Lambda Legal

For nearly 50 years, Lambda Legal has been the nation's largest Legal advocacy organization working to advance and protect the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq+) people and everyone living with hiv through litigation, policy advocacy and public Education efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. Programmatic efforts in 2022 continued to align with the top programmatic priorities identified in our 5-year strategic plan, including: (1) winning new protections for the most vulnerable in our community to secure full Legal and lived equality, and (2) defending our community from attacks designed to roll back our rights.our community faced a feverish climate of anti-lgbtq+ rhetoric and legislation, with more than 300 anti-lgbtq+ bills introduced by state legislators in just the first six months of 2022. State legislation targeting transgender and nonbinary people for discrimination has exploded. We have seen proposals to bar or criminalize healthcare for transgender youth, prohibit access to gender-appropriate facilities like restrooms, restrict transgender students' ability to fully participate in school and sports, or put more roadblocks in place for transgender people seeking identity documents with their name and gender. This legislation targets and harms the most vulnerable among our lgbtq+ community. Florida's "don't say gay" law harmed lgbtq+ people and violates the first and fourteenth amendments of the constitutionby discriminatorily censoring classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in Florida public schools, not only for grades k-3 but for any grade as long as someone concludes that the discussion is somehow not "age-appropriate." Lambda Legal believes that all schools need to be safe places for all students, who must be able to freely discuss their family structure, sexual orientation, and gender identity. On july 25, 2022, we filed a lawsuit to block the law from going into effect. The battle in fl took place contemporaneously with other litigation across the country, from Texas (where we worked to prevent the weaponization of child protective services against transgender families) to Oklahoma ( where we filed a federal lawsuit against the Oklahoma state department of Education (osde), three Oklahoma public school districts, one public charter school, and numerous government officials for implementing and enforcing a new school facilities access law that singles out transgender students for discriminatory treatment), to Arizona (where the state legislature adopted bills targeting transgender youth by limiting gender-affirming care and banning transgender girls from participating in school sports). We continued our efforts to root out discriminatory barriers to gender-affirming healthcare, including a successful challenge in Illinois where a federal court ruled that blue cross blue shield il could not exclude coverage for medically necessary gender-affirming care in its administration of employer-provided erisa plans. In west Virginia, we brought a challenge to the state's exclusion of medicaid participants for gender-affirming surgical care. In Nevada, we filed a complaint with the u.s. Equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc), on behalf of a transgender woman employed as an it technician at the university of Nevada to remove its discriminatory exclusion on coverage for medically necessary facial surgery for transgender employees. We continued to make important progress in our ongoing effort to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people can obtain government identity documents with accurate gender markers. In north carolina, as a result of our efforts, transgender people born in the state can now correct the gender marker on their identity documents without the need for surgery. We continued challenging Tennessee's discriminatory birth certificate law, filed a new lawsuit challenging similarly discriminatory policies in north carolina, and supported related litigation across the country by filing amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs. Through our youth in out-of-home care project, we continued our advocacy on behalf of youth experiencing homelessness, in juvenile justice systems and in school settings, undocumented youth, youth at risk of commercial sexual exploitation, and transgender and nonbinary youth seeking medical care or identity documents or participating in school sports because we believe that every child deserves a loving home, we went to court and won an important victory for our client who for more than two years had been denied the opportunity to foster refugee children through a federally funded program solely because she is a lesbian. After she filed a federal lawsuit the taxpayer-funded agency involved told the federal government it no longer has a religious objection to working with a single lesbian foster parent and has allowed our client the opportunity to provide a safe and loving home for refugee children.through our hiv project, Lambda Legal continues its signature litigation to ensure fair employment practices and to combat hiv criminalization. In april 2022, a court injunction finally prohibited the department of Defense ("dod") from denying eligibility for deployment or commissioning to servicemembers on the basis of their hiv status if the servicemember is asymptomatic and has an undetectable viral load. In june 2022, dod announced changes to its regulations that purport to allow service members who met these criteria to deploy and to commission. Additionally, much of our current work centers on combatting hiv criminalization. We are currently fighting one of these laws in new york state by leading a campaign to pass the repeal sti discrimination bill and strike down an outdated 74-year-old law that continues to criminalize people for transmitting an sti based on outdated science. The nys decriminalization bill would remove the statute from books, amend the criminal code, and remove all prior convictions under the statute. Finally, Lambda Legal's national help desk continued to serve a particularly critical function during this time when we are seeing increasing rates of hate crimes targeting the lgbtq+ community and those living with hiv and has responded to more than 5,000 requests for assistance in 2022 on a broad range of issues, including employment, housing, healthcare, parenting and relationship disputes, immigration, and criminal law matters. To expand the reach and scale of its litigation and policy work, and leverage the expertise of its internal subject matter experts, Lambda Legal recruits, organizes and oversees the work of a large network of pro bono lawyers and law firms around the country to help in our work. Assembling and managing these pro bono services is a key component of our strategy and program services. It allows Lambda Legal to expand the scale of our essential, high quality Legal services nationwide with a modest staff, and enables us to focus our internal resources as needed to a variety of breaking Legal issues across the country. This work also trains and expands the pool of pro bono attorneys available around the country to advance the work of protecting and expanding the rights of the lgbtq+ community on an on-going basis. The value of these pro bono services is included in our audited financial statements and was $6,787,109 in 2022. In accordance with applicable law and regulations, revenue or expenses associated with this important component of our program services are not reflected in the revenue and expenses set forth in part ix statement of functional expenses of the 990. Nevertheless, we believe it is important for all Lambda Legal constituents to be informed of this work and its impact.

Our Legal work is supported by expansive public Education and communication efforts that allow us to reach a wide range of audiences across many channels throughout the year. For example, our media team regularly engages with a broad range of reporters to keep them, and by extension their audiences, informed on lgbtq+ rights issues. Moreover, we maintained a robust online presence that provided comprehensive resources, timely news, analysis, and commentary across multiple platforms, including our website, as well as facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube, medium and other social media channels. Through these platforms, Lambda Legal has published hundreds of pieces of content that can reach over a million or more people every week. These combined efforts generate tens of thousands of news stories annually and advance our goal of increasing awareness of the challenges lgbtq+ people face and our work to alleviate those challenges, as well as greater understanding within the lgbtq+ community of their Legal rights. Where possible, we use attention around our litigation and policy efforts to promote broader public Education on important issues. For example, our hiv work promotes our larger effort to drive policy informed by "science, not stigma." We do public Education building on our cases on behalf of transgender youth and their families to support greater understanding and empathy for this vulnerable population. Our large portfolio of cases challenging efforts to dilute nondiscrimination protections against anti-lgbtq+ discrimination through the use of religion and speech-based arguments contribute to a larger effort to promote awareness of the ongoing problem of discrimination and the need for robust protections at all level of government. Finally, as we continue to exit the covid-19 pandemic, Lambda Legal's attorneys and other staff maintained our public profile by attending and speaking at several in-person conferences and other public events, as well as virtually via platforms created by Lambda Legal on our social media channels to ensure continuity in our public Education efforts.