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John,
On Trans Day of Visibility, we hosted a community webinar on which we discussed How We're Adapting: NCTE's Response to COVID-19. During the call my colleagues and I spoke about what NCTE and the NCTE Action Fund are doing during this time and how our priorities are shifting because of it. If you have time, please take a moment to watch the full 1-hour video recording here. Below are some points from the call that I wanted to make sure that we highlighted for you:
1. The National Center for Transgender Equality (and our connected political organization, the NCTE Action Fund), has no intention of stopping our work. We are taking precautionary measures, using different tactics and delaying certain projects, but we are absolutely proceeding with the work needed to advance trans equality.
2. Since March 12th, we’ve been a fully remote organization. NCTE recognized this threat early on, and has taken the necessary steps to protect our staff and our broader community by putting workplace policies in place to allow us to do our part to flatten the curve.
3. We recognize that this is a very difficult time for a lot of people. You might have a lot of questions or be wondering where you can go to find help. We’ve done our best to compile these resources on our website at transequality.org/covid19. Please check back often as we are updating it frequently. If you have suggestions for other resources, please let us know.
4. We’ve been actively engaging with Congress as they attempt to respond to COVID-19, including on issues of sick and family medical leave, the government’s economic response, calling for a release of people who are incarcerated or in immigration detention, and several other issues that affect the most marginalized within our communities.
5. As a matter of public safety, we’ve cancelled all in-person events for the foreseeable future. This unfortunately includes our annual Trans Equality Now Awards, our largest fundraising event, which was scheduled to take place on June 9th in Washington, DC. In lieu of in-person celebrations, our staff has been hard at work developing a new way to celebrate the accomplishments of our community through online webinars. We anticipate releasing a new schedule of online events shortly.
6. As many of you know, NCTE is the organization that conducts the U.S. Trans Survey (USTS), and we were on schedule to start collecting data for the USTS this September. However, in order to attain a representative sample, NCTE partners with several hundred organizations (in 2015 we partnered with more than 800). Right now, many of these organizations are—rightly so—focused on the response to COVID-19 and ensuring the safety of our community. Because doing responsible outreach for the survey conflicts with the responsibility of all of us to focus on this current pandemic, we’ve made the difficult decision to delay the USTS until 2021. We hope to collect data as soon as it is safe and responsible to do so, but due to the uncertainty of this crisis, we can’t predict exactly when that will be.
7. Our political work through the NCTE Action Fund could not be more critical now, and we will absolutely not stop. While we are unaware if or when we’ll be able to deploy on-the-ground organizers to assist in presidential and other campaigns, we will continue to utilize our digital, web and social media platforms to mobilize trans voters. If this situation makes anything clear, it’s that now more than ever, we must Transform the White House.
These are challenging times, but one thing that I am absolutely confident about—based on the tens of thousands of trans people I have met—is that we are resilient people. We haven’t faced anything like COVID-19 before, but we—as communities and as individuals—have faced so much more. Stay indoors whenever possible, continue to practice social distancing, and seek any help that you need. As awful as this situation currently is, we will get through it, together.
Stay safe,
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Mara Keisling
National Center for Transgender Equality
Executive Director |
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