2025 Events

I want to thank Kristen Browde for her commitment to seeing transgender and nonbinary attorneys being admitted to the Supreme Court bar. When she first approached me about this project in 2019 I told her that I was all in. She tried to schedule ceremonies in 2020 and 2021 but because of Covid we weren’t able to schedule one. I had to submit my application to the court three times before we were finally scheduled in 2022. I was extremely honored to be a part of that first group and to have continued to work with Kristen on these ceremonies.


Kristen is stepping down as the organizer and we all owe her a debt of gratitude for the work she has put into this project for so many years. I have been asked to take over as the organizer next year and I am thankful for her leadership and guidance. I look forward to continuing her vision of getting transgender and nonbinary attorneys in front of the court every year.


Jessie McGrath
NTBA Board of Directors

And that’s because the questions stump all of us. The Supreme Court is faced with big questions right now, such as whether universal injunctions are permitted, or what to do when a President refuses to abide by Court orders. We are in a world of big questions. The merits of these issues are rarely the point; the current presidential administration is bringing a wrecking ball to the structural and procedural underpinnings of the rule of law. Constitutional law professors—yes, those who taught us in law school—are banding together, across the political spectrum, to call this out. We are in times that most lawyers alive do not know how to contend with. We are facing, in truth, a moment of constitutional crisis.


I had answers for the question from the Harvard Law School graduate in the audience who asked what options we have if we lose equal protection under Skrmetti because I work in that arena of alternatives. First Amendment claims (viewpoint discrimination, freedom of association, and more), disability law claims based on reasonable accommodations for gender dysphoria, doing everything we can do with state constitutional law alternatives.


But the tougher question came from a non-lawyer: How do we deal with the fact that so many people are making every effort to change the law to literally erase us? The answer from the presenters: we wait for a harm to come about before we sue over that definitional erasure. True. That is what the courts allow.


But that can’t be enough.


Legal tools aren’t enough.

Enter Schuyler Bailar.


He was invited as the keynote speaker because he’s the first openly trans NCAA Division 1 Male Athlete. But he very kindly said “thank you” to any and all cheers for that, keeping his speech in a political register to galvanize the audience. He said that he has given about 600 speeches over the past ten years. That has been “his work.” I wondered who he’s in community with, who he has dialogue with rather than one-way keynote speeches with no Q&A, who he is accountable to. I ask these questions of myself, because others have asked them of me. Is sharing about trans joy and coming out to a room of trans people the path to liberation? I don’t know.


But something else he shared felt like it got me closer to it: “They”—and you know who he means, the conservative governments, egged on by highly financed conservative actors—“can take away our sports, our health care, our bathrooms, our gender markers on our passports, but they can’t take us away from each other.”


Well, I’m not even sure about that, given the senseless deportations occurring that have many people concerned about potential acts of banishment of U.S. citizens. Or the mass incarceration that separates people from their families and disappears them into cages.


But the “us” now was the “us” in the room. Trans people at Trans Pride here in DC. We are the ones who can find joy in the “small acts of love” that can sustain us and others, and get people to slowly change their preconceived notions about us.


If we all do it—bravely, boldly, beautifully—we can slowly start to create change, and find peace. Small acts amount to changing the world.


I don’t think it’s sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary. And many of Bailar’s words were right on target with a progressive agenda showing he cares about all the same things that I care about. I just think “the work” must mean more than giving speeches in auditoriums.


So, please, find a mutual aid network near you and give to it what you can. Just google “mutual aid near me” and you’ll very likely find something. More likely than not, if you’re receiving this newsletter, you can tangibly help another person who is in the crosshairs of this administration, as we all continue to navigate daily life.
If you want to give to a gender-affirming care mutual aid network, check out genderbands.org.


Give to Trans Lifeline and help a trans person stay alive. (translifeline.org).
Look for a bail fund to help people to be removed from jail, where they are held simply for being unable to afford the ticket price of their exit.

This pride season, find a rally, a protest, something more than a pinkwashed march with Silicon Valley-sponsored floats and investment banking-fueled freebies.


Find joy when you can, yes. But don’t stop there. This is the time to act.


In solidarity,
D Dangaran