Cozen O'Connor’s Post

Name: Cozen O'Connor on LinkedIn: #pridemonth #lgbtq #aclu #impactlitigation #probono #transrights…
Uploaded: 2024-06-27T17:00:54.330Z
Channel: Cozen O'Connor

Cozen O'Connor

20,517 followers

3mo

🏳️🌈 As we near the end of #PrideMonth, we are reminded of the trans community's ongoing struggles, especially in the U.S. courts. Earlier this month, we spoke with former Cozen O'Connor member and current Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU, Harper Seldin. We invite you to watch our conversation and learn more about Harper’s work, what success looks like for him, and what we all can do to advance the rights of Trans Americans during Pride Month and beyond. #lgbtq #aclu #impactlitigation #probono #transrights #cozenoconnor #interviews #pridemonth2024 #changetheworld

Transcript

So I'm a senior staff attorney at the national ACLU in the LGBTQ and HIV Project. We litigate for LGBTQ rights nationally, So for the past 18 months I've been flying around the country challenging bands to gender affirming care for transgender adolescence. In states like Oklahoma and Indiana and Ohio and Texas, I think there are a couple things that we'd really like to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years. You know, the win in Bostock was huge for transgender rights and establishing that discriminating based on transgender status is discrimination based on sex. So we're certainly hoping, hoping to build on the winds from Bostock to move that principle principle to other spaces. My theory of change is that. Even if we don't win these impact litigation cases, what matters is that we didn't go down without a fight. What matters is that we showed up in court and we at least made courts. And legislators say the quiet part out loud about what they really don't want our transgender people and transgender youth living their lives. When you have a temporary injunction hearing in Texas State court, you have to have live testimony. The last person that we put up was one of our anonymous transgender teenage clients. His case name is Nathan. He's 17. He is a great kid. So I did his direct, I put him on the stand and the second question I asked him is where you supposed to be today? He's like, it's the second day of my junior year of high school. I'm missing class to be here. I was good thing I knew the answer was coming cause otherwise I would have started crying. And he just talked about his life and how he'd come to realize that he was a boy and how being able to take testosterone while he was in high school meant that he could go out and be with his friends, have a job. And they talked about the burden it would be on his family if he had to go out of state for care, right? They'd have to move or they'd have to drive. And he felt. Add that that was what what it would put his family through to take care of him. And so I asked him like, seriously, I said, you know, do you in open court? I said, do you like living in Texas? And, and he's he said he did and he talked about how he looked the weather and he loved the wildflowers and it was his home and he wanted to be with his friends in his community. And I'm like, that's a win right there, right, like having this kid be in court and talk about his story and. Have everyone in court and have the judge here that you know, this, this was this kid's life and what he wanted was actually really simple, like a really profound moment. I think there are a lot of ways to support to support the work of the ACLU and and the broader project of LGBTQ rights and liberation. I think pro bono work is huge. I can't our cases, we could not do them without pro bono partners in terms of the resources that that they bring and the intellectual curiosity and the passion. So we talk about pro bono. Partners as force multipliers, right? We can be in more places when we have trusted her partners working alongside us. And I think that that's true for cases at every level. That's not just the impact litigation cases that we do. That's things like name change, petitions and other kinds of pro bono where, you know, really just helping individual people live their lives because that's why we do the impact litigation, right, is so that the end of the day, people can live their lives. So any kind of pro bono work or support that that folks can do. Not even on a direct services basis is is enormously impactful.

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A brilliant article from one of our key contributors!!!
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