Lambda Legal CEO, Richard Burns (left) and legal director, Sharon McGowan (right).

After years of helping to score major court victories for gay rights, the nation's largest and oldest LGBT legal organization finds itself battling to hold the line against attacks, including the Trump administration's latest move to redefine the meaning of “sex” to eliminate transgender.

The Trump administration proposal, according to a draft memo obtained by The New York Times, seeks to define sex as either male or female, to be determined by the genitals with which a person is born. The definition would serve for purposes of applying federal anti-discrimination laws in such areas as education, employment, health care and more.

In an online post Monday on the organization's website, Diana Flynn, Lambda Legal's litigation director and herself a transgender lawyer, accused the Trump administration of “literally trying to write [transgender people] out of the law by defining them out of existence.”

“For years, courts across the country have recognized that discriminating against someone because they are transgender is a form of sex discrimination,” Flynn wrote. “If this administration wants to try and turn back the clock by moving ahead with its own legally frivolous and scientifically unsupportable definition of sex, we will be there to meet that challenge.”

In an interview with Corporate Counsel, Richard Burns, an attorney and the interim CEO at Lambda, called it a “very challenging time” for the organization considering the new direction of the Trump administration and some courts on gay rights. “We are just trying to inch our way forward while safeguarding our past victories,” he said.

Lambda Legal, staffed with former officials of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, is now fighting to erect a “firewall to block some of the worst coming out of this administration,” agreed Sharon McGowan, the group's chief strategy officer and legal director.

“The government has abdicated its responsibility to protect the LBGT community and has set itself up as an adversary,” said McGowan, who previously served as deputy chief of the appellate section of the Civil Rights Division under the Barack Obama administration, as well as deputy general counsel, and then acting general counsel, of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

McGowan left the DOJ two years ago, she said, because she believed doing civil rights work would be compromised under U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. She previously had worked at the American Civil Liberties Union and was an associate with Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C.

In June, Flynn joined McGowan at Lambda after serving 34 years at the DOJ, including as chief of the Civil Rights Division's appellate section. She was quoted in an interview at the time as saying she was prompted by “a number of decisions made by the Trump administration” that she saw as moving backward on civil rights. The breaking point, she said, was when her division filed an amicus brief opposing transgender rights, and she learned about it in news reports.

Now McGowan and Flynn continue the gay rights work they started at the DOJ, along with about 30 in-house attorneys at Lambda. As part of that work, Lambda partners with other gay rights groups, such as the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco; with other civil rights coalitions, such as the National Women's Law Center; and with ACLUs and law firms across the country.

The need for partnering right now is greater, but so is the desire, Burns said. “This army of lawyers in the private bar has always been part of Lambda from the beginning,” he added, “and we want to reiterate that need” in these challenging times. Currently Kirkland & Ellis, which McGowan called a long-time Lambda ally, is partnering with the group in U.S. district court in Seattle on a suit challenging the Trump administration's plan to ban transgender people from the U.S. military.

She said other key cases and partners include:

• Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman went to trial with Lambda last winter, winning a restroom case on behalf of a Florida transgender high school student.
• Winston & Strawn is litigating with Lambda on behalf of a sergeant in the D.C. Army National Guard who was denied the opportunity to serve as an officer and faces possible discharge because he is living with HIV.
• Hogan Lovells is co-counsel with Lambda in a challenge to a U.S. Health and Human Services Department policy of allowing Catholic charities to direct refugee children only to those couples who mirror “the holy family.”
• Stone Pigman filed a lawsuit with Lambda on behalf of a man with HIV who was denied employment with a sheriff's office in Louisiana.

Meanwhile, McGowan said Lambda is trying to stay “agile and responsive” to future moves to dismantle gay rights. The long-term strategy, she said, “is to continue to dig ourselves out of the hole of inequality.”

On Oct. 19, the American Bar Association announced that it will honor McGowan with its Stonewall Award during a ceremony on Jan. 26, 2019, at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Las Vegas. The award recognizes lawyers who have considerably advanced lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals in the legal profession and successfully championed LGBT legal causes.