Tyrone Hanley

When first approached for this feature, Tyrone Hanley hesitated. He had not thought of himself as a “children’s lawyer.” But, for his entire legal career, Tyrone’s anti-poverty work at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NLCR) has addressed core issues facing youth.

Tyrone was born and raised in poverty by his Black, lesbian mother outside of Chicago. His experiences shaped his vision for justice and how he sees the world today. Tyrone understood that his family’s experience was not in isolation to the rest of the world, and as he grew into adulthood, he recognized that his childhood poverty, coupled with the racism of the systems his family was navigating, was trauma. “There is pain passed on in Black families from generation to generation that includes poverty. I grew up feeling ashamed about being poor. But this shame is placed on Black people everywhere through policies like mass incarceration and welfare reform.”

Tyrone began his career at HIPS, a Washington, D.C.-based organization providing support to sex workers and drug users. He continued his work at the Gender Public Advocacy Center as a Youth Program Coordinator. But Tyrone’s desire to go to law school was motivated, in part, by his time at SMYAL, a LGBTQ youth organization in D.C. At SMYAL, Tyrone led an HIV-prevention program for Black and Latino gay and bisexual young men. Tyrone organized events for the participants to discuss how racism, gender stereotypes, and homophobia impact the everyday decisions they were making as gay and bisexual men. He watched while people cycled through the program but kept returning with the same obstacles in place. While he knew that each of these individual and group interventions were important, the young people at the LGBTQ youth center faced so many more pressing issues. Addressing their risk of HIV was important, but the young people at SMYAL faced housing issues, employment barriers, and lack of quality healthcare.

Seeing there was no systemic response to address the needs of the community he had thus far devoted his life to working on behalf of, Tyrone set out to go to law school. He believed that the LGBTQ movement more broadly was not addressing poverty in its community. “The poverty I was raised in is still really relevant to my life. People with direct experience should be leading this conversation.” Moreover, he believes that through the lens of intersectionality—considering race, gender, geography, disability—we should be creating solutions to poverty because it is through this lens that people experience poverty. Tyrone began his legal career at NCLR to begin creating these solutions.

Queer and transgender youth who face family rejection often end up in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Yet, the child welfare system is not set up to support youth rejected from their families, and instead further fuels the cycle of poverty. Tyrone reasons that rather than tearing families apart, we should instead be thinking of how to support families. Yet, race and class inform the ways in which some families are supported while others are surveilled. “Privacy is a privilege. Poor people are constantly surveilled, which increases the likelihood they will be system-involved and criminalized.” Tyrone’s anti-poverty work is rooted in addressing the many issues facing families who encounter our systems. “Rather than taking kid away and placing them, we should be finding ways to provide interventions—the skills family members need, housing.”

When children are pushed out of their homes, they can engage in behaviors that are criminalized. LGBTQ young people who engage in sex work and other survival crimes are disproportionately placed in the criminal or juvenile justice system, yet these systems have not historically been set up to address the needs LGBTQ youth face. “These systems claim to be helping kids, but they just further harm and cause trauma.” Pushing children into these systems also exacerbates the violence that the Black and Brown communities face. As Senior Policy Counsel, Tyrone focuses his work on ending the criminalization of queer and trans sexuality and LGBTQ poverty.

LGBTQ youth are also disproportionately criminalized for navigating adolescence and their sexuality. Because of society’s “discomfort with a young person being a sexual being,” we criminalize their behaviors, often placing life-long labels of “sex-offender” on them. Tyrone argues that this criminalization is an investment in systems that harm people rather than one that invests in children and that the criminalization and collateral consequences attendant to the charges further perpetuate the child’s poverty.

While Tyrone’s current work is focused on a systemic response to poverty, it is informed by his direct work with LGBTQ youth and adults. To the attorneys who represent children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, he advises to “treat children holistically.” Although we are called upon to address the imminent issue at hand—the child’s separation from their family or charges levied against them—our child clients may be facing other barriers related to poverty and because our systems have shirked the responsibility to holistically address their needs, we can fill the gap. 

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