Shannon Minter is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), one of the nation’s leading legal advocacy groups for LGBTQ people and their families. Founded in 1977 by feminist attorneys Donna Hitchens and Roberta Achtenberg, NCLR was originally a project of Equal Rights Advocates and later became the first national LGBTQ legal organization to adopt an explicitly feminist foundation. Shannon has served as NCLR’s legal director for more than twenty years. He follows in the footsteps of former NCLR legal directors Maria Gil de Lamadrid, later an advocate for people with disabilities, and Abby Abinanti, California’s first Native American female lawyer and currently the Chief Judge of the Yurok Tribal Court. As an openly transgender man, Shannon is one of the LGBTQ movement’s most senior transgender leaders and helped to create the Transgender Law Center, initially a sponsored project of NCLR, in 2002.

Shannon joined NCLR in 1993 as an Equal Justice fellow to create a legal advocacy program to stop the abusive practice of so-called “conversion therapy.” In 2014, NCLR launched Born Perfect, which has passed laws protecting youth from this dangerous practice in more than 25 states. In 1994, Shannon started NCLR’s Immigration Project, which has represented hundreds of LGBTQ asylum seekers and helped to establish the precedent that persecution because of one’s sexual orientation or gender identity is a basis for asylum. Over the past thirty years, Shannon has represented dozens of LGBTQ people in cases involving child custody and adoption, education, employment, hate violence, elder rights, prisoner rights, military service, and marriage. In 2008, Shannon was lead counsel on behalf of several same-sex couples seeking the right to marry in California and successfully argued before the California Supreme Court. He later litigated marriage equality cases in Alabama, Florida, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming and represented married same-sex couples seeking recognition of their marriages in Tennessee in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Shannon was counsel in several other Supreme Court cases, including Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), V.L. v. E.L. (2016), and Pavan v. Smith (2017). In 2017, Shannon led NCLR’s challenge to the transgender military ban, which was finally repealed in 2021. He is committed to building bridges between LGBT people and conservative religious communities.

Shannon has been recognized for his legal advocacy by the American Bar Association, the Ford Foundation, California Lawyer Magazine, the Transgender Law Center, the National LGBT Bar Association, the Department of Justice Pride Group, Cornell Law School, Stanford Law School, and the City University of New York Law School. In 2015, President Obama appointed him to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Shannon has twice served on the American Bar Association Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. He received a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. from Cornell Law School. Shannon lives in Texas with his wife Robin and many rescue animals.