As a transsexual, Justine Nicholas said she often feels like Nora in the last act of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” This sense of isolation was only compounded after a security guard in Midtown demanded that she prove her gender after she walked out of a women’s restroom.

“I was born as an insider,” Nicholas, 46, said. “I lived the first 43 years of my life as a white heterosexual male and while I wasn’t fabulously wealthy, nobody questioned what restroom I used when I walked in.”

Nicholas, a teacher at the City University of New York, was among more than 60 activists, officials and legal experts at a forum at New York University on Tuesday, April 19, that discussed the implementation of law that amended the city’s Human Rights Law to include gender identity and expression as a protected category. The New York City Council overwhelmingly passed Local Law 3, which protects transgendered New Yorkers from housing, employment and public accommodation discrimination, in April 2002; Mayor Michael Bloomberg quickly signed it into law. The city’s Commission on Human Rights adopted these guidelines in December.

Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, said these guidelines and amendments establish an important legal precedent. “There haven’t been many guidelines for gender identity and expression,” he said. “But when we added gender identity and expression to the city Human Rights Law, it was somewhat of a novelty under civil rights law.”

The TLDEF announced earlier this month that it had reached a settlement under the amended HRL after Nicholas and Pauline Park, co-chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, filed complaints with the CHR. They alleged security guards did not allow them to access public restrooms. The settlements (the first since Local Law 3 took effect) constitute an important success, Silverman said: “Having success in cases like those is pressing some hot buttons.”

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Lesbian & Gay Task Force, described the impact of Local Law 3 as “tremendous” and added that other municipalities across the country are looking at it as a model. “This is a monumental step forward,” Foreman said. “When you do something like this it affects 8 million people. And other cities look to New York and say, “If New York can do it then we can do it also.”

Councilmember Bill Perkins (D-Harlem), who sponsored the bill, said it was part of an ongoing civil rights struggle for the transgendered. “We are not talking just about human rights but a civil rights movement,” he said. “One of the most important things we have learned is that laws don’t change attitudes.”

Sen. Tom Duane (D-West Side) and Assemblymember Dick Gottfried (D-Hell’s Kitchen) have reintroduced a bill in Albany last week that seeks to extend legal protections to transgendered people statewide. NYAGRA, the Empire State Pride Agenda and a number of other gay advocacy groups have endorsed the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act. Gottfried said he hopes the bill will expand protections outlined in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act. “The experience of transgender individuals and the discrimination they face is unique,” Gottfried said. “It should be specifically identified and unambiguously rejected in our state’s civil rights laws.”

Despite these ongoing legislative and legal efforts, CHR Deputy Commissioner Avery Mehlman said he is concerned that many transgendered New Yorkers are simply unaware that they are protected under the law. “When we speak with the transgender community we see discrimination everywhere,” he said. “But we don’t see the numbers coming down to the agency to file a complaint.”

But Nicholas said this was a first step: “The fact that such a law was passed caused people to realize that their own consciousness needs to be raised.”

This article originally appeared in the 22 April 2005 issue of the New York Blade News, which is now defunct.

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To the Editors:

Re: “Bloomberg faulted for mixed record on gay issues” (news, June 29)

There is one major omission in Joshua Lynsen’s article — mention of the Dignity in All Schools Act, enacted in 2004 by the New York City Council over Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto. DASA prohibits bias harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity or expression (as well as race, religion, ethnicity, disability and medical condition), and the training required by DASA would do much to combat the epidemic of homophobic and transgender-phobic harassment in our city’s schools.

But Bloomberg has called DASA “a silly law” and his administration refuses to implement the duly enacted statute. Just as on marriage, Bloomberg pledged to lobby the state legislature on the Dignity for All Students Act, but the mayor has done nothing to help move that bill through the Republican-controlled Senate, where it is currently stalled (primarily because of its transgender-inclusive language).

The article mentions the Empire State Pride Agenda’s praise for Bloomberg for signing the transgender rights bill into law; but the mayor had little choice, as the City Council passed it by a 45-5 vote, so any veto would have been swiftly overridden. The New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, which led the campaign for that landmark legislation, working in partnership with the Pride Agenda, worked with other groups and the City Commission on Human Rights on guidelines for implementation of the law, but they were issued in December 2004 only after considerable resistance from the mayor’s office.

And because Bloomberg has under-funded the Commission, the task of educating employers and the public about the provisions of the law has fallen to a few small, under-funded transgender advocacy organizations here.

Yes, we would have same-sex marriage in New York City if it were not for Bloomberg’s appeal of the lower court ruling, but his hypocrisy on marriage is part of a larger pattern. High-level appointments to his administration and an elaborate annual Pride event at Gracie Mansion are part of a larger strategy to co-opt LGBT community leaders and organizations.

Anyone who is under the common misapprehension that our mayor is “pro-gay” needs only talk with activists here in New York to learn how truly dismal Bloomberg’s record on LGBT issues really is.

PAULINE PARK
New York

Editors’ note: The writer is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy.

This letter to the editor originally appeared in the 6 July 2007 issue of the Washington Blade, which is now defunct.

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Pauline Park, a co-chairwoman of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, at the Manhattan Mall, Herald Square, Friday.
(photo: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times)

Transgender Group Reaches Agreement on Restrooms

By Nicholas Confessore
New York Times
2 April 2005

When Pauline Park watched Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sign an amendment toughening the city’s anti-discrimination laws two years ago, she never expected to become one of its first beneficiaries.

But yesterday, a complaint filed by Ms. Park – a co-chairwoman of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, which helped lobby for the amendment to the New York City Human Rights Law – became part of the first settlement issued under it. The amendment forbids discrimination based on sexual identity whether or not it differs from a person’s biological sex.

The settlement,

administered by the city’s Commission on Human Rights, found that people working for Advantage Security, a New York security guard company, discriminated against Ms. Park when they demanded to see her identification after she used a women’s restroom at the Manhattan Mall in Herald Square last April.

She said that she had been having lunch with friends and was “taken aback” when five guards – four men and a woman – stopped her after she used the restroom a second time that day. The first time occurred without incident, she said.

“They encircled me in a very menacing and hostile stance,” Ms. Park said.

“The female security guard demanded to know, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ ” Ms. Park said. “I said to her that I identify as a woman. And she said, ‘One of my colleagues thought you were a man.’ ”

The settlement also covered a second incident involving the same company at a different location.

Last March, an Advantage Security guard asked Justine Nicholas for identification after she came out of a women’s restroom in a Manhattan office building where she was taking the Graduate Record Examination.

Like Ms. Park, Ms. Nicholas was born male but identifies herself and lives as a woman.

Under the terms of the settlement, Advantage Security will adopt and enforce a policy allowing people to use bathrooms “consistent with their gender identity,” said Michael D. Silverman, executive director and general counsel for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represented the two complainants before the commission. The company will also pay $2,500 to each complainant.

Ms. Park said she was pleased with the settlement.

In a statement released by the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, Ms. Nicholas said that she had been “humiliated” by the incident and that the case would “increase the public’s awareness of transgender people’s needs.”

Officials at Advantage Security did not return several telephone calls seeking comment.

The commission’s chairwoman, Patricia L. Gatling, said that the settlement “sends a message that discrimination in any form will not be tolerated in our city.”

This article originally appeared in the 2 April 2005 issue of the New York Times.

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City Needs to Start Enforcing Transgender Rights Bill
By Pauline Park
Gay City News
29 April 2004

Two years ago this month, the New York City Council passed Int. No. 24, amending the city’s human rights law to add gender identity and expression, thereby extending protection from discrimination to transsexual, transgendered, and gender-variant people throughout the five boroughs.

I still remember vividly the euphoria we felt as we sat in the gallery of the City Council chambers on April 24 as the Council passed the bill by an overwhelming margin of 45-5.

After Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed the bill into law on April 30, the New York City Commission on Human Rights convened a working group––made up of members of its staff as well as transgender activists including me and my co-chair at the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), Moonhawk River Stone––to draft guidelines for implementing this civil rights statute.

By the time of our most recent meeting––in May 2003––we had reached consensus on broadly conceived yet meticulously detailed guidelines that could well be a model for other cities to emulate. But a year after completion of the draft, the Commission has yet to approve it.

I was reminded of the importance of implementing the law by a disturbing personal incident I suffered on April 19. That morning, I joined John Won, Jih-Fei Cheng, and Alain Dang from Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York and Riley Snorton from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in a meeting with Details magazine about the “Gay or Asian?” feature that caused a storm of public protest due to its insensitivity about race and sexuality. After the meeting, we lunched in the food court on the lower level of the Manhattan Mall on Sixth Avenue and 33rd Street. Before sitting down to lunch, I availed myself of the women’s room, without incident. But after eating, upon emerging from the women’s room a second time, I was stopped by a female security guard demanding to know, “Are you a woman or a man?” Advantage Security, a private firm hired by the mall, has an office only yards from both restrooms, and the security guards were apparently using the big glass window on the security station to engage in surveillance of the restrooms.

Startled by the question, I was alarmed as a pack of security guards––all powerfully built men towering over me––circled me in a physically threatening manner. What I found disturbing was their use of physical intimidation as part of their attempt to interrogate me about my gender identity, their menacing posture suggesting the potential for violence. From the lead security guard’s comments, I strongly suspected that this incident might have been part of a persistent pattern of harassment of gender-variant individuals using the restrooms at the mall.

It is important to recognize that bathrooms are not just an issue for transitioning and post-operative transsexuals; they are an issue for all transgendered and gender-variant people. There are women with butch haircuts who are challenged every time they go into the women’s room, and gender-queer folk who find it difficult to use either restroom without being hassled or harassed.

The only difference between me and any other transgendered person being harassed by this private security outfit was that I was well aware of my rights, having coordinated the campaign for the very transgender rights law that they very well may have violated. Despite the risk to my personal safety, I decided to challenge what appeared to be their discriminatory intent regarding access to a public accommodation. But neither the female security guard nor the head of security, whom I asked to see, seemed aware that this incident may have constituted a violation of city human rights law.

I was struck that the incident at the Manhattan Mall occurred only five days before the second anniversary of the passage of Int. No. 24, reinforcing what I already knew––that the law’s enactment would be a hollow victory for the transgender community unless the Commission began implementing it seriously and enforcing it rigorously.

The working group’s last meeting at the Commission took place nearly a full year ago, last May 12. Commission staff informed us that the Commissioner for Human Rights, Patricia Gatling, had “concerns” about the draft guidelines, but I cannot understand why, a full year after the working group completed them, she still has yet to schedule a meeting with us to discuss those concerns. Since last May, I have made repeated calls to the Commission inquiring about the status of the guidelines without having received any substantive response.

When I joined the working group two years ago, I assumed that the Commission was committed to implementation of the law; but the pattern of delay suggests that the Commission is not serious about implementing the transgender rights law. It may even be possible that Commissioner Gatling is deliberately delaying implementation so as to impede effective enforcement of the statute.

Meanwhile, there may well be countless incidents of discrimination occurring that might have been prevented had these guidelines been issued in a timely manner. As the incident at the Manhattan Mall clearly illustrates, employers, landlords, and other providers of public accommodations are woefully ignorant of the transgender rights law. Many may not even be aware that it is now illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender identity or expression, and I strongly suspect that most have no idea how to modify their own operations––through staff training and other initiatives––in order to comply with the law’s provisions.

It is now time –– well past time, in fact –– for the Commission to approve and adopt broadly conceived guidelines to implement the transgender rights law and to undertake an aggressive campaign to inform and educate New York City agencies as well as private employers, landlords, and others about the provisions of the statute.

I would encourage all those who support implementation of this legislation to demand action from the Commission. You can phone the Commissioner Gatling at 212 306 5070 or e-mail her via the web at http://nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mailchr.html.

To protest the gender-policing of restrooms and the harassment of transgendered and gender-variant people at the Manhattan Mall, call the management at 212 465 0500.

Transgendered and gender-variant people in this city continue to face pervasive discrimination, and those thrown out of jobs or apartments––or simply restrooms in shopping malls––do not have the luxury of time while waiting for implementation of this non-discrimination statute. Only the most rigorous enforcement of this law will help reduce such discrimination, but responsibility for such enforcement rests with the Commission, as does responsibility for the unconscionable delay in the law’s implementation.

Pauline Park is co-chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (nyagra.com). In her capacity as coordinator of the work group on gender-based discrimination that included the six City Councilmembers who took the lead on Int. No. 24, Park led the campaign for passage of the measure. She also serves on the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (transgenderlegal.org).

This op-ed originally appeared in the 29 April 2004 issue of Gay City News. In December 2004, the New York City Commission on Human Rights adopted guidelines for implementation of the transgender rights law, with language drawn in part from the settlement of my discrimination case against Advantage Security.

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If you ever wondered why the New York Post is reviled by progressives and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in New York City, the Rupert Murdoch footprint daily demonstrated why in April 2005, when the tabloid printed an op-ed by Nicole Gelinas of the right-wing Manhattan Institute.

In the op-ed, Gelinas inaccurately claims that the guidelines for implementation of the 2002 New York City transgender rights law (adopted by the City Commission on Human Rights in December 2004) say that “people can pick whichever gender they want to be.” Not true. The guidelines recognized that transgendered people face pervasive discrimination and violence in this city, even after enactment of that landmark law. These sensible and practical regulations were intended to enhance public safety at minimal cost, including the safety of transgendered women who, if forced to use the men’s room, would be vulnerable to humiliation as well as harassment and assault.

But truth and the Murdoch press have been long estranged, and so the transphobic op-ed from Nicole Gelinas — complete with offensive headline — came as no surprise to any of the transgender activists that I know.

Tranny Time
By Nicole Gelinas
New York Post
18 April 2005

Human rights are self-evident and sacred: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But Gotham has gone one further: New York’s Commission on Human Rights has determined that everyone in the city has the inalienable right to . . . dress up in women’s clothing and use the women’s restroom?

Last year, Pauline Park, who is biologically male but views herself as a woman and dresses as one, used the women’s public restroom at the Manhattan Mall. After she used the same restroom again, five security guards from Advantage Security stopped her. Park told The New York Times: “The female security guard demanded to know, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ I said to her that I identify as a woman. And she said, ‘One of my colleagues thought you were a man.’ ”

The same thing happened to Justine Nicholas, who, like Park, is biologically male but identifies as a woman: Park was stopped by Advantage guards after using a women’s restroom at a different location.

Enlightened people would view the above incidents as awkward situations — but Mayor Bloomberg has turned them into human-rights violations. Bloomberg outlawed “gender-identity” discrimination in 2002 — and last December, the Human-Rights Commission released guidelines to enforce the new law.

The law covers people whose “gender identity and/or gender expression does not match society’s expectations of how an individual who was assigned a particular sex at birth should behave in relation to their gender.” It covers, but is not limited to, pre-operative transsexuals and, as the commission notes, “drag queens or kings.”

Sounds complicated — and it is. It’s also expensive. Violations carry fines up to $250,000.

The law is a waste of taxpayer money — the Human Rights Commission’s budget could go toward keeping libraries open late.

Worse: The law will compromise public safety and punish employers. The law covers “challenging an individual’s gender” — so Park and Nicholas filed complaints. Under a settlement reached two weeks ago — one of the first — Advantage will fork over $2,500 apiece to each woman. (Park, as a co-chairman of New York’s Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, had lobbied for the law in the first place.)

Five grand won’t put Advantage out of business — but it’s a humiliating result for a company that did nothing wrong. Security guards are supposed to look out for unusual activity — and a man in women’s clothes in public restrooms is an unusual occurrence, and a possible security risk.

Worse, Advantage has now agreed to allow people to use bathrooms at locations it polices around the city, “consistent with their gender identity” (apparently to be unchallenged on sight). This forces guards to put gender politics above common sense, comfort and safety.

The law will also cause headaches and cost more money. It covers “housing institutions” — so what happens when a man who identifies as a woman shows up as the roommate of a female student at NYU?

The law also recommends that employers and retail stores label single-stall restrooms as “gender-neutral” — and construct private spaces in locker rooms and changing rooms. The implication: If companies don’t do these things, they could be seen as promoting an environment ripe for discrimination — and bullied into paying a fine if an awkward incident occurs.

And the law recommends that employers educate their workers, so that they don’t face hefty fines for crimes like not addressing customers “with names, titles, pronouns and other terms appropriate to their gender identity.”

Finally: The guidelines are just plain nonsensical. They note that “Nothing in the Human Rights Law prohibits restrooms from being designated by gender.” But people can pick whichever gender they want to be — which makes any attempt at gender segregation at public facilities futile.

If Park or Nicholas were ever threatened or assaulted because of her gender identity, officials would, and should, prosecute the perpetrators. But mind-boggling new regulations over “he vs. she” is the last thing New York’s businesses, and its tolerant citizens, need.

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New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Board of Health
public hearing on proposed amendment to Article 207 of the New York City Health Code
testimony by
Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair, New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
30 October 2006

My name is Pauline Park and I chair the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy. NYAGRA is the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York and we are perhaps best known for having led the campaign for enactment of the New York City transgender rights law (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002).

On behalf of the board of directors and the members of NYAGRA, I would like to commend you for your efforts to make Article 207 of the New York City Health Code more transgenderfriendly. I would also urge you to reconsider the proposed amendment under discussion here because in many ways the language of the proposed amendment represents one step forward and one step back for the transgender community here in New York.

While we in NYAGRA welcome the removal of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) as a requirement for a change of legal sex designation on one’s birth certificate, and while we commend the change to allow a full change of legal sex designation from either ‘M’ to ‘F’ or ‘F’ to ‘M,’ we also would like to express our deep concern with other aspects of the proposed amendment that we view as misguided and even harmful to transgendered New Yorkers seeking a change of legal sex designation on their birth certificates.

To begin with, I would like to voice NYAGRA’s support for all of the points made in Michael Silverman’s presentation on behalf of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) and the Transgender Health Initiative of New York (THINY), a joint project of TLDEF and NYAGRA. We in NYAGRA share TLDEF’s concern with the onerous and unnecessaryrequirements that applicants for a change of legal sex designation live in the gender with which they identify for two full years before obtaining the change in gender marker; in practice, it may be difficult if not impossible to produce a precise operational definition of ‘living full-time.’

We in NYAGRA also share TLDEF’s objection to the requirement that the applicant prove medical intervention; most transgendered people do not obtain sex reassignment surgery, because most do not want it, and most of those who do cannot afford it. Also, many transgendered people either do not want hormone replacement therapy (HRT); for medical reasons, HRT may be ‘contra-indicated’ for many others. One can live fully in one’s desired gender without either HRT or SRS, and many transgendered people do. We in NYAGRA also share TLDEF’s concern with the onerous burden represented by the requirement of an affadavit from a physician “practicing in the field of gender identity disorder or qualified through board certification” in one of a number of specialties; there is no such thing as board certification in transgender issues, and board certification in areas such as plastic surgery, family medicine, or internal medicine may or may not be directly relevant to the ability of a physician to effectively work with a transgendered patient. I shall return to the vexed issue of ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID) later in my testimony.

The requirement of a legal name change is particularly misguided, as many names are not clearly gendered. Why should someone with a name such as Dale or Dan, Gale or Jamie, Leslie or Lynn have to change his/her name as part of a change of legal sex designation? Also, female infants in contemporary American society are increasingly being given names that were traditionally considered men’s names, such as Ashley (any fan of “Gone With the Wind” will recognize it as the name of the two leading men in the novel and the film of that name) – which, according to the Social Security Administration (http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/babynames/) is now the tenth most popular girl’s name – as well as Brooke, Daryl, Hunter, Meredith, Morgan, and Shannon, just to name a few.

We in NYAGRA also share TLDEF’s concern with the open-ended nature of the discretion given to the Department of Health (DOH) to require “other information or evidence demonstrating the applicants transition to his or her acquired gender.” Such a provision could potentially allow an official at the DOH to delay action on an application indefinitely and for no apparent reason.

One final recommendation: we urge the Department of Health to allow for the continued possibility of a change from ‘M’ or ‘F’ to no legal sex designation for those who were born intersexed. It is crucially important that the new policy allow for newborn intersexed individuals to be issued birth certificates with no sex designation, in view of the widespread practice of intersex genital mutilation (IGM) imposed on such individuals in infancy or childhood by misguided surgeons and panicked parents who fear social ostracism for children whose external (and/or internal) genitalia do not appear to be fully male or female (see www.isna.org or www.bodieslikeours.org for more on intersex and IGM).

Our central concern with the proposed amendment to Article 207 is that it is rooted in a medical model of transsexuality that assumes that there is only one linear medical transition that all transsexual and transgendered people pursue. That medical model of transsexuality is a disease model based on the false diagnosis of ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID), which suggests that the mere fact of being transgendered – that is to say, the mere identification with the gender opposite one’s sex assigned at birth – constitutes prima facie evidence of a mental pathology. In fact, there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for the hypothesis that identification with the gender opposite one’s sex assigned at birth (in the absence of any other mental pathology) constitutes mental illness per se. In many if not most pre-modern non-Western societies (as well as in many pre-modern Western ones), there was a recognized ‘third sex/third gender’ subject position, an identity formation that accommodated those who identified with the gender opposite their birth sex. Only with the development of psychology and psychiatry in the late nineteenth century were terms and concepts such as ‘transvestism’ and transsexualism’ constructed by European sexologists such as Kraft-Ebbing as pathological. And only with the development of HRT and SRS in the twentieth century were technologies developed that could ‘re-sex’ the body both internally as well as externally.

In other words, the proposed amendment to Article 207 of the New York City Health Code – just like existing policy – is premised on the notion that transgender constitutes a mental illness. Because a change in legal sex designation on one’s birth certificate may be a crucial step in obtaining a change of legal sex designation (or ‘gender marker,’ as it is often called) on other important documents – such as a driver’s license, Social Security card, passport, etc. – the policy that DOH adopts will have implications for policy and procedures at the state and federal levels as well. And because a change of legal sex designation on all of these important identity documents represents a crucial step in the transitioning individual’s ability to obtain adequate education, employment, housing, credit, health care, and social services, the proposed DOH amendment will have a profound effect on the quality of life for transgendered New Yorkers. But the requirement for a diagnosis of gender identity disorder in effect represents a requirement that
a transgendered person have him/herself declared mentally ill in order to legally transition and obtain adequate education, employment, health care, etc. No such requirement exists for any other group in this city or this society.

It is important to recognize that the pathologizing of transgender and gender variance through the GID diagnosis is in fact controversial, just as the listing of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was. As you may know, homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1974 when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published the fourth edition of the DSM. Unfortunately, DSM-IV introduced GID as a diagnosis, and that diagnosis has been used to pathologize gender variance in children and adolescents ever since then. There is an effort underway to remove GID from the DSM-V (currently under discussion) or at least to ‘reform’ the GID diagnosis (see www.GIDreform.org). It would be an irony indeed if the New York City Department of Health were to institutionalize the GID diagnosis in its policy regarding birth certificate change just at the very moment when the APA was debating removal or substantial revision of the GID diagnosis in the DSM.

It would also be ironic in light of the history of transgender law in New York City. In April 2002, the New York City Council passed Int. No. 24, the transgender rights bill signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg later that month as Local Law 3 of 2002. That statute amended New York City human rights law by adding a definition of gender that included identity and expression (among other terms), thereby prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, credit and education throughout the five boroughs. The guiding principle of that statute was one of self-determination in gender identity and expression, rooted in a conception of gender that recognizes transgender identities as no less ‘natural,’ no less ‘normal,’ and no less deserving of full equality under law as are conventional gender identities. In light of the enactment of that statute in 2002 and the adoption of guidelines for its implementation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 2004, adoption of the proposed new amendment to Article 207 of the New York City Health Code by the Department of Health would represent a setback to the positive and affirmative concept of transgender identities embodied in that statute and those guidelines.

We in NYAGRA therefore urge the Department of Health to revise the proposed amendment to make it consistent with the broad and holistic concept of gender identity embodied in Local Law 3 of 2002 and its implementation guidelines. Following from such a holistic and affirmative concept, a regulation amending Article 207 would require only affirmation by an applicant of his/her intention to live fully in the gender with which s/he identifies, along with either a letter from a physician documenting significant medical intervention or a letter from a psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychiatrist documenting his/her opinion verifying the self-declaration of gender identity. The treating mental health professional should be licensed, but there should be no specific requirement that s/he be recognized as having expertise in gender identity issues. The medical intervention mentioned above should allow either HRT, SRS, breast augmentation or breast removal as a sufficient condition for approval of the application for
a change of legal sex designation on the applicant’s birth certificate.

Officials at the Department of Health should understand that the decision to live in the gender different from the sex assigned to one at birth is not a decision entered into lightly but indicates a profound identification with that gender, but that there is no one way in which a transgendered individual actualizes that gender identity; instead, there is a great diversity of paths that transgendered people choose to realize their gender identities, and public policy must reflect and accommodate that reality.

The Department now has an opportunity to help further the advances represented by Local Law 3 of 2002 and the guidelines for its implementation. We in NYAGRA urge the Department of Health to substantially revise the proposed amendment to Article 207 along the lines recommended in my testimony, and we stand ready to work with Department officials in drafting language for that amendment in a manner consistent with the broad concept of gender identity and expression and the progressive ethos informing existing transgender law and regulations in New York City.

Thank you.

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