Monthly Meeting July 11, 2011
What is ‘transgender’? Who are the individuals who could be said to constitute the ‘transgender community’? And what are the legal issues that transgendered and gender-variant people face in this society? Pauline Park, who led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002, will address these questions as well as describing current efforts to prohibit discrimination and bias-based harassment through legislation and public policy change at the federal, state and local levels.
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Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of NYAGRA, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (nyagra.com), which she co-founded in 1998. She is also president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org) — an LGBT community center she co-founded in 1997 — and vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (transgenderlegal.org). Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act of 2010, the first fully transgender-inclusive statute enacted by the New York state legislature. In 2005, she became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary that premiered in 2008.