Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us
for our webinar tonight, Advocating Justice:
Issue Areas for Transgender Rights.
I wanted to start this program by introducing myself.
My name is Megan Hoyo, and I am the alumni officer
for Professional and Affinity Networks.
In my role, I work as the office liaison
for the UMass Amherst LGBTQ and Allies Network
that is presenting tonight's webinar.
Our presenter tonight, Dru Levasseur,
graduated from UMass in 2003,
with a bachelor's degree in women's studies.
He currently is the senior attorney
and transgender rights project director for Lambda Legal,
the oldest and largest national legal organization
centered around the rights of the LGBTQ community.
Before we get started, I do want to point out
a few housekeeping details.
All attendees will be on mute during the presentation
to enable everyone to hear the presenter.
Today's session will be recorded
and later added to our online video library
of career resources.
By joining this session, you are giving consent
to be part of a recorded session.
During the session, you will have a chatbox
available on your screen to enter questions.
Please feel free to do so.
If time permits, we will have a question and answer session.
You can submit your chat questions
to everyone or just to the host.
If time runs short, I will collect the questions
for Dru's feedback offline.
And now, I'd like to turn it over to Dru.
Hi everybody, thank you so much, Megan.
I'm very excited to be with my UMass people.
I have very good feelings about my time at UMass,
and I'm excited to talk about my work
and about transgender rights.
So, I've been at Lambda Legal,
I just hit my ninth anniversary here,
and I'm currently, in the last year,
in the Atlanta office, but I was, for eight years,
working out of the headquarters in New York.
Lambda Legal is the oldest and largest
LGBT legal organization in the country.
We were founded in 1973, and our mission
is to work on behalf of the civil rights
of LGBT people and people living with HIV.
And we, over the years, have had some important cases
that are pretty well known in the Supreme Court,
and we worked, particularly on marriage,
but during my tenure, I'm excited that we formalized
our work on behalf of transgender people
into an actual transgender rights project
and we have many more transgender staff at Lambda,
and I'm excited to say that the largest portion
of our docket is now transgender rights cases.
So tonight I'm gonna give you an overview
of some of the casework that we do
and some of the policy work and education that we do,
particularly around transgender rights,
but I first want to just start off
by saying that the work that Lambda Legal does
is impact litigation, which means
that we bring test cases.
The idea is that we want to bring a case
that will impact the largest portion
of the community and change the law
by winning in the courts.
So it's an exciting way to use
your legal background, but it's unique.
It's also difficult, on one hand,
because we get about five to 6,000 calls every year
to our help desks in all six offices,
which is Chicago, New York, now D.C.,
Atlanta, Dallas, and LA,
but we only take a handful of those cases
to the court to actually change the law.
So Megan, next slide please.
So the difference between impact litigation
and say, direct service work, like if you would work
at legal aid, is that you,
with direct service work,
you're helping your client directly, you see the impact.
With impact litigation, it's a little broader,
we have a client or an organization of clients sometimes,
and we do media around that and we also shape the narrative.
So I wanna start off by talking about some terminology.
It might be some kinda basic stuff for many people
who are listening in, but it's important for us
because we are introducing the courts, often,
to LGBT people and people living with HIV,
the issues affecting our communities.
And so it's really, a lot of our casework
is actually arguing around the definitions
of who we are in the world, and if,
when Megan asked me to do this,
it was actually a month or two after that
that people might have seen the New York Times memo
about the HHS leak around the Trump administration's
defining trans people, so this is front and center,
where trans rights work is at,
is around the definition of gender identity.
So here are some, the terminology
that we at Lambda Legal use internally, often in our briefs,
although sometimes we change it for context.
But the one I wanna highlight is gender identity.
We have shifted our definition
because when we bring a case, we often bring in
medical experts and have a very medicalized framework
and that, for some people in the trans community,
that feels oppressive, why do we need to rely
on third party medical providers to define who we are,
but we found that that can be actually really critical
in the legal system, at least at this point in time,
where there's arguments around our existence.
I am an openly transgender person,
and Megan mentioned that I got a women's studies degree
while I was at UMass.
I transitioned during law school,
I went to law school, actually in western Mass,
at Western New England University.
So just the understanding that trans people,
the gender identity is not something separate
or in someone's head, it's literally part
of who they are and that it's not something
that can be changed with the person,
that conversion therapy is unethical.
These are the types of things that we're introducing
in the courts, so I wanted to start off
with some terminology, and right here,
it says it's also called brain sex,
it's one's deeply felt internal sense of being male,
female, both, or neither.
So it's not necessarily a binary,
and that's a lot of the work we're doing is,
but what matters is for everybody,
whether you're transgender, not transgender,
now they're also known as, next slide please,
cisgender, you know, that's a term we've now,
referring to, for people who are not transgender,
it's very helpful for the courts.
We're actually briefing with that terminology now too.
But it's helpful to point out that everybody
has a gender identity, intersex folks,
trans folks, cisgender folks, it's about who we are
and how we understand ourselves.
So it's just not unique to trans people,
and a lot of our work is about making sure
that people have legal avenues that they're,
sorry about that.
I have a motion sensor, and I'm trying
to keep people on their toes.
So, sorry, and so it's to make sure that people are,
in their identity documents or
they're acknowledged as who they are,
and with the legal rights that come with that.
Sorry, one more on that last slide, Megan, sorry.
Just wanna also flag that non-binary,
we're doing a lot more non-binary work,
and I am very excited to be speaking
with the UMass group, 'cause my friend,
Dr. Genny Beeman is over there
and has been, much before my time,
has been a pioneer in the world of transgender rights,
and particularly around non-binary issues
and in school settings, especially,
and that has been life saving work.
And so I'm gonna talk a little bit more
about some of the policy work that we are doing now
and also a case, but non-binary is a term
you're gonna see more of, referring to a spectrum
of gender that is outside of the binary of male and female.
And intersex, also, we have some new developments
and new work in this area.
We are not an intersex-led organization,
but we partner with intersex-led organizations
like interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth, and so on,
but that's a term used to describe
a wide range of natural body variations.
With this HHS memo that I mentioned,
there's a lot that is targeting both trans people
and intersex people and questioning
who they are in the world and whether the sex
they were assigned at birth is fixed
and if they have rights that flow.
Okay, next slide please.
So, I put on here in the slides for
the factors used to determine sex, just as an example,
partly because sometimes when I'm speaking to folks,
it's new information, I know that it was new information
for me to understand the components of sex.
I think our culture, we are all understanding
that you're born, you know the sex that someone is
because you look at their genitals and that's it,
and it's a pretty simple thing,
but it's been very important to understand
the medical understanding,
that it's actually more complicated,
and that for all of us, we could,
each of these factors you see in the list here
could all be on a spectrum,
that there's variation, and that human variation
is actually okay, and it's part of life.
And so, some of the information here
we bring before the court when we are using,
when we're trying to explain why somebody needs
to use the bathroom that they're using
or get the healthcare that they need and so on.
It's a good introduction for the courts
to know that there's variation, and all of it's beautiful.
So one of the pieces here, the last one
that you'll see on the list there is gender identity.
And so the medical understanding of that
is that that's actually one of the factors
that we all have, and that could be on the spectrum
of more male and more female,
typically male and typically female, and so on,
but that is all part of more scientists
showing it's all part of, rooted to biological factors.
And so, the argument that we use often
is that gender identity is the most determinative factor
defining one's sex, and I'll just say one example
is that for our client who, we have a client who is intersex
who was assigned male at birth
and then surgeries were performed on them,
they use they as their pronoun,
surgeries were performed on them
without their consent when they were young,
it was very traumatizing, they still have health issues
throughout their whole life, they've had,
they've dealt with so much trauma
from systems of oppression around them,
and they tried transitioning, this and that,
and they realized that where they land
was that they are non-binary,
and so when we went before the court,
we brought in this information
and we educated the court around intersex folks
and about how common this, it's like 1.7% of the population,
and how this should be connected to people's rights.
Next slide, please.
So, I started off, just some information here
that you'll have for looking at statistics,
pointing in the direction
of the anti-violence project that's tracking.
I think when we talk to trans communities
about what is the most pressing need,
we often hear from people that it's about survival,
it's about staying alive, whether it's being free
from violence that is prevalent, particularly
for transgender women of color,
on the intersecting identities of being black
or a person of color and being a woman,
the statistics, as you can see
from this slide, are horrific.
And so that is the most pressing need,
and so in our work, we try to center
the people who are most marginalized in our communities
to think about what, how the impact,
how this will impact saving lives.
And I know that a lot of us who are in the trans community,
just a few weeks ago, November 20th,
is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance.
I'm not sure if there was, I'm sure there were some
in western Massachusetts and elsewhere, but I attended
an International Transgender Day of Remembrance event
here in Atlanta, and the first transgender person
who was murdered this past year in 2017,
was from Western Mass, and was an organizer
with me when we did the transgender,
New England Transgender Pride back in 2007, 2008,
and so, I know this is very connected
to the communities that we're in at UMass,
and this is happening in our communities,
so I just wanted to start with that.
And next slide, please.
A very important tool in my work
in the past nine years has been
the National Center for Trans Equality
put out this US Trans Survey.
This is the second version.
This is the largest survey of transgender identified people,
27.7 thousand, it's been very helpful.
I mean, for years, we all knew that trans people
were facing harms in all walks of life,
but this survey has helped us with our policy work,
our advocacy, especially when we had
a friendly administration, the federal government,
where we can show and point to these numbers.
A lot of that advocacy now is happening in states.
You can go on the website and pull,
they have different states, they pull data.
If you're in a certain state and you need to,
if that's gonna be helpful to your advocacy
or to your legal casework, but these are the topics
that are in that survey.
And kind of, they cover healthcare, employment,
economic stability and violence.
I will flag that in relation to the last slide,
that a stunning, horrendous statistics from this survey
is that 40% of the trans people who were surveyed
have attempted suicide.
That is a very extreme rate
compared to the general population,
so what we know is that we not only have
high numbers of violence and murder happening
to trans people, but we also know
that there is an extreme suicide risk.
So I think this is very important
for people to know and use in their advocacy
and their casework to really highlight
why we need to be including and centering trans people
in our work on gender and in our civil rights work.
Next slide, please.
So here I just pulled, I know this is a PowerPoint no-no,
there's way too much information here,
but I felt compelled to include
some of these statistics here.
If anything catches your eye,
the difference of family support was a very relevant theme
throughout the entire US Trans Survey.
The difference when a family is accepting
of a trans person, it is profound.
And so any work that can be targeting,
getting information to families,
supporting families, the Family Acceptance Project
by Caitlin Ryan, there's resources out there.
I'm gonna have my information at the end.
If you have any questions beyond
what we're gonna talk about in this hour,
but if you need resources in certain areas
where you think this will be helpful
to whatever it is that you're doing or studying,
I would be happy to try to get those resources to you.
Identity documents, 32% of people surveyed
have been verbally harassed, denied benefits or service
or asked to leave when they did not match
their identity document.
I did a lot of press recently when the,
sorry, the election happening
where there was a very helpful survey put out,
not survey, a report put out by the Williams Institute
out of LA, showing that trans people,
particularly in the South, particularly in Georgia,
where I am, are at risk for disenfranchisement
because they're not able to get identity documents
that match who they are.
So that has been, it's been very helpful
to connect the larger issues that are happening
here in Georgia around voting,
with the Stacey Abrams campaign
that I know that the whole world,
the whole nation was watching at least,
but connecting that to how trans people
are a population that experienced difficulty.
So we have a lot of stories, we have a lot of cases
right now that are dealing with birth certificates
and other identity documents, trying to make the case
that trans people, it's in everybody's interest
for trans people to have identity documents
that reflect who they are,
and it also is, it's a safety issue.
Healthcare, 33% reported negative experiences.
A lot of our cases and our work has been
related to healthcare, either like the,
we don't treat your kind, which we're seeing a lot of,
still, where people are just, have terrible experiences
just because they are trans,
but also the barriers, the systemic barriers
in insurance and in Medicaid still,
around accessing the type of healthcare
that is specific to trans people
like transition related healthcare like hormones, surgery.
So we have had now, for over 10 years,
the American Medical Association
and all of the large professional associations
have come forward and acknowledged
that this type of care can be medically necessary,
yet, there's still the majority of insurance companies
still have exclusions.
I already mentioned the suicide piece
and the respondents living with HIV
are nearly five times the rate of the US population
from the Trans Survey, okay, next slide please, Megan.
Again, a couple of other highlights.
Schools, I think that's been very much in the news
around the harassment and it's been very confusing
and harmful for the Trump administration's
stance on rescinding the guidelines
that the Obama administration put out
around transgender students using the restroom
and being acknowledged for who they are
in accordance with their gender identity.
We have had so many calls from our help desks
and we have lost young people in the community
to suicide and beyond, it's just been terrible.
So this is definitely an issue that you all have
an expert in your midst with Dr. Genny Beeman,
and I encourage you, I'm gonna talk about our toolkits
in a minute, and we collaborated with Dr. Beeman
and Higher Ed Consortium, Consortium of Higher Ed
LGBT Resource Professionals on some resources
to help students advocate for themselves.
Sex work, 20% participate in underground economy.
What we know is that people just don't have options
in getting jobs, and they have to resort to survival sex
and other options to stay alive.
Police, 86% reported being harassed and targeted.
Public accommodations, 31%, mistreatment,
and restrooms, which is a very hot topic, I guess,
but that, one in 10 reported someone denied them
access in the last year.
Okay, next slide please.
So you now have a range of some of the issues
that are affecting the trans community,
which I promised with the title.
And I wanted to start with, this is transgender people
who are incarcerated, starting with that,
because if you look at the statistics
for Lambda Legal's help desk,
the number of people, right now, tonight,
trans people who are in prison,
who are suffering is just incredible.
There are so many people, and there just has not been
enough attention paid, and in fact,
we now have the federal government
taking steps to dismantle any of the policy gains
that we've had for people who are incarcerated.
We have had, I'll mention some of our cases,
but we focused on this as a place
for some of our transgender healthcare cases
that's been very effective because when you are in prison
you are in the hands of the government
for your healthcare and you,
regardless of how much money you have in the world,
you cannot pick and choose, and the government decides,
and so that has been a vehicle for us
as litigators to try to challenge
that it's cruel and unusual punishment
to deny trans people the kind of healthcare that they need,
and so we've been winning in the courts,
but I will say that there needs to be more effort paid
and more attention paid to this area.
If you see here, percentage of adults reporting
time spent in prison or jail,
transgender women are the most impacted.
I had a colleague of mine last week say to me
that the largest number of trans litigators
are actually transgender women
who are imprisoned filing pro bono cases.
It's not me or other trans attorneys
working in LGBT nonprofits, it's trans women
who are fighting for their own lives, and they're experts.
So some of our plaintiffs have been fighting for years
on their own, and so I just wanna flag this
as a very important area to focus.
Next slide, please.
And here are some of the reasons why,
like looking at systems of oppression.
Why do you see the rates that I just discussed,
family rejection, homelessness, unsafe schools,
pervasive discrimination in every walk of life,
and then, the laws that are set up
to place trans people in crisis.
Next slide, please.
That's from MAP, Movement Advancement Project.
And now, this is just a list of what's available online.
I encourage you all to check out our toolkit.
It's been developed over the years,
there's 13 topics in there.
It's a know your rights, four pages each.
On the left there, you can see there's an actual booklet.
If it's useful for you to have a stack of those,
we can mail you some of the actual booklets,
and here are all the issue areas that are covered.
And because I'm speaking at UMass,
I want to flag the one I mentioned before,
this Transgender Students in College.
That is one of the few ones we did as a collaboration,
as I said, with Dr. Beeman, who runs campuspride.org,
and it not only has a know your rights
kind of overview, but it also has the best practices area
for schools that wanna do the right thing,
and it gives them information there.
The final thing here is the Nationwide Trans Resources,
that's something we just added,
thanks to my awesome legal assistant,
Anthony Luken in New York.
He is a young trans person who came from Kentucky
to take the job at Lambda in New York,
and he reminded us that for many people in the country,
Lambda Legal was the only option to call.
There are no local or state,
kind of, LGBT organizations available.
And because we do impact litigation,
we are not able to take everyone's case,
so sometimes, survival for trans people
means connecting with other trans people
wherever you are, so we put together state by state,
all of the trans groups or resources we could find,
so that somebody calls us from the middle of nowhere,
Oklahoma, we can send them,
even if we don't take their case,
we can try to send them and connect them
with other trans people to try
to get resources and stay alive.
So please use that resource and send it out
to your networks in case it's useful.
Next slide, please.
So now, I wanna leave time for Q and A,
but I wanna highlight some of the exciting trans cases
that we've done, often in collaboration
with other LGBT groups or trans-led groups,
like Transgender Law Center, and in most cases,
we're dealing with firms that are supporting us pro bono,
that's how we get these things done.
And so, identity documents, I kinda organized them
by kind of topic, we have now been trending,
we filed several birth certificate cases.
We've won, and these are in jurisdictions
that people, trans people were barred
from changing their gender marker
that was assigned to them at birth completely.
And so, we filed a case in Puerto Rico
and we won, that's the Arroyo case.
We won in Idaho, that's not on the list there,
but we had a case in Idaho,
and we're currently litigating
with the ACLU right now in Ohio.
The case, In Re: Feldhaus,
that is our name change challenge here in Georgia.
Two transgender men went to change their name,
and here we are doing these cutting edge things
in certain areas of the country, and here in the South,
it's just like basic name changes are being denied.
The judge suggested to both of them,
that why don't they pick something
that's a little less male and typically masculine
and how about something more gender neutral?
And so with the legal standard for a name change
is not up to the judge's discretion,
it's just whether there's no fraud
and that you give notice, usually.
So, we were able to an appeal for both of them,
and when our Zzyym case is the one I was mentioning before
on behalf of our client who is intersex
and non-binary identified, Dana Zzyym,
they are an amazing person,
and they just recently were able
to change their driver's license in Colorado,
which is where the case is in federal court,
to an X gender marker, because there's been
a really tremendous amount of amazing policy work
going on throughout the country,
particularly by National Center for Trans Equality
and other local advocates trying to broaden
identity documents to be inclusive of non-binary folks
or people who don't want to specify their gender.
So healthcare, this is a list we've had,
some of these were in prison,
well actually, below that are some of the prison ones.
The Hicklin and Fields ones
were actually both healthcare cases,
where transgender women were being denied
medically necessary care and very extreme,
upsetting set of facts if you look at those cases.
All of these case pages are on lambdalegal.org.
Passion Star case, it was on the cover
of the New York Times and got a lot of really great press.
Passion Star is an amazing black trans woman
who is suffering behind bars in Texas.
She is now out, but she asked to be protected
and right now the standard for housing
is that trans women are placed with men in prison,
and so she was put in general population
and she was severely harmed and has a scar
on her face from being attacked
and we brought a case about the application
of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, PREA,
and we won that case.
But like I said, these handful of cases we're taking
is not even touching the surface
of how many people are needing help right now,
particularly behind bars.
And so there's a list of our healthcare cases.
We've been filing some exciting ones, challenging denials.
The Conforti one, I'll flag is in a New Jersey case,
where a transgender guy needed a hysterectomy
and he went to a Catholic hospital,
and the hospital said that that's their policy
not to provide care, that kind of care
to a transgender person, so that case is ongoing right now,
but I think we're gonna see more
of those religious refusal type cases
with the administration that we have right now.
Next slide, please.
We have one of the cases suing Trump
over his military position and his tweets,
that started as a tweet,
and ours is based in Washington state.
We've had some great success there.
I encourage people to check out,
look at some of the briefing there.
And the student restroom cases,
the Adams case, we just won in Florida.
These cases are very difficult.
I'm sure that the second case was,
we were an amicus support on for the ACLU,
but the ACLU's Gavin Grimm case made
natural, international headlines
and really brought the issue into everybody's living room,
and I think that's really had an impact
on a lot of trans people, particularly young people.
Trans people are no longer flying under the radar,
we're getting, we're hearing from so many young people
who are being harassed and bullied in schools,
and it's quite a public debate to be having
when this is our most vulnerable in our community.
So that's been really tricky, so these cases
have been important, but the backlash has been real.
So the Adams case, we did win a case around the use
of restrooms for a young white
transgender high school student,
but like I said, the impact is often
mostly on young trans people of color,
particularly trans girls and trans women.
Workplace fairness, we're well known
for the Glenn v. Brumby case that was here
in the 11th Circuit, which is one of the hardest circuits,
and it was a Title Seven, which is the federal law
that protects people from employment discrimination,
and Vandy Beth Glenn was transitioning on the job.
She told her boss, she was a legislative editor
at the Georgia State Senate, Assembly's office.
She told her boss, informed him that she'd be needing
to transition and coming to work as Vandy Beth,
and he just straight out said, he contacted his attorney,
his attorney said, "You probably shouldn't fire her,
"the law's a little uncertain."
And then he went ahead and did it anyways,
and so that win, all the way up to the 11th Circuit,
has been very critical for a lot of the jurisprudence
around protections of trans people.
The EEOC followed suit and said that,
in the case shortly after that,
that trans people are protected under Title Seven.
If we look at the statistics of where the need is,
workplace as well as prisons, it's critical,
it's for survival, so any efforts
to make sure trans people get jobs and can keep them
and are treated fairly at work is very important.
And those are some of the other cases
that are ongoing right now.
Next slide, please.
And now I just wanna highlight
that we put this transgender affirming hospital policy
out along with HRC and the New York City Bar
LGBT Rights Committee back in 2013.
It's basically, we looked out
and saw, has anybody done best practices to how to treat
trans people when they come through your hospital doors?
And it wasn't out there yet.
And we were getting a lot of calls from people
with horror stories of mistreatment,
and so instead of having to sue everybody,
it was like, let's try to get this on the front end
to help people do the right thing
and get people the information they need,
an introduction to trans people.
And we couldn't have done this work as lawyers
without having the expertise of people
who work in the hospital settings.
So we relied on Dr. Barbara Warren from Mount Sinai
in New York, these amazing people who had,
these hospitals have these policies.
These were not something that lawyers drafted,
these were the policies that some hospitals
were using already for many years without a problem.
And we talk about room assignments, how do you,
restroom, confidentiality, how to get that,
gather that information from people about their gender,
all these tricky things, and also put together,
how the law supports you doing this,
and so that, we put it out in 2013,
we did an update a couple years ago.
It's available online, I could also ship you the hard copy.
And it was kinda like, we didn't hear back at first.
And now, it has been amazing,
'cause it has trickled out there.
We know that the Health and Hospital Corporation
in New York, which serves 1.4 million people,
they adopted it whole-hearted.
So this has been a very helpful,
and I actually give this to trans people,
and I say, when you go to the doctor,
just bring this with you.
It's a piece of advocacy, so I encourage people
to check it out, and just this past month,
we collaborated with interACT,
which is the intersex led organization.
Their mission, their main mission
is to just stop surgeries on infants
that are still happening across the country
in the US to this day without consent,
when there's no medical need for it.
It's just about making kids' bodies conform
to what's typically, a gender binary.
And so they do a lot of great work,
but we collaborate with them, and we just introduced,
and we have available an intersex-affirming hospital policy
that talks about the basics around
why these types of surgeries should not be happening,
and you should wait until a person is older
and they can consent and make choices about their body.
Next slide please.
And I think I only have one,
this is like the final one here.
So I just also wanted to flag this material,
just in case, I know there might be a mixture
of attorneys out there and alum LGBT folks.
We have this Moving Beyond Bias training
that is available, it's kind of like a train the trainer.
You can adapt it, but we use it often
around the country to train judges
that have invited us in, judges, court staff,
it's focused on the judiciary mostly.
It's out of our Fair Courts Project,
but it's also for attorneys and legal professionals.
I think people might find it useful.
It's got some basic information.
It is LGBT, but it really just focuses specifically
on a lot of trans issues, because we find
that that's where a lot of the questions
and struggles people are having
and so we just wanna flag that we are very open,
we have a great attorney who works in this project,
he is always on the road going to do trainings.
So in case that might be something,
it's available online as a PDF to check out,
but if you find that it might be useful,
please contact me and maybe we can do a training
for you wherever you are.
Next slide please, Megan.
Here is our info, how to contact Lambda,
and that's my email right there.
That's a really cool graphic for our help desk.
Like I said, we have a help desk in all six
of our offices and we actually recently switched over
to have help desk attorneys answering the calls.
So they're all located in our LA office,
but we take calls from all 50 states
as well as all US territories,
so I would encourage you to reach out.
One other piece that I do, actually,
I was just doing this before we got on with you all,
sometimes my role is to actually consult behind the scenes
with attorneys and help them,
it might be their first trans case.
I just wanna say I encourage people to reach out.
People are often very well versed
and an expert in whatever field they have,
and they know wherever they are,
the local rules and the style and things,
but I can maybe help with, if the trans expertise
is something that's new to you.
The reason I want to do that is because, like I said,
we don't take all these cases.
We need more people in our cooperating attorney network
and I would like a world filled with people
who are feeling comfortable taking trans cases
and knowing how to do this and can do it themselves.
So it's if there's anything that people need,
I'd be more than willing to try to help
or get you the resources from my colleagues out there.
So that was my big pitch.
So yeah, so I mean, I'm hoping
that people have some questions or comments
and I'm gonna pass it off to you Megan, thank you.
Mm-hmm, no problem, thank you.
So let's see if we had anything.
We do have a question here.
Have you heard of any cases relative to trans parents,
in terms of child custody,
and have they had difficulty?
Yes, that's funny, I was just talking to Megan
before we went live here about a call
that we just had, but yes, over the years,
we have had several of those calls.
We have not taken a case yet like that.
I think that National Center for Lesbian Rights, NCLR,
has done more than us in that field.
We are definitely looking at that.
It has been very tricky.
It really depends on where people are in the country
and how well-resourced the parent is,
who is supportive of the child,
and I'll say that, there was a bad case,
a negative case for the parent who was supportive
of the child, I believe in Kentucky a couple of years ago,
I think maybe five years ago.
We saw it, that was the beginning,
where we were seeing these cases being filed and going up.
What really is kind of the tipping point
for those cases is to get the experts
who work with trans children in on those cases,
and before the judge.
And so my role has often been in those cases,
a lot of behind the scenes work
where I'm connecting the attorneys for the parent
with the experts in the field.
And so these are a lot of the same experts
that we use in our, say, our bathroom cases.
And so it's been important for the court
to understand that, to hear from the experts,
to hear from the medical experts.
And so the attorneys, it's not a lot of legal question
around that, it's more about whether the judge
understands that this is the recommended treatment
is to, I mean, the treatment that we understand
is that we wanna let the child decide.
You don't wanna steer them one way or the other,
you want to have supportive network for the child,
but it's going to be that area
where the child may persist or desist, is the terminology.
And often, we see that there's one parent
that doesn't want the child, it's often,
a child that was assigned male at birth,
where the parent is freaking out
'cause they don't want their little boy to become a girl.
What's been also effective is just getting
the parents information.
Sometimes, when this is happening,
when a child, the parents are freaking out
'cause they just don't have any exposure,
and so I think there's been more discussion around that,
I think there's actually a new movie out around
that kind of issue by Silas Howard.
And I think it's helpful kind of getting that information
into mainstream to support parents
who are grappling with this and it might be new.
But I think, yes, we're gonna only see more
of those cases and it's a very good question, thank you.
And this one.
It doesn't look like we have any other questions right now.
If anyone does have a question after the fact,
or if they feel more comfortable asking it offline,
feel free to send me an email.
My email will be on the next screen, as will Dru's.
You can email either one of us directly
for that to be answered, sometimes it's easier
to do it offline, or you think of something after the fact,
which is completely fine.
We're both available to either answer the question
or pass it along to the appropriate party.
Definitely.
Thank you all again for joining us today.
We do encourage you to check out the resources
that Drew shared today, in addition to webinars,
the Alumni Association has a variety of resources
to support you in navigating a career transition
or advancing in your current profession.
The Alumni Association works to connect you
with advice, guidance, networking opportunities,
to help you in your career.
Some examples include the UMass Amherst Alumni Advisors,
connecting you with experienced alumni advisors
in your field for career advice,
resume feedback and mock interviews.
Career counseling and coaching, offered at discounted rates
from alumni career counselors and coaches,
with a variety of specializations,
and events and programs throughout the year
to network with fellow alumni.
You can view upcoming events at umassalumni.com/events.
In addition to live webinars like today's program,
we provide alumni access to a comprehensive library
of on-demand webinars.
To take advantage of any of our career resources,
visit umassalumni.com.
Thank you again, Dru, for sharing
your expertise with us today.
On behalf of everyone at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst Alumni Association, we wish you all the best.
Have a great day, and go UMass.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dru.
