On paper, they’re lawyers. In practice, they’re more like a human firewall, a scattered fellowship of civil rights advocates whose work has become a bulwark against the Trump administration’s campaign to erase transgender people from American public life.
They range in age from their 40s to 60s and live in cities including Boston and Seattle. They spend their days in courtrooms, on Zoom calls, or drafting briefs at all hours of the night. They are queer, transgender, cisgender, parents, introverts, hikers, softball players. One volunteers at a food truck for the fun of it. Others wind down by reading fantasy novels. All of them have grown accustomed to facing judges and government lawyers who often don’t understand the very existence of their clients or question that existence.
The rarefied group of attorneys stands between America’s LGBTQ+ community and an administration determined to write its members out of the law. They’ll keep fighting in court, in public, and in quiet conversations over coffee or in softball dugouts. Because for them, the work is personal. And it’s far from over.
Legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, Shannon Minter. courtesy Shannon Minter
Shannon Minter, 63, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, grew up in a conservative Texas family surrounded by love until the day he came out as a teenager, at first as a lesbian.
“I felt like one day my parents loved me, and the next day, they didn’t,” he says. “I felt rejected by God. It was so terrible.”
Minter later realized he was transgender and transitioned in his mid-30s.
He says he spent years drifting, even trying a Ph.D. in English before switching to law, almost on a whim, after following a friend into Cornell Law School. He discovered LGBTQ+ legal work during a clerkship at NCLR and never left.
“I didn’t even know that was a type of law you could do,” he says. “It was so exhilarating.”
He has since become one of the nation’s foremost attorneys advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. Throughout his career, he has argued landmark cases, including representing Sharon Smith in California’s first case allowing same-sex partners to sue for wrongful death. That case, Smith v. Knoller, arose after Smith’s partner was killed in a dog attack, and the court ruled that same-sex partners had the same right as spouses to seek justice for the loss of a partner.
Minter also helped lead legal battles for marriage equality that culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. Now he’s one of the lead attorneys challenging Donald Trump’s revived ban on military service by out transgender people in Talbott v. USA.
What gives him hope? He recalls a recent religious liberty summit at Brigham Young University’s Law School in Utah. “It was encouraging,” he says. “There’s a real desire among some moderate conservatives to find middle ground on these issues. I’m so hopeful we can do that.”
And Minter has strong words for how the movement needs to adjust. “We talk too often in ways that are way too intellectual, way too academic, way too abstract,” he says. “Transgender people just want to lead their lives, work, go to school, have families. Exactly like other people.”
Sasha Buchert is the director of the Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal.Sam Crowell
Sasha Buchert, 59, is a transgender woman and director of the Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal. She transitioned after law school and shifted her career into LGBTQ+ legal work to fight the barriers she once tried to avoid confronting directly.
“I wandered in the woods for a while trying to find myself,” she says.
After moving from Oregon to D.C., where she came out, Buchert initially avoided LGBTQ+ legal issues during law school. “It was too close to home,” she says. “But after coming out, I became enraged at the barriers trans people face. And that’s stayed with me.”
Buchert began her career at Basic Rights Oregon and the Transgender Law Center before landing at Lambda Legal. Today, she leads Lambda Legal’s work on cases including Schilling v. United States, which challenges the Trump administration’s reinstatement of a ban preventing transgender people from serving openly in the U.S. military. Lambda Legal recently announced that it raised $285 million to fight for the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
In court, Buchert often finds herself educating judges about the basics of what it means to be trans. “That’s why we bring in experts,” she says. “You can’t assume a court will understand something they really won’t.”
She finds moments of escape playing softball in D.C.’s LGBTQ+ sports leagues. “There aren’t nearly enough trans folks taking advantage of queer sports leagues,” she says. “I’d encourage people to get involved. It’s amazing.”
HIV Project director at Lambda Legal, Jose Abrigo. courtesy Jose Abrigo
Jose Abrigo, 42, HIV Project director at Lambda Legal, grew up as a queer kid in California in the 1990s, feeling rejected by the world to the point where he tried to die by suicide. “I made a promise to myself that I didn’t want anyone else to feel as hated as I did,” he says.
Abrigo’s career began in direct services, representing low-income LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV. Now he’s the lead attorney in San Francisco AIDS Foundation v. Trump and National Urban League v. Trump, challenging executive orders that strip federal funding from nonprofits if they mention or support transgender people or diversity programs. It’s an effort critics say amounts to erasing LGBTQ+ identities and racial justice work from public life.
“These policies don’t target issues in isolation,” he says. “It’s all part of a strategic plan to disenfranchise minority groups. Life is a zero-sum game for them. One group’s success depends on suppressing another.”
He’s frank about the stakes. “Right now the courts are the only ones checking executive power,” he says. “But we can’t just rely on them. We have to keep fighting.”
“There’s a moral arc,” Abrigo says. “But it doesn’t bend on its own.”
When he can steal a moment of peace, Abrigo escapes into fantasy novels. “Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones — I’m a huge fantasy nerd,” he says. “And I love traveling. I’m hoping to finally get to Italy.”
Li Nowlin-Sohl is a senior attorney with ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.courtesy Li Nowlin-Sohl
Li Nowlin-Sohl, 41, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, never planned to become a lawyer.
“I thought lawyers were just angry people banging on tables,” she laughs. It wasn’t until she worked on a political campaign in Vermont that she realized law could be a tool for justice.
She joined the ACLU in 2017, and today, Nowlin-Sohl is leading the ACLU’s fight against a new Trump administration policy that blocks transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans from updating the gender marker on their U.S. passports.
The lawsuit argues that forcing people to carry documents that misgender them not only endangers them but also violates their constitutional rights. A federal judge recently agreed and issued a preliminary injunction against the policy change.
“It’s inconsistent with where the rest of the country is,” she says. “In 46 states, you can change your driver’s license. Forty-four states let you amend your birth certificate. The Trump administration decided your passport must misgender you, no matter what.”
Nowlin-Sohl spends much of her time educating judges on transgender identity and the medical facts of transition. “We have to break down misinformation,” she says. “Hormones aren’t handed out like candy. This is medical care.”
Outside work, she soaks up Seattle’s rare sunshine and plays board games with her wife and 1-year-old son.
Jennifer Levi is a senior director at GLAD Law.courtesy Jennifer Levi
Jennifer Levi, 60, a senior director at GLAD Law, traces her life’s mission back to her childhood in Miami Beach during the late 1970s, when singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant launched her infamous “Save Our Children” campaign. Bryant sought to repeal local ordinances protecting gay people from discrimination, portraying them as threats to children. Levi was in seventh grade at the time and recalls crying when Miami-Dade County’s gay rights ordinance was overturned, a moment that ignited her commitment to LGBTQ+ advocacy.
“I didn’t really have a sense of my own queer identity, but I was impacted by that work,” she says. “I probably did have, if not like a conscious sense, but a heartfelt sense, that I was queer.”
At GLAD Law, Levi was hired to focus on transgender work. “I had kind of just a few years before that connected to my own transgender identity,” she says. “I had gone to one of the early conferences in Texas of the International Conference of Transgender Law and Employment Policy. I met Shannon Minter and I met other leaders of the transgender legal advocacy world, and GLAD Law hired me with that commitment to transgender work, and the rest is history, I guess.”
Decades later, she’s leading Talbott v. USA with Minter, challenging Trump’s renewed trans military ban.
“The policy maligns honorable transgender service members with falsehoods,” she says. “It’s devastating.”
Levi knows how much of her job involves education. “It’s painful to hear questions in court that reveal how little some people understand,” she says. “But we can’t leapfrog over ignorance. We have to confront it.”
When not drafting legal briefs or preparing for court, Levi has a surprising hobby: volunteering at a food truck. “People are surprised when they see me there,” she laughs. “But it’s routine. I meet people and make them happy with food. It’s a nice change.”
This article is part of The Advocate's Sept/Oct 2025 issue, now on newsstands. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader.
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