Welcome!

I’m excited to announce the official launch of Threshold Strategies, providing legal and policy counsel on civil rights issues with an emphasis on transgender youth and the LGBTQI+ community, legislative and administrative advocacy, and the intersections between justice and mental health. Here’s a few ways that might look:

• Guidance on the social and legal issues LGBTQI+ people are facing right now, particularly attacks on trans rights

• Policy strategy on healthcare, education, and nondiscrimination laws

• Building connections between nonprofits, organizers, faith institutions, and government agencies

• Developing issue-based campaigns from the ground up, from local trials to nationwide implementation

• Trainings on everything from Trans 101 to civil rights history to why sharks have freckles*

That’s a lot of words that essentially mean, if I can be useful, let me be useful. On the most difficult days of federal service, what kept me at my desk was knowing one day I’d be able to bring what I was learning on the inside back to the community. I’ll never be the same advocate I was before. There are things I just couldn’t know from the outside. Consulting allows me to take that knowledge quickly to the places it can be most useful in any given moment.

And this is a hard moment. But we’ve seen hard moments before.

This name (and logo) come from a piece of queer history written in another hard moment - Angels in America. Two characters have simultaneously hit some version of rock bottom, one from an overdose of Valium and the other from complications of AIDS. During a shared hallucination between strangers, they find that, in this moment of disease and despair, some things that ordinarily lurk below the surface are suddenly visible to them. “Oh that happens,” says one. “This is the very threshold of revelation sometimes. You can see things.”

I think we find ourselves in a threshold moment. It is, almost by definition, one of loss, fear, and existential threat. There are days it feels downright apocalyptic. But it is also, if we can sit in discomfort and keep our eyes open, one of revelation. Apokálypsis, the original Greek word from which “apocalypse” is derived, doesn’t mean an ending - it means an uncovering. Literally, “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known, and which could not be known apart from the unveiling.”

How well our well-worn strategies have and haven’t served us, how many people have been left behind, how much will be asked of us in the days to come. How hard our ancestors fought so we could be alive to face them.

I think we have what it takes to keep our eyes open.

If you think we can too, or if you’re just curious how we might be able to help each other in this fight, drop by thresholdstrategies.org or schedule a chat at calendly.com/samames. Can’t wait.