Mariah Lopez has been suing New York City over transgender rights since she was a child.
In 1999, at the age of 13, she was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit alleging that gay and lesbian children in foster care were subjected to frequent violence and psychological abuse.
At the age of 17, she won the right to wear dresses and ao dai in a men’s house. At age 20, she sued to force the city to pay for her sex-affirmation surgery; although she eventually lost, the city soon began to embrace such activities.
Lopez’s most recently settled lawsuit against the city has resulted in an extensive settlement of New York transgender people, the homeless, and those who have long complained of harassment. , discrimination, and sexual and physical violence in the city’s homeless shelters.
By the end of this year, the city must open at least four transgender shelters. It must also introduce a range of anti-discrimination measures, including mandating anti-discrimination training for workers and improving how it responds to abuse complaints.
Ms. Lopez, a high school dropout, scribbled papers without a lawyer, while crashing into friends’ floors and playing tricks to survive.
“Let me paint this picture,” Ms. Lopez, 37, said of the homeless shelter case, which involved proceedings in both federal court and the state Supreme Court and concluded. end previous November. “With a little pen, and a dog, and barely able to sleep from stress, and barely working phone to look up the law, I filed a scratch lawsuit and it brought me in front of a Supreme Court judge. “
The settlement to the middle a sharp increase in the number of young people identifying as transgender and increasing awareness of the obstacles that transgender people face. National studies have found that transgender people have more more likely become homeless or unstable.
Ronald E. Richter, who served as the deputy commissioner of the city’s Children’s Services Administration while Lopez sued the agency, said that when she first arrived on the scene, “Our system was complete. completely ignorant of young people struggling with transgenderism and do not appreciate what it means to be born transsexual. “
He said Ms. Lopez has always understood “making people uncomfortable is an important part of moving the dial.”
“She made a difference to young people after her,” he added.
Ms. Lopez’s life and huge court record – she has filed at least 14 lawsuits against government agencies – is like a history of a group’s struggle for acceptance.
When I Became Transgender in America
She has also been arrested more times than she can count, often for prostitution or violations of vague wording and the anti-loitering law has now been repealed sometimes referred to as “walking and moving.” Along the way, she alienated a large number of fellow activists.
“I wouldn’t work with her,” said Ceyenne Doroshow, founder of GLITS – Gay Men Living in a Transgender Society. “I see her as problematic, disrespectful and not being the leader of the black people in the community.”
David France, a filmmaker whom Ms. Lopez unsuccessfully sued for over a documentary he was working on, said he admires her for her ability to harness her personal battles to make real change. the. “She has many ways to make lawsuits really impactful, looking forward to the future,” he said.
Born and raised in Amsterdam Houses, a public housing complex on the Upper West Side, Lopez entered foster care at the age of nine after losing her drug-addicted mother to AIDS, and later her grandmother. Teacher.
She spent most of her youth running away from group homes where, among other incidents, she was thrown downstairs and broke her nose, according to the 1999 lawsuit.
She ran away to”Transy House“, A brownstone in Brooklyn hosted by the transgender icon Sylvia Rivera. She started her own transition, buying hormones on the street and getting silicone injections into her hips and thighs.
At the age of 16, according to court documents, after she was evicted from two homes for gay and transgender youth for misconduct, Ms. Brooklyn, where the director issued a memo saying she couldn’t “wear. “women’s wear” in the establishment. “The Children’s Services Administration backed him up.
Ms. Lopez recalled: “I said, ‘Didn’t I just sue you? “. “Are you going to make me do it again?”
One the judge ruled that the city violated the New York State Human Rights Act. Ms. Lopez is allowed to wear skirts and dresses.
As Ms. Lopez approached 21, when she would reach the end of foster care age, she tried to force the city to pay for gender confirmation surgery. One family court judge considers the surgery was medically necessary and the verdict was in her favor, but the city appeal and win.
However, two years later, the city adopted a policy pay for the surgery for young people in foster care. Mr Richter, now chief executive officer of JCCA, a foster care provider, said the change was “a function of Mariah’s advocacy”.
Even with the surgical case pending, Ms. Lopez took the city to court again. She sued the Police Department, claiming that, during false arrests for wandering, she was assaulted and groped under the guise of a manual “gender test”.
The city settled for $35,000. Two months later, Ms. Lopez went to Florida and had surgery.
As of 2017, Ms. Lopez, after earning her GED and briefly attending college, was living with an aunt in Brooklyn. When her aunt died, Ms. Lopez and her service dog, Chica – Ms. Lopez suffered from PTSD, anxiety and depression – had nowhere to go.
She sought placement through the Department of Homeless Services at the city’s first LGBTQ shelter, Marsha’s House, an 81-bed facility that recently opened in the Bronx. The shelter is named for Marsha P. Johnsontransgender pioneer. Ms. Lopez revived a transgender rights group founded by Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera, renamed STARR, for the Strategic Alliance for Radical Transgender Reform.
Although Ms. Lopez was admitted to Marsha’s House, her dog was not. So she sued, and a judge ruled in her favor. Ms. Lopez and Chica move in, and things immediately go south.
Based on Ms. Lopez’s court papersOfficers and security guards at Marsha’s House sexually assaulted her, demanded to see her genitals, called her derogatory names, threatened her with sex, and threatened to assault her. , then retaliated by bringing disciplinary charges after she filed a complaint.
Eric Rosenbaum, executive director of Project Renewal, the nonprofit that runs Marsha’s House for the city, said Project Renewal investigated Ms. Lopez’s claims and found no corroboration of them. added that the city asked Project Renewal to run a number of new transgender people. – Friendly shelter unit.
The city moved Ms. Lopez to a women’s shelter, which in court papers claimed she broke rules, threatened staff and hit a security guard. The city writes that the women’s shelter has better mental health services and a constant police presence.
Ms. Lopez refused to go, citing fear of retaliation and said that, at a women’s shelter, she would have to choose between being harassed or being shut down as a transgender woman.
As the court battle dragged on, Ms. Lopez gathered evidence that transgender people in the city’s shelter system were being persecuted. In 2019, she filed another handwritten petition, seeking to confirm the incident as a class action. “This abuse and neglect is widespread and systematic,” she wrote.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy nonprofit, joined the lawsuit. It interviewed dozens of transgender people about abuse in shelters. Many said they felt so unsafe that they were forced to return as homeless.
“We have accumulated really terrible stories of people being kicked out of shelters, as if people were being stoned,” said Chinyere Ezie, a lawyer for the center. “People have reported that when they submitted written complaints, they saw them being collected and thrown in the trash.”
The city, which initially fought the case, has entered settlement talks aimed at what it calls “systemic reform”.
The settlement allows shelter customers to complain to city attorneys about how shelters have responded to their complaints. The city must also report to Lopez every six months on progress in implementing the terms of the agreement. It filed its first report on Tuesday.
Ms. Lopez also received a “nearly six-figure” payout, Ms. Ezie said.
“We thank Mariah Lopez for her leadership on this issue,” the Department of Homeless Services said in a statement after the settlement.
On Tuesday, the department said it was “proud of the progress” it has made in complying with the agreement, “from instructing shelter staff to use preferred pronouns and gender signs calculated to create a positive environment to develop a rapid adoption process.”
Ms. Lopez has filed five more cases since the homeless shelter case, including one asking the city to reimburse her for her surgery and another against the city of Albany. for not letting her put Chica on the bus.
She most recent lawsuit sought to prevent the creation of a beach along the jetties in West Village, a longtime center of transgender blacks and Hispanic street life including where Marsha P. Johnson’s body was pulled from the Hudson River in 1992.
Ms. Lopez argued that the project’s impact on an area of historic significance must first be assessed and said that, if the beach were built, transgender people of color “would be replaced by people of color.” white heterosexual sunbathing”.
Ms. Lopez seems to have no intention of slowing down. She recalls the first time she set foot in the law office, when she was 13 years old, and visited Paul, Weiss, the reputable firm that worked professionally on her first case.
“We were in this huge conference room,” she said. Lawyers “take off their coats and roll up their sleeves to open the law books. And I said, “Oh, I think this is what I want to do.”
