“What shocked me working at the National Center for Transgender Equality
was the sheer level of discrimination out there,” maintains the group’s former Deputy Director Simon Aronoff. “Not letting [transgender] employees use the restrooms
or just blatantly firing them; extreme harassment, police brutality
The discrimination and oppression out there
is just really intense.”

Having left NCTE to do public interest communication, Aronoff maintains, “Particularly for trans folks, communications need to take a leading role, because for us, a really basic battle is public education, public awareness around what our lives are like and what kind of discrimination we face. Those are stories that need to get out there
and more of us need to be comfortable telling these stories in clear and compelling ways.”

Aronoff recently joined Renna Communications, as Vice President to the small, lesbian-owned media relations and communications firm, which works primarily with non-profits and foundations serving LGBT and women’s communities.

“The mission of the firm really fits with my own personal values around using communications as an advocacy tool,” Aronoff explains. “We take clients selectively, ones that
move the issues of the LGBT community forward or the issues of feminism forward.”

Aronoff has served on the boards of both San Francisco’s Transgender Law Center and the National Stonewall Democrats. He encourages other activists, “You can use the media to advance whatever campaign you’re working on.”

“Through the ENDA debacle we saw the vast majority of our community supported inclusive legislation and vowed to continue the fight to get that legislation back on the right track,” Aronoff maintains. But he recognizes that wasn’t true across the board.

“The further you are from experiencing some kind of oppression or discrimination, the harder it is
to recognize. Some of the more conservative voices in our community don’t want to accept their own past. They took a really a historical stance on where trans people have been in LGBT communities. They really wanted to divorce the gender from the sexual orientation issue. But the fact of the mater is that being gay or lesbian is transgressing gender norms. The discrimination
non conforming gays and lesbians face [is] gender identity discrimination, it’s not sexual identification discrimination.”

Those kinds of internal attacks are difficult to address, but Aronoff believes, “It comes back to the need for public education, even within our own communities.”

A Smith College graduate, Aronoff contends he has no regrets about attending an all women’s school. “I live and breathe LGBT advocacy. I’m out in every which way you can be. If that had not been my nature and if I had wanted to do other types of work where being out was problematic then having a degree from Smith would have been a challenge.”

“I really value having women’s institutions [and support] the right of trans women to attend sex segregated schools,” Aronoff asserts. He worked with Smith to develop their policies around trans students, eventually settling on the idea of Smith as a single sex institution with students representing a diversity of gender expressions.

When it comes to trans masculine students, Aronoff suggests, “You have to be your own kind of judge, in terms of ‘Is my gender identity such that I’m comfortable in this space and I don’t feel that I’m being disrespectful of the space that is women or female-identified?’”

After transitioning from female to male and receiving testosterone shots for seven years, Aronoff made the decision to stop his hormone treatments, because “the cumulative effects of testosterone were pushing my gender expression—my physical manifestation of masculinity—past the point where I was comfortable with it,” he explains. “Stopping testosterone has reversed that to a degree where I’m more comfortable in my body.”

Trans author Jacob Anderson-Minshall co-writes the Blind Eye mystery series with his wife.