As more advocates emerge from shadows of organizations and wage own battles, some ponder how they’ll advance cause without an LGBT ally at the height of its power – and ensure laws protect them from discrimination

The vans went out early Thursday morning, bringing a handful of transgender rights activists to Albany for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s state of the state address. The Democrat had recently used his executive power to ban discrimination against transgender New Yorkers in housing, banking, employment, schooling and public services.

The activists, though, were not there to applaud Cuomo. They were there to protest for a bill to make those protections permanent.

It is an effort that the state’s most powerful LGBT organization had all but dropped. In late 2015, the 25-year-old Empire State Pride Agenda announced that it was preparing to cease its lobbying operations.

The move left the state’s trans rights activists feeling abandoned. Now, they face daunting questions of how to advance their cause without an LGBT ally at the height of its power.

Similar questions are dogging transgender rights activists across the country. Their fight for equality is enjoying unprecedented visibility. But many of the movement’s key advocates still belong to groups whose dominant mission, until last spring, was winning the right for same-sex couples to marry.



In the shadow of that milestone, many LGBT organizations have become diminished. And transgender advocates say they worry about their ability to leverage the gay rights community’s political connections, donors and institutional might for their own coming battles.

“LGB groups are a really important resource for the trans movement, and they’re fading in some states,” said Mara Keisling, the director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “The infrastructure is very unsteady. That should be a real cause of alarm for us.”

To New York’s trans communities, that infrastructure has already destabilized. A bill banning transgender discrimination had been the last major policy goal of Pride Agenda, which helped pass marriage equality and anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation. But that bill, the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, had failed for several years to clear the Republican-held state senate. When Cuomo changed the law himself, Pride Agenda declared its last goal fulfilled, and at the end of 2015, announced that it was all but shutting down.

The fledgling network of trans rights groups accused Pride Agenda of recasting its goal in order to declare victory. Without the force of law, they pointed out, Cuomo’s successors could easily undo those protections. A local politician further fanned the flames when he declared Pride Agenda’s “mission accomplished”.

Juli Grey-Owens described Pride Agenda’s closure as leaving a hole trans activists like herself must scramble to patch. (Grey-Owens is a former Pride Agenda board member.) The group possessed a valuable email list and an extensive rolodex of power players. Its members were also active in training local activists around the state to get the attention of lawmakers. For years, transgender activists took their cues about how and when to agitate for GENDA from its leaders.

“Pride Agenda was always the leader,” Grey-Owens said. “We have a massive amount of work that has to be done, and we don’t have a strong bench. In fact, to heck with the bench. We don’t have a network of activists doing trans issues, period.”

As in other states, donor support is also in jeopardy. Many recent transgender rights victories were the handiwork of gay rights organizations – groups that expanded thanks to a record outpouring of financial support for gay marriage.

Now, those contributions are drying up. And transgender rights advocates say they don’t have a donor base that comes close to making up the difference. For one, the number of trans people is lower. Transgender individuals are more likely to be unemployed, and they are more likely to be poor. “A lot of the work in the LGB community has been financed by cocktail hours and elite hookups and making rich people feel important,” Keisling said. “Well, we’ve never supported our movement that way. We don’t have our own culture of philanthropy.”

The difficulties facing trans right activists highlight old fissures between the trans and LGBT rights movements. Although the two movements frequently find themselves allied, they share a fraught history. Trans rights advocates can point to many instances in which gay rights groups pushed for legal protections that excluded them. And the two have discrete missions: while LGBT rights are a matter of sexual orientation, trans rights are about gender identity and expression.

Some blame the troubles facing the fledgling trans right movement on a failure to acknowledge those different needs.

“We as advocates have done a terrible job of making the country and especially the donor community aware that the big sexy marriage issue is the beginning of the fight, not the end of the fight,” said Patrick Paschall, an LGBT rights advocate in Maryland. “We have done a bad job across America communicating our continuing need to donors. Hopefully we can reengage donors. Because they thought the job was done, and it’s not.”

In Maryland, Paschall is overseeing an effort to keep the state’s major LGBT group viable as activists like himself intensify their fight for trans rights.

Equality Maryland spearheaded the fight for a same-sex marriage law that passed the state legislature in 2012, and it led efforts to win over voters when that law was challenged by ballot initiative two years later. That same year, 2014, Equality Maryland made a successful push for legislation shielding trans people from discrimination. But once the right of same-sex marriage was secure, donations began to evaporate.



Maryland activists were facing the loss of an organization that had dominated LGBT rights in the state for nearly a quarter-century. So Equality Maryland merged this month with FreeState Legal, a local legal advocacy group run by Paschall that has been front and center in the fight for trans rights.

“We see folks like the Empire State Pride Agenda declare victory and shut their doors and we find that very concerning,” Paschall said. “Here in Maryland, in theory, we could do the same thing. We could have declared victory because the big, sexy marriage equality law and nondiscrimination laws have been passed.”

The merger may not solve the problem of flagging donations. But it has, for the time being, preserved Equality Maryland’s clout and connections for future battles. The new group, with an emphasis on serving transgender individuals, will shift its focus away from landmark legislation to plugging smaller gaps in Maryland law and ensuring that existing law is enforced. The goal is “lived equality”, Paschall explained, rather than just on-paper protections.

Keisling hopes events in Maryland will be a model for LGBT groups looking to take on more trans issues. More and more lawmakers are open to transgender protections, she acknowledged, “but there’s got to be some professional presence guiding that impulse.” In New York state, she said, “There are some great trans leaders up there who could fill the void. But they’re starting off with their arms tied behind their backs. With no money, no infrastructure, and a group that walked away from its political contacts.”

Others say the challenge facing trans groups is being misconstrued.

Rebecca Isaacs, director of the Equality Federation, the umbrella group for dozens of state-based LGBT organizations, noted that local LGBT groups have almost always been under-resourced. The flush years during the marriage equality fight were an exception. “We’re a movement used to being scrappy,” she said. While many local LGBT groups are once again struggling to make ends meet, she noted that very few have closed.

Melissa Sklarz, a board member with Pride Agenda who is also a trans woman, strongly objects to other trans rights activists’ characterization of the situation in New York. The group is maintaining its political action committee to influence elections, she noted, and would continue to support transgender activists in the state, although she did not give specifics as to how.

As for GENDA, Sklarz portrayed continuing to lobby the current Senate, held by Republicans, as a fool’s errand.

“I was one of three people in the room when GENDA was created,” she said. “I and others have been fighting for this legislation for the past 13 years. We have educated every opinion leader, public figure, and faith leader in the state. Our last barrier was the Senate. We lobbied and lobbied and lobbied, and not once has the bill come to the floor,” she said. “Everyone is moving on in New York state. I wish the transgender communities of New York would give more attention to what the governor has done.”

“As far as trans rights are concerned, we’re at a tipping point,” Sklarz continued. “To expect gay and lesbian people to carry the ball is not really realistic anymore. It’s time for transgender people to create our own organizations.”

Few of her fellow activists disagree. Trans activists in New York and nationally are pleased with Cuomo’s executive action. And Renate Hartman, one of Pride Agenda’s critics, together with Grey-Owens and about a dozen others are cobbling together a network of trans activists to pick up where Pride Agenda left off. But they are meeting hurdles.

“We want to speak for ourselves,” said Hartman, one of the Pride Agenda critics. “We’re just a very tiny community. It’s hard for us to make enough noise to make people pay attention, when we’re by ourselves.”