This post was originally published on this site
This content originally appeared at The Paper. (abq.news). Read it here: https://abq.news/2025/06/in-their-own-words-pride-in-the-community/
This article is part of a month-long look at the challenges, triumphs and everyday life of Albuquerque’s LGBTQIA+ community. In keeping with the theme of Pride Month, each article will be in the format of a transcribed interview, allowing these people to speak directly to us and to our readers in their own words.
Adrien Lawyer is co-executive director of the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico, an organization he co-founded in 2008 to improve safety and advocate for the rights of trans and non-binary individuals and families. He has trained thousands of New Mexicans in “transgender cultural fluency” at schools, police departments, healthcare facilities and every correctional institute in the state. At a very young age in the 1970s, Lawyer and his family didn’t have the information or language to talk about gender that we use today, but in 2025 he shares a message of love and acceptance, educating communities throughout the state and across the country about issues surrounding the transgender community. He’s also known for playing a pretty mean guitar in A Band Named Sue.
The Paper.: What is a transgender resource center? What does the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico do?
We serve trans and non-binary people throughout the state of New Mexico through a combination of direct service work, advocacy and education. Since 2007 or 2008, training has been primarily aimed at cisgender folks to improve access and safety for trans people. That training is called transgender cultural fluency. Now we also, additionally, have a Transgender 201 training, pronoun and gender neutral language workshop training, an advocacy training to teach best practices and messaging about all of this, and we have a presenters bureau of about 40 people who come out as panelists to enrich the educational offerings.
We have written trans policy for different entities like Albuquerque Public Schools, and in 2015 we were the co-authors of their current trans student policy. A lot of places we work with don’t need a policy per se, they just need more help with their materials or spaces. We consult and review things like intake forms, website language, job postings or taking a look and seeing if the bathrooms in your space can be safer and more inclusive.
We’re a C3, so we have some limitations on how much legislative work we can do, but we work in coalition with Equality New Mexico, ACLU, Bold Futures and Progress Now to try to help advance legislative priorities that are going to help trans and non-binary families. Over the years, we’ve targeted two laws and gotten our coalition partners to help us change it, which was the way you change the gender on your birth certificate and the way that you change your name here in New Mexico. Both of those laws had outdated, prohibitive requirements that we can help you get rid of.
We do about $7,500 a month in direct financial aid to trans and non-binary folks. We do non-medical case navigation and counseling statewide. We have eight active support groups that meet both in person and on Zoom, and have discord servers so they include people from all over the state. We do active jail and prison outreach all over the state of New Mexico. And in Albuquerque, we have a physical space — a building that we call our Drop-In Center — where trans people are welcome to come and get help. The people who come into the Drop-In Center tend to be homeless and dealing with really serious survival concerns. So we have showers, we have washers and dryers, we serve a ton of food and give out a lot of non-perishable foods for when people aren’t at the center. We have storage for people’s things. We’re a permanent mailing address. We have partners who come in like Healthcare for the Homeless, and we have two professional massage therapists who come in throughout the month right now. And all of our services are free, so we don’t charge anything. You don’t ask people to prove their income or prove their identity to get assistance.
It sounds like you provide services to the community in general, and they don’t necessarily have to be trans-specific resources if I am correct.
That’s exactly right. We certainly distribute different kinds of prosthetics — breast forms, packers, different kinds of undergarments like binders and tucking underwear — but mainly we’re just trying to help trans people with whatever it is they need, whether it’s trans specific or not. Emergency financial assistance is that way. When you’re housed and employed but you kind of live paycheck to paycheck, a sudden emergency — like all of a sudden you need to buy four new tires — can throw people into a tailspin. We try to step in and give assistance for that. We don’t want people unable to pay their bills or losing their apartment.
There is a lot of legislation stacking up against the transgender community. Could you talk about what you might be facing right now?
People are really scared, and the things that are happening at the federal level are definitely affecting people here in New Mexico. The ban on trans service members will affect thousands and thousands of people who might be losing their jobs. We don’t have our heads in the sand about what’s going on in DC and the way that it’s actually affecting people right now, but we also really count ourselves lucky to live in New Mexico. Over the last 30 years, activists and advocates have created one of the most legislatively protective environments in the country for LGBT people. It wasn’t in response to the current situation, it’s just the groundwork that’s been being laid for a long, long time. There are a lot of state-level laws that aren’t just highly protective for trans people but also for LGBT people. We feel that being in New Mexico is the best position we can be in [regarding] access to the right identity documents and the right kind of medical care. Banning care for trans kids or keeping trans kids off sports teams, those kinds of bills get introduced here in New Mexico, but they never make it to the floor. We feel very lucky to be here in a place that cares about trans people and makes that a value. I know that the parents of transgender kids are deeply afraid right now.
Do you receive federal funding and has that funding been changed lately?
TGRC is funded through state entities, and so far so good. Our fingers are definitely crossed right now, though. We’re worried about the Violence Against Women Act. We received money through VAWA, so we’re worried about that not being renewed in Congress. We’re watching that landscape pretty closely. But right now, the only effect for us in terms of funding is that a handful of trainings have had to be canceled. We’re part of a research project through the NIH, and we’re pretty sure the funding is gonna get pulled any second.
Is New Mexico in a better position than the rest of the nation for transgender people as a whole and for access to resources/support?
I do believe that, truly. In 2008 my co-founder and I thought, after a few years, we would look up and there would just be trans resource centers in every state. We want there to be [centers] with our budget size everywhere doing the scope of work that we do, because everywhere needs a Transgender Resource Center right now. We’re one of a very small handful of organizations that do what we do: a nonprofit of this size that’s statewide — intentionally — and not just in one city. We have people telling us that they moved to New Mexico because our state laws are so protective and so shielding to this population. We have people say, “I have moved here within the last year or two from a state that is deeply hostile to trans people, because I did the research and found out that y’all were a much safer place.”
Who specifically is using the TGRC right now? Let’s say for a walk-in appointment.
We see people needing all different kinds of things. People who have jobs and apartments come by for name change paperwork packets. We have people who come in and say, “I need help paying this utility bill that’s gotten in arrears,” and we help pay the bill, and we never see them again. We have other folks who come almost every single day that the center is open to get into their storage bin, take a shower, wash some clothes and get some food. We serve about 30 hot meals every shift that we’re open. We have folks who mainly interact with the center because they attend one of our eight different support groups. Those folks also tend to be a little bit above water in terms of surviving. So, really, we see the gambit: folks with all different kinds of needs, pretty much on a daily basis, from top to bottom.
What are folks in the transgender community in New Mexico worried about?
I think the threats and the swirling misinformation is effective in terms of keeping people really insecure. People are hearing things like gender-affirming care is going to get banned for adults, not just kids, at the federal level. People are already unable to obtain a passport that matches their gender, and that is scaring a lot of people.
What is the community upbeat about and what are you looking forward to?
Equality New Mexico and TGRC are statewide, so we are attending all of the Pride [events]. I don’t think New Mexicans realize that there are about 12 to 14 different Pride celebrations in New Mexico. Some of our really small rural communities hold their own Pride celebrations, and it’s a really exciting thing as a statewide organization to go out to Silver City’s Pride or the Navajo Nation Pride celebration on June 28, or Eastern New Mexico — which is actually on the same day out in Portales — because we set up booths at Prides far from the Albuquerque metro area. We reach people who may not even know us there, but are definitely looking for the Trans Resource Center. It’s a really exciting time for us to do outreach to different corners of the state where we know there are trans folks who could really use our assistance.
To contact the New Mexico Transgender Resource Center, go to tgrcnm.org or call (505) 200-9086.
In Their Own Words: PRIDE in the Community is a story from The Paper.. Publishing from New Mexico’s largest city, The Paper is your source for local, independent news, covering politics, arts, culture, and events.