My Story

​I grew up in a lower-middle-class white family in Beaumont, Texas, near Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. In 2003, I made a great escape to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, which at the time was "the land of the free and the gay" (especially compared to Texas). I got to be an out and proud lesbian for about 2 months before I learned the term "transgender", and the rest of my life has really unfolded beautifully and circuitously from there.

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I soon moved to Columbus, OH, and cut my community organizing teeth with TransOhio, a small and mighty organization run by and for trans people. I learned to be an impactful and engaging public educator, policy activist, lobbyist, and major event planner, helping to organize and manage their annual statewide symposium for several years.

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After graduating from Ohio State, I decided to attend the City University School of Law in Queens, NY to become a public interest attorney who could take my transgender rights advocacy to new levels. While there, I focused intensely on civil rights law, healthcare law, social entrepreneurship and the possibilities available in innovative business models like B-corps, worker-owned cooperatives, and multi-entity organizations, all with the goal of supporting legal, economic, and political development for multiply-marginalized transgender people.

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Incredibly, I started making real-world impacts as early as my first legal internship at the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) in 2011, where I researched and drafted the strategic blueprint for administratively overturning Medicare’s longstanding categorical exclusion of gender-affirming care. This was later used by other advocates to successfully challenge the ban in 2014, leading to an avalanche of healthcare-access wins for transgender people across the country in both private and public insurance plans.

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From 2014-2015, I served as an Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow at Whitman-Walker Health Legal Services in Washington, DC. There I worked to improve access to employment and economic stability for 250+ transgender people in the DC Metro Area by securing name and gender changes through pro se clinics staffed by law school clinics and law firm partners. I also persuaded my public and private funders to update their grant reporting and analysis tools to demographically count the number of transgender people served by their grantees.

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From 2015-2018, I worked at the LGBT Rights Attorney at Empire Justice Center in Rochester, NY. There I led a statewide legal project representing low-income LGBTQI+ clients in administrative and court proceedings, formed and led coalition efforts to improve statewide regulatory and legislative protections for trans and queer students and workers in Upstate New York, and advocated with Monroe County Jail officials to improve conditions for incarcerated trans women. I delivered CLE trainings to thousands of attorneys, judges, and other professionals on LGBTQI+ people and legal issues and I wrote and published several community-facing resources and frequently hosted community trainings to help LGBTQI+ New Yorkers exercise their rights on local, state, and federal levels. In 2016, right after Trump's first election, I secured and managed six-figure Open Society Foundation rapid-response grant to support movement-aligned legal education and direct service initiatives across the entire state, including dozens of trainings, pro bono name change legal clinics, and Peace of Mind Planning workshops to help LGBTQI+ folks prepare advance directives, healthcare proxies, and other important legal forms to secure their body sovereignty and agency in medical emergencies.

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In 2018, I decided to embark on my own! I opened a virtual, solo, sliding-scale LGBTQI+ civil rights practice, as well as Just Roots Consulting, a certified LGBTQ-owned social enterprise that helps organizations become industry leaders in workplace anti-racism and equity. My partner at the time and I also ran an Icelandic sheep farm called Bright Earth Farm in Nunda, NY (by far, one of the coolest things I've ever done). It was a busy season of life.

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Through my solo law practice, I handled 100+ legal name and gender marker changes, and worked throughout the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to improve the NYS court e-filing system to more effectively protect private personal information of transgender petitioners. I also investigated and litigated civil rights claims of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, and disability in employment, healthcare, and public accommodations, securing over $500,000 in record-breaking administrative settlements for my clients. I also successfully sued the state to change its policy so people could use gender-neutral “X” markers on their New York State birth certificates.

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Through Just Roots Consulting, I worked with incredible teams of DEIB and anti-racism experts to support, advise, teach, and coach 60+ mission-driven organizations and public agencies as well as thousands of senior leaders on how to align their inclusive values with real policies, practices, and accountable actions. My personal favorite part of this work has been supporting fellow white* (bodied / passing) leaders to learn, grow, and act accountably together toward anti-racist principles and goals. I am most proud of the innovative curriculum I developed for Beyond Good, an 8-week intensive anti-racism leadership cohort program originally designed for white* nonprofit legal services executive directors that provides the brave space for deep learning, somatic reflection, vulnerable sharing, courageous growth, and radical connection they need to take their individual and collective leadership to new levels. 

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In 2023, I decided to make a change. Closing down the farm and my law practice, I moved out west to San Francisco, CA to get more deeply connected to spiritually-rooted community organizing and social justice networks with decades-long lineages in radical Black queer feminist abolitionism. In 2024, I moved to Santa Cruz to be closer to love and nature.

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These days, I focus most of my energy on nurturing my beloved communities, teaching and mobilizing people (especially white* and queer folks) into solidarity movements, and working on several writing projects, including a speculative memoir about the women, queers, and trans people in my matrilineal line who have been silenced and erased. I still look for every opportunity to teach, coach, strategize, create spaces for intimate connection, and find others interested in visioning what's next after the fall of Empire.

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We are in an ever-unfolding, treacherous Moment on the Clock of the World (Grace Lee Boggs), and there is a lot we can and must do together not only to survive, but to thrive and midwife something new, beautiful, and free in its place. 

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Please don't hesitate to contact me if any of my story resonates for you, or if you'd like me to offer personal or professional support along your own journey, or to inspire your people by speaking at your next event!