Skip to content

Law-2

Many transgender and gender diverse people are licensed attorneys, judges, lawmakers, and elected office-holders. This list is currently focused on the United States.

This site also has a section on legal aspects of making a gender transition.

US attorneys

Below are a few notable transgender and gender diverse lawyers who have been admitted to at least one bar in the United States.

CB Baga (Minnesota)

Kylar Broadus (Missouri)

Julie Chovanes (Pennsylvania)

Denise E. Brogan-Kator (Florida)

Ellen Krug (Iowa)

Shannon Price Minter (California)

Sheryl Ring (Illinois)

Martine Rothblatt

Dean Spade (California)

Chase Strangio (Massachusetts)

Ezra Young (New York)

US judges

Phyllis Randolph Frye (Texas)

  • Associate Judge for the Municipal Courts, Houston
  • transgenderlegal.com [archive]
  • liberatinglaw.com [archive]

Victoria Kolakowski (California)

  • Judge for the Alameda County Superior Court
  • America’s first elected transgender judge
  • vkolakowski.com

US lawmakers and elected office-holders

  • Lisa Bunker
  • Gerri Cannon
  • Joanne Marie Conte
  • Phillipe Cunningham
  • Althea Garrison 
  • Kim Coco Iwamoto
  • Andrea Jenkins
  • Stephe Koontz
  • Rachel Levine
  • Sarah McBride
  • Lisa Middleton
  • Stu Rasmussen
  • Danica Roem
  • Lauren Scott
  • Amanda Simpson
  • Taylor Small
  • Brianna Titone
  • Mauree Turner
  • Aime Wichtendahl

Historic trans and gender diverse attorneys

Thomas Baty (1869 – 1954)  – British

Sonia Burgess (1947 2010) – British

Andrew S. Cray (1986 – 2014) – American

Pauli Murray (1910 – 1985) – American

Shain Mahaffey Neumeier (born 1987) – American

Mia F. Yamamoto (California – retired)

Outside the United States

  • Kael McKenzie – Canada judge (born 1971)
  • Micheline Montreuil – Canada
  • Nisha Rao – Pakistan

Aaron Greenberg

Federal law status for sex discrimination and gender variance (law.harvard.edu) Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 2005. (PDF)

An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Analysis of Binary Sex Categories, in TRANSGENDER RIGHTS: HISTORY, POLITICS, AND LAW (Paisley Currah & Shannon Minter, eds., Univ. of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2005)   

Gender Nonconformity: A Comprehensive Theoretical Approach to Break Down the Maternal Wall and End Discrimination Against Gender Benders :Commentary on Keynote Speaker Joan Williams’s “Beyond the Glass Ceiling,” 26 T. JEFFERSON L. REV. 37 (2003) 

Legal Aspects of Gender Assignment, 13 ENDOCRINOLOGIST 276 (2003) 

Definitional Dilemmas: Male or Female? Black or White? The Law’s Failure to Recognize Intersexuals and Multiracials (ch. 5), in GENDER NONCONFORMITY, RACE, AND SEXUALITY: CHARTING THE CONNECTIONS 102 (Toni Lester, ed., Madison: Wisconsin Univ. Press, 2002)   

Deconstructing Binary Race and Sex Categories: A Comparison of the Multiracial and transgender Experience, 39 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 919 (2002) 

When Is a Man a Man and When Is a Woman a Woman?, 52 FLA. L. REV. 745 (2000)