Photo by Kriston Bethel
Educators
Naiymah A. Sanchez
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
Naiymah A. Sanchez has made it her mission to support trans people living in the Philadelphia area. In 2017 she joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania as a trans justice organizer, where she works to build community liberation, address the causes of intersectional oppression, and build political power to protect and preserve LGBTQ+ rights.
“Things are happening ever so fast as we experience anti-LGBTQ+ legislation taking priority by elected officials. We are always on high alert, waiting for the next attack,” says Sanchez.
But this isn’t her first time fighting for the trans community. Before coming to the ACLU, Sanchez spent five years as coordinator of the Trans-Health Information Project, where she provided education and advocacy services to transgender people in Philadelphia. Since 2015 Sanchez has also worked to help the city’s prison system become more compliant with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a federal law designed to stop the sexual assault of prisoners.
In the future, Sanchez seeks to continue supporting her community by opening her own nonprofit organization. “I want to continue this work toward community liberation without the limitations of traditional nonprofit politics,” says Sanchez. She also plans to run for office one day.
“We all deserve equal rights and, if nothing more, to be treated with dignity and respect,” says Sanchez. “We must stop singling our loved ones and community members out because our experiences differ.”
“If we look at our many similar experiences, we will see that we are no different from one another and can finally move toward the equity we are fighting to secure,” adds Sanchez. “LGBQT+ rights are human rights. Love has no boundaries.” @therealnaiymah
Courtesy of Maeve DuVally
Maeve DuVally
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
Courtesy of Maeve DuVally
For 18 years, Maeve DuVally worked at Goldman Sachs as the managing director of communications. But it wasn’t until 15 years into her role that DuVally was able to enter the workplace as herself: a “transgender woman who had thought herself a man for the first 56 years of her life.”
It was 2019 when she first introduced herself to her colleagues as Maeve DuVally. The decision to come out at work had been sparked by a panel sponsored by Goldman Sachs’s LGBTQ+ affinity network on how to make the workplace more comfortable for transgender people. DuVally first realized she was trans in October 2018, after becoming sober in January of the same year.
“Getting sober in 2018 was the most harrowing and difficult accomplishment of my life so far. I believe I would be dead if I hadn’t succeeded or at the very least, I would not have realized who I am and there would be no Maeve,” says DuVally. “I had to go to the brink and look into the abyss of death before making a decision to live sober.”
A few months after coming out at Goldman, DuVally was the subject of a New York Times article, which profiled her first few days of being out at work. In 2022 she left Goldman to consult for corporations and other organizations on communications strategy and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In 2023 she published a memoir called Maeve Rising, which chronicles her struggles with alcohol and her very public coming-out.