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Women’s History Month 2023: Cecilia Chung

Mar 29, 2023 | News, women's history month

Cecilia Chung was born in Hong Kong in 1965, but immigrated with her family to Los Angeles in 1984. She attended Golden Gate University and graduated with a degree in international management, which was around the same time she realized she was a transgender woman and began to transition. Like many LGBTQ+ youth, she struggled to share her truth with her parents who she ended up not speaking to for over three years. After losing her job as she began to transition, Chung experienced homelessness and began relying on sex work to survive. Soon after, she found out that she was HIV positive.

In 1994, she became a member of San Francisco’s Transgender Discrimination Task Force, which documented the widespread discrimination against trans individuals that was happening at the time, and still happens today. The work of the task force led the city to adopt many anti-discrimination ordinances and policies. 

Chung became the first transgender woman and first Asian elected to chair the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration, the first transgender woman and first person living openly with HIV to chair the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

Alongside her accomplishments is a long career of advocating for trans individuals. In 2002, she joined the Board of the Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center, working on their mobile HIV testing project for trans youth. In 2004, she was a founding organizer of Trans March, an annual event that now happens in cities all across the country, and a year later she was named as the first Deputy Director of the Transgender Law Center. In 2011, she served on California’s Civil Rights Enforcement Working Group. 

In 2013, she was appointed to the San Francisco Health Commission overseeing the Department of Public Health, pushing the department to pay for gender reassignment surgeries for uninsured trans patients and making San Francisco the first city in the country to do so. That same year, then-President Obama appointed her to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

In 2015, she founded Positively Trans to address the stigma and inequity faced by trans people, particularly people of color living with HIV by focusing on story-telling, lobbying, and leadership development.

Today, Chung is the Director of Evaluation and Strategic Initiatives for the Transgender Law Center.

We thank Cecilia Chung for her years of service and advocacy!