Interview with Alex Lee

An interview with Alexander Li-Hua Lee, an Asian American trans masculine activist and attorney from Oakland, California. At the time of this interview, he was the Project Director for the Grantmakers United for Trans Communities (GUTC) initiative at Funders for LGBTQ Issues. Prior to joining Funders, Alex was a public interest career counselor at UC Berkeley School of Law, providing coaching and ongoing professional development for the next generation of social justice attorneys. Before that, Alex founded and led the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), a community-based legal services and policy organization based in San Francisco that works to end the abuse of transgender people in prison. He has served on the board of directors of Borealis Philanthropy and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and was a grantmaking panel member for the Saguaro Fund of the Funding Exchange. He is also an independent filmmaker. In this oral history interview, Alex discusses the beginnings of his political and community work in San Francisco Bay Area trans organizations in the late 1990s, the founding of TGIJP, and the beginnings of his work advocating for incarcerated trans people, the trans community's relationship with institutional philanthropy, the benefits and drawbacks of legal approaches to trans movement work, and his thoughts on the history, trajectory, and future of trans movements.

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View At: https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll97:198
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Item Information:

Identifier: tb09j597n
Collection: Oral Histories with People of Color
Institution: Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota
Creator(s): Lee, Alex
Contributor(s): Beam, Myrl
Billund-Phibbs, Myra
Publisher: University of Minnesota Minneapolis Libraries
Date Created: Nov. 17, 2019
Genre: Oral Histories
Transcriptions
Subject(s): Funders for LGBTQ Issues
Grantmakers United for Trans Communities (GUTC)
TransAction
Places: California > San Francisco County > San Francisco
Washington > King County > City of Seattle > Seattle
California > Alameda County > Oakland
Topic(s): Asian American transgender people
Legal services
LGBTQ+ imprisonment
Police harassment
Prisoners--Civil rights
Social justice
Transgender activism
Transgender people
Transmasculine people
Resource Type: Moving image
Text
Language: English
Rights: Copyright undetermined
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