Events

Our events connect nonbinary community members with resources. We offer self-help information for folks who haven't been to law school and support for nonbinary law students and lawyers.

Past Events

In 2021, we held a virtual Nonbinary Law Students Convening.

Since launching Beyond Binary Legal, we’ve heard numerous requests from nonbinary lawyers, law students, and prospective law students looking for resources and opportunities to connect. So, we teamed up with the National Trans Bar Association to co-host an event for Trans Day of Visibility.

The resulting virtual “Nonbinary Law Students Convening” included a panel discussion on navigating law school and careers as nonbinary law students. We heard attorneys in different practice areas and stages of their careers talk about their experiences. Then, we split into small groups to discuss issues of misgendering, navigating professional clothing and gender expression, isolation, and accessing resources. We heard a lot of positive feedback from participants. Most had never had the opportunity to gather with other similarly situated students before. It was incredibly powerful to share this (virtual) space together.

If you would like us to offer another event like this, please reach out to hello@beyondbinarylegal.org to chat about organizing.

In 2020, we piloted our knowledge sharing events program.

Our goal was simple. We wanted to make information about the law more accessible to nonbinary community members who have not gone to law school or done extensive legal work. The content of these events intentionally focused on the big-picture context that is necessary for successful advocacy because so many community members must constantly advocate for themselves in their daily lives.

These events helped us test different ways of presenting legal information to community members. Participants shared thoughts and feedback about where they saw value and what seemed most relevant to them.

We tried a couple of different formats:

Discussing a specific topic in context. We talked about nonbinary gender markers in detail, drawing connections to how gender markers operate in the bigger picture of the legal system. Our idea was to help folks understand how gender markers work in the legal system. We discussed where legislation for third gender markers has passed, potential issues folks may have with nonbinary gender markers, and chatted with participants about everyone’s thoughts and opinions.
Providing an overview of how the legal system works. We explained the basic structure of how different courts and other parts of the government are related and how they interact. We shared more technical details than many other “know your rights” presentations because we know how valuable it can be to get a better idea of how the system itself works. We tried to describe some of the most important stuff you learn in law school in an hour or less, and we more or less succeeded!

The legal system overview proved to be more popular. Many participants felt that having exposure to structured background information about the law would help them understand political news and other legal information in the future.

Why learn about the legal system

There is a lot of gatekeeping of information about the law. Yet many people, especially those of us from marginalized communities, can’t count on getting a lawyer for every interaction that we have with the legal system or every question we have about how the law works. A little information goes a long way to contextualize the challenges we encounter in our everyday lives, and it does not take a law degree to understand the basics.

We plan to offer more events like these.

The topics we cover will depend on what we hear from community members. What would be most useful to you? Let us know what you’re interested in by emailing us at hello@beyondbinarylegal.org.

More details

Ethical boundaries around legal information

There are some boundaries we must maintain due to ethical rules that all lawyers and legal workers must follow. This is both for your protection and for ours. For any events that may cover self-help information, we share more details about what we can/can’t discuss before and during the event to avoid miscommunications.

The main points are:

We cannot give individual legal advice.
Training presenters may not be licensed to practice law where you live.

We always try to be as transparent as possible about this, but please do not hesitate to ask us if you’re not sure you understand.

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION

We care about your access needs! Please let us know if there’ something we can do to make an event more accessible to you by emailing hello@beyondbinarylegal.org.

Here is some general information about what you can expect at our events:

All of our events for now will take place on Zoom. (We hope to offer Facebook Live in the future.)
Our knowledge sharing events include a slideshow that provides some visual support to go with the spoken content of the presentation.
We have not had voice-to-text or ASL interpretation at our events yet. Please let us know if either of these accommodations are necessary for you, and we will work very hard to make it happen!

We’d love to hear your feedback on our programs

We have learned a lot and made improvements based on participants’ feedback on previous events. Please let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions. You can contact us any time.