At a moment when the legal ground beneath transgender Americans feels increasingly unstable, Shannon Minter is being recognized as one of the most influential people in the world, a distinction he says reflects the urgency of the moment as much as his decades of work.
Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ+ Rights and one of the most prominent transgender attorneys in the U.S., was named to the TIME100 list of the most influential people on Wednesday. For one of the country’s most consequential LGBTQ+ civil rights attorneys, the honor arrives amid a warning signal that the fights he spent his career waging are far from over.
“I think it’s a mark of the gravity of these issues right now in our country,” Minter told The Advocate in an interview following the announcement. He said recognition from a mainstream institution like Time is reassuring because it shows that what transgender people are experiencing is being seen and understood as significant.
Minter appears on the TIME100 list’s “Pioneers” roster, alongside figures including Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut who just returned from a historic crewed mission around the moon. As commander of Artemis II, Wiseman led the first human lunar flyby in more than 50 years, a 10-day journey that marked a new chapter in space exploration and set records for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth.
https://www.advocate.com/news/people/shannon-minter-time-100
