There will be some new faces in Lambda Legal’s Atlanta office.
The LGBTQ legal team’s Transgender Rights Project Director, Senior Attorney M. Dru Levasseur, has relocated to Georgia. According to Lambda, Levasseur’s areas of focus are “strategy development, impact litigation, advocacy and community education.” He played a crucial role in originating Lambda’s Legal Transgender Rights Project and the organization’s popular Trans Toolkit. A member of the New York Bar, Levasseur co-founded the Jim Collins Foundation, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts and the Western New England University School of Law.
Since Levasseur began at Lambda, the organization’s transgender rights docket has tripled. The last several years have seen a revolutionary integration of transgender rights into the different spheres of housing and family law, education, employment and health care. Levasseur has participated in each of these expansions. His work was crucial in Esquivel v. Oregon, the Asti suit and several other legal cases. Levasseur attended a White House summit regarding transgender policy, and has given speeches at many universities, including Harvard and Yale.
Additionally, Lambda Legal’s new Tyron Garner Fellow is Taylor Brown, a transgender woman hailing from the South — specifically from a rural town in the west of North Carolina. Brown got her B.A. from Chapel Hill’s University of North Carolina and in May will graduate from the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York. While at Cardozo, Brown was a member of the Black Law Student Association, the Minority Law Students Alliance and was the Vice President of OUTLaw. Brown was a law fellow at the National LGBTQ Task Force.
She also worked as a legal intern at the Georgia Resource Center. The GRC provides pro bono representation to indigent Georgia citizens who are on death row. This is not Brown’s first time working alongside the professionals of Lambda; she previously interned with Lambda’s Transgender Rights Project. According to Lambda, Brown is “particularly interested in the compounding effects of poverty, racism and LTBTQI discrimination on African-American members of the community.”
Lambda Legal is a national nonprofit legal organization dedicated to full recognition of the rights of LGBTQ Americans (and those living with HIV) through public policy work and impact legislation. They are the largest and oldest such organization in the United States.