 So good afternoon. Thank you all for being here for our fifth annual Stonewall lecture at Roger Williams University School of Law. We are fortunate to have you physically and virtually here. My name is Ralph Tavares. My pronouns are he, him, his, and I am the director of diversity and outreach here at the law school. The 1969 Stonewall riots marked a critical turn in the fight for LGBTQ plus rights, serving as the impetus for the formation of several gay, lesbian, and bisexual civil rights organizations. Today, 52 years later, we honor the numerous individuals who have fought for LGBTQ plus equality and justice and the many contributions they have made to advance this modern day civil rights movement. Taylor Brown is among those who continue to fight in the civil rights movement, and we are so fortunate to have her here with us today. I cannot wait. To start our program and welcome you all to Roger Williams University School of Law, I would like to introduce the dean, Gregory Bowman, to give some opening remarks. Greg. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for being here. My name is Greg Bowman. My pronouns are he, him, his. I have the honor and privilege of serving as the dean of this fine institution, and we're really excited to see you here for this really important event on the fifth anniversary of this lecture. I want to start by reading a land and labor acknowledgment. I want to start by taking a moment to reflect today on the lands on which we reside. We are coming from many places, physically and remotely, and we want to acknowledge the ancestral homelands and traditional territories of indigenous and Native peoples who have been here since time immemorial and to recognize that we must continue to build our solidarity and kinship with Native peoples across the Americas and across the globe. Roger Williams University School of Law is located in Bristol, Rhode Island, and so we acknowledge, we honor, the Narragansett and Poconocha people and Soems, the original name of the land that our campus resides on. We also acknowledge that this country would not exist if it were not for the free, enslaved labor of Black people. And we recognize that the town of Bristol and the very land our campus resides on have benefited significantly from the trade of enslaved people from Africa. The economy of New England, Rhode Island, and more specifically, of Bristol, was built from wealth generated through the triangle trade of human lives. During this time of national reckoning with our history of slavery and the disparate treatment of Black people, we honor the legacy of the African diaspora and the Black lives, knowledge, and skills stolen due to violence and white supremacy. While the movement for justice and liberation is building and we are witnessing the power of the people, many are still being met with violence and even being killed. As upholders of justice, our hope is to become agents of change for members of our society who have been met with violence, physical, mental, emotional, through our privilege. And as upholders of justice, we believe that our students, who will soon be practitioners of law, can be and already are agents of change. And for those who are not familiar with this practice, why do we do? Why do we read land and labor acknowledgments? I want to share with you a statement from Northwestern University's Native American and Indigenous initiatives, which explains it much better than I could. And I quote, it is important to understand the longstanding history that has brought you to reside on the land and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land acknowledgments and labor acknowledgments do not exist in a past tense or historical context. Colonialism is an ongoing process, and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation. So again, thank you for being here at this very important event. We're very proud to host it. Pleased to have our guest with us today, and I'm very pleased to introduce the president of our LGBTQ plus alliance, Dalton Maldonado, to make introductory remarks and to introduce our speaker. Dalton, thank you very much. Good evening, everyone. My name is Dalton Maldonado, and my pronouns are he, him, his. It is my honor to introduce Taylor Brown to speak with us today at RWU's annual Stonewall Lecture. Ms. Brown successfully fights for LGBTQ equality. She decided to practice law because she loves to read, write, analyze, and make arguments. She understands what it is like to be fired, denied healthcare, and mistreated based on her identity. Like many of us, she has had to fight her entire life to exist. She attributes much of her success and drive to her grandmother. She enjoyed working at Lambda Legal because she was able to fight on the behalf of others. She is now the staff attorney for the LGBTQ project at America Civil Liberty Union's headquarters in New York. She litigates civil rights lawsuits to defend the rights and liberties of LGBT people and those living with HIV. She continues to fight because she knows the LGBTQ community is attacked daily. Ms. Brown is highly sought after public speaker on the LGBTQ legal issues, racial equity, socioeconomic equity, and intersectionality within broader civil rights movements. Ms. Brown has given numerous presentations, lectures, media interviews, and CLEs on these topics. Taylor has presented at Harvard Law School, the Federal Bar Association, New York Nurse Association, the Centers for Disease Control, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Next Gen, and various other conferences, businesses, law firms, and law schools. And if we're lucky, we might be the first to hear about her YouTube history. Without any further ado, I would like to introduce Ms. Taylor Brown. I'll know such luck, Mr. Maldonado, but he was showing me some of his YouTube history, so if you all are interested in that, perhaps we could get some of his. Thank you all for being here. Again, my name is Taylor Brown, and I'm so excited to be here. This is my first time in Rhode Island, and as I was doing research, learned that this is the only law school, so you all sort of have the racket on that, which is awesome. And thanks for everyone who's attending virtually. I don't know where the camera is. I think it's that one, but I appreciate your presence as well. And again, very excited to be here to talk about these issues, which are my job, my life, and sort of seriously my true calling in life. And so, I did make notes normally. I don't like to read, but everything's so important that I want to make sure I'm saying everything. Again, first another idea I want to say thank you to Mr. Tavares for setting this all up. Ms. Horn and Ms. Govodnik, if I set that right, for arranging all of the logistics and getting me here. So as Dalton was saying, I am a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, and I'm based in our headquarters in New York City, where I do LGBTQ and HIV impact litigation. And so my remarks today, I want to focus on sort of my personal story and sort of what brings me into the movement. The movement in general and some of my ideas, I guess that I've had in the past year, especially as we think about racial justice and our push for that. And then sort of my casework today and then hopefully leave time for a question and answers, which I really do encourage. I really like hard questions, ask me, I've been to many a law school, I'm not expecting this to be like the University of Mississippi or the University of Alabama, which I get lots of fun questions from those folks. But I will say, no, I mean, I realize this is recorded, so I had a wonderful time, thank you for inviting me. But the questions were very, very interesting, but I do encourage questions, I do like them. And so about me. So I am a southerner born and raised, I'm from North Carolina. I'm a biracial black woman, and if you did not know, I don't know folks that have looked me up, but I'm a trans woman, I speak about this all the time. And so being trans, just basic 101, is I was assigned male at birth, but I've always identified as female, I just had to make the world see that and that has been sort of, unfortunately, a central fight to my life. Aside from that, I was raised by a single mother, my dad, he was incarcerated for the majority of my life until I was about 22 or 23. So I grew up in the South, as we say, dirt poor. Very, very poor. And I was the first in my family, still the first in my family to go to college and then onto law school. And so when it comes to diversity, for the longest time, I told people I had the jackpot, unfortunately it was not doing much for me. But these days, diversity is very important and we understand, especially in the legal field, that we very much need it. And the work that I do, it's very, very important as well. And so it's something that I can speak from with authenticity and something that I care a lot about and something that I center a lot of my work on. And so I definitely will get into that as I speak more about my work. But I wanna talk to you sort of about the LGBTQ movement in particular. So it's a very interesting movement. The ACLU is a leader in our movement. I began my work at Lambda Legal, which is the nation's oldest and largest LGBTQ law firm dedicated to the full recognition of civil rights for LGBTQ people. So Lambda Legal is a single issue organization. They only focus on LGBTQ issues and those issues affecting people living with HIV. Whereas at the American Civil Liberties Union, we are a large organization. I would say 200 plus attorneys across the country, plus all of our affiliates. We have an ACLU over on Island, as you may or may not know. But we have a large amount of attorneys focused on various issues of social justice. And so that's our racial justice project, reproductive freedom project, speech, privacy and technology project, lots of different projects that concentrate on various civil liberties and civil rights in this country. And so being in the LGBTQ project, an HIV project, I get to help lead truly some of the most important litigation in our country to expand, protect and solidify the rights of people like me and people in my community and people in adjacent communities. And so it's funny because I'm just coming off of what's known as the National LGBTQ Litigators Roundtable and that just ended today. It is an annual conference every year where LGBTQ organizations in the movement cross the country. So I'm thinking of places like Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights, GLAAD, a bunch of different organizations. We all come together for four or five days and this year it was virtual again, of course, because of the pandemic. And we talk about sort of our current cases, what's going on trend-wise in the law and sort of what we hope to do in the future. And my colleagues, I love to joke. I love to laugh. And so I think you have to in this kind of work because it is quite serious and can be very emotionally heavy. But I also tend to come from a critical lens, I will say oftentimes, of our movement. Our movement has been a traditionally white-led movement and a white-focused movement. And as someone who comes from a very different background in a lot of ways from my colleagues, I am very critical of the way that cases are litigated, sort of the focus of what we have done in the past, I would say, over the history of the movement, but especially what we're concentrating on now and the people who are really, really in need of our services and what it means to be impact litigators. And so I want to talk to you all about sort of what this model of impact litigation means, especially today, especially given today's political climate and legal climate. So impact litigation is tailored in this idea that we want to make surprise the biggest impact on the most people that we can with our cases. So we don't do direct services. So someone comes to us, say it's in New York where the law is quite clear that discrimination based on sexual orientation violates several different city, local, and state laws and federal laws. So that's not the kind of case we would take. We take cases where the law is unclear on an issue and we want to advance an issue. And usually this happens in federal court that's been the majority of my practice. I don't, thankfully I will say don't have any state court practice from what I hear from my colleagues. It is quite a zoo sometimes, but primarily practice in federal court exclusively. And so what we do is, again, we take cases that again are issues that we're interested in. Sex discrimination has been a big one. And we take those in jurisdictions where the law has been either not well-developed or we feel like we could make a positive impact in the law. So we're not talking Fifth Circuit. We're not talking Eighth Circuit. We're talking circuits where, again, we think that we can get a favorable decision. And also another thing that goes into impact litigation and the considerations that we do are who we represent. We have to have people who are, I would say, what's the best way to say this? People who are, because our cases are so large and we do a public education component to it, we want people who are palatable. I guess that's the best way to say it. And so largely that has meant representing white people and white issues and not being able to focus on people like trans people and like black and brown people who have a history of being criminalized and have a history of being discriminated against and who have had to make life choices that make them sometimes what the popular media or what the world would consider unpalatable for decisions that, again, we've had to make surely because of who we are and discrimination in this country. So that's another consideration that impact litigation, unfortunately, has to consider. And so that sort of model of advocacy is mirrored in multiple organizations, Lambda Legal, ACLU, GLAD, and it's produced notable decisions. 2003, the landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas which decriminalized sodomy, and we had 2015, the Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, and then most notably, ACLU's big win in 2020 in the Bostock, Zarda, and Stevens trilogy, which says that Title VII where a employer fires an employee because of their sexual orientation or transgender status, they are discriminating on the basis of sex, which was huge. So I mean, that's a huge decision and it means a lot. But I say that I come from a critical perspective because again, when you think about the cases that have been won, so decriminalizing sodomy, very important marriage, and then of course this case, which Bostock I will say I think has more implications for minority communities and sort of the work that I do because it's very important to have solid Supreme Court case law that says sex discrimination is discrimination when you discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. I mean, the language is perfect, it's amazing, and we've only had it for a year and we're already seeing it being implicated across the federal government and in various state jurisdictions that are where it was unclear before that sexual orientation and gender identity were included. They are taking the language of Bostock to make it clear that you could not discriminate in employment. And our theory in anti-discrimination law is that where you can't discriminate in one sector like employment, you can't discriminate in schools, you can't discriminate in healthcare. And so our goal as an organization at the ACLU is to take that win in Bostock and to apply that in as many contexts as we can. And but unfortunately what that means in a lot of ways is that we have these huge landmark cases and then we kind of move on to the next issue. And so I describe what we hope as the trickle-down effect. We hope that what's gonna happen is that state legislatures will recognize it as they have, the federal government will recognize it as they have, and the private bar will bring private cause of action to sort of expand sort of what does actually Bostock mean not just hiring and firing, it's everything, it's uniforms, it's looks policies, it's bathrooms, it's restrooms, it's all of these things. And unfortunately for me, that has been a bit of a struggle considering the communities that I come from and the needs that we have because it's great that we have a case that says you can't be hired and fired but that, you know, that supposes that you're employed already. And when I look at the employment rates for transgender people, when I look at the employment rates for black and brown people, especially black and brown LGBTQ people, Bostock really is not gonna impact their life because again, they're being excluded from employment and discriminated against. And again, I felt the same way sort of about the marriage case. Of course that was very important. It was very important for a lot of reasons and sort of the legal precedence that it set. But when I think about the effect in people's everyday lives, that's what I'm most concerned with. And I think that's where I butt heads a lot with my colleagues about what it means to be an impact litigator and have an impact in people's lives because I truly, truly, truly, truly do believe that even if I was to impact only one person's life, that that's very important. But to my colleagues and to our funders and to our donors and to our mission, sometimes that outlook doesn't necessarily mesh. But I will say I'm solely but surely making changes. I often find myself, I'm the only person usually in the room that is like me or exactly like me in terms of background. At the ACLU, I was the first trans woman they hired as an attorney in the project and the first black trans woman that they hired in the project, which for an organization that's 100 years old is kind of sad. But it's not entirely their fault. There have been many barriers to trans people's full participation in society and education and all of those things. But I bring this perspective to my work and as I see it as sort of a subtle takeover because I'm trying to change our organizations. I'm trying to change the way we do our work and the way that we think about our work and the way that again we consider who's most impacted and who we represent and to me that has to be black and brown people and trans people especially because those are the members of our community who are suffering the most severe pervasive and systemic discrimination in this country. And I particularly like to focus my work on the South as well because that's where I'm from that has large, extremely large populations of black and brown people as well as LGBT people. And so it's very important to me that I bring back sort of everything I've been so fortunate to gain through education and through my work to the people who really need it. And I always tell people sort of some of the few stories that sort of got me involved is that, you know, I came to Chapel Hill first-gen student. Had no idea what I was doing. But my first year I just sort of knew, I knew when I left home that it was the time for me to be authentic. And I didn't really have the words for it at the time but I knew, I just knew who I was. And I remember sitting on my bed in my dorm having a panic attack. And I said, Taylor, I said, you're brown. I said, you're poor. I said, and now you wanna be trans. I said, wow, it's like trajectory is looking great. Like we're gonna, life's looking great right now. But no, I remember in that exact moment accepting who I was and saying to myself that I would never let anyone discriminate against me or treat me differently. And so my advocacy really started at Chapel Hill in terms of, again, I was the only trans person that I was aware of on campus. And so I had to negotiate to get a single dorm at the same rate as a double dorm. Because again, you know, it's sort of not my about the situation, it's who I am. And you know, you don't really have housing that provides to LGBTQ students. I don't wanna make anyone else uncomfortable. I don't wanna be uncomfortable. And I shouldn't be charged double because of the situation. And then to healthcare, I was on Medicaid at the time. And I sort of my first win was appealing a denial of hormone therapy to the North Carolina Medicaid agency and getting them to cover it. And again, this is all I was in undergrad. And I just thought, you know, this is what I wanna do. So I go to law school. I get to law school, very strategic decision. I decided that I wanted to be in California or New York because not only did I needed a law degree, but I needed a lot of healthcare, serious healthcare. I'm welcome. And so that's primarily why I chose New York, but I get to law school the first week, very excited. I'm sitting in my dorm, scrolling through our student health insurance plan. And what do I come across? An exclusion, a categorical exclusion for any care related to transgender people or the treatment of gender dysphoria. And so Monday morning, I'm in then Dean Judy Mender's office who I'm sure thinks of me as the biggest curse of her life. I'm sure she never imagined a law student was gonna give her so much trouble, but I was determined to be that law student. But she was our dean of student services and I just said, Dean Mender, I said, look, I would never pay for health insurance that discriminates against me and either you all are gonna give me $3,000 that I paid into this health insurance plan or you're gonna work with me to convince SIGNA or to provide coverage for medically necessary healthcare. And so these sort of early battles in my life, aside from everything that I ever came just to get into college, to get into law school and to become an attorney, have really informed sort of my priority areas and where I think our movement needs to be and where we need to focus. And so again, wonderful time in law school. I spent three years. I didn't really have time to participate in move court and law review and things like that. That's another thing I wanna tell law students that those things of course are so important and if you have the opportunity, please do them. But I do also to understand, I tell minority law students all the time that sometimes these opportunities are just not there because you do have to spend your time fighting for health insurance. You're still dealing with poverty whenever you're in law school. You're still dealing with so many things that affect, again, these metrics that they say are gonna rule your life for the rest of your life but they don't, I mean, they do at some point and the entry part of your career but you can have a fabulous career regardless of those things. I was not a move court or law review because I was writing appeals to SIGNA to get them to cover the care that I needed and our third party administrator. And I will say that in 2017, I got coverage for three huge surgeries that I needed that were medically necessary for me and I was very proud of that and it ultimately resulted in me not taking the bar that summer even though I crazily thought I was going to. I spent that summer having surgery because the Trump had just been elected. I was scared to death of what was gonna happen in healthcare and it was very important to me that I got the care that I needed. And so, again, those sort of early battles are sort of what I brought into Lambda Legal and I was really the first trans woman that they had and I told them, I said, I guess you don't really get volcano insurance until you get a volcano because I got into my career and I faced those same kind of exclusions by my employers who were LGBTQ employers and again, that is why I do the work that I do because we are still being discriminated against in vast levels and so when it comes to black and brown trans people those are the issues that I concentrate on and that I care about the most and so I'll talk about some of the work that I do before I again, open it up to question and answer is because I really would like this and I think those are where people learn the most. So the work that I get to do so I think the work that I'm most proudest of I will say, maybe not proudest of but that I care about the most is what I call my shadow docket, funny enough. So my main docket is of course cases that I do that I bring affirmatively are cases that I'm assigned to by my supervising attorneys and other folks in the project that I work in it's about 10 different people in my project like I can't remember off the top of my head like six or seven attorneys and then the rest are paralegals and support staff in my project in particular, the LGBTQ project. And so of course I get assigned cases but my shadow docket are advocacy matters that I take on myself that I don't necessarily have to go to my project for approval and that I get to work on on the side. Now these are again are these are not cases that are going to you're gonna see in the headlines these are not cases that I'm filing in district court. These are matters that I'm taking on on a personal basis to help people. And so I think my latest win was just helping this lovely trans girl in South Georgia who was facing discrimination at her school. They were not letting her run for homecoming court as a girl. They were not letting her use restrooms and all of these things. And so of course I come in with a nasty we call a demand letter knowing that the law in the 11th circuit right now is a little wonky because the 11th circuit has decided to take on a case called Adams v. The School Board of St. John's County. They have decided to rehear this case on bonk. I was involved in this case when I was at Lambda Legal and we got a great decision out of a panel of the 11th circuit. But now the 11th circuit has decided for some odd reason that they would like to rehear this case even though the ninth circuit, the third circuit, the fourth circuit and the seventh circuit have all decided this issue in favor of trans students. And so anywho, I said, whatever, I don't care the Adams is pending on bonk. I'm gonna write a nasty letter to the school. I'm gonna threaten to sue them if they don't do what I want them to do and to treat this trans girl equally. And it was a win. And I've done this in so many contexts. I did this in a context where a trans person said something silly to a provider on a virtual call. The provider called and had this person committed to a mental institution. And a mental health institution, not by, they didn't have any choice in it. The police came, they arrested them and they took them there. And this person then got slammed with a large bill. And so of course, again, for trans people, whenever you get a bill like that, this is something that could affect your credit for the rest of your life. You don't have money for these things. And so I help this person again, just navigate the healthcare system, help them sign up for this help. The hospital had a sort of a project where if you made under a certain income, they basically wiped away all of your fees. And I'm gonna see small things in helping my community that I find are some of the proudest moments that I've had in helping folks. But then of course, there are my cases, which I think that people hear about those are the things that make the news and sort of what we're known for at the ACLU. A big focus of my cases is Georgia, well, one case is in Georgia, but it's Medicaid access. So of course, as I said, I was on Medicaid. Medicaid is very important to me. And so Medicaid, of course, is a federally funded program available in all states that provides healthcare for low income people. And so in Georgia, as in a few other states, they have again these categorical exclusions of care, which I fundamentally believe, and many courts have agreed, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution, the Affordable Care Act, and various other laws in this country. Whenever, again, you're providing care to cisgender people, but you're telling trans people they can't have this same kind of care because they're trans, and that's unlawful. We just can't let that stand. And so I have sued the state of Georgia on behalf of two wonderful black trans women, and they are, again, some of the most wonderful people I've met, people that truly, when I got to the ACLU, we were actively representing no black plaintiffs, and since I've joined the ACLU, we now represent three black trans women. And that's the kind of change that I wanna see at the ACLU and that I'm pushing for. And because we have to be taking on these kinds of issues because these are the kinds of issues that are affecting our community in the biggest ways. And so Medicaid is a big area of concentration of mine, as well as healthcare in general. I'm also involved in prison-related healthcare cases, and so the biggest case I have is against the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which will have a very large impact because the Federal Bureau of Prisons is, again, a very large incarcerator in this country, and does a lot of bad and evil work. And especially for trans people, it has been hell for them, especially under the Trump administration, which rolled back a lot of friendly Obama-era policies that we saw that were helping get trans people housed in accordance with their gender identity, which was protecting them from rape and protecting them from violence from other prisoners, and they were getting the healthcare they needed. Whereas now, well, that's what happened with the Trump administration. We expected the Biden administration to come in and hopefully be a little more proactive, but coming from the critical lens that I often come from, I'll shame the Biden administration now and say they have not done enough. We are still fighting the Department of Justice because they're representing the Bureau of Prisons in this case. I have a PI hearing coming up on November 22nd in this case to get my client the healthcare that she needs. And again, this is a glacis v. true. It's a very important case in the Southern District of Illinois, and again, impacting the way that the Federal Bureau of Prisons treats transgender people in prisons and the kind of healthcare that they're provided. And so those are two big cases that I'm working on. I'm also involved in a couple of state corrections, Department of Correction cases, North Carolina in particular, which is another problematic state in terms of healthcare for trans people who are incarcerated. And again, these kinds of issues are what we can, what my world and my circle and my colleagues view as impact cases because again, they're these cases that we can bring on a large scale that we hope are gonna have large scale reform. And of course cases that I'm invested in and that I love, but again, our cases that I don't know to the degree that they're gonna affect people's everyday lives and that's the kind of things that I wanna do. And again, the response that I often get from my colleagues is, well, that's what we have direct service providers for. But there are just so many direct service providers that are not equipped in this country to serve black and brown people or LGBTQ people. And that's just a fact. And I see us as leaders in this movement as people who, I was sitting at round table with 64 participants. I'm looking at the people on the screen. I'm scrolling through everyone's Zoom and I'm just like, wow, I'm just like, none of us, like, I was like, nobody here was elected. Nobody was chosen. And we're here over four or five days to make some of the most significant and biggest decisions for people's lives in terms of what could impact them or ultimately what won't impact them. And to think that our community members often don't know who we are or don't know us is just extremely, it weighs on me a lot. I wake up every day and I think like, wow, like, again, the mantle that I've taken on is so, so huge because, again, I'm there to represent people like me and even in spaces where I, of course, have wonderful colleagues who have done amazing work over the last 20, 30 years across that time span. But again, still sometimes often don't understand the concrete needs of some of, again, our most vulnerable community members. And that is so, so, so important to me. And so the Medicaid and healthcare work that I do is very, very important. But I'm also, unfortunately, I was telling Ralph, Mr. DeVaris, before I was, before I came in today, that we are being, I've been drug into sports litigation, which are, as we saw this past legislative session, a bunch of various states, Texas being the latest, past legislation attacking trans youth, which are very, again, vulnerable population of people, and especially when we break that down in terms of race and socioeconomic status, the outcomes and disparities are even worse for LGBTQ people. But in those cases, again, these states are purporting to protect women in sports. And it's this idea, again, that trans women are not women, that they have a physical advantage in, in sports. And again, a lot of this, I, this is a newer issue for us. And especially, I think it's a harder, not a harder issue, but an issue that where I can plan for a case and where I can understand sort of all the aspects and plan for this litigation and bring it, versus where a state acting an animus with no, literally they don't have to have any kind of scientific basis or support, all they have to have is enough votes, can pass a law that then I'm drug into, either through intervention status or through, you know, just bringing a ferment of litigation because it's violating someone's civil rights. Those cases are a little harder because we're sort of on our feet where this is an issue that we're having to tackle head on and we don't have a, we didn't have time to prepare to plan and the court of public opinion is being swayed by often what I consider pseudoscience and just misinformation about transgender people. And these are very hard cases, but we have been very successful and the federal courts have been very receptive to our arguments. I am counsel in our West Virginia case, BPJ versus the West Virginia State Board of Education, as well as our Tennessee case, which is LE, V Lee. And again, so these cases are challenging these laws, which are banning, again, youth, who, again, many are pre-puberty, so they truly have no biological advantage in any aspect when it comes to sports and their ability to play or they have had access to providers and the providers have given them the appropriate care, which is usually puberty blockers. So again, no kind of advantage that you're gonna see coming from hormones or anything like that and targeting these trans youth or, again, just exclusion from sports. And this is, again, just a line of cases that is following from losses in the bathroom and locker room and context arena that we've seen and now the latest thing is sports to attack youth. And again, these cases, these are my main docket, these are not my shadow docket, they're cases that I have to litigate and that I'm responsible for. And they are, these cases, I don't represent black folks in these cases, but at the same time, when I look at the issue in these cases, which is sex segregation, it comes down to the very same principles that we saw in segregation in this country, excluding white people from black people based on these misbeliefs and this pseudo science about biological differences between our bodies. All kinds of women are built differently, all kinds of men are built differently, it's just the science. And again, when we think about the purpose of school sports, especially in this public school context, I tell people ultimately it's about participation, like, I hate to break the news to y'all, but your kids aren't going to the NBA. It's like, don't wanna be rude, but little Johnny is really not gonna be in the MLB. And so when we think about the implications, it's really just so you can take a group of students who are already ostracized, who already have such a hard time and who already, again, face so many barriers to obtaining a degree and to participation in society and you wanna make it even harder for them and make it easier for kids to bully them and to discriminate them. And so it gets me very fired up and very angry. But again, the courts have been very receptive. In our West Virginia case, we won a preliminary injunction blocking that law. We just filed our Tennessee case. We have another case I'm not on is in Idaho. That is called Hecox and Hecox. We were also successful. That, I can't really off the top of my head remember the procedural posture, but I know it's been up to the Ninth Circuit. We won a PI in that case as well. Because the courts again are seeing what these cases are and they are attacks from far right organizations. I'm gonna call it out right now. Alliance Defending Freedom, which actually, I will say, if you look at alliances defending freedoms record in the Supreme Court, they have quite a record, but they are classified as a hate group by the Southern Property Law Center and I very much consider them a hate group in the actions that they bring against LGBTQ people on, again, just false premises of family values of these inherent biological differences between men and women and just truly, truly just horrible cases just seeking to undermine LGBTQ quality in this country. And then lastly, it's 440. So I'm being mindful of time. I think I'll save maybe 15 minutes for Q and A, but another important aspect of our work is religious exemptions. You'll see that we just recently had a case come down. So this was not my case, but this was my supervisor's case who I always shout out. Her name is Leslie Cooper. She's amazing. She, we joke all the time, but Leslie's been at the ACLU since 1999. So she's been there for quite a while and she has litigated a number of cases, but Fulton was one of her latest cases. And Fulton was basically this situation where the city of Philadelphia had contracted with various agencies. They contracted with an agency who did foster care that is associated with the Catholic Church. The city of Philadelphia also has a non-discrimination ordinance which says that if you receive a contract with the city, you cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, which is inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity, what Supreme Court has made clear now. And they unfortunately said that they were not gonna abide by that. They were not gonna serve same sex parents and a lawsuit arose. It got to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court came down with a ruling. And so this was again one of these sort of odd technicality situations that we saw in Masterpiece. So the Masterpiece cake shop case was about the ability of a public accommodation which was a cake shop to deny same sex couples service. And in that case, again, it wasn't the Supreme Court ruling and saying that, hey, people have this right. The situation in Masterpiece was that the Colorado commission which had initially reviewed it showed some animus towards religion in that situation. And so the Supreme Court reversed on those grounds and sent that case back down. And so in Fulton, it was very much the same situation. Well, there wasn't animus, but the sort of technicality procedural situation that they sent it back down on here, the anti-discrimination statute had a sort of this end of the line ruler plate situation which gave sort of this unfettered discretion to the commissioner to grant exemptions to the non-discrimination ordinance. And so the court found that that meant that that was not a neutrally and generally applicable law, subject to strict scrutiny and thus that kind of unfettered discretion was ultimately unlawful in this situation and sent the case back down. So the solution in my mind, what I tell people is that anti-discrimination law shouldn't have exemptions like who needs to be exempted from these things that sort of defeats the whole entire purpose of having an anti-discrimination law. My colleagues feel differently, many of them do for various reasons, but that was Fulton. And so now we're seeing the situation pop up in a variety of contexts, especially for transgender people. And so this is showing up in denials of care by religious institutions. There was a very important case called Minton that the Supreme Court just denied certain in which the ACLU was canceling. And in that case, so the Ninth Circuit has ruled in favor of us, but basically what happened is that a trans man was to go undergo surgery at a Catholic hospital, a week before the surgery. And then we see this fact pattern happening across the country. There have been a number of cases where we and other organizations have had to take on this issue. They deny the surgery and they cite religious objections to why they're denying someone surgery. And again, I'm from the South, I respect religion a great deal. I was forced into the church for a very long time and I have my own religious beliefs, but I think that those things are very personal and they should be left like that. I don't wanna know about anyone's religious beliefs as much as I don't wanna know a lot of things like your blood type. It's usually irrelevant to me. And so I think that's very much how it should be, how it should stay. And so for especially black and brown people, a lot of hospital accesses they do have is funded by the church. And so there are free clinics and things that people access. And again, when we think about where people are getting care, this ability for someone to look at you and because of how you look or because of the kind of care you need, say, thank you, goodbye. And this could result in many different things. Many bad healthcare outcomes is just absolutely ridiculous. We're seeing this in schools as well. Ooh, this is a situation where teachers who are objecting on religious grounds to using students' pronouns or their correct names, trans students' pronouns or their correct names. Again, it's just, to me, it's a matter of manners. I tell people all the time, so many issues in the LGBTQ community could be solved if everyone was just Southern and practiced manners, which means that we just all do our best to get along and we don't say things that hurt other people's feelings. I think that's a simple principle that unfortunately that just cannot seem to be what we can get accomplished. And so in these contexts, we see teachers, again, citing religious objections, saying that they do not believe in transgenderism, all of these things, which, again, transgenderism is not a word, I just wanna throw that out there. And again, just these, again, harmful citations to religion to, again, I think skirt what I consider societal compacts. We live in society together. I think once you avail yourself of the opportunities of society, you become a healthcare services provider, you become a cake shop provider, you lose the ability to look at people and because of a factor, a demographic factor, you lose the ability to then say, you're not gonna serve that person because you disagree with them on some level. To me, if that's the kind of behavior that you wanna engage in, that's something you have to do on your private time, on your private time, and you don't, again, get to avail yourselves of the idea that you're gonna be in society and fully accepting of all people and opening your doors to all people, but then just have this unlicensed, unfettered discretion because someone, again, doesn't match your ideas of what sex is or you don't approve of their sexual orientation, deny them services or treat them differently. It's just, to me, wholly unacceptable. And so those are some of the bigger cases that we're working on at this time at the ACLU in which keep me very busy and I don't get to spend a lot of time on my shadow docket, which is sad. But I do, I will also throw out, I love that the Supreme Court shadow docket is coming to the world's attention because that's also a huge issue where we see a lot of activity on and I think needs closer scrutiny to say the least. But in my remarks there, so that was just, again, some of my work touching on some of the bigger issues and I'll open it up to Q and A. Any questions? Oh, and you can talk. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna do, you know, so I'm gonna be running the microphone and running back to my seat, bear with me. Any questions? Any at all. Personal, professional. Oh, I was like, oh, we have a brave person. Come on, I always tell people to try to stump me. I love that. Hi, can you hear me? I can. Lloyd, thank you for coming. Just had a quick question. When you first spoke, you mentioned the ways that you see or the way that you saw Vostok falling short of impacting Black Crown trans lives. And in the same vein you referenced Obergefell. I just wanted to know if you could elaborate on what you see as Obergefell falling short in the same way. Absolutely. Well, I mean, if you look at the history of marriage overall, I mean, just from a perspective, I mean, marriage has been this idea of, in the past it was a way of a, sort of a comeuppance of social status and these ideas. Comic situation. The idea of love and marriage and choosing who you wanted to marry and marrying below your social class before we became a country and then all that stuff. Again, marriage was just very much a, just something that, again, a very white-centered situation and it was very much a thing that I view as gay culture needing sort of acceptance from society in this way. And of course I think it's very important. I think that everyone should have the same legal entitlements that come with marriage and sort of that recognition and what it means. And so I don't suggest that. I just think that in terms of priority, we spent so much funding and so much money in the battle in various states leading up to the Obergefell decision where again, I'm thinking about people who are poor, people who don't have homes to go to, people who aren't being able to eat. And again, we think of these things as direct services situations and I very much don't. I think of these are the systemic impact things that we need to be targeting and of course they're harder and of course they're more difficult and of course we have to talk about difficult things like social inequality and wealth inequality and racism. But those kinds of things are what I'm interested in and that I think are very much LGBTQ issues. They're not just exclusive to their movements. I think they very much intersect with LGBTQ people and very vulnerable members of our community. I was those people, I was that person who dealt with housing insecurity, food insecurity, those types of things. And so I guess that's sort of what I mean. Of course, I mean, we can't take away the wonderful decision that we got in Obergefell and sort of what it expanded on in terms of rights to privacy and implications for that, which I think are very important and will play a big role in future impact litigation. But again, we have to prioritize sort of what are we aiming to impact and what are we prioritizing in the LGBTQ movement? And I just know, had I been born many years ago, when I was in a, should I have been in a leadership position, I probably wouldn't have prioritized marriage. It just wasn't something that I think is super-duper important in my mind. Yeah, of course. Great, we have a question on the chat. Did you as a black trans woman from North Carolina ever struggle with convincing LGBTQ plus colleagues in the Northeast to not write off Southern and Midwestern states as inherently non-viable for advocacy? Growing up in Rhode Island, sometimes it would feel like people forget that black and brown LGBTQIA folks exist in rural communities as well as in big cities. And that is from Megan Jackson and she also says, good luck at your PI meeting. Oh, thank you, thank you. I wish it was just a meeting. I wish I could just talk to the judge and we'd be friends. No, I'm feeling good about it. Thank you, Megan. I will say yes, I will say I had a lot of learning to do. Coming from the South, I will say I was a country bumpkin very much Beverly Hillbillies coming to New York City out of nowhere. I had never been to New York City before. I moved there and I just was in culture shock for the first six months and just couldn't leave my apartment, but when I got into my career, I realized I was probably attack conservative in terms of what I thought was possible to be completely honest because in the South, again, we're facing such dire issues that I think when I got to New York and I saw that people were just like, oh, you're fighting over it because you want to go there and buy a cake or you're fighting over that or like these kinds of things. I'm like, wow, we have much bigger issues in the South. It's, I think the hardest thing for my colleagues is risk because again, and again, this didn't hit me until I led my first case. My first ever case was a case called Cato V, the North Carolina State Health Plan, which I love to come back to North Carolina with a lawsuit as my first case. And it was challenging the State of North Carolina's State Employee Health Plan, which impacted lots of people, teachers, anybody who worked for the state. It excluded care for transition-related health care. And so in that case, oh, I forgot why I brought Cato. Oh, no, this, okay, the point. So the point was this is when it first hit me and what I can understand from my colleagues, but again, I sort of depart on is this idea of risk because when I was leading that case and I was responsible for everything and I was prepping, I remember I was like, at the office, it was like one in the morning and I was working on opposition to a motion to dismiss and because the state was basically saying that sex discrimination, that old argument we've seen, which the Supreme Court just disposed of, sex discrimination didn't coverage under identity or trans status. But it hit me all of a sudden, I thought, wow, I was like, if I lose, this is gonna affirmatively mean that people don't have civil rights in this jurisdiction. And it just really didn't, I don't know why in that moment and it hits me every day since then that what it means when we lose. And that's my colleagues' concerns. I don't think it's that, that they don't understand the need sometimes, but they're very risk averse. And to me, the things that are worth doing the most are the things that take the most risk. And I understand that we are scared of losing civil rights in the federal courts. I completely understand that and I know what it means, but at the same time, I think about the span of the LGBTQ rights movement and I think we lived in a world pre-Laurance where there was Bower v. Hardwick and it was a situation where esotomy was criminalized. And sometimes we have to go through those periods at the society where it's not necessarily that we're just in the courts, but we're pushing state legislatures, we're pushing policy people, or maybe there will be a reaction to this kind of injustice, like who knows? But I just find myself more and more and this idea of not that I want to lose people's civil rights, but we have to try. We have to be in the places where people need us the most. I don't care if it's a fit circuit, I don't care if they're a bunch of lovely people with different legal opinions in mind, but it's like we have to absolutely try. And I think that's just where I get caught up. And some of my colleagues, I'm sure we'll say it's because I'm younger and I'm a millennial and I want everything now. And it's not that, it's just that I think that as someone who has been through a lot in her life and has had to fight for a lot, I understand just very intimately what people of my communities need. And so I think it's pushing my colleagues to be more focused on that. And I think it just forces us to become better attorneys. Like we just have to be better at what we do so that we don't lose. Knock on wood. First, thank you so much for your comments. This has been so enlightening and helpful. Could you elaborate a little bit more on what I'm hearing about this internal tension with the ACLU in terms of you? Like your agenda would be different if you were selecting the cases to take. And obviously, you and your entire team are working towards the same goal. So can you just talk a little bit more about how you navigate that as an individual on a daily basis when you're pushing for black and brown and trans and they're pushing for something else, but you're all moving in the same direction. And yeah, that's of course. And I don't want to, I genuinely have affection and love for every single person that I work with. They're amazing people. They have amazing professional histories, personal lives, all of those things. But again, I just have to emphasize that I am very different in a lot of ways. And I think that I don't take that for granted and I don't let them forget it, that's for sure. And how I navigate that is that I've had to learn that being the person that's always fishing back, being the person that's always speaking up doesn't make me a bad person. It just makes, I'm advocating for a position that I believe is ultimately right. And I just, I think that's where the future is headed. And I think that's where we have to go. I just think it's a situation where again, because of, if you look at the LGBTQ movement, there are a few black leaders on top of trans leaders. And so it's a space in which it has just been heavily dominated just by virtue again of a lot of societal barriers for various minorities where we haven't really made it into this space. But as I see more black and brown colleagues, and I was reminded of this at Roundtable, which I talked about, which was that conference, we had a POC caucus, and which had 26 people in it, which is the highest number we've had in forever. And we had a trans caucus, which was 18 people. And as I see our numbers grow, I see my perspective slowly taking over the LGBTQ agenda. But it just, to me, it doesn't faze me at all. I understand that there's disagreements. I disagree with a lot of work that the ACLU has done. And I vocalize that every single day. I have serious problems with a lot of the work that our speech privacy and technology first amendment folks take up, where they're defending what I consider a horrible speech. And they have a different opinion than mine. And I make it very clear how I feel. The ACLU has some very fundamentalist, very just rooted in the origin of the ACLU, which I completely understand being a 100-year-old organization. But as more and more, and we just have an issue, I mean like all social justice organizations, like all corporate organizations, with diversity in general. And I think that's a big problem. And so I think that's where that tension comes from. But one way I've handled it, I'll say, and again, conscious that this is being recorded, is that we unionize at the ACLU in terms of employees. And I think that reflects on the internal work we have to do, because I'm all about cleaning up your own house before you go telling other people how to order theirs, which I do a lot. And so I think that we have to be consistent in values and missions. And so one way I sort of get the change I want to see is that I'm on the marketing committee, and I'm pushing us to be better people and to do things like pay equity and to do things like more racial justice work and to have a better perspective. But in terms of my colleagues, I take their wisdom. I take everything that they've done. And I, of course, I appreciate it and I value it. But I'm firm in my beliefs and my position. And it's, yeah, I just have no problem every day pushing back against what I think we should be doing and what we should be prioritizing. And I'm winning. So leave it, Charlie. Yes. Are you final? Hi. Thank you for coming. I apologize for being late. And if you already answered what I'm going to ask. Kimmerhurr and I'm an alum. And I'm wondering how you all work either collaboratively or in conjunction with Lambda Legal, NCLR, GLAAD, all the groups that are uniquely situated to do this work. And tell us more. I think it might be helpful for the law students and for me, just a better understanding. Yeah, of course. Love your mask, by the way. Thank you. Get it? So, yeah, so as a movement, which I'll say I take that big capital M movement, we have a lot of partners. And that's policy organizations. That's grassroots organizations. And that's also other litigators. And so there are some sort of informal recognition. Like GLAAD is a lot of work in the Northeast. And so we don't necessarily take on cases in the Northeast unless we're sort of invited or we're asked to. But oftentimes, we are co-counseling the sports cases with Lambda Legal, a lot of the sports cases. Because these are newer cases and resource-intensive and something that we want to, well, secretly basal. You doesn't want to say, well, I wasn't just our fault. We lose. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It would be nice to say that if we had the situation. But oftentimes, we actually don't partner with our sister organizations because we talk together and we decide who should take on what cases and where the need is. We each have discrete funding. And so the idea that we're all funneling our resources into the same case or something like that just doesn't make sense, just as we wouldn't bring the same kind of case in the same circuit. Like we wouldn't have two school bathroom cases going on in the same circuit. Because that's just a waste of our resources where we could be bringing that other case and another jurisdiction to advance a law. But we do, there is a very collegial environment amongst the organizations. We all know each other. It's a very small world when it comes down to it. And so everyone has each other's email. Everyone has each other's phone number to a certain degree. My boss, James Essex, who is the LGBTQ Project Director, he meets monthly with the other executive directors of the organizations. So we're all very much in touch and conscious of what's going on on each other's landscape. And everyone's quick to criticize, I will say. If anyone does any kind of misstep, you'll hear about it from your own community before anyone else. And so, yeah, there's a lot of that, yeah. And I will say, I respect so many different people at, I love, have great relationships with people at my former organization Lambda Legal and across the movement, lots of just giants in the LGBTQ movement anyways, who I really respect. Well, we are at our time. Yes. I am just in awe of you, honestly. Folks who didn't, when we got her information and you look at her bio and Dalton was reading the bio, that was like the abridged version of the bio. And the real bio, which I'm sure is a bridge to, is massive and I am just in awe of what you're doing, what you have done and just the vulnerability that you've shown everybody here and sharing your story. And we just wanna thank you so much for being here and being a part of our community and for being our fifth Stonewall lecturer. Yes, thank you. We have a small little gift. I'm gonna awkwardly walk up there and give it to you with this microphone in hand. I'll awkwardly accept it. We welcome everybody outside as well. We have a small little reception and an opportunity to ask Taylor any questions you may not have been able to ask. So thank you all so much for being here. Thank you to those online. And we will see you at the next event. Donate today to tell you. Thank you.