When my identity is respected, that’s a euphoric feeling. It doesn’t hurt my soul to be misgendered, it happens all the time because of how I present. But when I’m acknowledged, when I feel seen, that’s euphoric. We should allow people to be who they are, not just respond to trauma. We need to be celebrating and promoting our lives as happy, functional, and beautiful. It’s not just all about “we’re all about to die and that’s why you should care.”
As adult queer folks who have gone through significant trauma, we need to be careful to not pass that along to the next generation if we can avoid it. They need to know history, but our lived reality shouldn’t be their future expectation. Our kids are growing up hopefully not knowing the same trauma. We should be raising them with the expectation that they can be whoever they are and they will be safer than we were because of what we did and what we’re doing right now.
If we can empower allies and our own community with a little bit more knowledge – a bit more focus on how to combat this discriminatory rhetoric and legislation and give them a hook, the talking points, the confidence that they are allowed to talk about something that they don’t directly experience – I think that would help us create a similar momentum for trans* rights and respect for gender non-conformity that we had with gay marriage.
The Trans in BigLaw Group (the Bar’s monthly mentoring group of transgender and nonbinary attorneys in large law firms) is incredible. There’s no way to explain it. I’ve identified as nonbinary since before I went into the legal field. There was no space for it back then. It was easier to let firms and colleagues call me a lesbian, but I did not identify with that term. When I went to Paul Weiss, I was the only nonbinary person I knew in the law. Over the years I’ve met others, including my friend and colleague Alexia, who later came out as trans* and nonbinary, and is now a partner at Paul Weiss. Having them in my life is the greatest gift, as a co-inhabitant, friend, and mentor in this profession and the world, in a nonbinary identity.
Now I also have the Trans in BigLaw Group, which started as 5 people and just grew and grew. Every month a new person joins our meetings, and just recently a new Big Law partner joined. Every time I’m in this Zoom meeting I am thankful to be alive in today’s world.
I never thought I would see this. I never thought there would be a space for us; being able to find community across firms in this space of being nonbinary and/or trans in big law. Big Law is already such an exclusive club within the legal profession. I never dreamed I would be able to talk about business generation, client management, and managing up and down, in the same conversation where we’re talking about clothes, bathrooms, pronouns, and coding – how you have to adjust based on who you’re with and where you are. It’s astronomical what Dru [Levasseur, The Bar’s Director of DEI] has done. I never expected there to be a way to connect not just with other Big Law lawyers but with specifically queer and trans people who are working to find their way, their path to success, however they define it. Every time I log into the monthly Zoom, it feels like the first time I walked in the door at Lavender Law as a 1L and went “oh wow, there are others like me?!”
Whether it’s about being a sexuality minority, a gender minority, or a lawyer, you know that the people in this group have all of those lenses of intersectionality on as well. People who are similarly situated to you – as opposed to someone who has various types of privileges, who might not be thinking about all the specific risks – can advise you in a way that is more holistically safe and better suited for you.