Center Blog

This morning  the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center was thrilled to hear that New York City has implemented measures to ensure that transgender people have equal access to marriage licenses.  As part of that effort the Office of the City Clerk is instituting training for all City Clerk staff to ensure they are culturally competent on issues relating to gender identity and expression; the office reached out to the Center for our guidance and expertise in this area in early February. Today  the Center’s Director of Community Services, Carrie Davis, a social worker and expert on gender identity issues, conducted the first of several trainings for City Clerk employees happening throughout the Month of March.

The changes were enacted after a transgender couple was refused a marriage license  in 2009 and sought the help of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.  As NBC reported:

The transgender woman, who had been born as a male, and her opposite sex partner, who was born female, were denied a license to marry at the Bronx office of the City Clerk in December 2009. When the pair supplied identification, a worker in the clerk’s office asked for birth certificates in addition to the ID.

New Yorkers seeking marriage licenses are not required to show birth certificates if they produce government-issued photo ID.

After the couple threatened legal action and sought help from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, City Clerk Michael McSweeney told employees this week that all marriage license applicants must be treated with dignity, and that transgendered applicants only need to produce the same ID as anyone else.

Quinn said Tuesday that the decision “ensures that all New Yorkers will be treated equally, and with the dignity and respect they deserve from a government agency.”

“Transgender people are challenged all the time about their status as men and women,” said Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. “We applaud the City Clerk’s office for adopting this policy and for taking steps to ensure that this does not happen again.”

You can learn more about the work that led to this change here. 

The Center’s Training Institute offers specialized training sessions for professionals who work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the New York City area. Achieving culturally competent training to work with the LGBT community is essential to conducting business in a city as diverse as New York. Our series of trainings has been carefully developed to offer important information, resources, and creative skills to help enhance the lives of LGBT clients. You can  learn more by watching this video from our Gender Identity Project.  ”Transgender Basics” is  a 20 minute educational film on concepts of gender and transgender people and we are showing the film to the City Clerk staff as part of our training with them.

The Center applauds the efforts of Speaker Christine Quinn and TLDEF and commends the city for taking this step to ensure that transgender New Yorkers applying for marriage licenses will be treated equally from now on, and look forward to continuing our training sessions.

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, the East Coast’s largest LGBT center, today announced the appointment of Carrie Davis, MSW, as Director of the Center’s new Community Services Department.

Ms. Davis is a social worker and takes on this role after leading the Center’s Adult Services Department for the past four years. Having first joined the Center in 1998, her new role will encompass a wide array of programs and administrative functions.  The transition combines existing social service areas under the one umbrella of the Community Services Department that includes health, youth and families.

These vital programs provide lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) people with community support to foster healthy identity and family development, including integrated substance abuse, mental health, HIV and AIDS, smoking cessation, and lesbian cancer and immigration services through the delivery of a range of supportive interventions, advocacy, outreach, education and capacity-building.

“We’re thrilled to have Carrie Davis heading up our new Community Services Department,” said Executive Director Glennda Testone.  “Carrie’s proven dedication to bettering the lives of our community through our vast health, youth and family programs is unparalleled. Under her steady program leadership and direction we are poised to significantly grow our capacity to serve LGBTQ people throughout the next decade.”

The new Community Services department improves participant services through freer internal transfers of talents and resources, and expands program reach and infrastructure to better serve clients. The department also provides new services designed to address the needs of underserved or “gap” populations and enhances our focus on the Center’s mission and strategic plan. At the same time, Community Services will cut operating costs and increase our fiscal responsibility through streamlining administrative functions.

Carrie Davis is also a community organizer, advocate and educator, working with health care providers, schools and government agencies to address LGBT identity, legal, health care and social concerns at the national, state and local levels. In addition to her work at the Center she currently serves on the New York City Police Department LGBT Advisory Committee, the All Gender Health Online Research Project Advisory Board, and has previously served on the board of directors of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and GenderPAC, as well as the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) Board of Advisors. Carrie is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Hunter College School of Social Work.

For more information on the programs offered by our Community Services Department visit these pages on our website:

Health

Youth

Families