LOS ANGELES, CA—On Saturday morning, armed with a crisp protest sign as clean and white as a Christmas Eve snowfall, Elizabeth Manning, 39, took her very first tentative and awkward steps into the centre of her local Women's March, a worldwide event that saw three million people participate. Reminiscent of Bambi in her wide-eyed innocence, Manning was eventually able to stand up and march down the street with increasing confidence.

"I wasn't sure what to wear, or what to put on my sign, or where to put my other hand! I mean like, the one that wasn't holding the sign!" Manning confesses. "I wanted to get a sense of what to expect, so I watched this video on YouTube of the pipeline protests at Standing Rock, and this other video of a Black Lives Matter rally from a few months back."

"I guess some women have been at this a long time, so that was really helpful for me," she adds, noting that she wasn't able to attend the last Black Lives Matter protest but that she did "like AND retweet this super moving quote by Angela Davis."

A group of queer activists at the Women's March, who have been protesting for a decade against their governments' refusal to recognize their basic human rights, describe Manning's efforts as "commendable, even though she was holding her sign backwards the whole time."

When asked why she decided to attend Saturday's demonstration, Manning says she was moved to action after watching in horror as president Donald Trump was inaugurated the day before.

"This administration is doing some terrible things to women," she explains. "But it's like, white women this time? So I had to be there, because how crazy is that?"