The breakthroughd that SoS Clinton helped the US make in transgender and gay rights

When marriage equality for LGBT was still a dream, Hillary quietly took a step at the State Department that made a huge difference for the transgender community, allowing them to get passports in their preferred gender, without needing surgery.

And four months after she arrived at State, she made another key change, putting into place changes that would treat the partners of LGBT people the same way married spouses were treated.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/hillary-clinton-2016-transgender-rights-passport-policy-state-department-lgbt-equality-214007

Jackie Richter is the foul-mouthed, frank-talking owner of Heels and Hardhats, a small construction company near Rockford, Illinois. For almost half a century, she lived as a man—an existence the 58-year-old transgender woman told me felt fundamentally wrong, like always having to wear her right shoe on her left foot. But in the summer of 2010, a few years after she finished transitioning, she applied for a United States passport saying she was female. That September, she got it. This, she said recently, was the first time she felt the full support of the federal government. The document saved her business, saved her family, and—she believes—saved her life.

And for this, she credits Hillary Clinton.

“None of it would have been possible without what she did,” Richter said. “She was a forerunner on this.”

It’s not a label typically associated with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Over her quarter-century of national public life, Clinton mostly has enjoyed broad support from LGBT voters, donors and activists, but many of them considered her a laggard on the litmus-test issue of marriage equality, which she didn’t endorse until 2013. And during her surprisingly drawn-out primary fight with Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton consistently was cast as the more centrist candidate. Sanders, not Clinton, was the full-throated social revolutionary.

But five years before the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage and President Obama lit up the White House in the colors of the rainbow, Hillary Clinton and her staff at the State Department made a change that for thousands of people was exactly that—revolutionary. Clinton enacted a new rule making it easier for transgender people to register their identities on their passports. Sexual reassignment surgery was no longer necessary; all that was required was a doctor’s note. At the time, this was the most pro-transgender action by the federal government ever, and—coming a full six years before the Pentagon announced transgender troops could serve openly—it stands as one of the most progressive things Clinton has ever done. In a single stroke, she made the passport the best way—for some, the only way—for American citizens to prove they were who they were. For transgender people, it was—according to recent conversations I have had with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experts and advocates—“huge,” “enormous,” “monumental.”


SNIP

In May of 2009, four months after Clinton took over at the State Department, Kerry Eleveld, a reporter for The Advocate, the LGBT newspaper, got a copy of a draft of a letter Clinton had written that was to be sent to GLIFAA employees. “Historically, domestic partners of Foreign Service members have not been provided the same training, benefits, allowances, and protections that other family members receive,” the document said. “These inequities are unfair and must end. … [T]he Department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex domestic partners because it is the right thing to do.”

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