National Center for Transgender Equality

NCTE's mission statement reads:

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.[17]

Mara Keisling is the founding executive director of NCTE. She is a trans woman and began transitioning in her early 40s.[10][12] In addition to her work as executive director of NCTE, Keisling is a founding board member of the Stonewall Democracy Fund. She has also served as co-chair of the Pennsylvania Gender Rights Coalition, on the board of directors of LGBTQ youth group Common Roads, and on the steering committee of the Statewide Pennsylvania Rights Coalition.[9][12] In recognition of her activism, Keisling has won awards from PFLAG; the Equality Forum; GayLaw; the Transgender Law Center; the Harvard Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance; and Out for Work, among others.[8] Keisling was subject to controversy and was called to resign as Executive Director of NCTE in 2019.[15][18] In 2021, the organization announced that Keisling decided to not renew her contract, and that the board of directors had selected Deputy Executive Director Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen as her successor.[19]

Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen is the current Executive Director of NCTE.[19] He is a transgender policy, advocacy and messaging expert. As a transgender man, his wide-ranging experience in the LGBTQ movement has covered field organizing, leadership development, fundraising, and media advocacy. He previously worked with Freedom for All Americans, GLAAD, the Transgender Law Center, Gender Justice LA, and the National LGBTQ Task Force. In past roles, he trained thousands of volunteers to canvass and phone bank on groundbreaking nondiscrimination and marriage equality campaigns, and organized leadership development programs in transgender communities and LGBTQ communities of color, honing new strategies for social change. Most recently, he co-led the successful campaign to update New Hampshire's nondiscrimination protections to include transgender Granite Staters. Over the course of his career, he has conducted international Spanish-language interviews, including on Univision, Telemundo, and CNN en Español, as well as English-language interviews with outlets such as The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, and Politico. Rodrigo graduated from Brown University and lives in Washington, D.C. He serves of the Board of Directors of AsylumConnect, a non-profit connecting LGBTQ asylum seekers with resources in the US and Canada.[20]

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan on June 28, 2016, at the Department of Labor

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan is former director of external relations and former policy advisor at NCTE. Before joining NCTE as policy advisor in 2014, she served as legislative staffer for the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, LGBT liaison for the City of Somerville, and legislative director for Massachusetts State Representative Carl Sciortino, a Medford Democrat.[21][22] On August 18, 2015, she was hired by President Barack Obama as Outreach and Recruitment Director in the White House Presidential Personnel Office, becoming the first openly transgender person to work as a White House staffer.[23] He subsequently appointed her as the White House's primary LGBT liaison in 2016, making her the first openly transgender person in the role.[21] On April 3, 2017, Freedman-Gurspan rejoined NCTE as director of external relations.[24]

In May 2019, Freedman-Gurspan left NCTE to become Deputy Campaign Director for the All on the Line Campaign, a project with a mission to end gerrymandering.[25]

NCTE works on a variety of policy issues of significance to the transgender community. These include: state policy agendas; hate crimes and violence; employment non-discrimination; advocating for transgender parents and families of transgender people; health care access; access to homeless and emergency shelters; immigration reform; open military service; criminal justice reform; racial and economic justice; federal research surveys and the Census; travel security procedures and bodily privacy; voting rights; and protections for transgender students from bullying, discrimination, and accommodations exclusions.[7]

In addition to these policy programs, NCTE maintains an ID Documents Center and the Transgender Legal Services Network.[27][28] The ID Documents Center offers a constantly updated database of federal, state, and territory-based policies regarding name and gender change procedures so that transgender individuals can more easily navigate these complex legal processes.[27] The related Transgender Legal Services Network offers a consortium of over 60 organizations that offer advice, technical support, and legal resources to transgender individuals, many of which undertake pro bono projects.[28] The Network also confers to improve one another's organizational capacities and expand their service provisions.[28]

NCTE undertook successful work on state and local policies and in getting "gender identity" added to federal hate crimes legislation (which passed in 2009 as the Mathew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act). But its primary initial policy goals were transforming the lesbian and gay rights movement into the LGBTQ rights movement and adding gender identity and expression language to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which was then pending before Congress and covered only "sexual orientation". A significant step toward making the lesbian and gay rights movement more inclusive occurred in 2007, when NCTE and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force led a coalition of more than 425 trans and LGBT groups known as United ENDA, which demanded that Congress not pass ENDA without gender identity protections. Even though no version of ENDA was enacted, the United ENDA campaign was a turning point in LGBTQ activism, leading to the solidification of an LGBTQ movement that was fully committed to trans rights. ENDA had been the legislative priority for lesbian and gay rights organizations since it was first introduced in 1993, but gender identity protections were not added until 2007. ENDA was replaced in 2015 with the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in not just employment, but also in public accommodations, education, housing, and credit. The Equality Act has yet to become law as of 2020.

NCTE is increasingly more involved in state advocacy as resources allowed, which included pushing states to make it easier for trans people to change their names and gender markers on identification documents (e.g., driver's licenses and birth certificates) and to enact policies requiring health insurance companies and systems (such as Medicaid) to cover transition-related healthcare. NCTE maintains a comprehensive resources on its website[29] to assist trans people with navigating the complex state and local policies on ID document, as well as navigating health care systems to get them to provide transition-related care.

During the Trump Administration, NCTE was a leader in resisting policy rollbacks from the federal government. In 2018, NCTE launched the "Won't Be Erased" campaign in response to a leaked White House memo that outlined a strategy to overturn protections for trans people. To document and raise awareness of the anti-trans actions of the Trump administration, NCTE has also catalogued each loss on its website in a project called "The Discrimination Administration".[30]

On March 15, 2004, NCTE partnered with the now-defunct National Transgender Advocacy Coalition to run the first ever Transgender Lobby Day, for which transgender citizens and allies from across the country came to Washington to speak with their Senators and Representatives.[31] Since then, NCTE has organized lobby days every few years consisting of a conference on transgender policy issues and meetings with members of Congress in which participants share their stories and talk about transgender issues.[32][33][34] Past lobby days have featured guests from organizations such as the White House Office of Public Engagement, as well as prominent figures such as transgender activist and lawyer Shannon Minter from the National Center for Lesbian Rights,[35] Masen Davis from the Transgender Law Center,[36] Rep. Joe Kennedy III, and former Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi.[37] Transgender lobby days frequently draw over 200 participants from nearly every state.[33][38]

In 2008, NCTE partnered with the National LGBTQ Task Force and Pennsylvania State University's Center for the Study of Higher Education to launch the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS).[39] Then the largest study of transgender individuals in the United States, the NTDS surveyed 6,450 transgender residents about their experiences of discrimination in areas such as employment, housing, health care, and education, among others.[40][41] The findings of the NTDS have since informed public policy in the United States, such as at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which based new housing regulations to protect LGBTQ people on the study.[42]

In 2015, NCTE followed up the NDTS by launching the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), thus far the largest study of transgender individuals in the United States.[43][44] Nearly 28,000 transgender residents participated in the survey, which covered a broad range of topics pertaining to family life, health, housing, income, employment, discrimination, harassment and violence, military service, political participation, and others.[43] In addition to the full national report, NCTE has released various breakout reports focusing on specific states.[45] As of July 2017, breakout reports for 14 states have been released.[45]

NCTE is a frequent source of analysis and commentary for both American and international news media. In her capacity as executive director of NCTE, Keisling has appeared as a guest on news channels such as CNN,[46] C-SPAN,[47] Fox News,[48] and MSNBC.[49] She is frequently quoted in newspapers, news magazines, and online news sources, including The New York Times,[50] The Washington Post,[51] The Guardian,[52] Time,[43] BuzzFeed,[21] and The Huffington Post.[53] Keisling has also published op-eds in numerous outlets, including The New York Times,[54] Time,[55] NBC,[56] CNN,[57] and The Huffington Post.[8] NCTE's former director of policy, Harper Jean Tobin, is similarly often quoted by news media including The New York Times,[58] Reuters,[59] PBS,[60] and The Huffington Post,[61] and has published op-eds in publications such as The Guardian.[62] The organization also maintains its own blog on Medium.[63]