A Transgender Lawyer Just Made the TIME100. Here’s Why That Matters Right Now.
Shannon Minter has spent thirty-three years building modern LGBTQ rights through the courts. He’s now in court against the Trump administration over the military ban. The timing is Everything.
I was on my second cup of coffee last Wednesday morning when the TIME100 list dropped. Most years, I scroll through it the way most people do. Spot a few names I know. Learn a few new ones. Move on.
This year was different.
There, in the Pioneers category, sat Shannon Minter (Martinez, 2026; Wiggins, 2026a).
If you don’t follow LGBTQ legal news, that name might not land for you. Here’s the short version. Minter is a 65-year-old civil rights attorney who has spent more than three decades at what is now called the National Center for LGBTQ Rights (National Center for LGBTQ Rights, 2025a; National Center for LGBTQ Rights, n.d.). He was lead counsel in the 2008 California marriage equality case. He represented Tennessee plaintiffs in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that brought marriage equality to all fifty states. He led the NCLR team that won Pavan v. Smith in 2017, the case that forced states to put both same-sex parents on a child’s birth certificate. He was NCLR’s lead attorney in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez in 2010, representing the LGBTQ student group that intervened to help defend nondiscrimination policies at public universities, and his side won 5 to 4 (National Center for LGBTQ Rights, n.d.).
He is transgender too.
That last fact is not a footnote. It is part of why his work hits the way it does, and part of why his recognition this week matters more than any other name on the TIME100, at least to those of us in trans America who have been watching the past fifteen months unfold with the attention of people whose legal standing is the subject of every other executive order.
The case that put him on the list
The TIME tribute was written by Ricardo Martinez, executive director of GLAD Law, who has spent the past year working alongside Minter on the case at the heart of Minter’s recognition: Talbott v. USA (Martinez, 2026).
Quick legal recap. On January 27, 2025, one week into his second term, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” (Trump, 2025). It banned transgender people from serving in the U.S. armed forces. Unlike the 2017 ban from Trump’s first term, this one had no grandfathering. No exceptions for current service members. It required separation proceedings for active-duty transgender troops within sixty days (Maniccia, 2025).
Minter and his GLAD Law co-counsel Jennifer Levi filed Talbott v. Trump (later restyled Talbott v. USA) in federal court the next day (National Center for LGBTQ Rights, 2025c; GLAD Law, n.d.). They had run this play before. Together, they led the legal fight against Trump’s first-term ban in 2017, securing nationwide injunctions that held until the Biden administration reversed the policy in 2021 (GLAD Law, 2025).
This time, the fight has been harder.
On March 18, 2025, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a 79-page opinion granting a nationwide preliminary injunction (GLAD Law, n.d.). She called the ban “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext” (GLAD Law, n.d., para. 1). She said it stigmatized transgender people as inherently unfit and that its conclusions, in her words, bore no relation to fact.
It was a complete win. It lasted seven weeks.
On May 6, 2025, the Supreme Court, in a parallel case from Washington state, United States v. Shilling, lifted the injunction without explanation. Three liberal justices noted their dissent. The ban took effect (Lambda Legal, 2025; Maniccia, 2025).
Then, on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court handed down Trump v. CASA, sharply restricting federal judges’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions against executive policies (Trump v. CASA, Inc., 2025; Sidley Austin LLP, 2025). For litigators like Minter, this means even a victory at trial may now bind only the named plaintiffs. Everyone else in the same position remains exposed.
Minter and Levi responded with a class certification motion filed this week, on April 15, 2026, the same day TIME announced his place on the list. The lawsuit now represents 30 transgender service members and prospective enlistees. The government’s response brief is due May 29 (Wiggins, 2026b).
The erasure behind the recognition
Here is the political context I want you to keep in mind.
The Trump executive order targeting transgender service members is not a one-off. It is one of more than a dozen federal directives issued in the first months of the second Trump administration aimed at removing transgender people from federally funded spaces. Passports. Prisons. Schools. Medical care for trans youth. State legislatures piled on with bills restricting health care for trans adults, athletic participation, and bathroom access. Federal agencies took the word “transgender” off official websites. Data collection on trans populations has been shut down in places.
The pattern is not subtle. It is a coordinated effort to remove a category of people from the documents and public structures that govern American life.
When that is the political weather, getting a transgender attorney named to a TIME list of the world’s 100 most influential people is not a feel-good moment. It is a counter-move.
What visibility actually does
I want to be honest with you. A magazine list does not stop a Supreme Court order. It does not put discharged service members back in uniform. It does not undo CASA. Visibility is not a remedy.
But visibility has measurable downstream effects. Decades of social science on attitude change toward LGBTQ people show that sustained, humanizing media representation predicts shifts in public opinion, which eventually shape policy. The 2015 Obergefell decision did not come out of nowhere. It came after years of patient public-facing work, including putting actual gay and lesbian families on television and in news stories and on magazine covers.
Recognition from TIME does that work at scale. The list reaches a national audience that does not, by and large, read The Advocate or follow LGBTQ legal news. It reaches the moderate American who voted in 2024 without thinking very much about transgender policy and who may now, through Minter’s inclusion, encounter a transgender life as one chapter in a year-end portrait of consequential people.
Some of those readers will scroll past. Some will notice. Some will, perhaps, think differently the next time they read a headline about a military ban or a state bathroom bill. Cultural change works through accumulations of small encounters like that. TIME’s reach is the kind that produces at scale.
There is something else I want to say about how the tribute was framed. Mainstream outlets have not always treated transgender people with care. When they have included us, the framing has often been deficit-based, focused on suffering and tragedy, and the question of whether we are real. Martinez’s tribute does something different. It calls Minter “one of the most consequential civil rights attorneys of our generation” (Martinez, 2026, para. 1), not “one of the most influential transgender people.”
That distinction matters. It places Minter in a lineage with Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg rather than in the smaller, walled-off category that gets reserved for trans people whose accomplishments are framed as exceptions to their being trans. His being transgender is part of who he is and part of why his work hits the way it does. It is not a qualifier for his accomplishments.
Why am I writing this
I am writing this from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as a transgender woman who has watched the past fifteen months of policy unfold with the attention of someone whose life is implicated in every executive order and every Supreme Court order.
I have met Shannon Minter in person. He was the keynote speaker at the 2nd Annual TPAN Prism Gala on March 8, 2024, at the Washington Pavilion here in Sioux Falls (Transformation Project Advocacy Network, 2024). I was in the room as a board member of The Transformation Project of South Dakota, the sister organization to TPAN. He spoke the way Ricardo Martinez describes him in the TIME tribute (Martinez, 2026): with the steadiness of someone who has spent a career operating squarely within the truth. I went up afterward and shook his hand. I told him what his work meant to me. He listened the way he apparently listens in court.
I will be honest about the rest of the night, since the truth is funnier than any tidy version. My mother came with me. She is a MAGA voter. She is my mother too, and was determined, in her own way, to show up for her daughter. She had been drinking. By the end of the live auction, she had spent over three thousand dollars between the silent and live boards, on items I am still not sure she wanted, in support of a transgender advocacy organization whose politics she does not share. She spent a good portion of the evening flirting, on top of all that, with our auctioneer, Kameron Nelson, the first openly gay man elected to the South Dakota legislature and the chair of my organization’s board at that time (Kameron Nelson, n.d.). Kameron handled it with the grace of a man who has handled it before. I was mildly embarrassed and quietly moved. People are complicated. Love finds its strange ways through the politics that try to forbid it.
My driver’s license is governed by state law. My passport is governed by federal law. My ability to access health care depends on whether my insurance, my hospital, and my state government continue to treat me as a category of person worth covering. None of those things is stable right now. They are all moving, in most cases, in the same direction. Away from being seen.
In that climate, what Minter’s TIME100 honor gives the rest of us is twofold.
First, it is a public reminder that someone is in court every day, fighting on our behalf. The legal struggle has not been abandoned. The work continues. Plaintiffs are filing fifth amended complaints. Judges are setting briefing schedules. Lawyers are turning over evidence. The system has not ended just because the headlines are bad.
Second, it is a public reminder that the work is being done well enough, and visibly enough, that one of America’s major news outlets wants to put a transgender attorney on its annual list of the world’s most influential people. That is not a small thing for trans Americans who have, over the past year, been told in many different ways that we are not a serious topic of public concern.
Minter himself put it this way in an interview with The Advocate after the announcement: “I think it’s a mark of the gravity of these issues right now in our country” (Wiggins, 2026a, para. 3). He said recognition from a mainstream outlet like TIME is reassuring, in his telling, since it shows that what transgender people are experiencing is being seen (Wiggins, 2026a).
That word, seen, sits at the heart of what is at stake. A campaign of erasure works by making people invisible, in policy and in language and in the public record. Visibility is the counter-move.
The bottom line
The TIME100 honor will not stop the military ban. The DC Circuit will rule on Talbott when it issues its opinion (Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, n.d.). The Supreme Court will eventually take the merits of the transgender service cases, or it will not. The political fight in 2026 and beyond will be hard. None of that changes with a magazine cover.
What changes on April 15, 2026, is that one of America’s most-read publications, with its biggest annual platform, named a transgender civil rights attorney among the 100 most influential people in the world. That sentence is now in the public record. An executive order cannot retract it. An unsigned Supreme Court order cannot stay it. It sits, available, as evidence of what the broader culture has begun to see.
We needed this now. Shannon Minter has been doing the work for thirty-three years. His clients are real. His cases are real. The country he is fighting for, the one in which the Constitution’s promise belongs to all of us, is real, too.
That is the country a lot of us are still trying to build. Recognizing the people building it is one of the ways we keep the work alive.
References
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. (n.d.). Talbott v. Trump, 1:25-cv-00240 (D.D.C.). https://clearinghouse.net/case/45984/
GLAD Law. (n.d.). Talbott v. USA. https://www.gladlaw.org/cases/talbott-v-usa/
GLAD Law. (2025, May 6). Supreme Court issues ruling in Shilling, blocking the preliminary injunction protections and greenlighting implementation of Trump’s transgender military ban. https://www.gladlaw.org/supreme-court-blocks-preliminary-injunction-allowing-transgender-military-ban-implementation/
Lambda Legal. (2025, May 6). Justice denied: Supreme Court allows discriminatory transgender military ban to take effect. https://lambdalegal.org/newsroom/shilling_us_20250506_justice-denied-scotus-allows-discriminatory-transgender-military-ban-to-take-effect/
Kameron Nelson (politician). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kameron_Nelson_(politician)
Maniccia, E. (2025, May 22). Supreme Court allows Trump’s transgender military ban. Syracuse Law Review. https://lawreview.syr.edu/supreme-court-allows-trumps-transgender-military-ban/
Martinez, R. (2026, April 15). Shannon Minter. TIME. https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people/2026/shannon-minter/
National Center for LGBTQ Rights. (n.d.). Shannon Price Minter, Esq. https://www.nclrights.org/about-us/who-we-are/shannon-price-minter/
National Center for LGBTQ Rights. (2025a, June 9). The National Center for Lesbian Rights announces a name change to the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. https://www.nclrights.org/about-us/press-release/national-center-for-lesbian-rights-announces-name-change-to-national-center-for-lgbtq-rights/
National Center for LGBTQ Rights. (2025c). Talbott v. USA (formerly Talbott v. Trump). https://www.nclrights.org/our-work/cases/talbott-v-trump/
Sidley Austin LLP. (2025, July). Supreme Court substantially limits universal injunctions (Trump v. CASA): Implications for litigation against the government. https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/07/supreme-court-substantially-limits-universal-injunctions
Transformation Project Advocacy Network. (2024). TPAN Prism Fundraising Gala. https://www.transadvocacysd.org/news-and-events/tpan-prism-gala
Trump, D. J. (2025, January 27). Executive Order 14183: Prioritizing military excellence and readiness. Federal Register, 90(21), 8757–8759. https://regulations.justia.com/regulations/fedreg/2025/02/03/2025-02178.html
Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf
Wiggins, C. (2025, August 27). Meet 5 LGBTQ+ lawyers standing up to Donald Trump to protect trans Americans. The Advocate. https://www.advocate.com/news/lgbtq-lawyers-fighting-for-trans-americans
Wiggins, C. (2026a, April 15). Trans lawyer Shannon Minter named to TIME100 list. The Advocate. https://www.advocate.com/news/people/shannon-minter-time-100
Wiggins, C. (2026b, April 16). Lawyers ask judge to certify case to protect all trans troops affected by Trump’s military ban. The Advocate. https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/trans-military-ban-class-action