once to get my flu shot <\/p>\n

That\u2019s the entire list.
I live in terror of dying.#HighRiskCA<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/nKdxPz2NgN<\/a><\/p>\n

— Tory Cross \ud83c\udf51 (@queer_spice) January 26, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n