Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders

Celebrating 30 years as New England's leading legal rights organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation, HIV status and gender identity and expression.

Our Work Transgender Rights Project

Transgender Rights Project

Through the Transgender Rights Project (TRP), GLAD puts our litigation, legislative, and educational assets to work in a focused way to establish clear legal protections for the transgender community.

Transgender Rights Project

Transgender people face the most basic and blatant discrimination every day - from being denied access to employment, housing, or healthcare, to being physically attacked because of the way they look or dress. In New England, only Rhode Island, Maine, and Vermont provide explicit laws that prohibit discrimination against transgender people, and only Vermont and Connecticut have hate crimes laws that protect them. At the federal level, there are no laws explicitly protecting transgender people in any context.

TRP Director Jennifer Levi is a nationally-recognized expert in transgender legal issues. She serves on the Legal Committee of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and is a founding member of both the Transgender Law & Policy Institute and the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. With GLAD Senior Attorney Ben Klein, she authored the chapter “Pursuing Protections for Transgender People through Disabilities Laws,” in the book Transgender Rights.

TRP priorities include supporting efforts to write gender identity and expression into the anti-discrimination laws of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire; advocating for appropriate identity documents and standards for changing gender markers on them; ensuring access to health care; and securing employment protections.

Through the TRP, we also work with our allies to raise the profile of transgender people in the public eye. “A lot of transphobia is based on fear and ignorance,” says Levi. “Too many people say they have never met a transgender person. It’s very powerful when trans people tell their stories. It moves hearts and minds.”

Jennifer Levi, Esq.

Jennifer L. Levi is one of our nation’s leading experts on transgender legal issues. During the ten years Jennifer has been with GLAD, she was lead counsel in a number of precedent setting cases establishing basic rights for transgender people. These cases include: Doe v. Yunits, in which Jennifer represented a transgender student denied the right to attend school because of the clothing she wore; Rosa v. Park West Bank, which established key protections for transgender people under federal law; Beger v. DMA, which resulted in a reversal of Division of Medical Assistance’s refusal to cover breast surgery for a transgender woman, among many others. Jennifer was also co-counsel in the case of Goodridge v. Dep’t Public Health which established the right of same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts.

Jennifer is a Professor of Law at Western New England College. She serves on the Legal Committee of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and is a founding member of both the Transgender Law & Policy Institute and the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition.

Jennifer is a graduate of Wellesley College (1985) and the University of Chicago Law School (1992). She has also taught law at the Chicago-Kent Law School and is a former law clerk for Judge Michael Boudin at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Jennifer Levi interviewed in Tapestry Magazine in 2005

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Rosa v. Park West Bank

Victory • December 31, 2000

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Doe v. Yunits

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Barreto-Neto v. Town of Hardwick Police Department

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