I want to share with you Vicky’s journey with NCLR—a journey that spans 11 years. Vicky is only one of the hundreds of LGBTQ immigrants that turn to NCLR desperate for help each year. Your gift today doubled by the Justice and Equality Matching Gift Challenge — will help us continue our vital work for people like her. We first met Vicky in 2003 after she came to the U.S. seeking asylum from Mexico. She had lived through abuse and violence because of her gender identity and sexual...
Date
Month: December 2014
I received a letter from a prisoner a few weeks ago that still haunts me. The prisoner, a transgender woman of color, tried to remove her own testicles after she was repeatedly denied medical care for her gender dysphoria. While this might seem extreme to people outside of prison, these incidents of “self-surgery” happen regularly in prisons and jails across the country. There are thousands of transgender prisoners housed in correctional facilities who need basic medical care, protection from...
Recently, a colleague at a legal aid organization told me about a client who came in for help because he had quit his job. It wasn’t until the attorney gave the client an overview of their legal programs, including their LGBTQ work, that the client opened up and said he had quit because he was being harassed at work for being gay. Without this kind of information, they would have never had a case. This story reinforced what we, at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, had known—that even a...
The advertisement from the Child Protection League Action that appeared in several newspapers across Minnesota last Sunday—attacking the Minnesota High School League’s proposed policy to address transgender student-athletes—was misleading and dangerous. The proposed policy has nothing to do with “male” students playing on girls’ teams. Rather, it has to do with transgender students—a tiny fraction of the population whose sex at birth is different from who they know they are on the inside, and...
