Transgender Outreach
Transgender individuals face obstacles within the business, medical, financial, housing, educational, and legal sectors – in fact there is scarcely an aspect of life where transgender individuals do not experience discrimination. Fair Michigan advocates and educates for transgender awareness, safety, and policy issues. We seek to overcome falsehoods, hate, and stereotypes via training, outreach, interaction, facts, and personal stories.
The Fair Michigan Justice Project seeks to create a safer environment for transgender persons in the Detroit Metro area by investigating and prosecuting hate crimes against transgender individuals. We go into the communities and reach out to victims and witnesses in their own neighborhoods where they feel safer. We help them through the prosecution process, which in turn, gets violent hate crime perpetrators off the streets.
Fair Michigan worked with the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office to develop the state’s first ever Transgender Interaction Policy. This policy provides guidance on working with transgender persons; the goal is to improve interactions between prosecutors and transgender crime victims and witnesses. The policy requires the prosecutor’s office employees to address transgender individuals by their chosen name, to classify and address them according to their stated gender, and to otherwise treat them with respect regardless of their gender identity or expression.
Our Director of Transgender Outreach and Advocacy, Julisa Abad, has been very busy teaching, speaking, advocating, and developing policies with a number of organizations in Wayne county and throughout the state. She has presented at numerous conferences and seminars and provided interviews and information to many news media outlets. In addition she works closely with the Justice Project to help find, interview, and guide crime victims and witnesses through the investigation and trial processes. She works to provide emergency housing and health care for members of the LGBTQ community, as well as helping transgender individuals obtain identification with the correct gender.