A cohort of civil-rights attorneys functions as a human firewall defending transgender people from policies aimed at erasing them from public life. The group spans ages, geographies, and identities, and they litigate, draft briefs, and advocate at all hours to protect legal rights. They confront judges and government lawyers who often fail to understand or acknowledge their clients' existence. Their work blends courtroom battles, public advocacy, and everyday community connections, reflecting both professional commitment and personal stakes. Individual journeys into this work include later transitions, career shifts into law, and long-term dedication to LGBTQ+ legal defense.
In practice, they're more like a human firewall, a scattered fellowship of civil rights advocates whose work has become a bulwark against the Trump administration's campaign to erase transgender people from American public life. They range in age from their 40s to 60s and live in cities including Boston and Seattle. They spend their days in courtrooms, on Zoom calls, or drafting briefs at all hours of the night. They are queer, transgender, cisgender, parents, introverts, hikers, softball players. One volunteers at a food truck for the fun of it. Others wind down by reading fantasy novels. All of them have grown accustomed to facing judges and government lawyers who often don't understand the very existence of their clients or question that existence. The rarefied group of attorneys stands between America's LGBTQ+ community and an administration determined to write its members out of the law. They'll keep fighting in court, in public, and in quiet conversations over coffee or in softball dugouts. Because for them, the work is personal. And it's far from over.
Shannon Minter, 63, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, grew up in a conservative Texas family surrounded by love until the day he came out as a teenager, at first as a lesbian. "I felt like one day my parents loved me, and the next day, they didn't," he says. "I felt rejected by God. It was so terrible." Minter later realized he was transgender and transitioned in his mid-30s. He says he spent years drifting, even trying a Ph.D. in English before switching to law, almost on a whim, after following a friend into Cornell Law School. He discovered LGBTQ+ legal work during a clerkship at NCLR and never left. "I didn't even know that was a type of law you could do," he says. "It was so exhilarating."
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