About Transgender People

The report contains detailed information about the discrimination faced by transgender people. For additional information about transgender people and our lives, please read NCTE's resource, Understanding Transgender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the Survey

The National Transgender Discrimination Survey is the most extensive survey of transgender discrimination ever undertaken.  Over four months, our research team fielded its 70-question survey through direct contacts with more than 800 transgender-led or transgender-serving community-based organizations in the U.S.  We also contacted possible participants through 150 active online community list serves.  The vast majority of respondents took the survey on-line, through a URL established at Pennsylvania State University.

The National Transgender Discrimination Survey met the standards established by Penn State’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the confidentiality and humane treatment of our survey participants.  We are grateful to Dr. Susan Rankin, a nationally recognized LGBT researcher, for hosting our study through Penn State’s Consortium on Higher Education.

This study brings to light what is both patently obvious and far too often dismissed from the human rights agenda. Transgender and gender non-conforming people face injustice at every turn: in childhood homes, in school systems that promise to shelter and educate, in harsh and exclusionary workplaces, at the grocery store, the hotel front desk, in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, before judges and at the hands of landlords, police officers, health care workers and other service providers.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality are grateful to each of the 6,450 transgender and gender non-conforming study participants who took the time and energy to answer questions about the depth and breadth of injustice in their lives. A diverse set of people, from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, completed online or paper surveys. This tremendous gift has created the first 360-degree picture of discrimination against transgender and gender non-conforming people in the U.S. and provides critical data points for policymakers, community activists and legal advocates to confront the appalling realities documented here and press the case for equity and justice.

 

About the Researchers

Dr. Jaime M. Grant is the founding Executive Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) at Kalamazoo College, where she also serves as an Assistant Professor. ACSJL aims to invigorate social justice scholarship and activism in the academy while nurturing social justice leaders and projects around the globe. Prior to her work in Kalamazoo, she served as director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force where she spearheaded a Census advocacy campaign, deepened the Task Force’s sexual liberation work, and authored its recent contribution to the field of LGBT aging, Outing Age 2010. Grant holds a BA from Wesleyan University and a Ph. D. in Women’s Studies from the Union Institute where she studied with scholar/activists Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith and John D’Emilio. She has taught the history of social movements at Georgetown University and her scholarly work has appeared in Signs, a feminist journal of culture and society and in Diana E.H. Russell’s landmark anthology, Femicide. Her critique of racism in the women’s and queer movements has appeared in The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History and the journal of the National Women’s Studies Association.

Lisa Mottet, Esq. is the Director of the Transgender Civil Rights Project at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which
she has led since 2001. The Project’s primary focus is to assist LGBT activists and allies with passing and implementing nondiscrimination laws and policies from the local to the federal level, with a secondary focus of enacting transgender-friendly policies such as those related to driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and health care. Mottet co-authored Transitioning Our Shelters: A Guide to Making Homeless Shelters Safe for Transgender People, working with the National Coalition for the Homeless. She also coauthored Opening the Door to the Inclusion of Transgender People: The Nine Keys to Making Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Organizations Fully Transgender-Inclusive. Lisa graduated from the
University of Washington in 1998 and received her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2001.

Dr. Justin E. Tanis is on the staff of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and has worked in LGBT organizations for close to 25 years as a community organizer, leader, educator and program specialist . He is the author of
Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith (Pilgrim Press, 2003), which was the result of his doctoral
research into the experiences of transgender people in communities of faith. Among his other writing credits, he and
Lisa Mottet collaborated on Opening the Door to the Inclusion of Transgender People: The Nine Keys to Making Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Organizations Fully Transgender-Inclusive. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College, a Master’s degree from Harvard University, and a doctorate from San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Mara Keisling is the founding Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. She is considered one of the foremost authorities on discrimination against transgender people in the United States, and has almost twenty-five years of professional experience in social marketing and opinion research. A Pennsylvania native and a transgender woman, Mara completed her undergraduate studies at Penn State University and did her graduate work at Harvard University in American Government.

Dr. Jody L. Herman is a consulting researcher for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She graduated from Illinois State University and now holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Public Administration in the field of Gender and Social Policy from The George Washington University, where she also earned her M.A. in Public Policy with a concentration in Women’s Studies. She currently serves as the Peter J. Cooper Public Policy Fellow at the Williams Institute in the UCLA School of Law.

Jack Harrison is a Vaid Fellow at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, where he has served since 2009. Prior to this report, he contributed to the Task Force publication, Outing Age 2010: Public Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Elders by Dr. Jaime M. Grant. Jack graduated from Georgetown University in December of 2008 and is now pursuing an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from the same university. He has previously interned for The National Center for Transgender Equality and Khemara, a women’s organization in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

About our Organizations

About the National Center for Transgender Equality

The National Center for Transgender Equality is a national social justice organization devoted to ending discrimination and violence against transgender people through education and advocacy on national issues of importance to transgender people. By empowering transgender people and our allies to educate and influence policymakers and others, NCTE facilitates a strong and clear voice for transgender equality in our nation’s capital and around the country.

About the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

The mission of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is to build the grassroots power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. We do this by training activists, equipping state and local organizations with the skills needed to organize broad-based campaigns to defeat anti-LGBT referenda and advance pro-LGBT legislation, and building the organizational capacity of our movement. Our Policy Institute, the movement’s premier think tank, provides research and policy analysis to support the struggle for complete equality and to counter right-wing lies. As part of a broader social justice movement, we work to create a nation that respects the diversity of human expression and identity and creates opportunity for all.