“We want to uplift everyone as we improve our own condition.”
In honor of Pride Month, our LGBTQ+ Lawyer Network and Pro Bono team hosted a firmwide discussion—Pride in Practice: Workplace & Community Efforts to Support LGBTQ+ People. Our panelists discussed efforts to support the LGBTQ+ community in both workplace and community settings, and the development of meaningful allyship for advancing LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion.
The panel featured Alexander Chen, founding director of the LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic at Harvard Law School; Emma Cusdin, co-director of Global Butterflies; and M. Dru Levasseur, director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association. Senior pro bono counsel Rachel Strong provided welcome remarks.
Below are some highlights from the conversation.
Rachel: In addition to being the beginning of Pride Month, this week marks our firm’s Community Impact Week, an opportunity to acknowledge the work that you all do to positively impact the communities in which we live and work. From this conversation, we hope that all attendees leave with greater appreciation and understanding of the important efforts underway to support the LGBTQ+ community in the workplace and community settings, as well as ways that allies can help advance LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion.
Neil: The LGBTQ+ umbrella encompasses a wide variety of gender identities, cultures, and ethnicities, and each has a unique experience but shares common interests in areas of equity and inclusion. We call this “intersectionality” because gender identity and sexual orientation do not exist in a vacuum. We want to uplift everyone as we improve our own condition. Pride Month is a celebration of our diversity, but it started as and remains a protest. Our communities have fought for and won many fights for equality and inclusion, but LGBTQ+ people are still attacked and oppressed because of their sexual orientation and gender identities. There is much work still to be done.
Alex: This has been a record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States. There have been hundreds of bills passed in state legislatures and dozens that have been enacted that restrict the rights of our community in different ways—everything from banning drag performances to restricting discussion of the existence of LGBTQ+ people in classrooms and laws to restrict the ability of people to receive gender-affirming care, use the bathroom, or participate in sports. Why now? Remember that the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling on same-sex marriage was very much rooted in that unique institution rather than other fundamental rights. It's a thin reed, often affected by who is appointed to the bench. And there is a way in which advancing rights in one arena inevitably creates backlash. As same-sex marriage went from being a political loser to a political winner in the last eight years, opponents focused on the two issues that remain closer to 50-50 issues with voters, and those are transgender sports access and gender-affirming care for minors. So opponents decided to go after those.
Emma: In the UK it’s 20 years since Section 28 of the local government act was repealed. For those who aren’t aware of this, Section 28 was legislation which banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality,” which was interpreted to mean that local authorities and schools were prohibited from distributing books, leaflets, etc. or staging performances that portrayed LGBTQ+ people and their relationships as anything other than abnormal. It meant that educational staff were fearful of discussing LGBTQ+ issues with students, and many support services were closed, which had a damaging effect on LGBTQ+ communities. Despite positive changes, are we still feeling the legacy of this today? The UK Government has introduced and/or repealed laws that impact LGBTQ+ people in different ways, and other legislative changes have stalled—for example, measures tackling conversion therapies and gender-recognition reforms.
Dru: Right, and the playbook that’s being passed around right now is compounded because people—the public—do not know who we are. They don’t have enough interaction with us. But with all the attacks, the silver lining is that now we’re more visible than ever. And our allies are stepping forward to point out that the arguments being made are not based on medical science or the facts of our lives. And though I hate to say these words, one of the best parts about seeing the number of anti-trans laws is that we can no longer ignore the “T” in LGBT . It’s now most of the docket, for example, at Lambda Legal.
Emma: As I’m based in the UK, I can give a subtly different perspective. Whilst it can be challenging in parts of Europe, some countries are moving ahead. They’re enacting positive LGBTQ+ legislation and positive political climates. Now in the UK we’ve had quite a different political environment since 2015, and regarding LGBTQ+ rights we’ve dropped from being ranked number 1 to 17th across Europe. The good news is that the legal system has been quite robust in the United Kingdom. We had the landmark Taylor v. Jaguar case in 2020, which enabled nonbinary people, at last, to get recognized for rights in the workplace. So for us, the challenges have been more political. It’s been more around the rise in hate crime, up 41% for sexual orientation hate crimes in one year and up 56% for transgender hate crime . But a recent YouGov poll still has LGBT acceptance at 81%, and for trans and nonbinary acceptance it’s slightly less but still at 71%.
Alex: I would add there’s some surprise at how the vitriol is beginning to affect all members of the LGBTQ+ community. That includes laws and regulations affecting access to healthcare, like prescriptions for gender-affirming care. We’re even seeing attempts to prevent access to life-saving prescriptions that might prevent the spread of STDs and HIV.
Alex: On that, one example of how different groups’ rights rise and fall together is in the area of religious exemptions. There was the Hobby Lobby case in the US touching on whether a “closely held private corporation” could deny access to contraception for its employees. And the Supreme Court has massively expanded the ability of individuals and corporations to claim those exemptions to deny rights based on their religious beliefs. That framework creates a two-tiered system of rights. Which makes it easy to extend those restrictions to other health rights like HIV or gender-affirming care and slot them right in. And they’ve very cleverly focused on things like wedding cakes and websites so that they can say, “what’s the big deal?” But the truth is, the same framework can be used to deny access to healthcare, and it has been. There was even a case where a transgender man had a heart attack and the responders stopped performing CPR when they discovered he was transgender.
Dru: And there, I would reiterate the importance of the role that law firms play in this. There’s the pro bono work but also the leadership role that lawyers play in society. You know, 2020 became the year of the pronoun, but that didn’t always include a conversation about why we were doing this. And then we have to ask who is missing in our profession...
Emma: Support is an important aspect to address in the legal workplace. How many LGBTQ+ people are Managing Partners? Judges? Stepping forward is a verb—it requires action.