Panelist Bios
Z Gabriel Arkles is a Staff Attorney at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in New York City. Gabriel has done activism and advocacy around issues of gender, sexual orientation, and HIV for nine years. At the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, he has provided free legal services to hundreds of low-income transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming people of color on issues such as name changes, identity documents, immigration, discrimination in sex-segregated facilities, and public benefits. He has also done impact litigation, publication, support of community organizing, and policy work to advance the rights of these communities. Currently, his work focuses on issues of prisoners’ rights and criminal justice. He graduated from NYU School of Law Order of the Coif and magna cum laude. While at NYU, he received the Tom Stoddard Arthur Garfield Hays Fellowship for work in sexual orientation and the law.
M. Barusch is a second year law student at Boston University. She serves on the steering committee for the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, the leading organization behind HB 1722, the Massachusetts trans rights bill. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Barusch co-coordinated the Harvard Transgender Task Force, which successful pushed for a transgender-inclusive non-discrimination code, improved health and mental health care for transgender students and staff, and improved policies for bathrooms, housing, and staff training. This year, Barusch and several other law students and lawyers worked to start Massachusetts’ first legal clinic for low income transgender people, the Massachusetts Transgender Legal Advocates.
Kylar W. Broadus is a professor, attorney, activist and public speaker from Missouri. He is an associate professor of business law at Lincoln University of Missouri, a historically black college where he serves as chair of the business department. Kylar has maintained a general practice of law in Columbia, Missouri since 1997. Formerly, State Legislative Manager and Counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group.
In August 2005, Broadus along with two other panelists were the first to present information before the American Bar Association regarding Transgender clients. In 2004, he spoke at the Regional Affirmative Action Conference on Transgender Issues and Affirmative Action. In January of 2003, Broadus was called before the American Association of Law Schools on transgender issues In February of 2003, he presented at Georgetown Law School’s Symposium on Gender and the Law on the same issue. He continues to speak and lobby on the national, state and local levels in the areas of transgender and sexual orientation law and advocacy.
Currently, he is board chair for the National Black Justice Coalition. He is on the ABA Committee-Section for Individual Rights and Responsibilities. He has served on the board of director of the National Stonewall Democrats since 1998, and served as the interim secretary from January to May 2001. He served three terms on the City of Columbia’s Human Rights Commission and two terms on the board of the statewide GLBT advocacy group, PROMO: For the Personal Rights of Missourians with the last year being as Vice-President. Broadus is a founding board member of a national think tank, The Transgender Law and Policy Institute. Broadus worked for State Farm Insurance Companies from 1989 to 1997. He is a 1988 graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law and obtained his B.S. in Business Administration from Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri.
Cecilia Chung, Deputy Director of the Transgender Law Center, is an openly trans and HIV+ woman. Cecilia was a member of the Transgender Discrimination Task Force in 1994 that lead to a groundbreaking report by the SF Human Rights Commission.
In 1998, Cecilia joined the Board of Directors of San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee. In 2001, Cecilia became the first Asian and first transgender woman elected as President of the Board and led the organization to a new standard of inclusion and excellence.
Cecilia was one of the producers of Transgender March, one of San Francisco’s largest transgender events and in 2005 produced the first ever Trans Stage at San Francisco Pride.Cecilia was a writer for Gay.com’s HIV Life Channel and was appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in 2004, where she co-chairs the San Francisco LGBT Advisory Committee and was recently elected as Commission Vice-Chair.
Paisley Currah teaches political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He has written widely on transgender law and politics in the United States. He is a co-editor, with Richard M. Juang and Shannon Price Minter, of Transgender Rights (Minnesota, 2006). With Dean Spade, he is a guest editor of two special issues of Sexuality Research and Social Policy on “The State We’re In: Locations of Coercion and Resistance in Trans Policy” (December 2007 and March 2008). He is currently guest editing, with Lisa Jean Moore and Susan Stryker, a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on “Trans-.” He is a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and served as the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies from 2003-2007. Recent articles include: “Gender Pluralisms Under the Transgender Umbrella” (in Transgender Rights), “The Transgender Rights Imaginary” (Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law); “‘We Won’t Know Who You Are’: Negotiating Gender Permanence in New York City Birth Certificate Policy,” co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore (article under review). He is currently working on a book, Not the United States of Gender: Sex, the State, and the Regulation of Transgender Identities.
Leslie Farber is an attorney at law practicing in Montclair concentrating primarily in the areas of personal injury, workers compensation, employment law, real estate, contracts, LGBT rights (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), small estate planning, and general litigation.
Ms. Farber received her law degree in 1991 from Pace University School of Law where she was an editor of the Pace Law Review.
Currently, Leslie is Chairperson of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Section of the New Jersey State Bar Association, a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Employment Lawyers — New Jersey (NELA-NJ), and the National Lesbian & Gay Law Association’s (NLGLA), where she also serves as NLGLA’s liaison to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession.
Outside of the practice of law, Leslie is member of the board of directors of Garden State Equality (a non-partisan LGBTI political action organization).
Phyllis Randolph Frye is known as the “grandmother” of the national transgender legal and political movement. She is also known as THE PHYLLABUSTER by thousands around the globe who are still being sent or forwarded her pre-blog emails (enroll by sending ADD ME to prfrye@aol.com) since THE PHYLLABUSTER began in 1995. She has changed laws and served as a role model. She is a partner in the Houston law firm of Simoneaux, Frye & Thomason, PLLC, which recently hired its seventh attorney and can be found at www.sftlawfirm.com. Her highest inner esteem from personal endeavors are the following:
(1) to have assisted many hundreds of people go forward with their lives because of her advocacy in the courtrooms across Texas since 1981;
(2) to have founded and presided for six years over the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy – known as ICTLEP and also known at The Transgender Law Conference which began the teaching and growing of grassroots transgender political and legal activism in the early 1990s ( www.tglegal.com, scroll to “History of ICTLEP” and also to “Chapter 22″).
(3) to have co-moderated and to have published “THE GAY AGENDA of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Questioning and Allies (LGBTIQA) Community of f Residents of the Houston Metropolitan Area, ” 2005. http://www.pridehouston.org/community/futures.php)
Nick Gorton is an openly gay and transgender physician. He completed residency and chief residency in Emergency Medicine at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, NY. Dr Gorton has a twice weekly clinic focusing on transgender patients at the Lyon-Martin Clinic in San Francisco. He lectures on transgender health care at medical schools and medical education conferences. He has worked as a medical consultant regarding transgender health care for Lambda Legal, the Transgender Law Center, the Northwest Justice Project, the New York Legal Aid Society and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and is on the advisory board of the National Center for Transgender Equality.
Richard M. Juang serves on the Committee for Transgender Inclusion of the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association. He is a co-editor of several publications, including Transgender Rights (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006), the National Center for Transgender Equality’s Responding to Hate Crimes, and Transgender Justice, proceedings from the 2005 Transgender Politics, Social Change, and Justice conference held at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is currently working on another edited collection, Transphobia: Critical Perspectives on Anti-Transgender Violence. As a genderqueer Taiwanese-American, Richard is particularly interested in the intersection among racism and transphobia. Plus, he is also learning how to walk in high-heeled leather boots.
Jennifer L. Levi works on a wide range of cases defending the civil rights and civil liberties of gay men, lesbians, and transgender people. She was co-counsel in the case of Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health in which she successfully represented seven same-sex couples denied the right to marry in Massachusetts. She was lead counsel in the cases of Albano et al. v. Reilly, challenging the Massachusetts anti-marriage ballot initiative, and Doe v. Yunits, representing a transgender student denied the right to attend school because of the clothing she wore, among many others.
Jennifer is an Assistant Professor of Law at Western New England College. She serves on the Legal Committee of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and is a founding member of both the Transgender Law & Policy Institute and the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition.
Jennifer is a graduate of Wellesley College (1985) and the University of Chicago Law School (1992). She has also taught law at the Chicago-Kent Law School and is a former law clerk for Judge Michael Boudin at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Alexander Li-Hua Lee is the founder and current director of the Transgender, Gender Variant & Intersex Justice Project, a nonprofit legal organization based in San Francisco. TGIJP’s mission is to end the egregious human rights abuses committed against transgender and gender variant people, and people with intersex conditions, in California prisons and beyond. Using complementary legal, movement building, and community organizing strategies, TGIJP works at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, intersex condition, and dis/ability, among other multiple facets of identity and background. Alex is a graduate of UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law.
Sharon McGowan joined the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project as a Staff Attorney in 2004. Although she works on a broad range of issues, Sharon focuses on transgender equality and student speech and expression. Sharon is the lead attorney in Schroer v. Billington, which is currently pending in federal district court in D.C. The case asserts a Title VII sex discrimination claim on behalf of a transgender woman whose offer of employment from the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress was rescinded after the Library learned that she was in the process of transitioning from male to female. She is a co-author of the fourth edition of the ACLU book, The Rights of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexual and Transgender People. Previously, Sharon had worked at the National Legal Department of the ACLU on First Amendment and Post 9/11 National Security Litigation as the William J. Brennan First Amendment Fellow. Before joining the ACLU, Sharon was a litigation associate at the Washington D.C. law firm, Jenner & Block, where she was part of the litigation team on Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court struck down all remaining sodomy laws in 2003. Sharon clerked for Judge Norman H. Stahl of the First Circuit and Judge Helen G. Berrigan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. She graduated with honors from the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School, where she was editor in chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
Lisa Mottet is the Director of the Transgender Civil Rights Project at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Since 2001, she has led the Project with a primary focus on passing anti-discrimination laws prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression at the local, state, and federal level. Since the Project’s inception in 2001, the percentage of the U.S. population living in a jurisdiction with a transgender-inclusive nondiscrimination law has increased from 5% to 38%. In her role, Mottet also provides guidance on all transgender-related legislative and policy questions, including how to implement and enforce nondiscrimination laws. In 2003, Mottet authored “Transitioning Our Shelters: A Guide to Making Homeless Shelters Safe for Transgender People,” working with the National Coalition for the Homeless. Mottet is the author of the forthcoming guide, “Opening the Door to the Inclusion of Transgender People: The Nine Keys to Make Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Organizations Fully Transgender-Inclusive.” Mottet graduated from University of Washington and received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was an active member of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and Outlaw.
Ksen (K.J.) Pallegedara is a graduate of the New York City foster care system, he became an activist out of necessity at seventeen and has been at it ever since. While in care, he became involved in advocating for the rights of transgender and otherwise GLBT youth in care. As a result, he was one of the people involved in the drafting and implementation of the city’s new non discrimination policy as well as the appointment of an LGBT coordinator for the agency. Currently, he is finishing up his BA, avoiding thinking about the LSATs and plotting his return to the world of foster care reform.
Donna Rose is an accomplished transgender activist, author, and educator. She spent the first 40 years of her life as a husband, a father, and a successful IT contultant. Since her 2000 transition she has become one of the most visible activists in the country. She has been featured in Fortune Magazine, USA Today, Marie Claire, Pink Magazine, and in countlss local and national publications. She was featured in a 3-part May 2007 series on Transgender Issues for Entertainment Tonight. She was a member of the Human Rights Campaign Business Council and had an active role in shaping US workplace policy towards transgender employes through her work on the Corporate Equality Index. She was the first transgender board member for HRC, for GLAAD, and for the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. She is on the Transgender Advisory Committee for the Out and Equal Workplace Advocates and has been invited to be co-chair of their 2008 Workplace Summit. She serves in an advisory capacity for the National Center for Transgender Equality. Her website, www.donnarose.com, remains a respected source of information for and about the transgender community. And, she is co-founder of TransEducate.com, dedicated to providing education on transgennder issues.
Melanie Rowen is a staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, focusing on transgender issues. Melanie has participated in litigating numerous cases affecting the rights of transgender, gender variant and intersex people, and is involved in NCLR’s legislative and policy work to protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Her current work primarily includes cases and policies connected to prisons, family law, and elder law. She received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 2004, where she was also a recipient of the law school’s Stonewall Scholarship, given to the student most likely to advance the cause of civil rights for LGBT people.
Carl Sciortino is a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, representing Somerville and Medford. After defeating an anti-marriage incumbent in 2004 at 26 years old, he is now one of the few out GLBT members of the legislature. In his first term, Carl took a leadership role in defeating the anti-marriage constitutional amendment. Prior to the legislature, Carl worked in the public health field, working on HIV/AIDS clinical research. He graduated with a degree in Biology from Tufts University and is a member of the Medford Ward 4 Democratic Committee and Progressive Democrats of Somerville.
Gunner Scott is the Director of The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition where he is currently involved in the campaign to pass the Massachusetts House Bill 1722, “An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes” for transgender protections. He is a nationally recognized activist, educator, and community organizer on transgender rights, LGBT health issues, LGBT partner abuse, and addressing access issues for the transgender community. He has provided trainings for the last eight years to wide variety of community organizations, colleges/high schools, criminal justice, health, and social service professionals. He is also the creator of the eight year old Gender Crash Open Mic, designed for queer and transgender performers.
He has written articles for What’s Up magazine, Sojourner Women’s Forum, and “Agitate and Activate”, the introduction to Pinned Down by Pronouns, a 2003 Lambda Literary nominee anthology published by Conviction Books. He was a contributing editor to “Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual” a National Center for Transgender Equality publication and the “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation” chapter of the 2005 Our Bodies, Ourselves book. He is on the National Board of Advisors for the National Center for Transgender Equality and a Commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth. He is currently attending Goddard College, where he is doing a study on LGBT adult homelessness.
Susan Sommer is Senior Counsel based in the New York headquarters of Lambda Legal, the largest and oldest national legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people (LGBT) and those with HIV. Sommer handles groundbreaking litigation and also supervises attorneys in all areas of Lambda Legal’s work, including battling anti-LGBT discrimination in parenting, employment, housing, relationship recognition, public accommodations and law enforcement. Sommer heads Lambda Legal’s Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project seeking to improve treatment of LGBT youth in foster care, juvenile justice and homelessness systems of care, where she focuses on developing policies, best practices and litigation addressing the specific needs of transgender young people. Sommer was part of the legal team that litigated Lawrence v. Texas, Lambda Legal’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down Texas’s “Homosexual Conduct” law. She also was lead counsel in Hernandez v. Robles, Lambda Legal’s lawsuit seeking the right to marry for same-sex couples in New York. Sommer is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. She clerked for U.S. District Court Judge William Schwarzer in the Northern District of California.
Dean Spade is currently a Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School and UCLA Law School. In 2002, Dean Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project ( www.srlp.org), a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. SRLP also engages in litigation, policy reform and public education on issues affecting these communities. Dean received his J.D. from UCLA Law School. Dean’s writing has appeared in the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, the Harvard Lesbian and Gay Review, the Widener Law Review, the Chicano Latino Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law and several anthologies. Dean will join the faculty of the Seattle University School of Law in the Fall of 2008.