30 Days of Pride!
June 11: Allyson Robinson
Allyson Robinson applied to West Point three times and served as an enlisted combat medic in the U.S. Army Reserve before finally receiving her appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. After graduating in 1994, she spent five years on active duty as an Air Defense Artillery officer, commanding PATRIOT missile units in Europe and the Middle East, before leaving the Army to pursue a calling to Christian ministry. Robinson went on to serve as pastor to Baptist congregations on two continents for over a decade, focusing her ministry work on raising awareness of systemic poverty and organizing community-based responses to it. The direction of her life changed dramatically, though, while she was a graduate student in the divinity program at Baylor University in Waco, Texas – she came out as transgender and decided to leave pastoral ministry to join the fight for LGBT equality. With the full support and encouragement of her wife Danyelle (also a West Point graduate) and their four children, her parents (one a Vietnam veteran) and grandparents (one a veteran of World War II), she transitioned from male to female in 2007.
In 2008, Robinson joined the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) as Associate Director of Diversity, becoming that organization’s first staff member focusing exclusively on transgender issues and lending her advocacy and community organizing skills to HRC’s efforts to pass a fully transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and Matthew Shephard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Her military experience proved invaluable to HRC’s effort to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and she has helped initiate HRC’s work to lift the ban on open service for transgender people in the U.S. military. She made history in the fall of 2008 when she was invited by West Point’s Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership to lecture to cadets and faculty on her experiences, becoming the first transgender person to receive such an honor. She later wrote, “So many transgender people are disavowed by organizations and institutions that had once embraced them. To know that my alma mater, my ‘Rockbound Highland Home,’ was calling me back with honor was profoundly moving.”
Today, Robinson works as the first Deputy Director for Learning and Development of the HRC Foundation’s Workplace Project, driving the design and delivery of HRC’s broad portfolio of training for government, corporate, and non-profit audiences to improve LGBT cultural competence and inclusion in America’s workplaces. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Knights Out, an organization of LGBT West Point graduates and their allies, and speaks regularly on ending the military’s ban on transgender service.
Robinson stands as a shining example that it's time to end the ban on transgender service in America's military and allow the open service of every qualified patriot who wishes to wear the uniform of our nation's fighting forces.
