The fight for trans rights
DJ Healey, senior principal at Fish & Richardson in Texas, was four years old when she realised that she was trapped in the wrong body.
“I remember asking my Mom when I was going to turn into a girl, and she just looked at me and told me that this wasn’t going to happen. I thought that it made no sense—I was really confused that I was a boy,” she recalls.
Healey is a member of a small but growing minority who identify as transgender, meaning they do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth.
While no robust survey data on the number of transgender people worldwide exist, a 2017 survey by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) suggests that Millennials (people born between 1980 and 1996) are 12% more likely to openly identify as trans—double the number of transgender and gender non-conforming people self-identified by Generation X (people born between 1960 and 1979).
Views on gender norms are changing. According to a 2018 report by Ipsos Mori, nearly one-third of Millennials and three quarters of Generation Z (people born from 1997 onwards) accept a spectrum of gender identities and reject the concept of a man/woman/binary.
A long struggle
Despite this growing awareness of gender fluidity, Healey’s own journey towards assuming her desired identity reflects the struggles faced by many transgender people. Her story is fraught with discrimination, prejudice and professional setbacks.
As she attended law school, got married and developed a successful career as a male IP attorney known as “David”, Healey continued to grapple with inhabiting a gender identity that felt misaligned with her true self.
“I kept it secret and tried hard to make it go away, I went to a psychiatrist and to doctors, I took medication and had therapy,” she says.
But nothing worked, and Healey dealt with the malaise by throwing herself into her work. “Alcoholism helps you drown in a way, and so does workaholism. It covers up your feelings and helps hide or bury things that are bothering you,” she explains.
In 2004, an epiphany came in the form of a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist who told her that she had gender dysphoria—the distress a person feels due to a mismatch between their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth.
“He told me I had done everything in my power to fight this and that I just had to accept who I really was,” recalls Healey.
From that point, she began living a double life, gaining a profound respite when she was able to embrace a female persona. “I felt wonderful; the illness and depression that used to come over me was gone,” explains Healey.
In 2017 she decided to come out as a trans woman to peers and clients. For Healey, her ordeal had become a life or death situation.
“It came down to a decision that a lot of trans people face: you either come out or it is the bottle, the needle, or the bullet,” she says. “My wife had a hard time with it but she weathered the storm. She knew that I could either live as Danielle or I would be dead. It had got to the point where I could no longer live as a man.”
”It came down to a decision that a lot of trans people face: you either come out or it is the bottle, the needle, or the bullet.” - DJ Healey, Fish & Richardson
Negative career consequences
Healey argues that despite the support of her law firm, her transition led to markedly negative consequences for her career.
“I realised that for every person who was supportive, ten people were repelled,” she explains.
This, she adds, occurred despite her successful career in IP. “I’m a lawyer who has been invited to the University of Texas School of Law and Stanford Law School to speak on patent issues. I’m well known in my field,” says Healey.
She believes that the issues of professional acceptance stem from a lack of familiarity with the transgender community.
“A lot of people have never met a trans person. That’s why I decided to adopt the name ‘DJ’ because it was easier to move people from ‘Dave’ to ‘DJ’, than from ‘Dave’ to ‘Danielle’. It’s my way of trying to help relieve the awkwardness that people, even liberal ones, can feel if they have never met a trans person before.”
A big part of the problem is that there are very few transgender, non-binary or gender-fluid people working in the legal sector, and even fewer who are prominently visible, agrees Darren Smyth, partner at EIP in London and a member of LGBT advocacy group, IP Out.
According to a 2020 diversity report by the National Association for Law Placement, the overall percentage of US LGBT+ lawyers had increased by approximately one-third of a percentage point from 2019, rising to 3.31%. But the association does not provide a breakdown for transgender lawyers.
A report by the UK Law Society, the Diversity Profile of the Solicitors’ Profession 2019, showed that 2% of solicitors and 1% of partners confirmed that their gender identity was different from that assigned to them at birth.
