By Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks
Editor’s Note: Keep an eye out for more in-depth coverage of changemakers through June 30. To read more, click here.
For Jaelynn Scott, faith and social justice have always been intertwined.
Scott has served as executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, a Seattle-based organization focused on safeguarding the rights and dignity of Black gender-diverse people, since 2020.
Under her leadership, the Lavender Rights Project has become one of the region’s most prominent advocacy groups, transforming from a legal aid clinic for low-income LGBTQ+ residents into a powerhouse organization delivering political advocacy, legal support, housing access and economic relief to Black LGBTQ+ residents.
The group co-led an effort to redirect $16 million from King County Jail operations to community health and housing programs in 2021, and helped develop the proposed federal Transgender Bill of Rights, initially introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal in 2022. The most recent iteration of the bill, which stalled in Congress last year, would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender identity and protect access to gender-affirming care.
A longtime LGBTQ+ equity consultant, Scott is also an ordained Buddhist minister — a background she said she draws on daily working one-on-one with Black and gender-diverse people.
“Just recently I just had the realization that this is ministry, it’s 100% ministry, and I haven’t walked away from my call at all,” Scott said, seated inside her Seattle office. “I felt the same spirit, the same pull on my heart, as I felt at the deepest spiritual moments in ministry.”
Liberation for Black trans people means liberation for all oppressed people, Scott said.
Trans people are more likely to experience physical violence when interacting with police compared with cisgender people. Housing insecurity and financial precarity disproportionately impact trans people of color. Restrictions on gender-affirming health care, like bans on abortion, are attacks against a person’s right to bodily autonomy, Scott said.
Communities have to work together, she said. “We’re in the same fight against a shared enemy,” Scott said.
After the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Legal Voice — a Seattle-based nonprofit that combats gender discrimination — began working with the Lavender Rights Project to more explicitly incorporate access to gender-affirming care in legislative work related to abortion care, said policy counsel Alizeh Bhojani.
“She has such a clear vision and voice, and will always go back to directly impacted people,” Bhojani said of Scott.
Growing up in Mississippi in the Black Pentecostal and Baptist church communities, resilience and social justice were the bedrock of Scott’s upbringing. When she was about 19, she got involved in campus activism, protesting the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten and left to die.
When Scott moved to Seattle around 2017, she began to live openly as a trans woman, finding kindness in the local LGBTQ+ community and comfort in the surrounding nature.
“I knew there was something about the Pacific Northwest that I could find sanctuary here,” Scott said.
The Lavender Rights Project was founded in 2016, primarily offering legal services to LGBTQ+ Washington residents for civil rights and employment discrimination cases — a legal resource Scott herself used when she sued her former employer for discrimination about five years ago.
The settlement she ultimately received was small, “but just having someone advocating on my behalf, believing me when I said that my experience was harmful … that just empowered me fully,” Scott said.
After successfully representing Scott, the Lavender Rights Project was eager to hire her as it reassessed its mission and vision to focus on helping Black trans people.
Using feedback from community members, Scott and the Lavender Rights Project learned an important concept: “The law can be used as a tool to get us to where we need to go, but the law was not going to be the vehicle for our liberation.”
Legal aid was not the biggest need — financial security and housing were.
“We are very much deeply rooted in mutual aid networks, fighting for resources for our community,” Scott said. “It’s less about the letter of the law.”
To that end, the Lavender Rights Project has broadened its advocacy work.
Over the past three years, the nonprofit has operated a small, guaranteed income program that delivers $1,000 a month to five people, which it hopes to expand. The organization is also building a litigation department focused on criminal justice reform.
The centerpiece of its work is a new housing justice initiative. Starting next year, the Lavender Rights Project will co-operate a new county affordable housing project on Capitol Hill specializing in providing services to Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people.
“There’s so much intersection with any form of oppression, any form of injustice,” said Derrick Belgarde, executive director of Chief Seattle Club, a Native-led housing and social services agency that will co-operate the development. “We’re here to heal people and get our community to thrive. … But to do the healing, you need to get the basic needs met.”
Looking ahead, Scott is weary about what the 2024 general election might bring. More “nasty ballot initiatives” are coming down the pike, she said, and an influx of LGBTQ+ individuals fleeing states with anti-trans and anti-gay legislation — who need access to housing, health care and more — may be on the horizon.
Comentarios