Mary and I are leaving for Florida again tomorrow, for 3 days. I was asked some months ago to speak before the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) on the subject "Best Practices in Recruiting Transgender Law Students". LSAC is a nonprofit corporation whose members are more than 200 law schools in the United States and Canada and is best known for administering the Law School Admission Test (LSAT®). I am honored to share the stage with my friend Dean Spade, currently a Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA and Harvard Law Schools. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color.
The LSAC has an annual meeting of Admissions Directors from all the law schools every year. This year, it will be held on Marco Island, in Florida. When I applied to law school, as an out transgender student, I was very uncertain how I would be received. But, as everyone knows, I was so committed to being out that I made my transgender status a central theme in my Personal Statement. And, of course, I got admitted. Now, this consortium of all the country's law schools wants my advice on how to bring more transgender students to law school (although I imagine that there will be some law school representatives, such as from Ave Maria Law School who will choose not to attend this session). How cool is that? I'm very excited.
In case you're wondering how they decided to ask me (I wondered), it turns out that they use the old-fashioned approach -- they did an internet search and stumbled across this blog. After reading my law school application's Personal Statement, and skimming the Law School related posts, they decided to approach me. I'm honored, truly.