Alesdair is an advocate for human rights. 

You might know their work as the Legal Director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth or as the first openly transgender recipient of a Skadden Fellowship. Alesdair’s physical disability and gender presentation were a little outside of the ordinary when they were growing up—although not in downtown San Francisco, where Alesdair moved after college to organize evidence for the legal appeals of low-income people sentenced to the death penalty.

After spending more than a decade working with national, state, and local organizations to create policy informed by the next generation of progressive youth leaders, Alesdair joined the United States Department of Health and Human Services to help ensure our nation’s health programs comply with bedrock civil rights principles. Their goal has always been to help young people thrive while navigating the intersections of LGBTQI realities and bodily difference.

Alesdair’s work at the vanguard of legal activism includes the first case challenging “conversion therapy” as consumer fraud, representation of transgender youth in educational and institutional settings throughout the Deep South, the first public case on behalf of an intersex person subjected to medically unnecessary “genital normalizing” surgery in infancy, and authoring the first ever state legislation to successfully renounce the human rights violations facing children born with variations in their sex characteristics.

Alesdair’s guidance has influenced interpretations of federal and international human rights law, including by the governments of several countries and the United Nations. Alesdair’s legal efforts have been covered nationally and internationally including by the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, CBS, and CNN, among others. In 2018, Alesdair was named one of the United States’ Best LGBTQ Lawyers Under 40 by the National LGBTQ Bar Association. In 2020, Alesdair was selected by Harvard Law School to serve as a Wasserstein Fellow, a cohort of “exemplary lawyers who have distinguished themselves in public interest work.”