Zsea Bowmani (Twitter: @LiberationGreen) teaches environmental law at Santa Clara University and co-leads the Law & Advocacy Project of the university’s Environmental Justice & the Common Good Initiative. As a scholar-activist, Zsea’s work investigates the intersections of the environment, race, gender and sexual orientation, and human rights. Zsea is particularly interested in the parallels between the treatment of queer, feminized, Black, Indigenous, disabled, and other marginalized bodies with the human treatment of the nonhuman world through our laws, institutions, customs, and beliefs. He explores this idea in his forthcoming piece on Black queer feminist ecology in the Tulane Journal of Law and Sexuality. Zsea’s scholarship has also been published in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Tulane University School of Law Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper Series, and the University of Toledo College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series. Prior to his role at SCU, Zsea was the Tawani Transgender Rights Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Illinois and the first Reproductive Justice Policy Fellow at the National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington, DC. In these roles, Zsea worked on legal cases and state and federal policies to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in employment, schools, and health care settings, to challenge the criminalization of trans and nonbinary individuals, and to expand access to affordable health care. Among his accomplishments, Zsea trained prosecutors on how to work with transgender youth in the Cook County juvenile system; provided revisions to the Chicago Police Department policy on interacting with of trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people; helped draft joint amicus briefs for US Supreme Court cases Zubik v. Burwell and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt; and created a first-of-its-kind toolkit for reproductive justice and LGBTQ advocates.
Zsea Bowmani
Reproductive Rights are LGBTQ+ Rights: The Case for Breaking Down the Litigation and Advocacy Silos