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Page 3 of 3 Ellis Driver <br />Other Comments: <br />This application was current on:8/17/2020 5:14:52 PM Date Printed:8/18/2020 <br />Boards/Commissions appointments: <br />Conflict of Interest: <br />I am committed to perpetually learning how to be a better advocate for marginalized folks, <br />especially people of color, disabled people, and the transgender population (of which I am a <br />member). I believe in redistributing resources and lifting up and amplifying marginalized voices. I <br />am always looking to meet more people across my community and believe that intergenerational <br />and generally diverse and genuine relationships are the only thing that can save us from being <br />divided and inequitable. <br />I do think being transgender and entrenched in the local transgender community has given me a <br />unique perspective, and the long struggle of advocating for myself at jobs or in life has given me <br />a lot of empathy for how advocating against one’s own oppressions is almost impossibly <br />taxing and difficult. I am determined to carry what weight of this burden I can responsibly take <br />from other marginalized folks. <br />A couple examples of this would be that <br />a) my job of 100k+ employees in the US does not employ any trans women (which is an issue in <br />and of itself) and thus I was the only person to point out that their health insurance coverage for <br />trans women only covers sterilization and none of the most-sought medical treatments. Public <br />acknowledgement led to action on this. <br />b) earlier this year I had a great conversation with the OC Partnership to End Homelessness to <br />submit a complaint to HUD about how they were erasing transgender homeless folks by making <br />them choose between M, F, or transgender. This complaint was at least new to the folks to <br />which I spoke, but HUD has for years been making binary trans people choose between their <br />real gender and the label “transgender” which has erased unknown numbers of trans <br />folks from our national data on homelessness. <br />c) after attempting filling out the census on census day, the day after Trans Day of Visibility, I <br />found that you could avoid answering the gender question and still submit the census. I shared <br />this with my non-binary community, many of whom (like me) were having trouble choosing to <br />contribute to their own erasure by choosing a gender. <br />16