Law Firms
Transgender Lawyer’s BigLaw Experience Would Likely Be Different Today
Posted Sep 4, 2008, 09:32 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
When Jillian Weiss worked as a male lawyer at a New York law firm in the 1990s, she was ready to make the transition to a female, but she knew her employer would never stand for it.
Weiss told the New York Times that simply switching jobs along with her gender identity wouldn’t solve the bias problem. She knew her new employer would call her law firm for references and her secret would be revealed. She ended up taking a job as a legal secretary, “where her paper trail was less of an obstacle,” the newspaper says.
The experience of Weiss, now a law professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey, would likely be different today. “It is a different world,” Weiss told the Times.
She attributes the change in large part to the work of the Human Rights Campaign, which publishes an index showing how well companies treat lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees. Only 13 law firms got perfect scores on the Corporate Equality Index in 2006, the first year large law firms were invited to participate. Now the figure has grown to 64, and law firms are outpacing banking and financial services firms.
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Comments
Posted by Dr. Jillian T. Weiss - 4 months, 4 days, 9 hours, 4 minutes ago
I’d like to think this is true, and I think it is becoming more true. I applaud the increase in sexual orientation and gender identity protection policies in law firms. However, there was a letter published in May of last year, by one of the few out transgender lawyers in the large law firm environment, discussing the fact that inclusion has been extended to gay lawyers more than to transgender lawyers. You can find a link to the letter online at my blog: http://transworkplace.blogspot.com/2007/06/so-many-interesting-things-have.html
Posted by Rupunzel - 4 months, 4 days, 8 hours, 49 minutes ago
Last year, the HRC threw transgender folks under the bus by not pushing for a gender inclusive EDNA.This resulted in their two most experienced transgender members of HRC to quit. To this day, HRC has not acknowledge they every did anything wrong regarding all that happened with the gender inclusive EDNA. The change in public, legal and cooperate attitudes towards gender different individuals are a culmination of many years of hard work and struggle from many, many individuals who fought for gender equality. It is simply wrong to give HRC all the credit for something they did not accomplish.
Posted by Alyson Meiselman - 4 months, 3 days, 8 hours, 51 minutes ago
Once again the NYTimes gets it wrong.
HRC does not support transgender lawyers, much less the rest of the transgendered community, having a long and tortured history of non-inclusive and abusive behavior toward the transgendered community.
If there are “transgendered” attorneys in large law firms they should identify themselves… I know of none, and the trans-attorneys I do know are all in solo and very small firms, or in public interest work. I’d be very interested in seeing the data that backs up this article, specifically how many of the 64 firms have a transgendered lawyer on staff.
Just because a law firm gets a good or excellent rating does not mean they have a single transgendered attorney on staff. It is far more likely that they have gay and lesbian employees and since “transgendered” employees would be lumped into the LGBT catagory, the statistics are misleading, at best.
Posted by Roberta R Zenker - 4 months, 1 day, 4 hours, 22 minutes ago
My experience in Montana is much the same. I am acriminal law attorney with 16 years of courtroom and two yeas of appellate experience. But, I wanted to stay home and remain in my profession through transition. I added only one letter to my first name to feminize it. Stealth was impossible amongst those choices. Do you think anyone will hire me now? I took a 40% pay cut to transition, lucky to just have a job and good credit. I still have the job, but very bad credit. Its enough to drive me to advocacy.