Human Rights Day panelist asks city to protect local trans community, immigrants, others targeted by Trump

Presenter: Eugene celebrated International Human Rights Day Dec. 14 with a panel discussion on this year’s theme, ‘Our rights, our future, right now.’ Here is Human Rights Commissioner Blake Burrell.

[00:00:12] Blake Burrell (Human Rights Commission): International Human Rights Day celebrates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on Dec. 10, 1948, the UDHR establishes fundamental human rights that are to be universally protected, marking the first time such rights were articulated.

[00:00:32] The UDHR safeguards the inherent rights of every individual irrespective of factors like race, color, religion, sex, language, political, or other national or social origin, property, birth, and other statuses.

[00:00:49] So, our panel discussion today is titled: ‘Our rights, our future, right now.’

[00:00:54] Anna Lardner (she/her pronouns), is a transgender woman who has lived in the city of Eugene since 2017. She grew up and went to school in Chicago, Illinois, where she received her master’s in social work from the University of Chicago in 2013 with a specialization in violence prevention.

[00:01:16] While in Chicago, she worked as a clinical intern with young men and women in the BIPOC community who were involved in the juvenile justice system. She was also a program data and evaluation manager at Alternatives, Inc., a Chicago nonprofit providing services for marginalized youth in underserved Chicago neighborhoods.

[00:01:38] Additionally, she supported local community organizing efforts in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood and in Gary, Indiana. After moving to Eugene in 2017, she worked as a parole and probation officer in the Domestic Violence Unit for Lane County for several years. While in this position, she advocated for victims of domestic violence connected with local substance abuse and survivor nonprofits, and provide a trauma-informed case management and supervision for individuals involved in the criminal justice system.

She also worked with parole and probation leaders at local and state level on use of force reform, updating county training and practices to align with statewide legal reforms and more ethical practices.

[00:02:28] Anna was also an advocate for improving LGBTQ+ policies throughout the community and continues to support county DEI initiatives towards these ends, and left her work with Lane County in 2024 to more directly support LGBTQ+ individuals as a mental health therapist and to pursue her personal passions for dancing.

[00:02:53] Today, she is a clinical social work associate at a local mental health agency and member of different Eugene PRIDE planning committees and member of local grassroots organizations focused around LGBTQ+ support and advocacy.

[00:03:10] Presenter: With a question for Anna Lardner, Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hiura.

[00:03:15] Thomas Hiura (Human Rights Commission): The transgender community has historically been discriminated against in the realms of employment, marriage, medicine, incarceration, and the military, along with many other aspects of life considered normal for cisgender or non-transgender people.

[00:03:29] Transgender people are many more times likely to experience homelessness, unemployment, and mental illness than their cisgender counterparts. The U.S. court system has offered sparse legal protections for transgender individuals and has, in fact, invalidated the lived experiences of almost every trans person who has sought restitution for discrimination.

[00:03:49] However, in 2020, the Supreme Court held that Title VII’s employment protections extended to transgender individuals. Transgender rights appear to be under attack in the United States. So, I want to ask you, Anna: What kind of issues are local transgender community members struggling with here in Eugene? And what can the local government and public do to protect transgender rights?

[00:04:11] Presenter: Anna Lardner.

[00:04:12] Anna Lardner: The first thing I want us to start with is this notion of protections that were guaranteed in Title VII. This was part of a Supreme Court case called Bostock, which was a 2020 Supreme Court case. Interestingly, many of the current conservative Supreme justices were on that case, notably Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts. Those two justices just heard the other week Scrmetti v. Tennessee, which is a similar case that challenges gender-affirming care and whether or not states can ban it.

[00:04:42] Roberts immediately signaled that he was going to jump ship and switch over to a much more conservative definition than upheld in Bostock. Gorsuch was silent, he didn’t say a word for the entire panel, and he ended up staring at his notes the entire time. So, even those protections that we secured as recently as five years ago have completely shifted in this new political climate.

[00:05:04] This gets to something (Human Rights Commissioner) Scott (Lemons), was saying that our current political climate is not just tenuous, it’s dangerous. And it’s something that we are going to ask. And I think a lot of the other groups represented here are going to ask the public’s and the city’s support in protecting us.

[00:05:18] As far as local issues go, and certainly all those things you said, as we were reading off the list, I’m like, ‘Oh, God, those really are all things that we deal with. That’s really terrible.’ But some of those really jump out.

[00:05:28] Employment and wages is huge. Most folks who are gender-diverse, nonbinary, trans, or elsewhere on the gender diversity spectrum, those folks are struggling with wages. The Human Rights Campaign did an analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics data back in 2022. I believe the data sets from 2021 is about as recent as we have. They found that transgender folks made 80 cents on the dollar on average versus cisgender folks, for those who identified as nonbinary and those who identified as trans men.

[00:06:06] Terminological distinction for folks who don’t know in the audience (I know the terms can be confusing): A trans man is someone who at birth was assigned the gender of female. Someone that we might say, ‘Oh, it’s a girl.’ That would be a trans man if that person transitioned later and realized that their gender identity is male.

[00:06:24] Those folks make 70 cents on the dollar. Trans women, like myself, make 60 cents on the dollar. And this was recent information from a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, again, very recently collected by the Human Rights Campaign. That remains a huge issue in Eugene, where a lot of trans folks have very little labor mobility, very little access to the job market, and significant wage stagnation.

[00:06:51] Another piece is housing. It is incredibly, it is no surprise to anyone in this room that housing is a huge crisis in Eugene, and the trans community is one that is disproportionately impacted by it. Trans folks face significant amounts of discrimination in the actual housing process. It is harder for trans people to find safe roommates who they are able to room safely with without fear.

[00:07:12] And it is also difficult for them to establish rental histories, as well as to secure security closets, which leads to a downhill spiral of housing instability. Another piece, which touches exactly on what (former Human Rights Commissioner) Scott (Lemons) said, is the overlap between those who struggle with disabilities and those who are transgender.

[00:07:30] Many folks who are trans, gender-diverse, nonbinary, struggle with disability. And our disability network is already not very robust when it comes to cisgender individuals and is even worse equipped to help those who are trans. This can include small things, or things that we may think of as small from a policy standpoint, like simple bathroom accessibility, but it can include larger things as well.

[00:07:53] Most providers are incredibly ill-prepared to talk with a trans person about health. And when you add in the comorbidity between different conditions, the overlap between disability and gender dysphoria, and other mental health issues or physical health issues a trans person is going through, it becomes basically impossible for trans people to find doctors that will take whatever insurance they’re able to get without their high-paying jobs.

[00:08:20] There’s also in the recent months, especially a huge uptick in mental health issues among the trans community that I have seen in my job. As a local mental health practitioner, a final issue that we’ve seen a lot of, which Capt. Burke talked a little bit about, you talked about earlier, (Eugene Office of Equity and Community Engagement Manager) Fabio (Andrade), in your discussion is harassment in the community as well as hate.

[00:08:40] This can take two forms. The first form is the one that I think is most accustomed to investigating, which is what I would consider to be individualized hate by hateful parties, from a much more criminal standpoint. And I think EPD does a good job of addressing that when people report it, and I’ll talk more about that in a second.

[00:08:59] And even then, there may be some barriers, and I have some suggestions there. The second one is actually more scary, which is organized hate under the guise of free speech. This puts EPD and other law enforcement in a position where they end up defending the rights, the free speech rights, allegedly of those who are harming the community and harassing the community with their actions.

[00:09:20] This has been something that I, someone who has attended the local Eugene Pride parade, I am on that committee as well, I lead the Pride march and rally along with a number of other fantastic men, women, and other trans and gender-diverse individuals. I don’t speak on behalf of Pride here, but it has been my experience that it can be difficult for EPD to help those who really need that help—in the parade in the actual event—and also have a legal pressure to preserve the free speech rights of those who are spouting hate speech and other harassing actions in the event. So, lots to do. Lots of things going on.

[00:09:59] I actually do have some very concrete, specific things that I want to talk about. One of them is very specific to EPD and it’s an ask that I’d love to make for them and for Capt. (Jake) Burke to relay back to command.

[00:10:11] EPD currently has a specific policy on immigration in chapter 3. I think it’s Chapter 305, Policy 305. I know policy, I used to work for the county, so I’m very familiar with them. And it explains exactly how EPD has to handle immigration-related enforcement requests.

[00:10:28] I would love to see either in that section, or perhaps in Chapter 4, which is Patrol Policies, a specific gender-affirming community contact policy that puts into language exactly how you are to interact with members of the community. A good example of this is a lot of Eugene systems, data systems may have someone’s ‘legal gender’ there, and that does not reflect their gender identity, their lived experience.

[00:10:54] EPD police reports, of which I read hundreds while a parole officer for seven years, would frequently put those sorts of pronouns in quotation marks, or just use the wrong ones altogether. It should be policy that those critical arrest report documents, which end up going through the court system, reflect the exact pronoun that the person identifies by.

[00:11:14] There are other things that could be included in that policy too, and I think forums like this are a great place to get input on what that policy should entail. So that’s one thing.

[00:11:24] A second thing is that the city, EPD, is specific of the city as a whole, often defers to federal law and federal guidance on certain aspects of gender: gender-affirming care, immigration enforcement, stuff like that. EPD immigration policy specifically says: ‘Except as provided by federal law.’

[00:11:44] Up until 2025, that was probably a reasonable rider. That will no longer be a reasonable rider under this new administration. I encourage the city and EPD to think of what will happen if the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, says that Oregon’s sanctuary law is unconstitutional and local police must enforce federal immigration law.

[00:12:07] Will EPD just say, ‘That’s the law, we’re going to go do it.’ Or will you protect the local community and say that, ‘We have a commitment to our local community that we have to maintain.’ I would look to the historical example of police officers in the South, or 1965, in the ‘50s, ‘40s and before, who were forced to uphold laws that were incredibly racist and bigoted, did it anyway and did so because it was legal.

[00:12:35] Legal is not a cover for what is right. It’s not a cover for what is ethical and does not protect our community. So we would ask the city and others to make sure that we’re following not what’s legal, but what is right.

[00:12:46] Lastly, I really want to echo (former Human Rights Commissioner) Scott’s (Lemons) thing about building local nonprofit capacity. It’s tempting for the city of Eugene to do too much work on its own when there’s so many great nonprofits already doing the work. I encourage the city to have more grants, even if it’s targeted for small sums of money for small capacity-building projects. This can make a huge difference in the community.

[00:13:07] Even something as small as a local nonprofit such as TransPonder who does documentation changes: For transgender individuals, a little bit of money can go a long way in protecting hundreds, if not thousands of community members, but just helping them get the right documents. That’s probably true for everybody up here. So, opening that up to local nonprofits to use the money and not necessarily just trying to solve the problems themselves.

[00:13:32] Presenter: Commissioner Blake Burrell.

[00:13:34] Blake Burrell: How can leaders from different marginalized communities collaborate to address common challenges and amplify their collective voices in advocating for the rights of marginalized communities at both the state, local, or federal level?

[00:13:48] Presenter: Anna Lardner.

[00:13:49] Anna Lardner: I think it’s easy to look at the current political situation here and be very disheartened, especially by, like, right-wing pressures in a city such as Eugene. I view this as a really powerful learning opportunity, though, in the sense that the current right-wing coalition built one of the most stunningly effective coalitions in the last 70 years, maybe in American history, of groups with completely different interests who all voted for the same candidate.

[00:14:18] And although that end result is very dangerous for all of the groups that we’re talking for up here, it is an interesting model of putting aside some divisions and trying to work together towards some common goals. I always like to make the sort of grim morbid humor joke that in Donald Trump, you have the same people: You have neo-Nazis voting for the same people, or voting for the same candidate that you would have a pro-Israel nationalist, and those people do not have the same interest whatsoever. And yet they’re voting Republican. And that’s challenging. That’s something we have to be overcoming.

[00:14:57] And I think within our communities, the example that (Panelist) DJ (Kelly-Quattrocchi) gave about suffrage and how women of color, Black women supported white women in their suffrage efforts, and in the moment that right was secured, there was no reciprocal support given back. Similar to LGBTQ rights, with the 2014 marriage equality case.

[00:15:19] After that, it’s been hard to find allies in the broader LGBT community that are willing to stand up for the T part of that acronym. And that’s true across the board.

[00:15:30] I think that siloing has been ineffective. I think it’s difficult to build bridges when we silo and I’d love to see more collaboration like this over issues that affect everyone.

[00:15:42] One that I’ve talked about before is the intersection between undocumented immigrants and trans people, both of whom are at the top of the administration’s list of marginalized groups they want to go after in the early part of this next administration, two groups that typically might not talk, actually, often have very different values, but in this have a common goal that we can unite around.

[00:16:03] So I think opportunities like that are really valuable.

[00:16:06] This event is fantastic. And if you hosted this every month with just the rolling assortment of people—if you brought the food, you get the space. you have some sort of exchange like that—that eliminates two big barriers for nonprofits.

[00:16:22] The first is trying to coordinate schedules and stuff like that, which is impossible as I’ve known from just trying to organize around here. If the city is just like, ‘Hey, we got a room for you every second Saturday, this location, that’s your room,’ that just solves that. Representatives will come when they come.

[00:16:38] You bring food, now you have people that are going there for lunch as well. Food is very important, the power of food and the power of how that brings people together. And that it’s not going to solve all of our problems, but food combined with a space like this is incredibly powerful and will get people as brilliant as these people, colleagues of mine into the same space together, and all the city has to do is put out, carve out a little bit of money for that are about the room for that.

[00:17:03] And then that can just be a standing thing. That’s occurring with rotating topics as a networking opportunity and as a way for the public to participate as well. So I think it’s a very concrete thing the city could do, and I don’t think it would cost very much money.

[00:17:17] Presenter: Human Rights Commissioner Blake Burrell.

[00:17:18] Blake Burrell: So, our last question is: In what ways can local government be held accountable for addressing systemic issues and promoting positive change for all communities, especially those that have been historically marginalized?

[00:17:35] Presenter: Anna Lardner.

[00:17:35] Anna Lardner: I think that there are things that can be done very specifically by the city to hold itself internally accountable for some of these things. I worked for the county for seven years. I ended up leaving for a variety of reasons in the county. Struggled with some LGBTQ equity issues. I had issues at Lane County for information.

[00:17:56] They were incredibly reactive to this and did a fantastic job. Once I had finally brought it to people’s attention a year and a half after it started becoming an issue, people responded. They were not, however, proactive. I had to bring it forward. And this is too often the case in local government where marginalized groups have to bring things forward.

[00:18:17] And then local government is reactive, and this comes up kind of in two cases. I hate to pick on Capt. (Jake) Burke because he’s been so wonderful. I also know that the trans and LGBTQ+ community has a very challenged relationship with law enforcement. So, I think there is something to be said there as a matter of sort of external accountability, specifically with law enforcement.

[00:18:41] I think there’s a lot of harm that’s been done in that community relationship and acknowledgement of that harm is so important at a very public level, saying that, ‘We know we have screwed up in these areas. And this is what we have done,’ and it could be the policy that I stress.

[00:19:00] There could be other things to make this better going forward. Those hate crimes in Eugene are publicly underreported right now. I know of probably 15 people off the top of my head who didn’t bother reporting a hate crime because they feared what that reaction would look like to what the conversation with the responding officer is because Capt. Burke talks about discretion, and it’s totally correct.

Discretion is such an integral part of both the patrol officer, prosecutor, everyone in the criminal justice system. And if Capt. Burke were to respond to my call, I could reasonably guarantee after this conversation that if he was taking the report, if he pulled that case number from Dispatch, it would probably be a pretty good experience.

[00:19:43] I’d have a good report. I’d have a good witness if this ever went to trial. But if I get a different officer who doesn’t have Capt. Burke’s empathy and kindness, someone who exercises discretion in a different way, I cannot make that guarantee. And that’s why people don’t always call the police. And I think that can do a lot of specific accountability towards acknowledging response issues in the past and in doing so, maybe repair that.

[00:20:11] And attending meetings. Like, this is a huge thing because, like, (Human Rights Day Panelist) Ibrahim (Hamide) has talked about that heart and mind connection. I can see Capt. Burke’s heart and mind working together up here in a way that I probably couldn’t see if he knocked on my door at three in the morning because I had a call that I put in, that’s going to be challenging. But I think that, I think that there’s a lot of opportunity for that. So that’s the EPD-specific piece.

[00:20:34] The citywide piece again, internal accountability, proactive accountability is making some sort of clear policy shift /city ordinance shift. And it’s kind of a broad term, but it’s what I’m using now, a sanctuary city status for Eugene, a sanctuary city status that will defend undocumented immigrants, gender-affirming care for minors and adults, and the identities of those that the federal administration at the federal level, through executive orders, Supreme Court decisions, or laws may, in fact, enact to limit our protections.

[00:21:13] That would be a proactive way to be accountable to show the public. This is the commitment we’ve made. We’re going to hold ourselves to that. And if/when (and it is likely a ‘when’ this happens), we have already made that commitment. So please hold us accountable for the words that we’ve said. So, I think, between the smaller aspects of just the ways that you can try to mend those relationships, the much larger aspects of what the city can do to declare itself:

[00:21:40] ‘We’re a sanctuary city. We don’t care what SCOTUS says. SCOTUS says that it’s unconstitutional for sanctuary laws to exist in a state. We will still protect our undocumented immigrants.’ That proactive measure of accountability will go a long, long way and far better than the community just asking for things.

[00:22:01] And then what we can do as the community is hold the city accountable to its promise. And that’s much more powerful.

[00:22:08] Presenter: At the International Human Rights Day celebration, Anna Lardner asks the city to harden its sanctuary ordinance against the Trump administration, acknowledge the harms caused by the Eugene Police Department, and build local capacity. Instead of trying to do it all on its own, the city could nurture local nonprofits with small grants. Anna also suggested offering a regular place and time where local groups can meet and share a meal together.