Task Force Transgender Civil Rights Project Director Lisa Mottet named as one of the best LGBT lawyers under 40
Task Force Transgender Civil Rights Project Director Lisa Mottet
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Civil Rights Project Director Lisa Mottet will be recognized this weekend as one of the “Best LGBT Lawyers under 40” at the 2011 Lavender Law Conference. The National LGBT Bar Association established this award to recognize lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) legal professionals under the age of 40 who have distinguished themselves in their field and demonstrated a profound commitment to LGBT equality.
At this conference, Mottet will also be presenting as faculty during the Transgender Law Institute and will be part of the Critical Decisions in Transgender Advocacy panel.
Mottet was nominated by her peers for her decade of work on transgender equality. She was involved in ensuring transgender-inclusion in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act before it passed Congress, as well as ensuring transgender-inclusion in federal employment nondiscrimination legislation. Mottet has also drafted myriad state and local laws that protect people based on gender identity and/or expression.
Mottet has worked at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for over a decade co-authoring key reports:
- Transitioning Our Shelters: A Guide to Making Homeless Shelters Safe for Transgender People, a joint publication with the National Coalition for the Homeless.
- Opening the Door to the Inclusion of Transgender People: The Nine Keys to Making LGBT Organizations Fully Transgender-Inclusive, a joint publication with the National Center for Transgender Equality, which guides LGBT organizations through all the steps needed to make organizations fully transgender-inclusive.
Most recently, Mottet co-authored the groundbreaking report, Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. The survey, a joint effort with the National Center for Transgender Equality, released in February 2011, is the largest transgender discrimination study ever undertaken in the U.S. It paints a more complete picture than any prior research to date revealing the depth of discrimination against transgender and gender non-conforming people in a wide range of areas, including education, health care, employment and housing.
When Mottet joined the Task Force staff in 2001, thanks to funding from Equal Justice Works, she held the nation’s first legal fellowship specifically aimed at addressing discrimination against transgender people on a national level. Mottet graduated from the University of Washington in 1998 and Georgetown University Law Center in 2001, where she was an editor of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. Before law school, she was a board member of Equality Washington, a statewide LGBT political organization, and served on the campaign committee for Washington state’s proactive statewide initiative to ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in 1997.
