Beginning A Global Dialogue on Transgender Rights 

In April of 2008, the National Sexuality Resource Center brought together Transgender advocates from around the world to join together, discuss commonalities and differences, and strategize what human rights for transgender people might look like. The conference has resulted in the development of global policy papers, including the US version, The State of Transgender Rights in the United States, authored by Jamison Green, Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker. Below please find links to our Director's Letter detailing the conference, links to the full executive summary and PDF, and information about our liveblog, hosted on March 30, 2009.

Conference background and context

"The rise of the Transgender movement since the early 1990s has brought into focus the needs and rights of a whole new category of people and the difficulties they face in being accepted by society. While no one knows for sure the number of people who are Transgender and precisely how the increasing visibility of this population is related to broader issues of sexual and reproductive rights and health in our time, there can be no doubt that the need for understand, research, and public sexual literacy is very great. It was in this context that the National Sexuality Resource Center convened a meeting of Transgender rights advocates in April 2008..." See how the conference came about.

Executive Summary

"We begin the international dialog by answering the question: 'What do we mean when we say "transgender?' 'Transgender' is a category which emerged in the late 1960's in resistance to the medical, psychiatric or sexological labels of transvestite and transsexual, and was invigorated in the 1990s in pursuit of a more just social order. In spite of broad theoretical origins, however, 'transgender' functions in the vernacular as a minoritizing identity label. Within and beyond U.S. borders, it threatens to subsume non-Western configurations of self, sexuality, and gender within a newly imposed category of social deviance.... "

Read Jamison Green's entire Executive Summary, or download the full-text transpolicy report.

Transgender Rights Live Blog

On March 30th, at 11am PST, in recognition of Transgender Visibility Day, join activists Jamison Green and Dallas Denny for a liveblog discussion on the state of Transgender Rights in the US. Find out where folks agree--and points of contention--during this lively, interactive blog forum. Think we need to take the T out of LGBT--or leave it in? How do gender and orientation differ? How can we incorporate trans rights into our work, our policies and our lives? Click here to go to the liveblog page for details.