FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 19, 2002

CONTACTS:
Miranda Stevens-Miller
It's Time, Illinois
(312) 409-5489
Peter Kostakis
Chicago Commission on Human Relations
(312) 744-1833

Chicago, IL — U.S. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, State Representative Sara Feigenholtz, State Representative Larry McKeon and Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley will join Clarence N. Wood, Chairman of the City of Chicago Commission on Human Relations, in a press conference highlighting discrimination and violence based on actual or perceived sexual and gender nonconformity. The press conference will be held on April 26, 10 a.m., at the Commission on Human Relations, 740 N. Sedgwick St., 4th Floor Board Room.

"As Mayor Daley frequently has stated, ‘There is no place for hate in Chicago,’" Chairman Wood said. "This 2001 report issued by It’s Time, Illinois! sheds needed light on victims who have been sidelined and marginalized in the public mind but whose stories must be heard," Wood concluded.

It's Time, Illinois! is the state’s leading political action and public advocacy organization for the gender variant and transgender community. It will release its sixth annual report on discrimination and hate crimes against gender-variant people in Illinois at the press conference.

The new report includes 30 cases, ranging from employment discrimination to violence and brutality. It’s Time, Illinois! is based in the Chicago metropolitan area, and most of the cases in the report took place in Chicago and Cook County.

It's Time, Illinois! began collecting information in 1995 about discrimination against gender-variant men and women. Since that time, it has documented nearly 100 cases of violence and other discriminatory acts. In these cases, persons were made — either through violence or through the denial of employment, housing, or public accommodations — to feel like second-class citizens merely because their lives or appearance did not conform to traditional expectations for gender.