Profile
Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of NYAGRA, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (nyagra.com), a statewide transgender advocacy organization that she co-founded in 1998. She also co-founded Queens Pride House (a center for the LGBT communities of Queens) (queenspridehouse.org) in 1997 and currently serves as president of the board of directors. Park co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997 and served as its coordinator from 1997 to 1999. She also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (transgenderlegal.org) and co-president of the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC.org), the first political club by and for LGBT people of color in New York City, which she co-founded in 2001. And she co-founded the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (GVIDCQ) in July 2002.
Park led the campaign for passage of Int. No. 24, the transgender rights ordinance enacted by the New York City Council as Local Law 3 of 2002. She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body. She also serves on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004.
Park did her B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana. She has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary about her life and work by documentarian Larry Tung that premiered at the New York LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) in 2008. The film is now available through Amazon.com.
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