| October 3, 2018 | ||
| 12:00 pm | to | 1:30 pm |
Knight Law Center
NEW ROOM LOCATION: Room 175
1515 Agate St.
Panel Discussion: “Trans* Law: Opportunities and Futures”
- Paisley Currah, Professor, Brooklyn College & CUNY
- Asaf Orr, Attorney, National Center for Lesbian Rights
- Moderator: Beatrice Dohrn, Director, Nonprofit Clinic, UO School of Law
Sponsors: Center for the Study of Women in Society, The Tom and Carol Williams Fund for Undergraduate Education, School of Law, Oregon Child Advocacy Project, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Education and Support Services (LGBTESS), Office of the Dean of Students.
Paisley Currah
Paisley Currah is a professor of political science and women’s & gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written widely on the topics related to transgender rights, sex reclassification policies, and feminism. In his current research, Currah looks at how states classify sex, focusing on the contradictions in definitions of sex (as in M and F) from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and agency to agency. He has also written widely on the transgender rights movement in the United States. His teaching interests include sexuality and gender studies, LGBT studies, feminist theory, queer legal theory, public policy, and political theory, including contemporary political thought, and biopolitics.
With Susan Stryker, he was the founding editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the flagship journal of transgender studies. Currah co-edited, with Shannon Minter and Richard Juang, Transgender Rights, which won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. As a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute Currah has advocated for transgender rights at all levels of government. He also serves on the board of directors Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE). His book, Sex is as Sex Does: Transgender Identity and the Politics of Classification, is forthcoming from New York University Press.
Asaf Orr
Asaf Orr is the Transgender Youth Project Staff Attorney of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), one of the nation’s leading advocacy organizations for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
Asaf joined NCLR in 2012 after years of representing students with disabilities and people living with HIV/AIDS. As NCLR’s Transgender Youth Project Staff Attorney, Asaf works to safeguard the rights of transgender and gender-expansive youth to be affirmed and supported for who they are. By changing the life trajectories of transgender and gender-expansive youth through litigation, public policy, and advocacy, Asaf hopes to create a future where all children can thrive.
For nearly a decade, Asaf worked to advance the rights of the little “t” in LGBT. During that time, he represented transgender youth and their families in a wide range of legal matters including discrimination in schools, child custody disputes, child abuse and neglect, and access to affirming medical and mental health care. He was the lead attorney in Student v. Arcadia Unified School District, which resulted in a historic resolution acknowledging that Title IX protects transgender kids from discrimination in schools and led to transgender student guidance released by the Obama Administration in May 2016. He also worked behind the scenes to increase inclusion of transgender athletes in all levels and types of sport; expanded access to transition-related care for Medicaid recipients, including puberty-delaying medications and facial feminization surgery; and supported attorneys representing affirming parents in custody disputes around the country.
