Jennifer Finnet Boylan will receive GLAD’s Spirit of Justice Award this year.
Photo: jenniferboylan.net/
BOSTON, Mass.—Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) will present the Spirit of Justice Award to Jennifer Finney Boylan, first best-selling transgender author in the U.S., whose writings, teachings, and activism have significantly illuminated and articulated transgender experience.
“Jennifer Finney Boylan’s work over the decades has exposed a broad public to the meaning of transgender lives,” said Janson Wu, Executive Director of GLAD. “Her best-selling memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders introduced many people for the first time to a three-dimensional transgender person. With storytelling that is powerful and humane as well as witty, she has fostered understanding and support for transgender people and the multiple issues they face in navigating a transphobic world.”
Boylan is the author of thirteen books – three memoirs, three novellas, a short story collection, and six young adult books. She was a professor of English at Colby College for 25 years, and is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard College. Her work frequently appears on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Boylan is the national co-chair of the board of GLAAD and serves on the board of trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality. She was recently named special advisor to the president of Colby College. [pullquote]“Her best-selling memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders introduced many people for the first time to a three-dimensional transgender person. With storytelling that is powerful and humane as well as witty, she has fostered understanding and support for transgender people and the multiple issues they face in navigating a transphobic world.”—Janson Wu, Executive Director of GLAD[/pullquote]
“GLAD has been a leader in defending the rights of LGBT people since its inception. I am personally very grateful for their work, not only as an advocate in solidarity with the fine work GLAD does, but also because they defended me, and people like me, in the state of Maine. Their work to defeat the bill that would have stripped human rights protections from trans Mainers meant, quite literally, the difference between living a life with dignity, or its opposite, in my home state,” said Boylan.
She added, “I am so grateful to be honored by GLAD. Although the organization of which I am the national co-chair, GLAAD, has an extra “A” in its name, GLAD deserves an “A” all its own, for its work in bringing forth justice and in improving the lives of LGBT people, and those that love them, throughout New England.”
Jennifer Finney Boylan will accept the award at the 16th Annual Spirit of Justice Award Dinner at the Boston Marriott Copley Place on October 16, 2015. Details about the event are available at www.glad.org/events.
Past Spirit of Justice honorees include activist Urvashi Vaid; Margaret J. Marshall, the former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and his family; Reverend Irene Monroe; Bishop Gene Robinson; Beth Robinson; GLAD Founder John Ward; Terrence McNally; Mandy Carter; Reverend William Sinkford; Tim Gill; Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon; Tony Kushner; Laurence Tribe; and GLAD Civil Rights Project Director Mary Bonauto.
The Spirit of Justice Dinner is co-chaired by Ben Franklin and Darian Butcher. The dinner’s prime sponsor is IVF New England.e dinner’s prime sponsor is IVF New England.
Through strategic litigation, public policy advocacy, and education, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders works in New England and nationally to create a just society free of discrimination based on gender identity and expression, HIV status, and sexual orientation.
[From a News Release]
