Recently, NCTE joined more than 30 transgender organizations in setting forth a set of principles for comprehensive immigration reform. The initial bill that was just introduced includes some of those principles, but has important gaps and some problematic provisions. The bill includes many provisions that would benefit vulnerable trans immigrants and their families, including a much-needed pathway to citizenship, albeit a long and arduous one, a swift pathway for “DREAMers” who came to the US at a young age and have finished high school, and lifting the harsh one-year filing deadline for asylum-seekers.

The new bill also has significant gaps. As the legislation moves forward in the Senate, we must press to ensure that the final bill:

• Includes all families, including LGBT families, in the family visa system.
• Makes the pathway to citizenship realistic and accessible to transgender immigrants.
• Ensures that a new  proposed employment verification system doesn’t violate the privacy of trans workers (such as by using unnecessary gender markers).
• Shrinks the wasteful and inhumane immigration detention system and sharply limits solitary confinement.

Share your immigration story so we can improve these provisions in the proposal.

Read our full analysis of what the immigration reform proposal means for LGBT people below.

This bill represents a huge step forward, but it is just the beginning of the process, and we know we can do better. LGBT advocates will need to press for a number of key changes as the bill moves forward to committee, including ensuring a reasonable and inclusive path to citizenship, including all our families, rolling back the harsh detention and deportation system, and reducing proposed increases in wasteful spending in enforcement.

NCTE will be keeping you up to date as this bill moves forward. Now is the time for inclusive reform.

The conference, attended by government ministers and human rights activists from around the continent, is part of a series of international meetings focused on elevating these issues within the global human rights framework. An Asian regional meeting was held earlier in March in Kathmandu, Nepal, and a Latin American regional meeting will be held this week in Brasilia, Brazil, concluding in mid-April with a global summit in Oslo, Norway, hosted by the South African and Norwegian governments.

NCTE was invited to attend as a member of the Council for Global Equality, together with Council staffer Mark Bromley, and I was very honored to be asked to speak on one of the workshop panels regarding legal gender recognition as a human rights issue. The conference was a tremendous opportunity to meet colleagues from Transgender Europe (TGEU), the Organization Intersex International, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association of Europe (ILGA-Europe), and other ILGA-Europe member organizations. These activists are doing fantastic work across Europe and beyond. No country today can boast a perfect record when it comes to the human rights of LGBTI people – though some have further to go than others – and these activists along with others around the world are doing incredible work from which US activists should draw inspiration and insight.

I was particularly honored not only to attend but to participate as a speaker in a workshop on “Liberties – Fighting Discrimination Against LGBT Persons,” which focused on the topics of gender recognition and attacks on the rights of expression and assembly. The following are my prepared remarks from the workshop:

I would like to outline for our discussion this afternoon the issue of gender recognition and its connection to fundamental rights.

The designation of one’s gender by the state is a constant presence in everyday life today. For most it is experienced as perhaps benign and hardly noticed, but for millions of trans people today it is a source of ever present anxiety, humiliation, and fear, because our official documents and records announce a gender at odds with our core personal identity. This means that, for example, a trans woman like myself must display a male gender marker every time she seeks to:

• apply for employment
• enroll in school
• open a bank account
• travel
• apply for public benefits
• or even seek help in a crisis

Lack of gender recognition, and the ever present documentation of the wrong gender identifier not only “outs” individuals involuntarily in numerous and often vulnerable situations; it not only thrusts one’s trans status into the forefront in every part of social and economic life; it does even more than that. Lack of gender recognition also has the effect if conveying to everyone we encounter the stigmatizing message that we are not who we say we are, and implicitly that our core identity is a kind of fraud, to be disregarded or regarded with disdain.  In effect, lack of gender recognition imposes a mark of inferior social status.

The impact throughout the individual’s life can be stark. In a recent US survey, 1/3 of trans people had no form of official document reflecting their identity, and 1/2 had records with a mix of gender markers. Forty percent had been harassed on at least one occasion when they presented identification not matching their gender identity. Fifteen percent were asked to leave a place of business on at least one occasion in reaction to presenting such incongruous identification. And one trans person out of 30 reported that had been attacked physically on at least one occasion in reaction to showing incongruent ID. Overall, those whose gender was not officially recognized faced higher rates of job and housing discrimination These data are from the US but the impact is similar and often more extreme across the world. Lack of gender recognition is thus inextricable from other forms of discrimination and violence against trans people.

Across the many US jurisdictions as across the nations of Europe, barriers to gender recognition take varied forms. In some places, it takes the form of a total refusal to ever recognize a change from the birth-assigned gender, so that all trans people, without exception, must go through entire life constantly outed, humiliated, stigmatized and vulnerable. In other places, gender recognition is subject to the arbitrary discretion of judges or other officials, is influenced by individual prejudices, and is often based on invasive inquiries into every aspect of a person’s life. Still common in many jurisdictions are mandatory surgery requirements, which instead of supporting individuals in  making varied medical decisions based on their individual needs and values, impose  often unwanted, unneeded, and for some even medically contraindicated procedures. While access to health care is critical for all people, unwanted and unneeded procedures are a violation of bodily integrity, often resulting in involuntary sterilization, exacted as the price of exercising important rights.

In this area as in so many others, we must recognize that what might at one time have seemed common-sense practices may in actuality be inconsistent with fundamental rights of dignity, privacy, equality, and self-determination. I hope our discussion today will illuminate gender recognition as a critical component of any agenda regarding the human rights of LGBT people, as well as of intersex people who are also impacted by this issue and many of the others we are discussing.

I am incredibly grateful to the organizers from ILGA Europe, TGEU, and the French and Polish governments, as well as our partners in the Council for Global Equality, for this wonderful opportunity to participate in a process that will hopefully translate into meaningful action at the United Nations level in the coming year.

As thousands gather in Washington, DC  in support of immigration reform, the National Center for Transgender Equality and over 30 transgender service and advocacy groups released a Statement of Principles on Immigration Reform. The statement outlines fundamental policies critical for reform that affect the estimated 20,000 undocumented transgender adults in the U.S., and thousands of transgender youth who came to the U.S. at an early age and also lack legal status.

NCTE Director of Policy Harper Jean Tobin said, “For thousands of transgender immigrants and their families, the need for reform is especially urgent. They are frequently locked out of asylum protections when they come here fleeing anti-trans violence, denied recognition for their families, subjected to especially harsh and dangerous detention conditions, and often deported back into harm’s way. This goes to the core of what NCTE stands for.”

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Statement signatories include local and national transgender advocacy groups from across the U.S. including the Trans People of Color Coalition, Gender Justice Nevada, and The TransLatin@ Coalition urging Congress for a more fair and humane immigration system for transgender and non-transgender people alike.

Share an experience of how immigration laws affect you as an LGBT person.

Read the Immigration Reform Statement of Principles below or download it here.

Released today, the Trans 100 list celebrates transgender activists, artists,  and legal advocates  in the U.S. NCTE is honored that the inaugural Trans 100 list recognizes the contributions of current staff and board members Mara Keisling, Harper Jean Tobin, Marisa Richmond, and Avory Faucette, as well as former staff and board members Diego Sanchez, Masen Davis and Jaan Williams. The Trans 100 list will be released annually.

Trans 100 is an effort to change the media conversation around transgender people to highlight the positive changes transgender people are making in the U.S. Nominations were collected in an open nominations period and the effort to curate the list was co-directed by Toni D’Orsay, Executive Director of This Is How, and Jen Richards of We Happy Trans, and sponsored by GLAAD.

“The only sustainable self-interest is that which extends the sense of self to include the whole,” said Jen Richards at the Trans 100 launch event. “Look around: women, men, people of color, genderqueer people, crossdressers, showgirls, sex workers, academics, activists, artists, and allies. We are all one community.”

NCTE Board Chair Marcus Waterbury said, “NCTE is proud to have our staff and board be among those recognized in the Trans 100 and especially proud to be honored alongside many of our close friends and allies. As NCTE Board Chair, I have the pleasure of working with this profoundly effective team and these  accolades only pushes our team to do more and to do it better.”

View the full list here.

In NCTE’s Blueprint for Equality, we noted that: “As our political system fails to deliver meaningful immigration reform, millions of individuals and families in the United States face unspeakable hardships, including the forced separation of families, escalating deportations of individuals with deep roots in their communities who have committed no serious wrong­doing, and indefinite detention in cruel and abusive conditions. The government’s failure to recognize LGBT families exacerbates the hardships on our community, and transgender people frequently find their relation­ships challenged regardless of the gender of their partner.”

For several years NCTE has worked with many other human rights advocates to reform our costly and inhumane system of prolonged immigration detention in which transgender people—many of them fleeing violence and persecution in their countries of origin—are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Reforming this system, as well as eliminating arbitrary barriers for transgender people filing for asylum, must be a part of reform. Immigration reform also can’t work for transgender and other workers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, if it imposes an employee verification system that unnecessarily invades personal privacy.

NCTE is proud to be among hundreds of LGBT organizations across the country advocating for immigration reform that protects all of our communities. Just one of the many ways we do this work is by joining with other advocates to weigh in with members of Congress and the White House on the many important issues involved in reform.

Click here to see a sampling of letters NCTE has joined on immigration reform over the last year.

 Sign the Out 4 Citizenship pledge to commit to inclusive immigration reform.

In response to the committee vote on SB1045, National Center for Transgender Equality Executive Director Mara Keisling said:

“The Arizona Appropriations Committee approved an incredibly discriminatory and hateful bill that specifically targets transgender people. Rejecting the thousands of people who’ve spoken out against SB1045 in Arizona and across the United States, Rep. Kavanagh and his six allies instead chose to defend discrimination and protect discriminators. SB1045 brings more shame to Arizona’s legislature for isolating and targeting another marginalized community. Transgender Arizonans and our allies stand stronger and more determined to put an end to Rep. Kavanagh’s anti-transgender campaign.”

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Rep. John Kavanagh, the bill author, pushed SB1045 after his failure to pass SB1432 last week. SB1432, known as the “papers please” bathroom bill, would have criminalized people for using a restroom that does not match their birth certificate. Both SB1432 and SB1045 were developed in response to Phoenix’s LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance enacted in February of this year.

Keisling added, “SB1045 is an unnecessary bill, disconnected from the reality facing transgender Arizonans. Over half of transgender Arizonans have faced harassment or discrimination in places of public accommodations. And stripping local governments the ability to end this violence against us is a dangerous abuse of the capitol’s authority.”

The National Center for Transgender Equality applauds the advocacy of advocates in Arizona who fought off SB1432. And NCTE will continue to work with advocates across the state as SB1045 moves forward.

A wage increase would have a significant effect on transgender people. Compared to the general population, transgender people are four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000 per year.  This extreme poverty is directly tied to the widespread discrimination against transgender people in employment and other sectors, which force an outsized share of transgender people into minimum-wage jobs.

Depressed minimum wages has resulted in an economy where low-wage transgender workers and all workers struggle to overcome poverty while many businesses continue to see rising profits.  For the 80% of minimum wage workers who are over 18, the current minimum wage amounts to just $15,000 a year–-below the poverty line for a family of three.

Discussions about raising the minimum wage first came to the forefront this year during President Obama’s State of the Union address, when he proposed raising the amount to $9 an hour.  Since then, Congress has introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which seeks to incrementally raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2015. The bill has support in both chambers, but it is unclear whether it will move towards passage.

Numerous studies show raising the minimum wage would result in decreased employee turnover and would not result in fewer jobs overall.

While we continue to monitor this legislation and fight against employment discrimination, raising the minimum wage is one of the most direct steps we could take today to lift large numbers of transgender workers out of poverty.

“An estimated 80,000 American prisoners spend 23 hours a day in closed isolation units for 10, 20 or even more than 30 years.

Now, amid growing evidence that it causes mental breakdown, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has decided for the first time to review its policies on solitary confinement.”

The federal review follows a Senate hearing last summer led by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. Durbin was moved to call the hearing by surgeon Atul Gawande’s harrowing New Yorker article, “Hellhole,” on the psychiatric impact of solitary confinement. At the hearing, corrections experts testified that while there may be some limited usefulness for solitary confinement for short periods of time, over an extended period it is usually unnecessary and exacts huge costs, both fiscal and human. Senators heard how some states have sharply limited or eliminated solitary confinement, saving money and sparing suffering. As the NPR story notes, most inmates will ultimately return to their communities – and returning them broken from the trauma of solitary has costs for communities as well.

While neither the NPR story nor the New Yorker piece discusses transgender inmates, NCTE’s testimony for the Senate hearing makes clear that solitary confinement is undoubtedly a transgender issue. Simply put, many people are placed in solitary for long periods precisely because they are transgender. Sometimes it is seen as a punishment for failing to follow prison rules about how inmates in a female or a male prison are supposed to behave. Just as often, having refused to house a transgender woman with other women, it’s deemed necessary to protect her from the men she has been housed with. As NCTE’s testimony stated, however, “It is not acceptable to trade the violence and cruelty of prison rape for the violence and cruelty of long-term solitary confinement.”

Reducing the use of solitary confinement and other especially restrictive forms segregation is one of many issues on which NCTE and other LGBT and human rights groups have been pressing the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP). We advocated for sharp limits on the use of solitary “protective custody” in federal rules to implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and continue to push for stronger limits than those in the final rules. We hope the recently announced review by FBOP will lead to significant reforms at the federal level, and catalyze further state reform as well. Reforming the use of solitary is a necessary step in addressing the enormous costs of our ever-expanding mass incarceration.