The Big Five

October 13, 2009 posted by Kyla Bender-Baird

Last week I had the honor and privilege of sharing the stage with Frances Kunreuther and Helen Kim at a leadership symposium here in New York City. The symposium was a collaborative project sponsored by the Ms. Foundation for Women, the New York Women’s Foundation, the Third Wave Foundation, the Astraea Foundation, and the Women of Color Policy Network at NYU Wagner. These five amazing organizations brought together over 80 participants from foundations, advocacy and research organizations to identify strategies for overcoming the structural barriers to leadership and power for young women and trans folks of color. 

Frances, Helen, and I were asked to discuss leadership now and in the next twenty years, looking at barriers to leadership and opportunities to lead for young women of color and young trans and gender-nonconforming leaders.  Frances directs and Helen is a team member of the Building Movement Project, an organization that “works to strengthen U.S. nonprofits as sites of democratic practice and advance ways the nonprofit sector can build movement for progressive social change.” Together with Robby Rodriguez, they recently co-authored the book Working Across Generations: Defining the Future of Nonprofit Leadership.  

Frances addressed the generational tensions in leadership development non-profits are currently facing.  Younger leaders are frustrated when older leaders say they’re going to leave the movement and there is no one to take their place. This anger has been turned into conversations and research.  What Frances and Helen found in their research was that the way we frame the issue of generational leadership defines the ultimate solution.  For instance, if the issue is framed as a crisis of leadership (i.e. there are not enough younger leaders to take the place of Baby Boomers when they leave), then the solution is to build a pipeline.  This framing, known as a replacement theory, is mostly defined by older leaders and is not popular among younger leaders.  On the other hand, if the issue is framed as a problem of recognition (i.e. older leaders don’t see the younger leaders because they don’t look and act like current leaders) the solution is to change assumptions of leadership in order to make younger leaders and different forms of leadership visible. 

Helen then took us into the future of leadership, saying that the next 20 years will be a time of experimentation where we must let go of what is comfortable and what we know and embrace a period of the unknown.  To ride this change, Helen encouraged us to think about leadership differently, to realize the impact of social location on leadership development, and to lift up the importance of sustainability, grounding, and spirituality in our all of our work. 

My contribution to the discussion was a brief outline of the structural barriers to power for trans and gender non-conforming leaders.  The truth is, we live in a gender binary system which erases trans identities, setting up numerous obstacles to leadership and making invisible those trans and gender nonconforming folks who are already leaders.  Here are some of the stats I shared:

• Only 13 states plus the District of Columbia have explicitly trans-inclusive nondiscrimination laws, meaning that only 40% of the U.S. population is covered.
• A 2007 Williams Institute meta-analysis of 50 studies examining LGBT discrimination found that up to 60% of trans respondents reported being unemployed. 
• This past year, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force conducted a survey of trans discrimination, collecting over 6,000 responses, making it the largest national survey of trans discrimination to date.  In their preliminary findings, they report that 26% of respondents lost their jobs because of their trans identity.  The numbers were even high for trans folks of color. 32% of black respondents and 37% of multiracial respondents lost their job due to their trans identity. 

In this environment of pervasive discrimination, it was honestly difficult for me to think of opportunities for leadership for this population.  In my research on trans and gender nonconforming communities, the discourse is around survival, not leadership.  To move forward, I suggested organizations work to advance trans legal rights, make their organizations safe and inclusive for trans and gender nonconforming folks, and to look to existing models of trans leadership such as FIERCE and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. 

Fortunately, this was not the end of the discussion and other panelists throughout the symposium offered further suggestions on how to advance leadership among trans and gender nonconforming communities.  Kris Hayashi, Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project, made the important point that trans and gender conforming leaders have always existed—they’re just not always recognized by larger social justice movements.  In building the power of trans leaders, organizations must first realize that many trans and gender nonconforming folks are already leaders in their community and that it may be barriers within organizations that are preventing the recognition of this leadership. For instance, do feminist and social justice organizations acknowledge multiple genders in their work?  Kris encouraged progressive organizations to better understand the conditions and external barriers trans communities face while lifting up the truth that trans folks are leaders.  He also emphasized the importance of supporting groups lead by trans and gender nonconforming people.