Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Harper Jean Tobin

An interview with Harper Jean Tobin, a white trans woman, consultant, and policymaker based in Washington, D.C. At the time of this interview, she worked as an independent policy consultant and educator around issues of LGBTQ+ civil rights, employment rights, and nondiscrimination. Prior to that work, she led the policy team at the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) for eleven years, writing and supervising the creation of a number of policies in areas like employment, identification, health care, and military service. In this oral history interview, Tobin discusses her upbringing, high school and college activism, and beginnings with the NCTE in 2009, her experiences working on trans policy during the Obama and Trump administrations, her thoughts on trans politics and movements, legal and policy approaches to social change, and the tensions between highly resourced, white-led national policy organizations and grassroots people of color-led organizations. Additionally, she discusses her work on specific legislation, cases, and initiatives such as the Real ID Act, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and North Carolina House Bill 2, her thoughts on hate crime and nondiscrimination laws, the structural inequality of national-level rights organizations, the use of trans issues as a political wedge issue, the mass exit from NCTE in 2019 and the ensuing scandal, and the future of trans legislation and movements.