The transgender experience in the United States has been heavily misunderstood and stigmatized. Being transgender in this country has become a radical act of self-preservation in the face of a traditionally gendered society.
This year alone 238 transgender people have been slain worldwide, often because of their gender identity. Their deaths are rarely avenged or made visible by the media. Their lives veiled by the discomfort and ignorance of their cisgender counterparts. Their identities misnamed by historians and their experiences often believed to be too difficult to explain or understand.
On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, we remember them.
Being transgender means you have a different gender identity than the one you’re assigned at birth. Long has been the plight of transgender people. From work place to health care discrimination, from homelessness to economic disenfranchisement, from incarceration to humiliation, the act of simply being transgender reveals an onslaught of discriminatory practices. Unfortunately, no transgender person is safe from them, not even kids.
This year California passed a piece of legislation that aimed to rectify some of the discrimination young transgender people are facing. The School Success and Opportunity Act, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in August, ensures that all students, including transgender students, have the opportunity to graduate from California’s public schools, by helping them be themselves and fully participate in school facilities and activities such as sports and physical education that match their gender identity.
Unfortunately, anti-LGBT groups have taken to targeting these students and their families. In an unjust, discriminatory fight, they’re driving a narrative that demonizes transgender youth and unequivocally exclaims that they’re undeserving of the same experiences of other students.
Transgender students often face bullying at school and sometimes at home. Coupled with a lack of comprehensive education around transgender identity, those experiences can lead to a lifetime of difficulty with self-acceptance.
On this transgender day of remembrance, we honor those that we’ve lost and make a commitment to "fight like hell" for those experiencing unjust, discriminatory practices. Humanizing the experiences of transgender people is necessary to creating a healthy, positive environment for all people.
It is essential for schools – administrators, teachers and parents alike – to understand that transgender students – just like all students – must have a safe and supportive school environment where they can be themselves, fully participate and have a fair opportunity to be successful—if not for the true realization of LGB"T" rights, then in honor of the countless we remember especially today, and everyday.
Support all students to be themselves and fully participate in school facilities by signing this petition today.
Shanelle Matthews is communications strategist at the ACLU of Northern California. Follow her @TheShanelleM

Solitary confinement can eat away at someone's mind, making mental illness worse and leaving many people depressed, suicidal, hopeless or hallucinating. It's no place for individuals with mental illness.
In 1995, a federal court in California agreed. After a trial exposing the appalling conditions at Pelican Bay—the state's most notorious, all-isolation, supermax prison and the site of repeated hunger strikes—a federal judge ordered all mentally ill prisoners out of the prison's security housing unit (SHU) in a case called Madrid v. Gomez.
But, because of the sometimes frustratingly limited nature of legal decisions, this judge's order only impacted Pelican Bay. While Pelican Bay has for years been notorious for its conditions of extreme isolation—leading thousands of prisoners across California to participate in the largest prisoner hunger strike in history, some for as long as two months—it is the only California prison in which prisoners with mental illness may not be held in solitary confinement as a matter of law. This means that seriously mentally ill prisoners all over California continue to be held in long-term solitary confinement, even though the Madrid order prohibits those conditions for the mentally ill at Pelican Bay.
It's time to change that. Today in Sacramento, key witnesses, including experts in psychology and corrections practices, will take the stand in support of the first statewide case aimed at getting all mentally ill people in California out of solitary confinement. The case is called Coleman v. Brown, and beginning today these experts will help to expose the extreme and sometimes irreversible damage of holding people with mental illness in solitary confinement.
The Coleman plaintiffs have marshaled stunning evidence to support their claims that all California prisons must remove mentally ill prisoners from solitary confinement. Statewide, according to case filings, about 9 percent of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's (CDCR) approximately 123,600 total prisoners are held in some form of segregated housing—but that number includes 21 percent of mentally ill prisoners system-wide. This means that mentally ill prisoners in California are held in disproportionately high numbers in solitary confinement. Even more alarming is evidence uncovered by the Coleman plaintiffs showing the dramatically heightened suicide rate among prisoners in segregated housing: in 2011, more than one third of all suicides in CDCR facilities took place in segregation units; more than half of the individuals who committed suicide in the first half of 2012 were housed in segregation; and 58 percent of the 19 people who have taken their life to date in 2013 occurred in segregation units.
These disproportionately high instances of suicide are unfortunately not surprising to those familiar with the harms of solitary confinement. Psychological studies consistently show that solitary confinement can wreak distinctive harms on prisoners, including heightened symptoms of hopelessness, depression, hallucinations, self-mutilation, suicidal ideation, and suicidal acts. And a 2008 study of California prisons noted a striking correlation between segregated housing and prison incident reports of self-mutilation and suicide.
Although the harms of solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners are well known, many states, including California, have been slow to catch up to the growing trend against prolonged solitary. Across the country, corrections departments, judges, activists, prisoners and their families alike will be watching to see if the Eastern District of California holds that the CDRC must forbid the housing of mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement. If the court holds that it must, then California—and the rest of the country—will be forced to rethink its statewide policies governing the use of solitary confinement.
Helen Vera is a fellow of the National Prison Project at the ACLU

From revelations of widespread NSA spying to high profile data breaches, transparency about how personal information is collected, used and disclosed is more important than ever.  California has long been at the forefront of transparency efforts. With updates to the California Online Privacy Protection Act and data breach notification law passed this year and a bill to modernize the 2003 Shine the Light law up for a vote in January, the state is continuing to lead the way.

In our new ACLU of California policy paper, Losing the Spotlight: A Study of California’s Shine the Light Law, we take a close look at the state’s landmark transparency law as it turns a decade old. We examine why it’s important and whether it’s continuing to provide transparency about the “who, what, where and when” of how a business handles personal information. We also highlight public support for transparency and draw specific lessons that can inform policymakers and businesses seeking to protect privacy and increase transparency about data collection, use and sharing in the modern digital era.
Here are a few of our major takeaways:

• Transparency really does work, and in three important ways. It incentivizes companies to take steps that are good for consumer privacy and good for business, facilitates public knowledge about issues that leads to policy change and empowers consumers to make more privacy-protective choices.
• Consumers are very concerned about how their personal information is being collected and shared, and rightfully so, because information landing in the hands of data brokers, third party advertisers and applications has led to a wide range of harms. Seniors have been scammed. Americans have been denied jobs and mortgages. Pregnancies, health concerns and sexual orientation have been revealed, too.
• Californians cannot effectively use the Shine the Light law to learn what is happening to their personal information due to obsolete provisions and large loopholes.

Our study highlights a few suggestions meant to ensure that transparency measures work effectively for both consumers and companies in the modern digital world:

• Consumers should be able to learn what personal information companies collect and disclose about them.
• Transparency rights should encompass a wide array of personal information, including location and sexual orientation information, and should reach businesses that consumers may not directly interact with, such as online advertisers and data brokers.
• The process for learning how personal information has been collected and shared should be straightforward and quick for consumers.
• Transparency requirements should be flexible for companies to implement and balance legitimate business and security concerns with fair enforcement.

We are encouraged that policymakers at the state, federal, and international levels are focusing on transparency’s important role in protecting privacy, and we applaud initial efforts by businesses to increase transparency about government demands for information.
Almost 100 years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that sunlight is the “best of disinfectants.” Echoing Justice Brandeis’ classic observation, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently emphasized the “need to move commercial data practices into the sunlight” in order to “empower consumers to make sure they are being treated fairly.” More needs to be done, and our study of California’s Shine the Light law seeks to help chart a path forward.
Download the full report.
Nicole A. Ozer is Technology & Civil Liberties Project policy director at the ACLU of Northern California