Celebration and Action: Pride Month 2023

Bay Area Legal Aid invites our partners, staff, clients and the communities where we work to join us in observing Pride month this June.

To our LGBTQIA2S+ family, friends, colleagues, and clients,

We celebrate you on this Pride month! Pride is a time to remember and a time to celebrate. We want to honor with you, your Black and Brown trans and gender nonconforming activists whose labor of resistance birthed Pride as we celebrate it today. We honor Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. We honor the loud, tireless, and effective work of ACT-UP and allied movements in insisting that healthcare for queer communities is a non-negotiable right. We honor the revolutionary ethic of care and the deep intersectionality of practices embodied by Bay Area heroines like Pat Parker and the Feminist Women’s Health Center. We honor those who continue to embody the strength, resilience, and determination to fight for liberation — and to win! — within LGBTQIA2S+ communities.

To the families, friends, and colleagues to the LGBTQIA2S+ community,

We encourage you to not only celebrate, but also act alongside the LGBTQIA2S+ community this month.  Equality and equity are under attack across the country, with nineteen states this year alone passing legislation that endangers the lives, health, and basic freedoms of transgender youth and adults. It is time for non-LGBTQIA2S+ individuals to affirm our commitment to fight for equal healthcare access, housing, protection from violence, and public participation for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals and communities. It is a time to stand against the structural state violence, interpersonal violence, and social exclusion that continue to threaten LGBTQIA2S+ life throughout American society.

For your cue on action or language, you can look to those who have gone before and for those who stand with us now. For example, you can loudly confirm that “Gender Identity Is Real” along with a memorable section title from yesterday’s preliminary injunction by the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida against Florida’s law banning and criminalizing medically necessary transition care for transgender youth.  In the world of legal services, you can push back on yet one more landlord evicting a tenant because “this is a family building.” Or you can firmly remind yet one more insurance company that California law requires them to cover gender-affirming healthcare. Or yet again educate first responders, health systems and law enforcement on implicit biases that stand in the way of effective care for LGBTQIA2s+ survivors of domestic violence.

Let’s celebrate ourselves, our colleagues, our clients, our children, our neighbors, and each other who embody the life, liberation, resistance, and joyous spirit of Pride, this month and beyond. “Pride isn’t just a month, it’s a state of mind” – Hope Giselle.