For more than five years since coming to Washington, D.C., from Pennsylvania to head the National Center for Transgender Equality, Mara Keisling has broached the issue of transgender inclusion in the LGBT movement and bridged the gap of ignorance and invisibility facing transgender people in the arena of public policy. NCTE remains the first professionally-staffed transgender-specific organization working at the national level in the United States.
Keisling vaulted to greater prominence in the fall of 2007 as a leader of UnitedENDA, a national coalition of more than four hundred LGBT organizations that includes the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The coalition opposed an effort in Congress to strip away key portions of a landmark civil-rights bill called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The deleted provisions dealt with protections against discrimination for all Americans based on gender identity. Not only did the protections have direct, and very dear, relevance to transgender people, who often face cruelty and bias based on hostility to their appearance or perceived nonconformity with rigid notions of gender behavior. But also protections for gender identity applied to all Americans and actually strengthened the overall bill by closing a loophole in sexual-orientation-based coverage that defendants and clever jurists have used to justify and pardon discrimination against some LGBT people.
Keisling continues to push for a federal nondiscrimination law in a future Congress with the same integrity as the original 2007 version of ENDA. With an appreciation of the interests of important coalition partners in civil rights—including labor, faith allies, lawyers, educators, and other professionals, she is a coalition leader and respected voice in the fight for dignity and nondiscrimination coverage at the federal and state levels. Her blog on transgender inclusion and the quest for equality is here.